Ordinances: The Vote

Do you like my idea? (please read below)

  • Total voters
    32
Artificial Intelligence

I think AI is absolutely vital. And I think most additions should be pared down to something that you don't have to fiddle with every turn of the game, not just for the AI's benefit but for the player's benefit. But the very existance of a feature should never hinge on "oh no, the AI will have to work harder". Because if that's the case, you'd never add a feature to the game. The AI question is not if a feature should be added, but how a feature should be added.

Decide if the feature adds something to the game first. Then design the feature to be managable for both the player AND AI. After all that, if the feature still looks like a good one, compare it to other features to decide if it's worth adding to the game.

Most of the time something that requires constant oversight is a pain to the player before you even ask about AI. There's seldom much need to give AI veto power over bad features -- they'll appear much sooner.

Too Much Like Another Game, Not Enough Like Civ

I'm not one to criticize a feature for it being "uncivlike". What's Civ-like except for a feature that goes into Civ? I'm surprised people aren't still crapping their pants because they added a new worker unit, and cut out road and irrigation abilities for settlers. I'm surprised peoples' veins aren't bursting over adding the "overused" resource concept to Civ 3. But the game moves on.

Why It's Wrong to Stop at Government

Sure there will always be governments. And yeah, if they didn't add anything else, governments might be the only way to provide the player with choices about their gameplay experience. You're right. But it doesn't mean that governments are the best or only way to improve the game.

Giving the player interesting choices about their overall social structure could be improved in three ways, to my knowledge:

Mini-branches in the tech tree...
Issues every 20 turns... (Ordinances, Edicts, Dilemmas, Crises, whatever.)
Or social engineering. (SMAC-Style Sliders, and so on.)

These are different from Governments. Governments give the user but one single degree of freedom to define and customize their Civilization. Not to mention that most of the governments go unused, anyway. I admire your tenacity in giving bonuses to some of the secondary governments so they actually get used, and it's certainly not a bad idea, but where's the freedom?

Social Engineering

Look at Social Engineering. Multiple sliders give you multiple degrees of freedom. Even two degrees would be a huge bonus. Say, political and economic choices instead of this lump "government" concept. A few more degrees would give players the ability to be creative with their Nation's Civic Life.

And ultimately, you wouldn't be playing with them every turn. It would be a lot like your tax rate, except that instead of trading off between the tech tree and treasury, you might be trading off between happiness and waste, or between militarism and diplomacy. You're ultimately taking a bonus in one area at the expense of another.

National Issues

The great thing about issues (ordinances, edicts, whatever -- not that I'm going to swear up and down and live and die by their implementation in Civ 4), is they're grounded in some kind of reality. Not that it's bad to be abstract, but it's fun to have asthetics incorporated into the game. Technologies are all the same -- you could abstract all technology into a systematic nomenclature like "Social Technology #12" and build "Happiness Upgrade Level 2", but it's probably a bit more fun to have Monotheism and Cathedrals.

That's rule #1 of game design: You add the feature for what it does. You give it context after.

Taking a look at issues. An issue could simply be "You have been granted a permanant bonus. Choose one: military, economic, happiness". But it's probably more fun to frame it in the context of "farmers are uprising" or "priests demand justice" or "you discovered a recreational drug". Give the player a tradeoff.

(For a 500 turn game of Civ, with an issue every 25 turns, you deal with 20 issues. Each issue takes a minute. That's 20 minutes of gameplay added. Really not much when you compare it to something like workers, and the gameplay effort for the gameplay payoff. National Issues still wouldn't cause as many problems as workers for player micromanagement and AI.)

Ultimately issues are still tradeoffs between bonuses. And they beat government because you can push gradually in one direction (picking money friendly bonuses for a while), but not going all the way (picking war-like bonuses at a few opportune times). This is much more fun and free than being forced into a binary decision between "the war government" or "the money government".
 
