DG2 - Build as You Go Rules

[DaveShack]

There has been a motion by Donsig, seconded by me, that we start with a very minimum set of officials to start the 1st term, such as a President and a Judiciary, and maybe a Governor given we know we'll have at least one city.

Under this proposal, citizens would create offices and assign duties to them via initiative as the need is identified during the game. Then the office might be filled mid-term by an appointment or a special election.

I'll throw out one more idea for this concept if we want it to be elections but not take extra time. We could have multi-choice nominations and elections for "officer at large" to begin the 1st term, and fill newly created offices by assigning offices to those who get more than 50%, highest tally gets first created office.

The floor is now open.

 

[Bertie]

Good idea! It’s an interesting idea to start with just the President. However, I’d prefer – as I outlined IN THIS POST a couple of weeks ago – to nominate candidates for several different offices rather than just starting with one office. Why? Because we already know we want and need more than one office, and starting with more officials will speed the development of our Code of Laws and will give more citizens proactive roles earlier in the game.

I suggest we start with President, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Domestic Affairs, Minister of Military Affairs, and Minister of Legal Affairs (Chief Justice if you will). Those officials, with the advice and consent of the citizens, could develop the scope and duties of their respective offices. Both officials and citizens would work to identify and define additional offices that might be needed. For example, the President might push for a Designated Player pool; the Minister of Domestic Affairs might push for governors; and so on.

At any rate I third Donsig's motion.

 

[DaveShack]

Yes, it would also be a good idea to define offices but not define the duties.

In case the "don't need to hurry" argument comes up, that's not the reason for either of these ideas. The reason is to defer those decisions until after all the players have returned so they get a fair hearing and all the valuable citizen input can be given.

 

[ice2k4]

Firstly in addition to this system a Constitution should be in place. This constitution would define the basic rights of the people and should atleast contain the following three points (although this was never polled, I didn't see any argument against it.)

The Citizen's Assembly has the right to create a office and distribute powers as any time via a initiative poll.

The Citizen's Assembly has the right to impeach the President via recall poll with 51% of the non-abstain votes being yea.

Upon creation of a new position a two day nomination period followed by a two day election period will be held (and can be mid-term.) (Daveshack's idea.)

For anyone who hasn't followed the previous thread which Donsig suggested this in, I would like to point out the benefits of said system.

It would effectively allow us to control the number of offices relative to the number of participants.

It would really jack up a good first term election.

It wouldn't be a ruleset written by just 4-5 people before the game took place. So citizens wouldn't be able to say "Well if I wrote the ruleset I would of..."

It wouldn't create a lot of idle offices during the first term

Daveshack also made a few points to the flaws of the system. Which can be found here
Answers to such scenarios can be found here

 

[GenMarshall]

No, Dont build as we go. Just go with a set amount of offices that we are planning to have in the beguinning.

 

[ice2k4]

No, Dont build as we go. Just go with a set amount of offices that we are planning to have in the beguinning.

Well a huge problem in DG1 was the amount of participants vs. the number of offices. I think this would help limit that problem. Also, it would get the game started a lot sooner (although I'm sure this is the least of our worries.)

 

[Falcon02]

Kinda wary of this myself. I personally like to see a minimum of legal discussion during the game itself as much as possible. I feel like it distracts alot from actually playing the game (I'm not really one of those people who enjoy the Legal side of things). And even given the legal arguments which usually arise I feel like it's gonna be multiplied if we're building everything as we go along.

However, I would assume there will be more participation in the discussions since the game would be underway.

If nothing else though I think we should start with the Basic Departments regardless (Military and Domestic).

That way we don't have to worry about the less busy departments like Culture but we've still already got people there besides the President to deal with some of the issues such as city placement, worker allocations, exploration and defense.

 

[donsig]

...but we've still already got people there besides the President to deal with some of the issues such as city placement, worker allocations, exploration and defense.

We already have people to do that - they're called citizens! If we're to play a true democracy game where the majority rules then we should minimize the middle man's role. By electing offcials we're playing a representation game not a democracy game. This system allows us all to be equals and therefore will allow those citizens who know their stuff (so to speak) to become natural leaders through the contributions they make via their posts. By not having a specific governor or military leader we can all feel free to contribute on an equal basis to discussions. I think many citizens tend to hold their tongue when an elected official speaks. Let's start out without all these elected gurus and see who emerges as leaders through our game play and strategy making discussions.

 

[Falcon02]

At the same time it's concentrating all of the "middlemans" into one single middle man, the president.

And I would say it still counts as a true democracy, as stated before.

Leaders - Executive Branch
Citizens - Legislative Branch

The "legislative Branch" in our case however is not elected and not represenatives. The Leaders are there to organize discussions, organize polls, and carry out the wishes of the people in the instructions thread.

Without leaders who posts instructions?

One could argue it's the President/DP's responcibility to follow threads and thus himself must make up his own instructions for everything based on citizen discussions and polls. But based on my own experience in previous demogames sessions in Civ III, it's alot for a DP to keep track of everything. Things get missed even with Leader posted instruction threads, let alone without.

 

[Black_Hole]

Here was my idea awhile back which got no attention, but is very similar to what Falcon02 wants:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4860035&postcount=13

 

[donsig]

At the same time it's concentrating all of the "middlemans" into one single middle man, the president.

Without leaders who posts instructions?

OK, we don't really need a president anyway. All we need are DPs (and the judiciary).

