Simulating Citizens

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Tsenzouken
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#61 Post by Tsenzouken »

That would be the difference between happiness/contentedness/morale and allegiance/loyalty/patriotism.

Happy well-fed people who are part of a team and feel empowered make good, productive workers, but don't necessarily feel any particular loyalty to anything past their own economic well-being. That being said, I agree that the MoO2 +% happiness was odd. An increase in efficiency (if relevant) and an increase in economic well-being would seem a logical outcome of a high happiness.

People who deeply believe in the ethos represented by their government aren't necessarily happy or efficient, but they do tend to support the government until convinced that it no longer has any chance of supporting their beliefs. So loyalty could increase the amount of disruptions a planet can tolerate before it foments riots, rebellion, etc.

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eleazar
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#62 Post by eleazar »

Tsenzouken wrote:That would be the difference between happiness/contentedness/morale and allegiance/loyalty/patriotism.
That is one of the major debates of this thread weather there should even be a difference, or if we can roll them all up together and let the level of allegiance toward the planets ruling empire serve in the place of happiness.

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Krikkitone
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#63 Post by Krikkitone »

Tsenzouken wrote:That would be the difference between happiness/contentedness/morale and allegiance/loyalty/patriotism.

Happy well-fed people who are part of a team and feel empowered make good, productive workers, but don't necessarily feel any particular loyalty to anything past their own economic well-being. That being said, I agree that the MoO2 +% happiness was odd. An increase in efficiency (if relevant) and an increase in economic well-being would seem a logical outcome of a high happiness.

People who deeply believe in the ethos represented by their government aren't necessarily happy or efficient, but they do tend to support the government until convinced that it no longer has any chance of supporting their beliefs. So loyalty could increase the amount of disruptions a planet can tolerate before it foments riots, rebellion, etc.
In that sense I would simply say "happiness" would be like an economic/social tech (so no meter required), allowing society to work smoothly.
"Loyalty" should not affect production except in the sense that people are actively working against the rest of society. (criminals, rioters, rebels). Or in the sense that you could 'mobilize' the people to give things up and work harder for the 'Parentland'

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#64 Post by Tsenzouken »

The issue there, in my view, is that reduced loyalty only decreases production once you get the population rioting and get home-grown rebellion going. So only at the extreme end of the scale. Espionage in the form of terrorist attacks can reduce productivity easily without affecting loyalty. That *could* be abstracted to a temporary planetary special that decreased production, but you'd end up with stacking issues if you wanted to do it more than once.

EDIT: Wasn't supporting it--just saying that if there isn't a happiness meter to factor production at low end values, there would have to be some way to represent it.
Last edited by Tsenzouken on Tue Jun 03, 2008 9:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Josh
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#65 Post by Josh »

Lets not have "temporary" planet specials, I don't think that's what they're meant for.

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#66 Post by MikkoM »

eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:I think that all of those should be looked at before a simple Loyalty->Production metric is put in. At the very least I might limit it to Money, which is a social product...
Well certainly we should consider other options.

Increased "money" could make a lot of sense, if money is redefined (as has been vaguely suggested) into some sort of "social" resource— of course depending on what the new definition actually is.
What I would consider to be the most important thing here is that the dropping allegiance meter, if it is the only meter, has some real consequences to the player. So that he/she has to either take his/her citizens opinions seriously or suffer the consequences what ever they might be. There could of course be other consequences than reduced production and rebellion/leaving the empire.

Also these real consequences should start early enough, so that the player has a clear motive to do something to the dissatisfaction, before the worst happens and the planet rebels or breaks free from the empire. And if these consequences start early enough, it also adds more weight to the citizens opinions than if you would only face real, in game consequences, at very low levels of allegiance.

I don`t know if Geoff already mentioned it here:
Geoff the Medio wrote: The effects can, and probably should, vary from race to race, and shouldn't always be happy = more productive.
but one idea that comes to mind is that perhaps different races could have at least somewhat different ways to show dissatisfaction. This could make them at least a little bit more unique. However this might be quite an obvious idea.

