FreeOrion

Need there be a significant (or any) difference in the internal code between having a meter(-like set of numbers) where current is constantly set to target and a meter(-like set of numbers) where current and target are calculated separately, or could it be possible to switch between one and the other completely using content files? If the latter is the case, it might be better to implement the code, then test whether having one or two values for allegiance would be better. This would also make this aspect of the game more accessible to modders.

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I think the key difference would be that a "current" meter value would need space in memory, as it needs to carry over from one turn to the next.
"Target" meter values could be recalculated each time they were used. (every time they are used, set them to 0 and recalculate)

The more i think about it, the more i think our simulating citizens concept is over-complex. This proposal is functionally the simplest, but it's not KISS enough. While the proposed process by which citizens are determined to be happy or sad can maybe be explained in a long, and hard to follow post, in the midst of a real game with everything else going on, the player will have only a MoO3-type vauge comprehension. The difficulty we all are having making the others understand just how our proposals would work, is just another indication that they are probably over-developed.

Even the simplest proposals here have far more depth and complexity than the citizen simulation of any 4X game i'm aware of... at least if we consider player-visible rules. Since this is mostly unexplored territory for a 4X, we would be wise to err on the side of simplicity, to prevent our cool new concept from sinking under it's own weight. We want the "domestic" side of politics to be interesting without being incomprehensible, or frustratingly dominate the game. Remember, if we are too cautious, it is more efficient to add in more detail later, than to try to simplify something after it's been coded.

The following is the bare-bones approach that i never yet quite had the guts to propose. Its hard letting go of a cool idea, even if it doesn't fit well in the over-all system. This doesn't do all that i wish it could, but it does a lot, and it does it in a more understandable way. Also if playtesting shows that this approach is too simple, it shouldn't be very hard to add in some of the features discussed in this thread. Sorry, no slick chart graphics until i get my real computer back from the shop.


Ethos / Imperial Alignment
At the highest level of citizen simulation is each specie's ethos. There will be a set number of alignment scales like:

Pacifistic <--> Bloodthirsty
Freedom <--> Security/Control
Expansion <--> Development
Hierarchical <--> Egalitarianism

Each empire's performance is measured on each of the scales. However, only known actions effect an empire's rating on the scales -- successful espionage does not. Both ends of every scale should be valid strategic choices, in other words none of the scales measure "Awesomeness <--> Pitifulness". Players can see the alignment ratings of all known empires, as this represents general, public knowledge.

The ethos is a preference for empires to act toward one end of a scale. For instance the Zugli might prefer Pacifistic and Expansionistic empires, but have no preference weather an empire is Hierarchical or Egalitarian. Ethos is an inherent and unchanging quality of a species, because it is intended to give each species a unique character.

"Allegiance" which in this proposal could also be labled "Ethical Compatibility", is simply and only the measurement of how well an empire's alignment matches a specie's ethos. Allegiance alters when relevant alignment scales change-- it does not have separate target and current values. Since it is a straightforward calculation, the allegiance of all known species to all known empires should be displayed, possibly on the same page that displays an empire's alignments. To keep things simple, all other factors effecting allegiance have been removed from this proposal, such as how many of a species have been killed by an empire. There were just too many complex, fluctuating variables in the equation, and simplifying "allegiance" seemed to cause the least damage.

Basing Allegiance primarily on “public knowledge” of imperial alignments has several advantages:

* It prevents human players feeling the need to try to intuit an empire's behavior from allegiance shifts.
* It codifies ethoi into something that’s easy to compare and process
* It makes it easy to see what changes in behavior would please/offend different species

Optional Homeworld Destruction Rule
If an empire destroys a homeworld, the entire species pronounces that empire "Anathema." Thereafter, that species allegiance to the destroying empire is permanently set at a very low level, the empire's alignment is no longer considered. This is a broad-brush approach to getting a reaction to the biggest atrocity, which is about all that is compatible with this system, but it is still something fun that MoO seems to have omitted.

