HorseshoeHermit
20% accurate as usual, Morty
Bridged discussion from thread where this post appears:
[Will update this post with good samples of the conversational bramble that was off-topic over there]
Let me tell you, I think the origin of the problems, referring to the first passage about "gaps" on the map and unsatisfying gameism, I am increasingly convinced this is a consequence of the "absolute ruler" and "homogeneity" conceits of the game... even the genre. You know we all agreed there are distortions that occur because this is a game, this game ends, this fiction is not history, etc. etc. I wonder if things are regrettably such that, because of the main stipulation that your decisions are an "absolute ruler", that the settlement components of the game are, from that alone, necessarily either gamey with incongruities such as unsettled territories, or just unacceptably distorted in some other way; constrained by the coherence with that one, original unrealistic premise that flows through the seams of the game systems and must have consequences in other parts.
{...}
While in dialogue with mod-creator JFD, I mentioned an idea of regarding the game, despite what it says in the "fluff", as one where your player decisions represented the aggregated and impersonal will of the people. That you are not one government, or one person, but just a kind of sensing foresight, absolutely unconscious to the simulated civizens at the start, and probably even into the atomic era. Even when the people began to use government, legal, and policy systems deliberately , the vector that a society took over iterations of those institutions is what matches up with the spans of time this series is supposedly about, and where the strategic game lives.
I wondered whether this envisioning, if erected into the design from its beginning, might be enough to rewrite the catastrophic incongruence mentioned previously in this post.
So government systems in the game have actually seemed both right and wrong to me. They have seemed right, it may surprise you from the foregoing, when they involved a restriction placed on what you're allowed to do, the, e.g. winning approval from the senate. "But my decisions are the actual will of the empire; why am I convincing its ruling power?" They have seemed wrong when they have mixed up scales. Some civic reorganizations are just different emphases on this small "economy" level ('economy' as the game analysts say)... the conceit of the civic/government mechanic is not different from hypothetically just the incremental effect of emphasizing certain developments and investments between your resources, just a different feedback system and player/environment challenge setting on the abstraction of game's Progression Design.
In mixing up levels is where I think 'winning approval from the senate' goes wrong. That got too tied to the idea of your monarchical will being literally opposed by a senate. But what about regarding the situation being that the senate and the public contain knowledge that a certain war is best; and they must struggle now, rather than against the unorganized, ignorant, and uncultured (read: vicious) but compliant peers and kin of yesteryear, but against the ignorance, obligations, and vices, and daresay against the acculturation, of the ruling class and their executive powers? And curses upon our lack of foresight 400 years ago when we tried this republic thing and didn't master it sooner!
To the question, I must teach the reason why the question is its own answer. A ruling power instituted by a people does what it does because it makes certain things not happen. Perhaps a proposition that could be made about reality is this: What makes certain things happen is only ever just the people. All the people, rulers and messengers, and peacekeepers, and the public (and thinkers, and businessmen, and educators and young people......). More-perhaps could we take this into the design of the game and make it bound up in the "absolute will" premise. Order cannot exist without Chaos. Rule is restrictive, not creative! The genius of your strategy , (that stood your civ through the test of Time) is what the people did, not what they had rulers and they did, it's what the people did, all of them. You are the direction that destiny did take them, but playing yourself into a corner may have made the way easy or hard.
Maybe another route , foreseeing the need for the divergent policy at that time, and taking a "less efficient" social institution would have been the lowest opportunity cost. Or maybe taking the sophisticated government, and crashing into the upheaval anyway, really was the Civ's best shot. Civ could be a game where you make that choice.
Or maybe I'm just describing my ideal Paradox game and I need to hang out with that crowd more for the game I'm daydreaming about. Dunno.
[Will update this post with good samples of the conversational bramble that was off-topic over there]
Let me tell you, I think the origin of the problems, referring to the first passage about "gaps" on the map and unsatisfying gameism, I am increasingly convinced this is a consequence of the "absolute ruler" and "homogeneity" conceits of the game... even the genre. You know we all agreed there are distortions that occur because this is a game, this game ends, this fiction is not history, etc. etc. I wonder if things are regrettably such that, because of the main stipulation that your decisions are an "absolute ruler", that the settlement components of the game are, from that alone, necessarily either gamey with incongruities such as unsettled territories, or just unacceptably distorted in some other way; constrained by the coherence with that one, original unrealistic premise that flows through the seams of the game systems and must have consequences in other parts.
{...}
While in dialogue with mod-creator JFD, I mentioned an idea of regarding the game, despite what it says in the "fluff", as one where your player decisions represented the aggregated and impersonal will of the people. That you are not one government, or one person, but just a kind of sensing foresight, absolutely unconscious to the simulated civizens at the start, and probably even into the atomic era. Even when the people began to use government, legal, and policy systems deliberately , the vector that a society took over iterations of those institutions is what matches up with the spans of time this series is supposedly about, and where the strategic game lives.
I wondered whether this envisioning, if erected into the design from its beginning, might be enough to rewrite the catastrophic incongruence mentioned previously in this post.
So government systems in the game have actually seemed both right and wrong to me. They have seemed right, it may surprise you from the foregoing, when they involved a restriction placed on what you're allowed to do, the, e.g. winning approval from the senate. "But my decisions are the actual will of the empire; why am I convincing its ruling power?" They have seemed wrong when they have mixed up scales. Some civic reorganizations are just different emphases on this small "economy" level ('economy' as the game analysts say)... the conceit of the civic/government mechanic is not different from hypothetically just the incremental effect of emphasizing certain developments and investments between your resources, just a different feedback system and player/environment challenge setting on the abstraction of game's Progression Design.
In mixing up levels is where I think 'winning approval from the senate' goes wrong. That got too tied to the idea of your monarchical will being literally opposed by a senate. But what about regarding the situation being that the senate and the public contain knowledge that a certain war is best; and they must struggle now, rather than against the unorganized, ignorant, and uncultured (read: vicious) but compliant peers and kin of yesteryear, but against the ignorance, obligations, and vices, and daresay against the acculturation, of the ruling class and their executive powers? And curses upon our lack of foresight 400 years ago when we tried this republic thing and didn't master it sooner!
To the question, I must teach the reason why the question is its own answer. A ruling power instituted by a people does what it does because it makes certain things not happen. Perhaps a proposition that could be made about reality is this: What makes certain things happen is only ever just the people. All the people, rulers and messengers, and peacekeepers, and the public (and thinkers, and businessmen, and educators and young people......). More-perhaps could we take this into the design of the game and make it bound up in the "absolute will" premise. Order cannot exist without Chaos. Rule is restrictive, not creative! The genius of your strategy , (that stood your civ through the test of Time) is what the people did, not what they had rulers and they did, it's what the people did, all of them. You are the direction that destiny did take them, but playing yourself into a corner may have made the way easy or hard.
Maybe another route , foreseeing the need for the divergent policy at that time, and taking a "less efficient" social institution would have been the lowest opportunity cost. Or maybe taking the sophisticated government, and crashing into the upheaval anyway, really was the Civ's best shot. Civ could be a game where you make that choice.
Or maybe I'm just describing my ideal Paradox game and I need to hang out with that crowd more for the game I'm daydreaming about. Dunno.