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eleazar
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#67 Post by eleazar »

Using the relatively simple formulas that others have suggested, i demonstrated that for social meter decay, and inter-planet empathy, they work and produce reasonable results.

I believe the most useful thing that could happen in this tread is if someone could similarly demonstrate that using only an allegiance meter rather than separate allegiance and happiness meters can also produce reasonable results.

And as previously mentioned the case of a planet under siege is the most tricky test case. Personally i don't really understand how it could work, but then math isn't my strong point.

josh wrote:Lets not have "temporary" planet specials, I don't think that's what they're meant for.
Though they should have another name, the need for something functionally equivalent to "temporary specials" is pretty clear.
What happens when you run out of food? "Famine". A temporary circumstance that has a special effect on the planet. "Strikes" and "Riots" are similar likely circumstances.
I would call these planetary "Statuses".

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#68 Post by Bigjoe5 »

I just remembered that this design thread was in progress. This is from my thread in Brainstorming:

Bigjoe5 wrote:Here's a preliminary list of citizen preferences, along with the selectable range of how much citizens can like or dislike them:

War: -10-10
Treaties (including all forms of friendly diplomacy): -10-10
Exploration: -5-15
Annihilation of a planet of their species: -20-0
Annihilation of a planet of a different species: -10-10
Colonizing new planets: -5-15
Conquering enemy planets: -5-15
Planets becoming their EP or discovering planet of their EP (kind of a hippie stat; unaffected by planet owner, greater bonus for Gaia) 0-20
Spying: -5-15
Being spied upon: -20-0
Planet of their species is conquered: -20-0
Planet of another species is conquered: -10-10
Starvation: -20-0
Research: -5-15

These are primarily based on the stated citizen preferences of the current races. The reason the conquering and annihilation ones are based on race instead of empire is because these are just base preferences which practically, will always be affected by allegiance to the empire(s) involved and the natural attractiveness or repulsiveness of the race(s) in question. So for example, if race X despises the annihilation of a planet of a different species, but the species on the planet was fully repulsive (10 points), the species who did it was fully charismatic (10 points), race X had minimum allegiance to the empire that owned the planet (10 points) and max allegiance to the empire that annihilated it (10 points), the race would respond exactly the same way as if all those stats were neutral and their preference for annihilation was 30!

The 0s for all of these picks are halfway between the upper and lower boundaries. Suggestions regarding boundary adjustments, adding or getting rid of categories, and general morale/allegiance mechanics are more than welcome.
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eleazar
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#69 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:I just remembered that this design thread was in progress. This is from my thread in Brainstorming:
Bigjoe5 wrote:Here's a preliminary list of citizen preferences, along with the selectable range of how much citizens can like or dislike them:
.....
I replied to the idea in the original thread. In short, i think it is very relevant to figure out how a planet's meters change when it is attacked, starves, is conquered, etc. These reactions would be universal, (i.e. every planet of every empire would react the same way if it was in the same situation) ... at least until v0.8 when we get into racial pics. I don't see a need to deal with a planet's reactions to disconnected events in the wider galaxy for this thread. Since we clearly don't want all citizens to revel in bloodshed, or all to deplore genocide, that again can be left until we deal with "race".



General Comments on the Thread

Ok, i just finished re-reading this thread. I think it's unfortunate that i chose a title with the word "simulating" in it, because i think we (including myself) have gotten a bit too much into trying to make this a realistic simulation of citizens. Going too far down that path is surely madness (if not for designers, then for programmers, or players).

I also share BigJoe5's feeling that we've got too many meters for this bit of the game... though i'm not entirely sure how we can keep the desired function with less, i'm going to throw out several ideas on simplification, in a not very critical, brain-storming fashion. Not all of these idea are simultaneously possible.

Also to reiterate from the other thread, i think this is our core we need to keep focused on:
The primary design goal of the "simulating citizens" aspect of the game is to have mechanics that makes riots/rebellions/etc an integrated and interesting part of part of the game rather than something arbitrary and annoying.


This thread so far

As i see it, the somewhat generally accepted consensus idea so far is that, we need an "allegiance" meter for each planet per each empire, but that "happiness" is not needed as a separate meter. These meters will be effected primarily by event that happen to a planet, but also by events that happen to other planets of the same species and/or empire.