Happiness
Happiness measures how closely things are the way a species or a planet wants them to be. No human-like emotions are neccesaryly implied. Low happiness produces riots and/or rebellions, and high happiness increases resistance to espianoge, and probably does something else nice. Happiness is strongly based on allegiance, but it does not influence allegiance. Happiness isn’t “directed” at any empire, though due to the fact that a planet resides in a particular empire, that empire has a bigger effect on happiness, and is more likely to be effected by a planet’s (un)happiness. The planet doesn’t care who causes the unhappiness, it just reacts.

Things that effect Happiness can be divided into two groups, 1) things that effect all members of a species within an empire, and 2) things that effect a single planet only. It can also be divided another two ways: 1) things that effect target happiness, 2) things that effect current happiness. For clarity i'll list them all out, adding everthing i can think of, though i don't expect all these effectors to be used.

Empire-wide Target Happiness effectors

* Allegiance
* Status/Rank (if we include this mechanic)
* Civics choices (though these might effect the alignments directly instead)
* Happiness-altering techs?

Empire-wide Current Happiness effectors

* Diplomatic Status changes (explained below)
* Empathy (if included)
* Empire-wide Random or Special Events
* Adding/Subtraction a planet of the species to/from the Empire (via colonization or conquest)

Local Target Happiness effectors

*Some Buildings
* Some Planetary Specials (such as "homeworld", and "capital")
* Satisfaction with planet's EP

Local Current Happiness effectors

* Espionage directed against the planet
* Destruction (population, infrastructure, or building loss)
* Starvation
* Overpopulation?
* Local Random or Special Events

Diplomatic Alteration of Happiness
Some diplomatic actions will effect the Imperial aligments directly, and thus effect happiness indirectly. For instance an empire increases it's "bloodthirstiness" when it declares war, and thus would make any bloodthirsty member species happier.
However diplomatic treaties have a more direct way of effecting happiness. When a diplomatic status changes (this includes all treaty signings, treaty breakings and cancelings), each species in an involved empire may react. If the treaty is beneficial to the foreign empire, a species will have a boost to current happiness to the degree that they have a positive allegiance to that empire. Similarly a species will be temporarily saddened is their home empire extorts something from an empire they like (have positive allegiance toward).
Having diplomatic stuff effect only the current happiness, has significant advantages for the sanity of the player and the coder. There are no subtile, unpredictable shiftings of happiness as allegiance to foreign empires change. The ramifications on happiness from any decision can be concisely listed for the player.

I have some ideas on a twist on the "loyalist" idea that would work with this system, but i need to flesh them out a little more. This is plenty for one post.

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It seems to me like it would be simpler for
Allegiance= All Species-Empire effects
Happiness= Allegiance of species-owning empire + Local-(owning empire) effects

It seems the reason you moved all 'non allignment' Species wide effects into Happiness rather than Allegiance is to prevent the player from 'intuiting' an empire's behavior from allegiance shifts.

However, will happiness be influenced by "hidden" beaviors?
I would presume not (I don't want my people reacting to something I don't want other empires knowing), and so I don't see any reason to make the system more complex by having a 'species in this empire' category of happiness

Because that means I need to know
1. Allegiance of a species to my empire
and
Separately
2. Empire-wide species happiness in my empire


Wheras in the
Allegiance=Species effect, Happiness=local
Then I ONLY need to know species allegiance, because ALL 'Happiness' effects are either Allegiance effects or strictly local

If you are worried about complex chaining with diplomacy, then have species allegiance only affected by Changes in diplomatic status (as you propose)

Basically, Species allegiance would be

* Allignment-Ethos match
* Status/Rank (if we include this mechanic)
* Diplomatic Status changes (explained below)
* Empathy (if included)
* Empire-specific Random or Special Events
* Adding/Subtraction a planet of the species to/from the Empire


And Happiness would be

*Some Buildings
* Some Planetary Specials (such as "homeworld", and "capital")
* Espionage directed against the planet
* Destruction (population, infrastructure, or building loss)
* Starvation
* Overpopulation?
* Local Random or Special Events
* Happiness techs

Allegiance+Happiness would be the important factor

....continuation of proposal in my previous post

Citizen Reaction to being Conquered
There's been a lot of discussion about what should happen when an empire acquires a planet from another empire. That's as it should be, the citizens reaction to conquest is one of the best opportunities to apply citizen happiness/allegiance to the game. This mechanic is pretty easy to understand, and as far as i can tell avoids any weird issues, and simulates a nice variety of things. The same calculation should be used weather the planet is acquired via warfare or trade, or even if the planet successfully rebelled and joined a new empire.