AI

I agree that the AI shouldn't have a veto over features and that bad features tend to be sunk on their own (lack of) merits. That said, there will just be ideas that may be too advanced for the AI. I suppose Firaxis already has the AI up and its probably built on some basic principles. More feature specific coding could bring it up to speed on new features, but if the feature requires the kind of thinking power a human mind can successfully execute, then perhaps we should step back and set some limits. Because ultimately we're not just aiming for the AI being able to do something, but do it competently. There's a distinction.

From my years of gaming, I've found one rule that holds generally. That is, there is a positive correlation between simplicity and AI competence. So even if an idea could theoretically, possible be done, if it could be make simpler, then why not?

That's why when I'm not daydreaming about my own ideas which can sometimes get quite complicated and I have to spend the rest of the time simplifying, I usually prefer the elegance of simple systems. (ie: my belief that having sliders for several broad parameters that the AI and player could access at anytime would be a superior system to passing individual laws that is randomly offered to the player as was originally suggested)

Governments and Social Engineering

Taking the idea of simplying models, my own take on this is that social engineering could be folded into governments.

How? Introduce a real left-right libertarian-authoritarian axes into Civ politics, which is a grid form measure of polices. That's 2 sliders right there.

A Democracy can thus be politically conservative and economically liberal for example, although by default the most socially conservative republic will be more liberal than say a fascist state.

National Issies

I don't disagree with what is put forth above. But it is merely a matter of preference. The stylistic flourishes of trying to frame it in terms of grand national issues could be included in a slider system too. Civ3 already does this by alterting players of when they can build their small wonders by framing it in terms of the people are asking for X small wonder.
 
dexters said:
Governments and Social Engineering

Taking the idea of simplying models, my own take on this is that social engineering could be folded into governments.

How? Introduce a real left-right libertarian-authoritarian axes into Civ politics, which is a grid form measure of polices. That's 2 sliders right there.

A Democracy can thus be politically conservative and economically liberal for example, although by default the most socially conservative republic will be more liberal than say a fascist state.
Click to expand...

I like the thought here, that each basic system would have its extremes before it can no longer be part of that system. Lets add something here that would make social developement choices more interesting. Suppose part of how you engineer your culture(different thread) would determine the limits on the Left-Right Wing and Authoritarian-Libertarian scales. This means your extremes are affected by how your culture developed. Think about what this could also add, new population conflict.

Suppose you conquer someone of a culture that would not normally allow your form of government(particular slider setting is out of range). This would cause a huge resentment problem and could make occupation harder. We consider Hilary Clinton left-wing, but Mao Zse Dung would be way out of kilter with American culture.
 
Sir, yes, within limits.

I've thought about a kind of 'blank slate' population skewing system where your population start out as neutral blank slates that are influenced by your actions, government orientation and social policy.

The one problem I have with my own idea goes back to the issue of transparency. You'll end up at a point where if you're a semi-warmonger, a warmonger/builder etc. where you have several populations under your control that it would just be impossible or quite difficult and time consuming to keep track of all their leanings and orientations and to manage them all. That sort of would be a big hinderance to enjoyment. I'm all in favour of allowing for the growth of commercial empires and the curbing of the warmonger game to some extent, but you see how this population idea can severely hinder even just going to war for land grabs and not neccessarily for domination.

Civ3 folded the concepts of cultural mismatch into the concepts of resistance and ethnicty. Both are fairly simply on/off concepts and easily represented by graphics and thus easily managed. It might be a better idea to revise the resistance/ethnicity concept.
 
Actually I think Schwick's idea is better than the way it is in GALCIV, for the reasons you just stated. With Schwick's idea, you get crisis points in a CIV's state. With GALCIV, the ordinances are more like a lottery---you win something big, or you don't lose much at all (like $1); It mainly just rewards the civ that built up it's international popularity.
The good/evil choices (the rpg stuff) in GALCIV is closer to that, but something like Schwik exampled would be mucher cooler---kind of Domestic Politics and more.
 