I do not consider this a conclusion, merely that it is what any good proposal must address and outclass to succeed.


Several untested idea for Simplification

* Instead of allegiance meters per planet, have them per species, per system.
This doesn't greatly reduce the total number of meters, but in some circumstances it would make things much simpler, such as a large system inhabited by the same species.

* Only have one allegiance meter per planet-- it measure how much a planet likes it's ruling empire. So spies might make a planet disloyal, but they couldn't make a planet loyal to a particular outside empire. Disloyal planets would be equally open to spies of all empires, even empires that theoretically they (in another proposal) might dislike just as much. When captured, a planet's allegiance might simply be reversed, i.e. if it strongly disliked it's old ruler, it would start out strongly liking the new one. Anyway, it is only at the point of a successful rebellion, that a planet really needs to rate outside empires when it chooses who to petition for membership.

* Make allegiance a zero-sum game. Something like Civ IV, there is only one bar, and each empire may (or might not) have a segment of that bar. Whichever empire has the largest piece of the bar would be the most popular. Possibly there could also be allegiance on this bar to empire "none" for when citizen hate their empire, but don't like any of the other's either. This would be quite different from what we've been discussing, though possibly it could meet most of the same functional requirements.


Benefits of High Allegiance

There seems to be a general agreement that there should be benefit in having allegiance higher than the amount needed to prevent riots/rebellions. Resistance to spying is a good start, but that doesn't feel like enough to me. It's not been mentioned in this thread, i don't remember about others, but high allegiance seems an obvious quality to add a bonus to your military, either space, and/or ground.

I don't think we currently have the concept of panic, retreat or surrender, but resistance to panic, especially for ground troops seems like a very intuitive benefit for high allegiance. If we included a panic/retreat/surrender mechanic, obviously some species would be more susceptible to panic than others. But even the Glysache should stand firm a little better against tough odds when they love their empire than when they hate it.

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#70 Post by Krikkitone »

eleazar wrote:
Also to reiterate from the other thread, i think this is our core we need to keep focused on:
The primary design goal of the "simulating citizens" aspect of the game is to have mechanics that makes riots/rebellions/etc an integrated and interesting part of part of the game rather than something arbitrary and annoying.

Several untested idea for Simplification

* Instead of allegiance meters per planet, have them per species, per system.
This doesn't greatly reduce the total number of meters, but in some circumstances it would make things much simpler, such as a large system inhabited by the same species.

* Only have one allegiance meter per planet-- it measure how much a planet likes it's ruling empire. So spies might make a planet disloyal, but they couldn't make a planet loyal to a particular outside empire. Disloyal planets would be equally open to spies of all empires, even empires that theoretically they (in another proposal) might dislike just as much. When captured, a planet's allegiance might simply be reversed, i.e. if it strongly disliked it's old ruler, it would start out strongly liking the new one. Anyway, it is only at the point of a successful rebellion, that a planet really needs to rate outside empires when it chooses who to petition for membership.
This seems reasonable, but I think it also eliminates the possibility of enriching diplomacy.... ie suddenly attacking your 1,000 turn ally that has gifted you massive amounts of tech and stood by you in wars and had trade treaties, etc. would result in mass revolutions on your planets.... (this gives a new idea to the “attitude meter” it is what the other empire’s Citizens think of your empire, rather than the AI player....which means you would have an attitude meter.... If your people are friendly with the Eaxaw they will riot when you declare war on them, if your people are furious with the Eaxaw they will riot if you make overly favorable diplomatic agreements with them.)
eleazar wrote:

* Make allegiance a zero-sum game. Something like Civ IV, there is only one bar, and each empire may (or might not) have a segment of that bar. Whichever empire has the largest piece of the bar would be the most popular. Possibly there could also be allegiance on this bar to empire "none" for when citizen hate their empire, but don't like any of the other's either. This would be quite different from what we've been discussing, though possibly it could meet most of the same functional requirements.
This doesn’t really simplify the system too much, you still need 1 bit of data/empire/planet (note in Civ IV there isn’t actually ‘one bar’ each empire has an amount of culture that goes from 0 to infinity... the bar just represents their portion of the total..... but that is the important thing)

