Social Model v3.0

[LDiCesare]

I like the idea of having a sort of "division of power" slider or pie chart, and this interface of generalised policies - do you plan to have it so depending on the settings you pick on the interface, you get assigned an "ism"?

Yes, the player's regime name should be found as the name of the regime which is neareste the current regime.

In the "cruise mode" do you return to the traditional select "-ism" as your system of government? If so, how many "isms" do you want?

What cruise mode? There is no selection of a regime, just setting policies and power shares. We might have a panel that offers to swithc to a given regime and adjust the policies and power shares accorsingly.
The number of regimes is defined in a resources file. The regimes.xml file holds 8 regimes for the moment. I don't know how many would be appropriate long-term.

Slavery and Civil Liberties seem the same to me

They are definitely different. You may have the right to protest against the government and have slaves, or be considered guilty until you prove otherwise and have no slaves.

What about Economic policy of the government beyond Property Rights?

What policy? There are already tax rates and property rights. Mark is probably able to tell you more about hpw econ works. I know there is a distinction between traditional and market economies, there may be more and the way we switch from one system to the other is not yet determined (it's jsut a trigger the player cann change for the moment, but it could at least require some tech).

Primitive Civs have to have a religious system, and become more advanced as economic considerations predominate.

Religious discrimination is already considered, what else/more would you want? (edited - I sounded aggressive when I really don't know what you would want to see here)

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
What about Economic policy of the government beyond Property Rights? Primitive Civs have to have a religious system, and become more advanced as economic considerations predominate.

You can have a range of options: religious collectivism (Communism, Fascism, Islamism...) and planned economies, mixed economies as well as market economies and participatory economies and subsistence economies.

The overall econ approach in ancient times is designed to be somewhere between the two poles of pure market economy and pure traditional economy. Traditional means "I do what my same-sex parent did." For a modern game I might add a third "collectivist" possibility, but it is pretty much already taken care of by private property setting.

Game effects (so far) include:
Market:
o Workers move between sectors of the econ freely, making it more productive
o Technological progress is better (other things being equal)

Traditional:
o More stable politically, since the "everyone has their predetermined place" permeates society

I am going to cross-post this in the econ thread. Please respond there with further ideas that impact econ more than the social model in general.

[yellowdaddy]

Originally posted by LDiCesare


What cruise mode? There is no selection of a regime, just setting policies and power shares. We might have a panel that offers to swithc to a given regime and adjust the policies and power shares accorsingly.
The number of regimes is defined in a resources file. The regimes.xml file holds 8 regimes for the moment. I don't know how many would be appropriate long-term.

Cruise-mode as in an auto setting for those who want a quick non-micromanaged game where they don't select policies just a pre-set "-ism" of policies.

They are definitely different. You may have the right to protest against the government and have slaves, or be considered guilty until you prove otherwise and have no slaves.

I meant Slavery as a state of Civil Liberties, a Civil Rights setting of "zero;"
Indenture as a setting just above that "1" if you like;
Class duty as "2" a setting above that, then Individualism as "3", and Anarchy as "4"?! (or 1-5)

What policy? There are already tax rates and property rights. Mark is probably able to tell you more about hpw econ works. I know there is a distinction between traditional and market economies, there may be more and the way we switch from one system to the other is not yet determined (it's jsut a trigger the player cann change for the moment, but it could at least require some tech).

As Mark notes I mean whether a government opts for a 100% free market economy, a mixed economy, a developmental state, an export led economy, an import substitution economy, a collectivist economy, a feudal economy, a parecon economy etc... - there's quite a few options.

Religious discrimination is already considered, what else/more would you want? (edited - I sounded aggressive when I really don't know what you would want to see here)

Yes I know, but as you also probably know Jews and Sikhs and Parsees and groups like that overlap religious and ethnic lines.
I don't disagree with having them seperate, I just wonder how you deal with overlaps.

[LDiCesare]

About religions:
The social model specifies that there are several types of religions:

The type may be "Ethnic Religion" (E-Religion) or "Multiethnic Religion" (ME-Religion). This replaces the designations "Primitive Religion" and "Great Religion of the World" used in version 2, but the difference remains: E-Religions aren't allowed to spread to other EG's and ME-Religions are.

So this means that, for example, only ethnic groups of nationality "jew" can have the religion Judaism.