Easy Dexters, just raise the level of militarism in your society and war becomes somewhat easier to achieve-though it might harm your economic and cultural development ;)!
I mentioned last night about my 'transluscent' system. Well Nationalism and Militarism are good examples for this. For instance, if you raise Nationalism, then it reduces the amount of active and passive culture which flows into your nation from foreign lands-thus helping to create a more culturally 'homogeneous' society. Raising militarism, OTOH, reduces the happiness cost of both drafting and war weariness. These are two, very transparent outcomes of adjusting these factors. Where things become a little more 'murky', however, is if the player has both very high militarism AND nationlism-in such a society your people may well suffer from 'peace weariness' (particularly if you share a border with a nation from a different culture group) and might try and thwart your attempts to pursue diplomatic options with nations of foreign culture groups-due to their deeply held 'militant xenophobia'. This is an 'unintended consequence' which occurs at the point where these two sliders 'intersect'.
Hope that makes sense.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
 
I meant to say the Good/evil choices are closer to Schwik's idea, not closer to a lottery (oops)
 
For one thing, occupation really does need to be a biatch, esepcially for well developed and vastly different cultures. Currently resistance and ethnic unhappiness is just not cutting it in terms of 'occupation hazards'. And yes, trying to invade nations with vastly different culture would make occupation very difficult. It was a major factor in the breakup of world empires.

Also, the Civ 3 model was a good beta for a new concept. However it is time to expand the concept to something more intuitive, actually comparing cultures. And for MM worries, your cultural advisor would have cultures highlighted from Green to Red in various shades based on how much your cultures are compatible. You could also see this bar is in a hanging pop-up(like the one you get in WIndows whenever you leave the mosue over something) over a citizens head for easy reference. For more details you once again see your Cultural Advisor.

Also, before you decide on any policies, your cultural advisor would warn you if it would put anyone off, lead anyone in, or other consequences such as that.
 
And thinking these ordinance ideas some more and the great conversation we got going here:

1. Pure randomness turns the game into a pure game of chance (I dislike GALCIV when it tends to do this).

2. Pure rules without chance of course makes it a sim. There's lots of interaction, but replayability goes down once you master the new rules. This is better at easier difficulty levels, until you master the rules, strategies and substrategies.

3. Rules with some chance---what Shwick's crisis point ordinance variation represents extra challenge---a harder difficulty level. It doesn't have to represent some kind of alternate, forced development (alternate to intentional development on the tech tree)----just a crisis that tests the way you're managing your system. In Schwik's example, you could keep the status quo, and fight the civil war. If you were running a magnificient monarchy you'd win the civil war. In a way, it's like SimCity's disasters--a random mini-scenario within the scenario.

So, I'd lean to including something like the ordinances as a challenge factor.

I'd still go with my 'factions' idea to help represent domestic social-political development. I don't quite like the "Social Engineering" as a simple slider bar(s) (like SMAC)---that implies our development was a 100% reversible, and 100% under our control from the beginning (I doubt that's realistic). It works in SMAC, because it's basically a post-industrial post-holocaust game.

The more realistic idea many of you are saying is to make the Social Engineering slider bars available choices with the tech tree. Doesn't that seem overly simplistic? More detailed, I say, is to represent it by factions which have their own agendas and powers. Balancing them against each other (suppress, support) by actual in-game actions would be more fun (purges, giving into the demands of some to grow the strength of their faction, reaping benefits of their special powers/weaknesses,etc..) . Without that, even more slider-bars would just feel like a spreadsheet to me.
 
I hate to break it to you, GoodGame, but recent history is showing that our social development is ALMOST 100% reversible. It will be resisted, of course-and this should be reflected in the game as well-but their are forces in this world which want to drag us kicking and screaming back to the past-the Corporate sector want workers to be like serfs again, Governments want to restrict our freedoms and our democratic rights, and church leaders want us to all fear and revere the institutions of the church. Whats worse is that they MIGHT all just get away with it if we don't fight them. That is what my system seeks to reproduce, the fact that our social development always sits on a precipice.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
 
My error in communication. I was thinking in terms of reversible state functions. Yes I agree society can bring itself down. What I meant to say was that in the ancient period, pre-knowledge of how make a working Democracy, or Equality, etc.. wouldn't exist prior to it being discovered, so that Social Engineering couldn't be selected for from the start. By implying irreversibility, I really meant to say that a path has be taken, so that even though we might build up from Despot to Democracy, and then go down again, there's a path taken that's not irreversible. Meaning a civ isn't total-potent from the very beginning, and once it's progressed in some direction, it's not an easy backward path to follow to reverse that progress.

