General discussion for civics

[Thunderbrd]

If the player choices represent 'national sentiment' then the player would have no choices and the game would play itself with the AI deciding based on what the people most want rather than what would be best for the competitive edge for society. There would not be so many ways to 'anger citizens' with your selections because your selections could only ever be what the citizens already wanted.

 

[Maltazard]

I'm specifically talking about what the sliders do, not all of the players choices though. Obviously the player has executive power, all the time.

The sliders simply send commerce units into other elements. All of the generated commerce in the country is necessarily not only the "public commerce", which doesn't even exist and would be taxation if anything (and I don't believe that commerce is only the taxed output of the commercial activity but rather the whole), so then commerce it's all the wealth, the GPD of the nation. After all, no country's GDP is 100% State owned bar perhaps North Korea, and also the modern State is a notion that only applies for a fraction of C2C's tech tree.

The sliders are a guide, a direction, a push, a funnel, but they are not the representation of just tax money being spent as much as they are the representation of the whole, gross domestic activity being directed - think about the third sector, or what I reckon is called philantropy/charity in the US, for instance.

 

[pi4t]

If the player choices represent 'national sentiment' then the player would have no choices and the game would play itself with the AI deciding based on what the people most want rather than what would be best for the competitive edge for society. There would not be so many ways to 'anger citizens' with your selections because your selections could only ever be what the citizens already wanted.

...Why would the game play itself? In this model, you are choosing the national sentiment (or, more precisely, the sentiment of the people who have political and/or economic power in your nation). Sure, you could simulate that by letting an AI do the decision making, but you can also let the player choose what the sentiment is going to be. In much the same way, in the "single leader" model, you could simulate the personality of an immortal Julius Ceasar, but instead we allow the player to choose for themself what Julius Ceasar is going to do.

Angry citizens, in this model, represent people who are feeling disenfranchised. Going on strike, etc, that kind of thing. There are numerous examples through history where the national mood, or at least the mood among the people with power in the country, has resulted in minorities getting angry and causing economic damage by protesting.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I mean, I get it but it's disruptive to the concept of a role play of leadership. The whole idea of making the choices involved in running a society means you have to consider the possibility of citizen disagreement with your decisions, which is why you can turn the slider to points of discontent. If the slider were in any way a reflection of 'national sentiment', it wouldn't be something you COULD choose to set against the will of the people, and yet that's much of what the slider is about, using authority to resist the will of the people for strategic benefit the people cannot understand from the limited perspectives and concerns they have in their own lives. Obviously you can only resist public sentiments so far before they protest. But it isn't the public that is making choices to anger themselves. By the initial model, if we were to let the people decide on where the slider would be, it would all go to culture (happy happy happy to excess despite the waste it represents.)

Not too keen on having removed all sources of getting happiness from culture expenses on the slider though... ugh. I'd love to see that come back in major ways.

And no, I'm not saying that you always are embodying a single leader - the collective will of those in power, yes, generally. I suppose you're including corporate heads and uber wealthy into the picture whereas I think of them as outside the bounds of that definition of 'in power' specifically, and more of an enemy of state rather than a wise collaborator helping to make decisions as part of the player's outlook.

 

[JosEPh_II]

It a miracle that Fort Knox somehow seems to be refilled with gold to keep paying the mercs, but it may simply not be fast enough to justify ever a return back to a gold standard.

