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Are provinces needed? What's the relation between them and govt administration? How expansion and provinces should be connected?
A little theory: In game terms you need to determine where several things happen. Things like where units are built, where infrastructure investment is made, where an independence attempt is made. In CIVX (Sid Meier's Civ1, Civ2, etc) we used the concept of cities for that, each one of them taking care of a group of mapsquares.
For Clash one possibiliy is to use directly mapsquares and do everything there, but that'd be a nightmare for players. There're just too many of them to take decisions at that level. Also, it'd be problematic to simulate things like religion spreading or other social effects, because you'd have to move information from one tile to the other surrounding tiles and that's expensive.
Using mapsquares grouped is a must to realisticly model social and economic effects.
What was proposed very early in the project, I assume by Mark, was to use Provinces, like CIVX grouping mapsquares, but beyond an individual city. That's good in terms of modeling and realism (given provinces along the game will adjust and in general grow) because historically, as tranportation and communications developed, the area where economic and social relations take place grows and cities, towns and the countryside experience interconnections of greater scope.
But here comes the problem: Governments (civs), as they progress, tend to make an administrative division of their land, creating provinces, districts, etc in order to get more efficient administration. But this division does not necessarily match the requirementes from a modeling point of view, as described in the previous paragraph.
What I've seen through my time in the team is the word "province" has been used with these two meanings/perspectives, producing confusion. Province, as a modeling tool, and Province, as a game feature for govt management, are not the same.
One of course tends to think administrative, social and economic stuff could be well handled all in the same territorial "unit" called "province" and that's why IMO all of us have carried on with the ambiguous interpretation of "provinces" never caring to clarify the concept.
But what if your empire isn't organized in (administrative) provinces? (early empires didn't have such divisions). Then you'd need a civ made of a single province. On the other side, one assumes players should be able to organize their (administrative) provinces freely. Is this possible?
The problem is the size/location/shape of administrative provinces does not match necessarily the size/location/shape of the provinces you need for accurate modeling of social and economic things. If you let players change province borders, then modeling gets damaged.
If we want to model an empire with no administrative divisions, then the result of having just one big province is social and economic modeling fails. The mongols under your one-big-province chinese empire would be influenced by the culture of the vietnamese when in reality the two peoples are just too distant from each other to have any sort of social interaction.
To model things correctly, there must be divisions. We need provinces (although the name isn't the best because of the administrative implications it has in common language) even if the empire is not "officialy" divided administratively.
Provinces, though, have their own problems:
1) Militarily, I've seen many times comments about what happens when a (single) mapsquare changes hands. Contrary to CIVX, where you conquer cities (and therefore groups of mapsquares), in Clash there seems to be the intention of managing military conquests at the mapsquare level. Of course this is more realistic, but it produces problems with the structure of provinces. In simple terms, the nearest province owned by the conqueror should be enlarged to include the new tile, while loser's province must be shrinked to exclude the lost tile. This rises questions like how long a military unit must stay in a square to allow the game to adjust province borders (because that's something we don't want to do often).
2) As Gary has said, for realism, you don't need to conquer a piece of land to call it your own. History shows a simple declaration of ownership is enough. Of course that may trigger unrest in those lands and maybe an international incident with other civ, but the bottom line is the game needs to do something with that declaration in terms of provincial organization and it isn't clear what. FE, Should provines of different civs be allowed to overlap if both civs have declared sovereignity over the same land?
As a summary:
A) We need Modeling Provinces to simulate correctly economic and social stuff, but their size and shape will not match, in general, with the Administrative Provinces the govt manages.
B) Creating and updating administrative provinces can be a tough task if individual mapsquares can change hands due to military campaigns or sovereignity declarations.
Note provinces structure and adjustment has a lot to do with the process of civ expansion. No doubt why the problem of province interpretation rised in the "Expansion and Settlement" thread.
Here ends the presentation of what I see is the problem.
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A Possible Solution
First of all, since a big part of the problem comes from using the same word for two different things, let me define Modeling Provinces as Regions, so I'll use the word "Provinces" only for the administrative division made by the govt.
Regions will be, then, a group of mapsquares where social and economic modeling is made.
At the beginning of the game there's population all over the place and the whole planet is divided in Regions. Social and economic models are applied each turn to each Region.
The player starts in one of these regions, controling it entirely. He makes with it everything we enviosioned so far, collecting taxes, investing, building troops, etc. All other Regions in the world are Independent Regions, uncontrolled by players, with no centralized govt. Each indep. region represents a multitude of small kingdoms and has a few military units for self-defense. In other words, I'm propsing here Indep. Regions = Minor Civs.
