@Shadowbound - You should consider merging stability and confidence into one metric [with default reform points continuing to be attached to the combined mechanic]
The separation of stability from confidence is a deliberate choice, as both track slightly different concepts.
Consider two states:
- A is a populist, recently founded republic. Its population has high confidence in its government, but said government is new and untested. Instead of strong civil institutions it mostly operates on the personal charisma of its ruler.
- B is a traditional, well-established monarchy. The population is not enthusiastic about its government, but said government has persisted for generations. The ruler can be a syphilitic inbred who leaves most of government to his ministers and the state will mozy along just fine.
On paper this may seem the seem similar, but both states would collapse through very different methods. I can find enough historical parallels for each. A would fall into civil war because of its leadership being personally discredited, while in B it requires more of an assault on the underlying institutions of the government as opposed to the ruler personally.
Both A and B are, in this example, small nations, but things get more complicated when I include colonies. Do I include colonial stability in the overall calculation? The easy answer is no, but that can still be disputed. What about nearby continental provinces, which may not have a say in the government itself and effectively be colonies anyway? It's in the handling of large, multi-state empires that the stability-confidence dynamic finds definition: a small colonial revolt in a high stability nation may be resolved with no action from the player, while in a low stability nation said revolt could spiral out of control or lead to a general civil war. To view it one way, confidence is the likelihood of a revolt, stability is the size of the revolt.
- C is a colonial empire put together over the course of a century. It has numerous states, some of which are tolerant of the government and some of which are agitating for independence. It has a small core of states that remain supportive. Its administration is capable of putting down large revolts and nipping small rebellions in the bud.
- D is the achievement of a particularly brilliant conqueror, taking a wide swathe of territory in a short time period. It has the same dynamic as C, in as far as states go, but it has much lower stability. A sudden military defeat or the death of its ruler may result in a quick collapse as the governing institutions to maintain control over such a large state don't exist.
We can find plenty of parallels to D, and contrast them with C in that C maintained or achieved a high enough stability. Austria during the Napoleonic Wars ended up losing nearly every conflict except the last one, while Napoleonic France just needed to lose the Russian campaign.
The current flaw in the system is that there doesn't seem to be a clear incentive for high stability, as low stability explicitly gives more reform points to spend. I'm, uh, working on that.
You know Shadow, you could move this over to a more modern map projection pretty easily...
My weakness is the map-making aspect. And all the work NESing did to produce more detailed, GIS-accurate maps in a better projection with filters and everything ended up going to waste as no one managed to run a game with them.