[yellowdaddy]

That works fine for Parsees (Zoroastrians), Yazidi, even Hindu (and Druze) - because you can only be born one, but does not work for Judaism...

You cannot generally regard the Ashkenazi (or German-Russian) Jews as ethnically Hebrew - the 7th-9th century Khazar khagan adopted Judaism as a faith (as a political decision of resisting Arab expansion) - an ethnically Turkish overlord community ruling an ethnically Slavic population (and perhaps some other I-Europeans like Persians and Turkic Bulgars, and other bits and bobs - Greek, Goth, maybe even the odd Chinese!).

So you could have ethnic religions like Zoroastrianism that don't allow conversion; and Semi-Ethnic religions like Judaism that allow conversions.

(although you may find some that say you can convert to Zoroastrianism, there still exist the Parsee sect which won't accept it)

I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

I assume you mean the Hebrew EG who are Jewish by religion; (and I suggest the use of the word Hebrew for the EG following the name of the language, and Jewish for the religion) you may also find Christians and Atheists of Hebrew ethnicity...

[yellowdaddy]

anyway, I don't see why you need to seperate slavery from civil liberties - slavery is a state of civil liberties - a subcategory as shown.

I'll shift the economics comments across.

Do you have your government types ("-isms") fitted into these thre categories?
charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

[LDiCesare]

I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

Nationality in an EG is the name of the civilization the people want to be part of. That is people who want to be part of the hebrew nation. I know it is not adequate as there are many jews who consider themselves both part of their country and of Israel. I know a brazilian for instance, who lives in Brazil, feels brazilian, and sends money to the state of Israel because he supports this state, so he would basically have both nationalities in Clash terms but that's far too detailed for the game to model.

Do you have your government types ("-isms") fitted into these three categories?
charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)?

No, the regimes are defined in the regimes.xml and currently there are only archaic/classical regimes. I'm not sure whether your distinction is adequate (I'd dub religious as traditional rather than charismatic) nor what effect that would have on the game.
The regimes have different power shares for the various political power blocks (military, clergy, etc...).

[yellowdaddy]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

Nationality in an EG is the name of the civilization the people want to be part of. That is people who want to be part of the hebrew nation. I know it is not adequate as there are many jews who consider themselves both part of their country and of Israel. I know a brazilian for instance, who lives in Brazil, feels brazilian, and sends money to the state of Israel because he supports this state, so he would basically have both nationalities in Clash terms but that's far too detailed for the game to model.

So does that mean that Civs can't convert to Ethnic Religions unless they are 100% of that EG? Or will you allow some Ethnic Religions which allow conversion for non-ER EGs?

...I'm not sure whether your distinction is adequate (I'd dub religious as traditional rather than charismatic) nor what effect that would have on the game.
The regimes have different power shares for the various political power blocks (military, clergy, etc...).

not my distinction, Max Webers:

http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

http://www.maxweberstudies.org/

[LDiCesare]

So does that mean that Civs can't convert to Ethnic Religions unless they are 100% of that EG? Or will you allow some Ethnic Religions which allow conversion for non-ER EGs?

No, a civ can make anything as official religion. I don't know exactly how religions spread. I know that it's possible from people to switch from an EG to another one in certain cases, so you can change ethnicity and probably later religion. I should check that part of the model, but I'm knee-deep in debugging the riots and teaching the ai to cope with it.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by yellowdaddy
That works fine for Parsees (Zoroastrians), Yazidi, even Hindu (and Druze) - because you can only be born one, but does not work for Judaism...

You cannot generally regard the Ashkenazi (or German-Russian) Jews as ethnically Hebrew - the 7th-9th century Khazar khagan adopted Judaism as a faith (as a political decision of resisting Arab expansion) - an ethnically Turkish overlord community ruling an ethnically Slavic population (and perhaps some other I-Europeans like Persians and Turkic Bulgars, and other bits and bobs - Greek, Goth, maybe even the odd Chinese!).

So you could have ethnic religions like Zoroastrianism that don't allow conversion; and Semi-Ethnic religions like Judaism that allow conversions.

(although you may find some that say you can convert to Zoroastrianism, there still exist the Parsee sect which won't accept it)

Also Hinduism allows converts. Just that you haveto start out at the bottom rung and this doesn't exactly appeal to many people.