When a planet is conquered, some of the causes of (un)happiness change, while others stay the same. A starving planet will still be starving, but the new empire will probably have civics, treaties, and an alignment that the the citizens will like more or less than the former ones. Therefore only empire-wide causes of (un)happiness should be considered in calculating the citizen reaction to a takeover.

So, when a planet changes hands two values are compared: The empire-wide target happiness of the species for the old empire (which includes allegiance), and the same values for the new empire. The value for the new empire may be hypothetical, since there may be no current citizens of the species being happy or unhappy, but the target happiness level is easy to calculate.

If the species prefers the new empire, a bonus is added to the planet's current happiness which is proportionate to the degree that they prefer the new empire. I.E. if they prefer the new empire a lot, a large amount is added to their happiness, or if they prefer the new empire only slightly a small amount is added to happiness. A message appears to the effect of "The [species name] citizens of [planet name] welcome their new [empire name] overlords!"

If the species prefer the old empire, the inverse occurs, negative happiness is added to the planet's current happiness meter, and you get a message expressing the citizen's lack of enthusiasm. If the citizens are made unhappy enough, they will of course riot and/or rebel.


Results
* There will generally a sudden fluctuation of happiness when a planet changes hands, though there doesn't seem to be any exploit-like results when different empires take over a planet in rapid succession, so that one order of conquest produces significantly different results than another.

* Notice that the inhumane conqueror is justly rewarded. Bombing citizens and buildings makes the planet unhappy. Bombing a planet a lot makes it very unhappy. But since this is local unhappiness, it is inherited by the new empire, thus that empire has to put up with the riots it's destruction has caused. On the flip side, a relatively humane conqueror will cause little unhappiness, and have the opportunity to take over with little disorder, assuming it's civics, alignment, etc. are compatible.

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This would be another advantage of keeping all Species-Empire relationships in Allegiance

The happiness change from moving between two empires would be based on Allegiance differences. Instead of having to look at a second (Different) value [species happiness in my empire.. and the other empire]

Otherwise, Good idea.

Krikkitone, I'm somewhat confused by your last 2 posts. If i understand correctly, you have two main points:

1)


You are recommending that what i've labeled "empire-wide happiness" should be relabeled "allegiance", presumably with what i labeled "allegiance" getting another label, like "ethical compatibility". Essentially you want a change in terminology, right? -- with the exception of moving happiness-modifying tech to effecting local happiness directly.

I see advantages and disadvantages to switching terminology, some of which depend on the second point.

2)

No, i simplified "allegiance", because it seemed like the best candidate for simplification. But (again, if i understand you-- and i'm really not sure that i do) this is an important point. Do we care if information like civics, and species rank is publicly available? Personally i don't. In CivIV, for instance, you can see the civics of all known empires, and i don't think that ruins the espionage aspect of the game.

Well, what you labeled "allegiance" wouldn't be .. anything It wouldn't even be visible except by "drilling down"
The "Giysache" Allegiance would read
-30 to you
breakdown
-5 you killed some of us ('Damage' Effect)
-15 you are Bloodthirsty (Alignment effect)
-10 Diplomatic effects



Neither do I... which is why I see no reason for things that affect all worlds of a species in your empire to not be part of a stat that applies to the entire species everywhere as opposed to an local world stat.

Basically I can look at the "Allegiance" and see which species Would tend to rebel more if they became part of my empire, as well as seeing which empire species already in my empire would rebel if they were taken in.

I'll be honest, I don't like the idea of Ethos affecting Allegiance/Happiness at all. I find that it pidgeonholes a player into a certain playstyle with certain races. If you pick a bloodthirsty race, and then try to pursue diplomatic victory, your people will hate you and rebel. Realistic? Sure. But not fun. Any option should be open to any race. Further, an entire game could then be decided by the random opponent races selected by the AI.