The Petro Dollar is dead. The BRICS union and with the Saudi (more countries too now) joining in that was the last nail in the coffin for the unlimited, no restraint, printing of the petro dollar. The Saudi have Officially rejected the Petro Dollar and embraced the BRICS Gold backed currency exchange. The amount of Gold being purchased by Gov'ts all over the world has increased exponentially over the past 2 years. Even the Central Banks are buying Gold at tremendous rates while at the same time pushing this Digital dollar under your skin agenda. And Putting this nation into a stagflation spiral worse than during Nixon's time. The world is upside down. It will be right side up soon.
The USA will go back to the Gold Standard. (That the traitor Pres. Nixon took us off of in 1971, after the meeting he had with the newly formed WEF and it's founder K.S.. And his trip to China (another 1st for a sitting Pres) where secret deals were made to finance China's industrialization.) And the Constitution will be reinstated after the 1871 debacle of Pres Grant borrowing money from England and making the US a debt Corporation instead of a Constitutional Republic. Every American born after 1871 was made a indentured servant to this debt Corporation. The very way that Birth Certificates were/are signed was changed at that time. And every US Citizen born here was placed under Maritime law and taken off the Land Law. The US Constitution is a Land Law system Not a Maritime system. But that too will soon be corrected as the evidence of an internal takeover of this nation has been in progress for over 100+ years will be revealed. The current Admin is unlawful according to the Constitution. The evidence is mounting and coming to a head very soon that will bring the needed action by the people, courts, and military to re-establish this Constitutional Republic.

And those that spout the US is a democracy are being taught a lie. That Propaganda was started long ago to so that Socialism and eventually Communism would take over this land. It almost succeeded too. The principles of Tzun Zsu were being employed against this nation and had reached the 3rd stage. But...there is an awakening happening that will bring this "slow coup" to an end.

My what a rabbit trail this needless Civic discussion has become. UGH!

 

[pi4t]

I mean, I get it but it's disruptive to the concept of a role play of leadership. The whole idea of making the choices involved in running a society means you have to consider the possibility of citizen disagreement with your decisions, which is why you can turn the slider to points of discontent. If the slider were in any way a reflection of 'national sentiment', it wouldn't be something you COULD choose to set against the will of the people, and yet that's much of what the slider is about, using authority to resist the will of the people for strategic benefit the people cannot understand from the limited perspectives and concerns they have in their own lives. Obviously you can only resist public sentiments so far before they protest. But it isn't the public that is making choices to anger themselves. By the initial model, if we were to let the people decide on where the slider would be, it would all go to culture (happy happy happy to excess despite the waste it represents.)

Not too keen on having removed all sources of getting happiness from culture expenses on the slider though... ugh. I'd love to see that come back in major ways.

And no, I'm not saying that you always are embodying a single leader - the collective will of those in power, yes, generally. I suppose you're including corporate heads and uber wealthy into the picture whereas I think of them as outside the bounds of that definition of 'in power' specifically, and more of an enemy of state rather than a wise collaborator helping to make decisions as part of the player's outlook.

Yes, I feel like we've been using the phrase "national sentiment" in different ways. Probably my fault, since the phrase isn't exactly what I meant. Yes, I'm meaning the collective will of those with power, whether that be despots, wealthy Victorian capitalists, the voting public, Friend Computer, or even (especially in the case of civics changes) a bunch of revolutionaries overthrowing the government. This is why you never lose control of your civilisation, even if you have a revolution or are running a system where power should logically keep changing hands: you're always "playing" as whoever happens to have control over that decision. At worst, you get factions, groups who aren't happy with what you're doing. Which causes unhappy citizens who refuse to work, or completely disrupted cities, or (for people who use Revolution) the country splitting in two or having a civil war.

Of course, that's how things work in vanilla. Doesn't have to be the case in C2C, I suppose. But I suspect that if you do announce that private individuals with power are outside the player's control, and implement that consistently, you'll find the player has rather fewer choices to make in the early eras. You will also be at serious risk, in modern eras, of a problem that Victoria 2 has. In Victoria 2, you have a choice of communist style planned economies where you choose what to build and pay for it from your treasury, or free market ones where you leave it to the AI to build and fund things. But players are much better at making build choices than the AI, meaning that communism is way stronger in player hands than the free market.

For these reasons, I would be very cautious about any mechanic which has the player "collaborate" with an AI to develop the country. Unless that AI is actively working against your objectives.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Yes, I feel like we've been using the phrase "national sentiment" in different ways. Probably my fault, since the phrase isn't exactly what I meant. Yes, I'm meaning the collective will of those with power, whether that be despots, wealthy Victorian capitalists, the voting public, Friend Computer, or even (especially in the case of civics changes) a bunch of revolutionaries overthrowing the government. This is why you never lose control of your civilisation, even if you have a revolution or are running a system where power should logically keep changing hands: you're always "playing" as whoever happens to have control over that decision. At worst, you get factions, groups who aren't happy with what you're doing. Which causes unhappy citizens who refuse to work, or completely disrupted cities, or (for people who use Revolution) the country splitting in two or having a civil war.