Originally posted by yellowdaddy I don't think the word "nationality" seems apt in this context, because patently there exist followers of Judaism - mostly ethnically Hebrew who do not have Israeli (or even Judaean or Samarian!) citizenship.

I assume you mean the Hebrew EG who are Jewish by religion; (and I suggest the use of the word Hebrew for the EG following the name of the language, and Jewish for the religion) you may also find Christians and Atheists of Hebrew ethnicity...

There is also a jewsh tribe in southern africa that has been practicing Judaism since biblical times unkown to the rest of the Jewish community. They are definatly not hebrew, but even by the most orthodox jew they are be considered Jewish branch.

[LDiCesare]

I want to list again the various policies and their in-game effects. Many have little or no bearing on the game itself. One of the (many) goals for D8.1 is to give them meaning.
The policies are:
Tax rate - has a definite effect.
Civil rights - has a twofold effect: High civil rights lower the likelihood of independentist feelings but increases the overall chance of riots.
Ethnic and Religious Discrimination - Effects on riots (antidiscrimination feelings to balance with bad policies feelings).
Slavery - No effect.
Foreign policy - No effect.
Private property - Effect on poor welfare feeling.
Social policy - Effect on poor welfare feeling.
And all policies have an effect on bad policies or regime change feelings.
Additionally, there is Province Autonomy, which affects the likelihood of people wanting independance (people of the same nationality may secede if given a lot of autonomy, people of different nationality may want more autonomy in order to lower their chance of secession) and gives better province effectivity - thus lower chances of poor welfare feeling.

Here are proposals to give some effects to the policies which have none:
Civil rights - increase research efficiency, lowers military morale (discipline).
Ethnic and Religious discrimination - lowers relation with civilizations of other ethnicity/religion.
Slavery - Should create slave social classes, but in which ethnic groups? This population would have a special economic role, but I don't know how to model that. Slaves should have a positive productivity effect but a negative effect as they should increase the likelihood of riotting and would revolt often. Thus a high slavery score would mean lower wages for the same productivity but higher likelihood of riots.
Foreign policy - Definition is "The level of aggressiveness allowed in the international arena." This is supposed to limit the ability of the ruler to declare wars etc. I think it should not lead to silly behaviours like civ2 where you can't declare war in democracy despite the enemy having 20 units near your core cities. This will require diplomacy code to be working before we can actaully use it.
Private Property - Should have an effect on economic model.
Social Policy - Should reduce the revenue of the ruler by a given amount.
Province Autonomy - Should reduce the revenue from the taxes from that province.

[alms66]

Regarding the policies:

Tax rate - This may be built-in already, I don't know, but high taxes should slow the economy, while low taxes should stimulate economic growth.

Civil rights - I agree with your two, and I'd suggest perhaps adding a moderate increase in migration occurances? - people are more free to move about the country and all - even out of the country(?). Probably the best thing to do for now is to tie the bonus to the population limit before migration occurs, so that if it is 5000 @ civil rights of 60, then it is 10,000 @ civil rights of 10 and 1,000 @ civil rights of 100 - just for example, in reality it probably shouldn't be this much of a difference.

Ethnic and Religious discrimination - This should also lower the number of RPs generated by the discriminated group - that is assuming we track that by ethnic and religious groups.

Slavery - For now, I'd just have it give a bonus to production, and increased chances of riots - it doesn't really matter that the rioting might come from the wrong group, that's a minor detail that can be fixed later since we'd need to build a better interface to toggle slavery for different groups.

Foreign policy - I think this should sort of act as war weariness does in civ 3, rather than the civ 2 hard limitation. In civ3, war weariness just causes increased rioting if you are aggressive, but your foreign policy is low (actually it's based on gov't type, but you get the idea). A low foreign policy should also act as isolationism for the state, reducing foreign trade and whatnot (but that's for the future). Other effects are possible, but it's pointless to discuss them since we have no diplomacy, as you stated.
I guess that will be your next big project after stabilizing the social model, coding the diplomacy model... Clash should actually feel like a real game then, rather than the testing sandbox it feels like now.

Social Policy - In addition to yours, this should also grant a bonus to the number of RPs generated (or some other kind of research bonus), since higher social saftey nets tend to make people more willing to take risks - which is another effect, this changes a cultures risk aversion (I forget if that's even part of the cultural template now) over time.