Say for example that I pick a passive race with the intention of pursuing diplomatic victory, and the AI selects all bloodthirsty races. Well now any world that I take will hate me for not being bloodthirsty enough, unless I go genocidal to wipe them out and resettle with my own people, who will hate me for preforming a genocide.. Meanwhile any planet that the enemy takes is going to be perfectly happy signing up for the fleet and going off to war with me.

Races, by virtue of their racial attributes, can be better suited to certain styles of gameplay, but pursuing a different one shouldn't penalize the player further by adding unrest.

I wouldn't be interested in playing a game that's essentialy an election in space, where every decision I make has to be carefully weighed on whether or not my own people will hate me for it, or if a certain percentage of the population working 2% harder is better than a different percent of the population not liking something and rebelling. There is too much else going on in the game to worry about this overmuch. The proposed system is reminiscent of Hearts of Iron, but that game didn't allow you to tactically control combat, so all you had to do was manage production and politics.

The entire concept of Allegiance/Happiness can be vastly simplified without homogenizing the races in your empire overmuch.

As a simple proposal, imagine happiness is a percent value (capped at 100%, minimum of 0%) with a default of 50%:

Set up 15-20 things that could possibly effect how much a race likes you, for example:
-If the race is your primary race, add 25%, if they are a minority, subtract 15%
-If your taxes/production quotas/whatever are a certain amount, add or subtract X%
-Empire-Wide Building effects
-Special policies (ie increased food rations for the people gives extra happiness at a cost of production)
-Modifier for the Diplomatic Status of your empire to that race's empire (for example, +25% if allied, -25% if at war). If would have to be determined what effect it would have if you were at war with that empire and then annihilated it entirely.
-Modifier for having destroyed a race's homeworld (or having had the homeworld destroyed for your main race)
Etc. Etc.

So if you have 3 races in your empire, each of them is going to have a different happiness percentage.

To determine the happiness level of a planet, apply the happiness% of the race to the %population that race represents on the world.. If your main race is 100% happy and represents 100% of the population, then the planet's happiness is 100%. If half the world is populated by a race with only 50% happiness, then the planet's happiness is 75% (100%x50% main race + 50%x50% secondary race). This can then be modified by local factors such as sabotage, buildings, etc.

By carefully choosing the factors affecting happiness you can include virtually all the concepts you've been discussing here, but in a much more manageable mouthful. Each factor would operate over a known scale, so it's predicatable, easy to understand, easy to display, and pretty flexible.

-Ty.

If a race is "bloodthirsty" but reacts the same to peace and war, what makes that race bloodthirsty
How is a "bloodthirsty" race different from a "pacifist" race?

Note: these are NOT race picks, a race could be "Bloodthirsty" but have terrible combat abilities, just like it could be "pacifist" but have terrible diplomacy abilities

Basically Ethos can ONLY affect Allegiance/Happiness

As for the AI determining your strategy....well, presumably the AI players will have a strategy (regardless of Ethos/Allegiance) so if all the AIs in my game decide on a teching strategy, then I won't have the massive early wars that I want.

So the AI Already has a certain strategy, and the prechosen strategies of AIs can (and will) affect your game


In any case the idea/benefits behind "Ethos"->Allegiance/Happiness are several
1. To make 'roleplaying' a race a good choice... If you want to play warmonger psilons, then customize them to be bloodthirsty
2. To make it hard to 'turn on a dime' in your strategy, planning it out ahead of time can give benefits, at the cost of flexibility
3. To offset the advantages of a multispecies empire... if you have a bunch of Psilon colonies for research and Klackon ones for production, that is a benefit.. but if your Psilons are pacifist, and your Klackons are bloodthirsty, you will always be upsetting one of them, so it is an advantage with a cost... maybe it would just be easier to wipe out those psilons, or enslave those Klackons, less production, but they get less uppity.