The player sees there're Indep. Regions surrounding his own and sees their borders. With a just built task force, decides to expand. Send it to one of those Indep. Regions and once inside it, press "d" to make his troops declare sovereignity over the region. These are just words, so nothing really happens for now(maybe a couple rebels appear). In general, though, it can have consequences in diplomacy with other civs who might not be willing to accept his sovereignity over certain territories.
But what the player really wants is to have control over the Indep. Region, so he fights "barbarian" units there. Once wiped out, the kingdoms acknowledge his sovereignity and now the region stops being independent and starts being part of his empire.
The riots model will simulate any future possible rebellions against his rule. In particular, if rebels are strong enough to kill all player's armies in the region, it goes back to independent again.
Doing this, the player forms his empire as a collection of regions. Regions are used by the player as normal "provinces" (in the sense the word has had until now), allowing him to build units, etc, but the performance of the region depends on the amount of institutional infra existing, management tech level, the number of administrators and the level of control the central govt has over the local govts, as described by the govt model and as the interconnections between that model and the econ model dictate (TBD).
(Note "local govts" here means local authorities, whatever they may be. They could be, FE, the kings who acknowledged the civ's sovereignity. It doesn't necessarily mean the civ has put a formal administration in the region)
As time passes and the player is able to invest in the region's administration and as he secures a high level of control over it, the region slowly becomes more of a province, in the administrative sense of the word. But we don't call it province yet.
A province is an organization of the territory that allows you to have better administration. If the civ has the management tech level high enough, then, as an application, you could have something like "territorial divisions". Having this application, you could implement, paying, a land organization of your regions, converting them into provinces. Only regions you have enough control on could receive this treatment. The effect should be a bonus in administration effectiveness.
In this way the division of territories (which is needed anyway) has one name when it isn't "officialy" part of a govt administration strategy and has another name when it is. And the process of organizing your territory, as a game experience, gives you an advantage in administration with respect to other civs.
On the other side, as investment in transp/comm grows, it'd be possible to join together regions/provinces. Every 100 yeras, for example, we check planet-wide if that can be made. As we enter modern times, the number of regions/provinces decreases and their size increases.
As for military campaigns, I think we shouldn't model things at the mapsquare level. If enemy units are inside one of your regions/provinces, then production should be penalized, but there shouldn't be any change of borders until a peace treaty is signed or until the whole region is conquered.
In the case of a peace treaty, when both sides have units inside a region, then a new frontier could be calculated and put in the diplomacy screen to let players know where the new borders are being negotiated. In that case individual mapsquares would be rearranged.
A little theory: In game terms you need to determine where several things happen. Things like where units are built, where infrastructure investment is made, where an independence attempt is made. In CIVX (Sid Meier's Civ1, Civ2, etc) we used the concept of cities for that, each one of them taking care of a group of mapsquares.
For Clash one possibiliy is to use directly mapsquares and do everything there, but that'd be a nightmare for players. There're just too many of them to take decisions at that level. Also, it'd be problematic to simulate things like religion spreading or other social effects, because you'd have to move information from one tile to the other surrounding tiles and that's expensive.
Using mapsquares grouped is a must to realisticly model social and economic effects.
What was proposed very early in the project, I assume by Mark, was to use Provinces, like CIVX grouping mapsquares, but beyond an individual city. That's good in terms of modeling and realism (given provinces along the game will adjust and in general grow) because historically, as tranportation and communications developed, the area where economic and social relations take place grows and cities, towns and the countryside experience interconnections of greater scope.
But here comes the problem: Governments (civs), as they progress, tend to make an administrative division of their land, creating provinces, districts, etc in order to get more efficient administration. But this division does not necessarily match the requirementes from a modeling point of view, as described in the previous paragraph.
What I've seen through my time in the team is the word "province" has been used with these two meanings/perspectives, producing confusion. Province, as a modeling tool, and Province, as a game feature for govt management, are not the same.
One of course tends to think administrative, social and economic stuff could be well handled all in the same territorial "unit" called "province" and that's why IMO all of us have carried on with the ambiguous interpretation of "provinces" never caring to clarify the concept.
But what if your empire isn't organized in (administrative) provinces? (early empires didn't have such divisions). Then you'd need a civ made of a single province. On the other side, one assumes players should be able to organize their (administrative) provinces freely. Is this possible?
The problem is the size/location/shape of administrative provinces does not match necessarily the size/location/shape of the provinces you need for accurate modeling of social and economic things. If you let players change province borders, then modeling gets damaged.
If we want to model an empire with no administrative divisions, then the result of having just one big province is social and economic modeling fails. The mongols under your one-big-province chinese empire would be influenced by the culture of the vietnamese when in reality the two peoples are just too distant from each other to have any sort of social interaction.
To model things correctly, there must be divisions. We need provinces (although the name isn't the best because of the administrative implications it has in common language) even if the empire is not "officialy" divided administratively.