Province Autonomy - This should also reduce the costs of running the province anywhere from 100% (full autonomy) - 0% (no autonomy). I don't know how it's set up currently, but there should be varying levels of autonomy, eventually at least.

[Mark_Everson]

I basically agree with the suggestions that both of you have made, and will only give the additions or rare disagreements in this post.

Slavery - I think that slavery should also have an affect on technology. Specifically what slavery does is make some people more wealthy, and thus able to pursue various technological ideas. It should work something like a function depending on the number of slaves per capita gives an overall modest benefit to technologies in general. However, the presence of slaves does tend to suppress labor-saving investments and ideas IMO. Therefore similarly to the overall tech bonus there should be a significant decrease in effective RP's going into technological areas such as agriculture, resource extraction, and others.

On which group you get slaves from, I have the following idea. I will just phrase it in words, because I expect you can easily turn it into an equation, Laurent. If significant ethnic or religious discrimination exists in the civilization, and the slaves will all be of the unfavored ethnic or religious groups. If there is very little discrimination, then slaves will tend to be spread roughly evenly across the civilization ethnic groups, including the "ruling" group.

Social Policy - spending on social needs of the people should also a decrease riot percentages. I'm not so sure about the contention that increased social spending should result in an increase in RP's. This is probably true at very low levels of social spending per capita. Going from zero social spending to a modest amount should indeed increase RP production. But once you get into the "welfare state" regime, I think history argues that it is the opposite. People are provided for, and there is relatively little incentive to innovate.

Private Property - high private property levels should result in larger productivity overall, and also increase income disparities within the society. The converse is true for low private property levels. Also, With high private property levels the people themselves invest in what they think is needed, from farming capital to education to storage of food against potential future famines. As private property decreases the people will spend less on these things, and to stay even, the government would need to spend more. Therefore hire private property gives the player more control over the detailed investments in the economy, but this control comes at the cost of lower overall productivity.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Civil Rights - It could lower morale somewhat if your army is made of up draftees or recently mobilized indivusals, but often in societies with high civil rights, military has fewer. So perhaps an upper cap on the amount it reduces morale or a diminishing returns cap for higher civil rights = lower morale.

it should also increase eventually (probably not in this coding) law enforcement efforts, not only just rioting.

Slavery - I think production bonus should be a constant based solely on number of slaves and their level of slavery. Indentured servants might work a bit harder if they thought they could be freed sooner. And also if we are usuing any type of generics model (for disease and EG) then it could also play a role here.

I'm also not sure if it should have a more downward pressure on wages anymore than peasantry class would mainly because you had to keep your slaves in working condition or constantly spend money to replace them. They still needed to eat even when they were sick and didn't work FE.

Also i think the social class model itself can handle bonus rp production for "wealhy" people investing resouces into things. Uusually though, this was more social than scientific.

I agree on the distribution for slaves as mark has it, with an exception. The ruling group should have fewer in all circumstances, even when they actually in some twisted sense be discriminated against.

Foreign Policy - I agree with both of alms66's points, exception more isolationist socieites would get bonuses to stability (ie fewer riots, fewers DoIs). And could infact make advances in infrastucture much faster to their current tech level the province would support. Of course all elements dealing with outside world suffer (or perhaps benift in a few cases).

But dealing with inward/outward looking is another thing and far more implications than just foriegn policy.

Social Policy - a boost in rps with a ceiling is fine. Perhaps n ceiling for specific "social" technologies.

However, it shouldn't nessarily reduce rioting. Bad social policies or disciminatroy social policies would raise these, but also reduce revenue and if there was no social policy beforehand, increase rps, which is why as it stnads now only reducing PWF is totally wrong.

Private Property - In addition to what mark said, higher private property should increase the chance of independace feeling and also if implimented eventually should slow law enforcement effiecency.

[LDiCesare]

On which group you get slaves from, I have the following idea. I will just phrase it in words, because I expect you can easily turn it into an equation, Laurent. If significant ethnic or religious discrimination exists in the civilization, and the slaves will all be of the unfavored ethnic or religious groups. If there is very little discrimination, then slaves will tend to be spread roughly evenly across the civilization ethnic groups, including the "ruling" group.

But a tile with only people of the main ethnicity would want salves from other ethnicities. Can the merchants code handle slaves?