Of course, that's how things work in vanilla. Doesn't have to be the case in C2C, I suppose. But I suspect that if you do announce that private individuals with power are outside the player's control, and implement that consistently, you'll find the player has rather fewer choices to make in the early eras. You will also be at serious risk, in modern eras, of a problem that Victoria 2 has. In Victoria 2, you have a choice of communist style planned economies where you choose what to build and pay for it from your treasury, or free market ones where you leave it to the AI to build and fund things. But players are much better at making build choices than the AI, meaning that communism is way stronger in player hands than the free market.

For these reasons, I would be very cautious about any mechanic which has the player "collaborate" with an AI to develop the country. Unless that AI is actively working against your objectives.

I do eventually want to have 2 build queues, one for public and one for private, where different civics give varying power to one or another in the division of production, and usually the private is a bit bonused but you don't have any control over it and it's at the whims of what people want the most (reason for taverns and bars being the first thing you see in small towns) according to some AI tagging that works on that basis, and the public one that the player, the state, has power over, but is usually penalized in how much production it gets due to a less enthusiastic work force.

I'm also looking to introduce an entertainment property and possibly others, that can help to further guide what the public thinks it wants most, which may not always be bad decision-making really because people CAN see their needs when it's hitting them in the pocket or economically or when crime is too out of whack or whatever. In some cases, the public can realize what's important to it fairly well. It should make for more interesting decisions.

 

[raxo2222]

And those that spout the US is a democracy are being taught a lie. That Propaganda was started long ago to so that Socialism and eventually Communism would take over this land. It almost succeeded too. The principles of Tzun Zsu were being employed against this nation and had reached the 3rd stage. But...there is an awakening happening that will bring this "slow coup" to an end.

My what a rabbit trail this needless Civic discussion has become. UGH!

Sounds like limbo - republic without democracy, and some sort of lightly regulated capitalism.
Something normal for 1920's, so you can make that in Victoria 3.

Like economically interventionist system with worker protections, but welfare, healthcare and education are fully privatized.
You want elections but one person shouldn't have one vote.
Poor/minorities get 0.1 vote per person while rich people get 10 votes like wealth/literacy weighted voting, adjusted by states.

So by democracy they mean republic with elections - as opposed to absolute monarchy, theocracy, oligarchy, and other systems without voting.
Even flawed/illiberal electoral system with more than one party still qualifies nation to democracy.
Those who say that USA isn't democracy sound like autocracy supporters - Russia/China style fake "democracy" at most.

Absolute power causes absolute corruption, USA absolutely empowered international organizations and corporations.
USA happy when those exploit others. They stare at USA hungrily now ready to turn it into banana republic.
Should made capitalism and republic great again like Nordic countries instead of doing dumb Red Scare.
Yes, let international organizations and billionaires exist, but not as overpowered as they are now - that is separate buisness and politics, like church and politics are separate in most of European nations.

 

[pi4t]

I do eventually want to have 2 build queues, one for public and one for private, where different civics give varying power to one or another in the division of production, and usually the private is a bit bonused but you don't have any control over it and it's at the whims of what people want the most (reason for taverns and bars being the first thing you see in small towns) according to some AI tagging that works on that basis, and the public one that the player, the state, has power over, but is usually penalized in how much production it gets due to a less enthusiastic work force.

Much as I like that idea in principle, I think that regrettably, the effects won't work in a good way in Civ. I've seen it done in other games (especially Victoria 2), and it didn't work right. The problem is that humans are much better at making decisions than the AI is, meaning that human civilisations - especially ones played by skilled players - have a massive incentive to maximise public production just to stop the AI wasting production on dumb stuff.