Basically I'm thinking the truth is closer to directional function curves, and not like states (endpoints) that can be jumped between at will (which is what a multi-slider bar Engineering like SMAC means to me).

Feb 18, 2005, 10:19 PM #51
Aussie_Lurker
Emperor

Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Posts: 1,448

I hate to break it to you, GoodGame, but recent history is showing that our social development is ALMOST 100% reversible
Click to expand...
 
Basically I'm thinking the truth is closer to directional function curves, and not like states (endpoints) that can be jumped between at will (which is what a multi-slider bar Engineering like SMAC means to me).
Click to expand...

And the way to flow/steer the directional curves is by playing the Domestic Politics game of playing with the factions within your civ. I see that Aussie and me both like factions in this way.

So yes, progress can be pushed back to Despotism, by supporting factions of that type by giving into their demands.
 
Althought I am not a huge fan of 'factions', I do know how to incoroporate your concern into my system. BAsically the system could be a slider(groan) of two things, Economic policy and political policy(simplicity for now). The factor that determines how far you can push that slider on either scale is your culture. I am not sure where the scale should start(maybe player decides when they start game?) but the fact is it takes a lot of social developement(technology, or if civics covers this) before you can start reaching more modern extremes. This creates the limiting factor you are looking for. It also allows you to add any limiting factor you want to in any other form you can think of. Trying to make something as complicated as political or economic systems into a few options is a disrespect ot both. Sliders make the assumption that the sum of policies(whatever there particular nature is for simulation) is equal to the quantity. This is not Alan Greenspan's Civilization or Nicoli Machiavelli's Civilization.
 
Schwik, what I'm thinking is the slider-bar people are thinking is that you research A on the tech tree, which then lets you select position A on the slider bar. How would culture determine how much you can move your slider bar (in economics or politics as you say). To me, the sum slider bars in a "Social Engineering" slider bar system, is the 'culture' defined. So I'm confused by what you mean. Do you mean culture in the CIV3 accumulated number sense, or some other sense?

I follow you as above on Tech A, gives option A on the slider-bar. Putting changeable limits on the slider-bar movement is a clever way to represent progress, but...

My point is, as a game mechanism, the slider-bars aren't very fun, and feel like some kind of magic teleportation, rather than progression, even with increased range of movement. They feel like balancing a spreadsheet, rather than playing with the make-up of a civ by interacting with it's subunits (factions). Also, I don't subscribe to the idea that all philosophies can be linked in polarities. They should be represented as organic wholes, not forced to be linear with each other.

The basic slider-bars of CIV3, I like---they represent very fundamental nature (pursuit of pleasure vs. pursuit of knowldege, with the remainder being unspent wealth) . They make sense as a simple, national policy.

As I said earlier, a slider jump is like jumping around endpoints on a state function at will, whereas indirectly developing the civ from the active, organic components (factions) feels more real to me. Heck the factions could be cellular automata that the player tries to manipulate to get the desired social engineering. That's not over-simplistic.


Speaking on limits---I think the only way I would accept a complex slider-bar system if the real limit is how much you can change the slider settings per turn. Changing them fast represents serious social change----there have to be some kind of in-game reprecussions for that. To me, that's why CIV3 governments aren't quick to change, and they are far apart on the
tech tree.

Sliders make the assumption that the sum of policies(whatever there particular nature is for simulation) is equal to the quantity.
Click to expand...

That statement does not compute to me.

(Is Alan Greenspan an emperor?)
 
I was actually suggesting making Left-Right and Authoritarian-Libertarian purely quantities. Options and policies you adopt over time determine where you can set your government within those numbers. Wherever your 'government point' is determines economic/political policy is overall. This way you do not need to know each policy and system, just that it is -5 overall(for example). It is not the SMAC sliders.