You dislike some of the things because you don't fully understand my proposal. There are other misunderstandings based on not knowing some of the long-standing design decisions. Which is understandable, since such a game is quite complex, and it's not easy to get up to speed with the project as it is in progress. I'm not even sure i'd recommend reading this whole thread to get up to speed, since everyone's ideas about how this should work have changed many times in many ways, but the last few pages would probably be helpful.

I'll try to clear some of those things up, which won't necessarily make you like the proposal, but should allow for more useful disagreement.


It's not that simple. There are multiple things an empire can do to make a species unhappy or happy. An empire does not have to do everything a species prefers to keep them from rebellion. Rebellions/Riots happen when you do a lot of stuff that a species doesn't like. All options are still open to the player no matter which species he has in his empire, but some options are more generally useful. Just as in MoO, it's generally best to use a research-emphasizing strategy with Psylons.



That's highly unlikely. The various possible ethoi combinations, should by random chance be about equally represented.



You certainly won't have to scrutinize every decision. Each species will only be interested in some of the alignment scales. For instance some species will be indifferent to weather an empire is bloodthirsty or pacifistic. Of course if you have a lot of species in your empire, the situation becomes more complicated. But if you have multiple species, you'll soon figure out which species loyalty is most important to you. If you don't want to worry much about internal politics, you'll probably just try to make most of your decisions that your most important species won't hate, and keep an eye on your other species so that they don't get unhappy enough to rebel.

There are various options available to "manage" some species that you can't (or don't want to bother) keep happy.
1a) You may be able to "repatriate" the citizens of a recently conquered planet if you simply don't want to mess with that species. (this may or may not be included depending on some other undecided issues)
1b) You can evict citizens from important planets and hand it over to more convenient species.
2) You can "enslave" discontented species or planets. This makes revolution more difficult, though the planet will probably be less productive and be less resistant to espionage.
3) Some civics will probably repress rebellions empire-wide.


If all goes according to plan, many of FO's systems will have less micromanagement than MoO2. And in many ways MoO3's supercomplexity is the opposite of the game we are trying to create. So there should be room for new macro-level strategic elements, like Ethoi.



It's been decided that FO won't have a "primary race" as MoO2 does. You'll generally start with a single planet, inhabited by a single species, but that species doesn't necessarily have a special role in your empire.



It's also been long ago decided, that to avoid micromanagement and UI complexity, Planets are only inhabited by a single species. Though you will probably have some means to evacuate the citizens of a planet and turn it over to a different species.

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I appreciate the time and clarification of your proposal.

I understand that this is somewhat beyond a brainstorming thread, but that numbers and implementation aren't really what's being discussed here, more of a concreting of concept. In that spirit, given appropriate balancing, I have no objection to your proposal as stated. Disallowing multispecies planets certainly simplifies the process as well.

In any "randomly-generated" scenario, there is always the slim possibility of a worst-case-scenario cropping up, but it's unrealistic to use this as an example of how a system is flawed, and of course tweaks can be made in terms of scenario generation to prevent every AI player picking the exact same personality.

What I would like to see developed is a defined set of factors influencing happiness, each of which operates on a given "happiness scale". I realize you maybe don't want to assign numbers to anything yet, but some type of rudimentary system could be hashed out that would make the entire concept easier for a player to grasp.

Also, I'd like to apologise for my ignorance on the matter. I came upon FO about 5 months ago and have mostly just been trolling, interjecting more only in the last week or two as I follow a thread and think I may have some useful input to it, but I havn't been through every post since 2003, and to be honest, I don't really plan to read everything back that far (though I usually try to make sure I have a firm grasp of the entire topic before I post in it). Any time I say something out of turn, feel free to ignore me or simply direct me to any appropriate background information which I will gladly read over.

-Ty.

RonaldX,

No apologies are necessary, and no offense was taken. I certainly don't expect anyone to read all the backlog. I haven't. My post was in no way a criticism of you-- just trying to get you up to speed.

I haven't closely followed the other threads you've posted in, but what you posted here wasn't out of turn. It's quite common for new people to mistakenly presume that FO (FreeOrion) will imitate MoO in various ways that we've chosen not to. Don't worry about it.

IMHO we can use more eyes thinking out the implications of this topic, especially since it is a bit of a departure from MoO.