As for posting instructiosn, well, if we're going to use continuous play (which is still undecided) we'd need a whole new way of posting instructions anyway. We have a couple options that I can think about:

1) If all valid instructions are based on polls then the instruction merely recites the poll and gives the results. Anyone can post such an instruction by copying and pasting and inserting a link to the closed poll.

2) We could also have a censor type official who is responsible for posting instructions based on finalized polls. We might want several censors in office at one time to ensure the workload isn't too heavy.

 

[GenMarshall]

I am against removing and playing the Demogame without a president. We need to have presidents and leaders to keep the Demogame moving. Without it the Demogame will be stagnant.

 

[DaveShack]

Donsig's point that we don't need leaders to make decisions is correct, but it overlooks human nature. Areas with assigned leaders tend to get pushed forward, while areas with no leader end up stagnant. DG1 was a perfect example of this. It lacked someone to lead a strong focus on economics, and we ended up with an abysmal science rate due to excessive maintenance costs from growing the number of cities too fast.

We can struggle along without a leader for an area, and citizens are capable of making decisions. It will be a better game, with more energy and stronger participation, if the assignment of duties to leaders goes quickly.

I must also reiterate that it would be a serious mistake to poll everything. We need to set up a system where leaders can handle details while following the framework of big decisions set by the people.

 

[donsig]

I must also reiterate that it would be a serious mistake to poll everything. We need to set up a system where leaders can handle details while following the framework of big decisions set by the people.

I agree and I certainly did not mean to suggest we do that. I also agree with leaders handling details within the big picture the citizens decide upon - al long as citizens are allowed to delve into details if they want to.

We must not only take into account human nature of citizens but human nature of elected leaders as well. Leaders do not always meddle in details. We've had many complaints about officials not having power. Many office seekers don't want to just do the noble thing and process what the citizens want. Many want to make the big decisions themselves. I've had enough of that and it turns me off from the game.

At the start of the game we can poll all the major decisions. We have to decide where to settle, what to build there, what tech to research and what to do without military unit. All of four decisions. We have plenty of time to create elected offices as our country grows and the need for them actually arises.

 

[Cyc]

I believe donsig is on to something here. The Demogame needs a good kick in the pants, so a major change in the fundemental operating rules wouldn't be such a bad idea. If you combine the majority of donsig's ideas (he's been pushing for them for a vey long time, so they are not out of the blue), they would gel into a playable game.

I like the idea of continually discussing new things as they are needed (Offices, duties...), and this major over-haul may be needed also.

 

[Octavian X]

The concept is interesting - it is difficult to plan at the beginning of the game for things needed at the endgame. I think, however, that the plan puts too much faith in the democratic aspects of the game.

For one, we seem to have this terrible inability to affect major change in our governing structure. Many have complained about the Triumvirate approach, which we ended up adopting with the understanding that the rules would be rewritten soon after the Alphawolf scandal had calmed down. This never happened, despite the flaws in the system. Affecting major change would be necessary for the 'build as you go approach.' Otherwise, we will almost certainly end up with a jumble of initiatives defining a patchwork of conflicting offices without coherent organization, and legal infighting to no end.

I'm probably beating a dead horse, but I think that the old proposed flexible ruleset dealt with a similar idea, but with a more organized group of leaders - military, domestic, and foreign, President - around which other subordinate offices would be added, thus avoiding the chaos bound to be inherent in any sort of ad-hoc setup.

 

[ravensfire]

At this point, I think we need to make a decision about the general approach we're going to take.

We could probably poll this as 1) Build As You Go vs 2) Defined Roles. Optionally, through in the Flex concept (a mix of the two). We need to start making serious progress on the rules, and start doing that soon.

While this is only one of the several open decisions still to be made, it is arguable the most important. The faster we move towards answering it, the better off we're going to be. Maybe, a day of final discussion, poll up up Thursday and close it on Monday?

-- Ravensfire

 

[Cyc]

Sounds like a good timetable to me, RF.

Hopefully, we can get a decent but brief proposal drawn up for all three concepts and a community-written poll can be done, as in one of the last important issues.

 

[ice2k4]

Alphawolf scandal had calmed down.

Can anyone explain what exactly happened in said scandal, since I entered the demogame in the middle of the second term. Not meaning to be nosy or anything, but it might help be understand potential flaws in our ruleset.

 

[Black_Hole]

Can anyone explain what exactly happened in said scandal, since I entered the demogame in the middle of the second term. Not meaning to be nosy or anything, but it might help be understand potential flaws in our ruleset.

I will try to be as objective as possible:

Alphawolf was the person who originally proposed and pushed the Triumvirate government. The Triumvirate was one of three governments proposed, the other two being flexible (offices could be created and removed) and traditional (similar to previous games). There was a poll between these government types and Triumvirate won (I think it was a slim margin, but don't quote me).

As that Code of Laws set was being polished and the demogame was about to start, the moderators discovered that there were about dozen or accounts from the same IP address as alphawolf, and they all voted in the poll that decided we would use a triumvirate government. A poll was then posted by the moderators on whether to continue on or to stop and repoll the Code of Laws set. "Continue' won by a slim margin, mostly because people wanted to play right away. Then the first term judiciary was encapsulated by arguments on whether or not the Triumvirate government was legally ratified. And now everyone is mad at the people who play the legal angle of the game since that "detracted" from the civ4 game, and some argue was a reason people lost interest in this game.