Provinces, though, have their own problems:
1) Militarily, I've seen many times comments about what happens when a (single) mapsquare changes hands. Contrary to CIVX, where you conquer cities (and therefore groups of mapsquares), in Clash there seems to be the intention of managing military conquests at the mapsquare level. Of course this is more realistic, but it produces problems with the structure of provinces. In simple terms, the nearest province owned by the conqueror should be enlarged to include the new tile, while loser's province must be shrinked to exclude the lost tile. This rises questions like how long a military unit must stay in a square to allow the game to adjust province borders (because that's something we don't want to do often).
2) As Gary has said, for realism, you don't need to conquer a piece of land to call it your own. History shows a simple declaration of ownership is enough. Of course that may trigger unrest in those lands and maybe an international incident with other civ, but the bottom line is the game needs to do something with that declaration in terms of provincial organization and it isn't clear what. FE, Should provines of different civs be allowed to overlap if both civs have declared sovereignity over the same land?
As a summary:
A) We need Modeling Provinces to simulate correctly economic and social stuff, but their size and shape will not match, in general, with the Administrative Provinces the govt manages.
B) Creating and updating administrative provinces can be a tough task if individual mapsquares can change hands due to military campaigns or sovereignity declarations.
Note provinces structure and adjustment has a lot to do with the process of civ expansion. No doubt why the problem of province interpretation rised in the "Expansion and Settlement" thread.
Here ends the presentation of what I see is the problem.
---------------------
A Possible Solution
First of all, since a big part of the problem comes from using the same word for two different things, let me define Modeling Provinces as Regions, so I'll use the word "Provinces" only for the administrative division made by the govt.
Regions will be, then, a group of mapsquares where social and economic modeling is made.
At the beginning of the game there's population all over the place and the whole planet is divided in Regions. Social and economic models are applied each turn to each Region.
The player starts in one of these regions, controling it entirely. He makes with it everything we enviosioned so far, collecting taxes, investing, building troops, etc. All other Regions in the world are Independent Regions, uncontrolled by players, with no centralized govt. Each indep. region represents a multitude of small kingdoms and has a few military units for self-defense. In other words, I'm propsing here Indep. Regions = Minor Civs.
The player sees there're Indep. Regions surrounding his own and sees their borders. With a just built task force, decides to expand. Send it to one of those Indep. Regions and once inside it, press "d" to make his troops declare sovereignity over the region. These are just words, so nothing really happens for now(maybe a couple rebels appear). In general, though, it can have consequences in diplomacy with other civs who might not be willing to accept his sovereignity over certain territories.
But what the player really wants is to have control over the Indep. Region, so he fights "barbarian" units there. Once wiped out, the kingdoms acknowledge his sovereignity and now the region stops being independent and starts being part of his empire.
The riots model will simulate any future possible rebellions against his rule. In particular, if rebels are strong enough to kill all player's armies in the region, it goes back to independent again.
Doing this, the player forms his empire as a collection of regions. Regions are used by the player as normal "provinces" (in the sense the word has had until now), allowing him to build units, etc, but the performance of the region depends on the amount of institutional infra existing, management tech level, the number of administrators and the level of control the central govt has over the local govts, as described by the govt model and as the interconnections between that model and the econ model dictate (TBD).
(Note "local govts" here means local authorities, whatever they may be. They could be, FE, the kings who acknowledged the civ's sovereignity. It doesn't necessarily mean the civ has put a formal administration in the region)
As time passes and the player is able to invest in the region's administration and as he secures a high level of control over it, the region slowly becomes more of a province, in the administrative sense of the word. But we don't call it province yet.
A province is an organization of the territory that allows you to have better administration. If the civ has the management tech level high enough, then, as an application, you could have something like "territorial divisions". Having this application, you could implement, paying, a land organization of your regions, converting them into provinces. Only regions you have enough control on could receive this treatment. The effect should be a bonus in administration effectiveness.
In this way the division of territories (which is needed anyway) has one name when it isn't "officialy" part of a govt administration strategy and has another name when it is. And the process of organizing your territory, as a game experience, gives you an advantage in administration with respect to other civs.
On the other side, as investment in transp/comm grows, it'd be possible to join together regions/provinces. Every 100 yeras, for example, we check planet-wide if that can be made. As we enter modern times, the number of regions/provinces decreases and their size increases.
As for military campaigns, I think we shouldn't model things at the mapsquare level. If enemy units are inside one of your regions/provinces, then production should be penalized, but there shouldn't be any change of borders until a peace treaty is signed or until the whole region is conquered.
In the case of a peace treaty, when both sides have units inside a region, then a new frontier could be calculated and put in the diplomacy screen to let players know where the new borders are being negotiated. In that case individual mapsquares would be rearranged.
But seriously...
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