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It's hard to keep track of all the details, but it seems like the essential difference between your latest posts and your earlier system is that in the latter design, the only thing that determines a species' "allegiance" to an empire is the empire's alignment ratings and the species' priorities and preferences for those ratings. Is that accurate?


Tracking, as a player or programmer, which happiness-modifying effects are "empire wide" and which are "local only" seems needlessly complicated.

What would be wrong with: When a planet is captured, the change in current happiness of the planet is determined only by the relative degree of alignment agreement between the planet's species and the two empires involved? Rephrased: current happiness goes up if the species has higher allegiance to a new owner, and goes down if the species has lower allegiance to a new owner.

Target happiness of a planet would always be determined by a combination of allegiance (which is derived from alignment factors and species preferences) and whatever other effects act on the planet. If a planet was captured, this might change the target happiness due to a different set of effects now acting on the planet, just like researching a tech or creating a building could add or remove effects.


As eleazar noted, there are multiple factors that would influence a race's happiness or allegiance / alignment. Your planets shouldn't rebel solely due to you not playing according to one of the alignment preferences of your largest-population species.

In the case of a bloodthirsty race, what you need to do is keep in a constant state of war with frequent battles. This wouldn't necessarily mean you need to actually take territory and expand and wipe out other empires. So, it might be in your overall best interest to lose some battles and ground, so that you can fight for it again against a the same enemy empire. As long as you can stay at war with *someone* and fight battles continuously, you could still play a diplomatic game with the rest of the galaxy, and keep your population happy.

Point being, players having to devise new strategies outside of the default always-expand-as-much-as-possible-and-kill-everyone-else mode isn't a bad thing.


If you're playing for a diplomatic victory, why do you need to go around taking enemy worlds? You should be playing enemies against eachother with diplomacy and perhaps espionage, while staying neutral or liked by as many of them as possible.

That said, it may be that "passive", if included, would be a particulalry inconvenient racial trait, in which case it would likely be counterbalanced by benefits for that race.

...

Regarding eleazar's question from a page ago about why the "meter" and "object" terminology distinctions matter, the short version is that it is based on programming issues, but it's also more than that due to the way the content scripting system works. Calling something a meter or object implies you can interact with it in certain ways, which wouldn't be possible or appropriate for every statistic the game tracks, or for every game concept or structure, respectively. As well, empires and species lack many of the properties that objects do have, most notably a position in the universe... So, using "meter" to refer to any gameplay-relevant statistic could be confusing for content creators or players (if the latter see the term at all).

Again, your patience is appreciated. Given that the basic concept here is hashed out, the "objection" is really more of a desire to see this develop from a concept into a workable feature, a rudimentary framework that can be altered, balanced and adjusted. My proposal earlier was more of a bare bones mockup of how the system might look to a player, albeit with some additonal simplifications, some misconceptions, and not a few liberties taken.

From this point, it is more a question of "how is this model going to actually work in-game?" What does it look like, and how does one manipulate it.

I think the next logical step is a set of defined factors influencing racial allegiance to an empire, a set of defined factors influencing empire happiness, and a set of defined factors influencing local allegiance/happiness. You've established that some things are more important to some races than others, and this might be implemented such that, for example (and I'm pulling numbers out of my head here, just as an example framework, you may have something entirely different in mind, just expressing concept):

Given that happiness is a percent value from 0% (despair) to 100% (euphoria), a race sits at 50% (ennui) by default.
Given that allegiance is a percent value from 0% (revolt) to 100% (unwavering), a race sits at 50% (steady) by default.

Say that a race's allegiance is altered by -25% if you are at war with their parent empire, and altered by +25% if you are allied with them, it might be a racial modifier that the race ignores changes in allegiance based on diplomatic stance, which in turn means that their happiness is much less affected by shifting allegiances. It's a two-edged sword in a way because you dont get the malus, or the bonus.

The main point being that you establish a standard framework based on defined factors, and then racial modifiers affect their response to certain factors.

Has it been discussed at all what the bonuses and maluses will be regarding happiness levels?

-Ty.