 

[Joij21]

Hasn't really changed from this perception. Except... You can't have the gov invest into innovation and entrepreneurship without gathering taxation, which is what the commerce income represents. Therefore, it's probable that we should go back to making many buildings produce commerce, except that from a game perspective, doing so means commerce is pretty much going to usually just be research spending, and this is not how the governments of the world usually operate. In fact, the biggest reason we don't adopt a public healthcare system is specifically because governments are extremely reluctant to massively spend on R&D and the argument is that the profit motive for a business is what gets our system to promote major investments into research (unfortunately mostly into research that will just create a predatory solution to addict patients to a symptom relief drug supply rather than actually discover a cure that relieves the need for further treatment, which a government system would be much more interested in finding so as to minimize expenses and move on to other goals to make things healthier and thus more productive for the system as a whole.)

Buildings provide wealth directly, therefore, because that represents the local taxation on those businesses. Honestly that productivity of gold should probably be linked to civic selections that adjusts how much income those buildings give directly, but it's to say that you can't just mostly assume that gov income is going to go towards R&D as the goal of any player is usually to get the slider to exist as strong on research as possible. In RL, research expenses are a crapshoot and a gamble and often wasted on fruitless pursuits that get nowhere except perhaps to eliminate some possibilities. I suppose it makes sense that the wealth % of the slider is the interest rate, except that raising the rates is how we combat inflation - to tune down the market 'heat' (aka to slow down our economic growth by cooling off how fast money is exchanging hands thanks to the expanding purchasing power cheap loans make possible), not how it's tolerated.

Rushing never really made sense anyhow (at least not to the extent we could) because it envisions that somehow we have more labor we can get out of our labor pool that's just sitting around doing nothing until we stimulate the economy with extra government spending. In reality, the extra government spending just redirects that labor pool to getting things done that needed to get done which makes for a healthier economy where if there IS any unemployed labor available in the system, does put it to work, thereby improving the buying power of the nation's consumer base, thereby making income stronger, rather than weaker. The only time spending like this creates problems is when we are lending (printing more money than we have) to do that spending. We don't have a means of lending (from the fed or with bond sales or from other nations) in our Civ economic base so it's really not well modelled.

What we wanted to put a stop to was banks being in essence universities by a different name.

I think your assuming that the state was the primary innovator of technology throughout human history. How foolish!

Often times it was the rich who no longer had to hunt or farm anymore in which all their survival needs were met so they could spend the rest of their finite time pondering things rather than worrying about starvation.

States weren't nearly as organized and controlling until at least the 19th century. I mean that's essentially when states decided to actually fund research and not leave innovation up to the wealth of private individuals. Compulsory education only came recently into existence in this period anyway. State funded research is meant to be represented by research producing buildings and the assignment of scientist specialists. In other words the more state control in the game you want the more you should do the specialist economy strategy.

IMHO like others have stated I feel like the player represents the soul of the nation and the totality of it's people. Hence the ability to freely switch civics, determine where they spend their surplus capital, or what buildings they construct (instead of simply zoning it out despite running capitalistic civics). Leaderheads represent the soul of the regime and it's nuanced ways of conducting governance (a.k.a. the ruling class). A rival regime that contests the current ruling class and desires to bring in a truly new ruling class of it's own to replace the old one is represented by the revolution/civil war mod comp.

 

[Joij21]

The Petro Dollar is dead.

The Petro Dollar isn't what gives our currency value. It's brass and lead and our governments ability to keep using it.

Russians fumbling in the Ukraine means America's brass and lead strategy has yet to be seriously contested.

The BRICS union

BRICS will fall apart the moment India and China get into a serious squabble or Bolsonaro starts something in Brazil against Lula. If Putin fails taking Ukraine expect his nation to begin crumbling. South Africa merely needs a class conflict between it's whites and blacks again to do it under.

None of the BRICS nations are truly stable nor do they exactly like each other. Nothing in BRICS has ever been officiated to the point they are like the EU. Plus their varying nations are spread out across the seven seas whereby the American navy cut cut them off from trading with one another (or more specifically with the EU) push come to shove.

The evidence is mounting and coming to a head very soon that will bring the needed action by the people, courts, and military to re-establish this Constitutional Republic.

That's treason.