Greenspan was the Federal Reserve Chair a year or two ago and had been for several years. Although I probably should have said John Keynes'(or Adam Smith's if you want to get old school) Civlization because of the Machiavelli reference.
 
OK, I confess that I haven't been sufficiently clear as to what I want as far as Social Engineering goes-so lets see if I can clear this up:

First of all, there would be several 'civic areas' in which you can adjust your settings-Militarism, Nationalism, Libertarianism, Materialism, Theism, Capitalism, Legalism and Sufferage.
These settings run from 0-10, with certain ranges having appropriate 'descriptors'. For instance, Militarism would run from 0 (pacifistic) to 10 (Ultra-militant). Libertarianism might run from 0 (Repressive) to 10 (Permissive). Capitalism might run from 0 (Communist) to 10 (Ultra-Capitalist)-just for examples. Now, at the beginning of the game, most of these settings will start at a preset number (usually zero) with no ability to alter them. However, as you obtain more social, governmental and cultural technologies (and, perhaps, also by dealing with the issues and dilemmas mentioned by DH_Epic) you gain greater latitude to alter these settings, up and down. The other limiting factor would be your current government. So, for instance, A Fascist or Junta Government might allow a Sufferage level of no more than 3, and can only change if you are prepared to 'suffer' a revolution-in order to adopt a more democratic type of society. In addition, though, large changes to your SE settings can also cause major disruptions to your society. Therefore, though you have great latitude in defining the overall 'look' of your society, there would be certain proscribed limits.

Anyway, if you want me to answer any other questions for you, please feel free to ask :)!

Oh and, BTW Sir_Schwick, I do understand that Sliders may not be the most 'elegant' of tools, but I do feel they allow the best freedom of action in truly creating more 'unique' governments.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
 
Social Engineering

Hand me my late pass, but I definitely like Dexter's ideas on social engineering. Either as a replacement for government, or a supplement to government in the first place.

Although "left / right" doesn't necessarily make sense to people. Not is it particularly descriptive.

If your really want to look at two dimensions, I would look at Social Issues, and Economic Issues.

Socially Planned and Economically Planned --> Authoritarian
Socially Libertarian and Economically Planned --> Left Wing / Liberal / Communist
Socially Conservative and Economically Libertarian --> Right Wing / Conservative / Fascist
Socially Libertarian and Economically Libertarian --> Libertarian

National Issues / Ordinances / Edicts

As for issues, I don't think they'd be that tricky for the AI to incorporate. For example, if an issue is really just "choose between an economic bonus and a happiness bonus" or "choose between a military bonus and a diplomatic bonus", then you really just need to give an AI a way to pick a good bonus.

If you take an almost RPG style approach, then the AI would strive for certain kinds of bonuses as it suits their natural pre-disposition. For example, you tell the Egyptian AI to strive for 80% growth, and 20% religious bonuses -- and they decide on issues accordingly. (The Egyptians pick the growth-bonus most of the time, but pick bonuses for religion on occasion, too.)

If you take a soulless competitive approach, so much the better. The AI doesn't care about having a style so much as picking what gives it the biggest benefit at the time. If they're the economic leader, then they should pick an economic bonus. If they're a military leader, they should pick a military bonus. Basically, they always choose to enhance their strengths.

You could also fake this -- the AI wouldn't have to get the same issues as the player, since it doesn't care about the semantics of a "peasant uprising" or a "discovery of a religious artifact". It just picks a bonus every 25 turns. In this respect, the AI would have a slight handicap to compensate for the player's ability to be flexible and creative.
 
dh_epic said:
Social Engineering


Although "left / right" doesn't necessarily make sense to people. Not is it particularly descriptive.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Left-Right axes describes your economic freedoms, top-down (authoritarian-libertertarian) axes describes your social freedoms.

This is an improved way of viewing politics than the traditional simplified left-right dichotomy which tended to bunch libertarians as right-wing.
 
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