1871 debacle of Pres Grant borrowing money from England and making the US a debt Corporation instead of a Constitutional Republic. Every American born after 1871 was made a indentured servant to this debt Corporation. The very way that Birth Certificates were/are signed was changed at that time. And every US Citizen born here was placed under Maritime law and taken off the Land Law. The US Constitution is a Land Law system Not a Maritime system.

We had just gotten out of a Civil War and the South was filled with traitors who had just recently raised arms in a terroristic fashion against what they saw as Northern ambitions threatening the institution of slavery.

The country had to pay off it's war debt somehow and these traitors (and potential future ones) had to be reigned in with a new system that would go after them if they tried to flee overseas to escape the firing squad.

The world is upside down. It will be right side up soon.

The world has been upside down since 1783. Or at least so the British lamented.

You wanna go back to mother England?

 

[raxo2222]

Conspiracy theorists are weird - they keep saying that 2 + 2 = 5, while their enemies say black is white.
Conspiracy theorists are anarchists, socialists and Luddites in severe denial. They would be happy to live in Sparta.

 

[JosEPh_II]

You wanna go back to mother England?

Wow are you Confused! Perhaps you are not the person you came across as after all. This question reveals that.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Conspiracy theorists are weird - they keep saying that 2 + 2 = 5, while their enemies say black is white.
Conspiracy theorists are anarchists, socialists and Luddites in severe denial. They would be happy to live in Sparta.

Who are you calling "conspiracy theorists? Your limited knowledge of the US is showing badly again.

 

[JosEPh_II]

That's treason.

No that is Liberty! And what the Constitution calls for. What you see now in the US Is Treason. It has been going on for Decades.

 

[raxo2222]

Who are you calling "conspiracy theorists? Your limited knowledge of the US is showing badly again.

That made you sound like one:

Perhaps you are a Yuval Noah Harari/Klaus Schwab fan and want a digital chip put under your skin so that you can never really own anything again? Digital slavery anyone?!

Digital chips under skin are absolutely unnecessary - just have normal devices collecting all your data for advertising purposes, so you have personal advertisements.
Have some authoritarian regimes seize that data.

Every country has its own pseudohistory, that makes them sound better/more powerful than they used to.

 

[Joij21]

No that is Liberty! And what the Constitution calls for. What you see now in the US Is Treason. It has been going on for Decades.

The Constitution does not call for such things the Declaration of Independence does. However it does so not in a legal sense (since rebellion can never be legitimized as legal) but rather a moral sense, that is if a state no longer gains consent from the people then the state is automatically unjust and it would therefore be morally righteous for the people to overthrow it.

The people nevertheless still have to win the civil war, if they fail they will be hung for treason or die on the field of battle.

 

[Joij21]

Conspiracy theorists are anarchists, socialists and Luddites in severe denial. They would be happy to live in Sparta.

What do you mean? The Spartans at one point had the best army in the world!

Anarchists would have been put down like the Helots they are, luddites simply wouldn't exist since there is no debate within Spartan society as to the use of technology; they simply fight to win, the socialists would be met with disdain for daring to have a redistributive system based on democracy rather than a republic led by warrior elders.

 

[raxo2222]

What do you mean? The Spartans at one point had the best army in the world!

Anarchists would have been put down like the Helots they are, luddites simply wouldn't exist since there is no debate within Spartan society as to the use of technology; they simply fight to win, the socialists would be met with disdain for daring to have a redistributive system based on democracy rather than a republic led by warrior elders.

That was the joke - those people are confused.

 

[Joij21]

Even flawed/illiberal electoral system with more than one party still qualifies nation to democracy.
Those who say that USA isn't democracy sound like autocracy supporters - Russia/China style fake "democracy" at most.

I wouldn't go so far as to say those claiming the U.S. is a republic are like Russians and Chinese nationalists. That just seems a little too insulting and they're technically correct, the U.S. isn't a true democracy, at least not at the Federal, state, and county levels. It sort of is at the municipal level with the exception of cities and their boroughs operating as mini republics. Hence a democratic republic.

More specifically the United States of America is a federal constitutionalist democratic republic with neoliberal mainstream political views and egalitarian social views with an emphasis libertarianism.