What this does do is solve the second problem... mentioned below... if I have an allegiance of 90 (on a meter that goes 0-100), the Effect depends on what the other empire allegiances are. (are there other empires with an allegiance of 100)

One problem with this idea is if “Relative Allegiance” is the Only thing that is important, then you reduce the diplomatic possibilities, and I think that the diplomatic possibilities of “citizen action” ie riots and rebellions are Key to helping make a game where diplomacy with AI players isn’t playing by different rules than diplomacy with human players. (ie Both players would have complete strategic freedom based on trying to win... but both would have to deal with their citizens response)

I think “Relative Allegiance” should be important for the generation of citizen response... ie you can look at your world and see how close it is to rebellion.
However, the “Absolute Allegiance” should be important for diplomacy.
ie If an allegiance 90 empire makes an alliance with an allegiance 90 empire, then the allegiance for both would Increase (we are glad you are the friend of our friends)
If an allegiance 10 empire makes an alliance with an allegiance 10 empire, then the allegiance for both would Decrease (we are unhappy you are the friend of our enemies)

However, I do agree that just because allegiance for my empire is ‘80’ that doesn’t mean I should be safe from riots/rebellions... because it should be competitive... If there is a nearby empire with an allegiance of ‘90’ then there might be “riots/rebellions” perhaps because of the high allegiance they would be low level.... causing my allegiance to drop, and continually becoming more severe.

Also, I’m not sure I like the “zero-sum” as a way of “using” allegiance because dealing with two enemy empires with allegiances of 90 and 10 should be different from dealing with two enemy empires with allegiances of 50 and 50
eleazar wrote:
Benefits of High Allegiance

There seems to be a general agreement that there should be benefit in having allegiance higher than the amount needed to prevent riots/rebellions. Resistance to spying is a good start, but that doesn't feel like enough to me. It's not been mentioned in this thread, i don't remember about others, but high allegiance seems an obvious quality to add a bonus to your military, either space, and/or ground.

I don't think we currently have the concept of panic, retreat or surrender, but resistance to panic, especially for ground troops seems like a very intuitive benefit for high allegiance. If we included a panic/retreat/surrender mechanic, obviously some species would be more susceptible to panic than others. But even the Glysache should stand firm a little better against tough odds when they love their empire than when they hate it.
I agree this would be a good additional benefit, and should probably be included.

I’m not sure if there needs to be much of a benefit than the amount needed to prevent riots/rebellions. Especially if Allegiance is a zero-sum game....



Over all I would say that High allegiance can be given a benefit by making Allegiance Competitive, rather than strictly ‘zero-sum’ ie... a Higher Allegiance to other empires will have a tendency to erode a world’s allegiance to its current owner, to the point where there are rebellions/riots, particularly if there are bad relations between the empires. (Note: the solution to this would be to unify with the other empire diplomatically)

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eleazar
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#71 Post by eleazar »

Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote: * Only have one allegiance meter per planet-- it measure how much a planet likes it's ruling empire. So spies might make a planet disloyal, but they couldn't make a planet loyal to a particular outside empire. Disloyal planets would be equally open to spies of all empires, even empires that theoretically they (in another proposal) might dislike just as much. When captured, a planet's allegiance might simply be reversed, i.e. if it strongly disliked it's old ruler, it would start out strongly liking the new one. Anyway, it is only at the point of a successful rebellion, that a planet really needs to rate outside empires when it chooses who to petition for membership.
This seems reasonable, but I think it also eliminates the possibility of enriching diplomacy.... ie suddenly attacking your 1,000 turn ally that has gifted you massive amounts of tech and stood by you in wars and had trade treaties, etc. would result in mass revolutions on your planets.... (this gives a new idea to the “attitude meter” it is what the other empire’s Citizens think of your empire, rather than the AI player....which means you would have an attitude meter.... If your people are friendly with the Eaxaw they will riot when you declare war on them, if your people are furious with the Eaxaw they will riot if you make overly favorable diplomatic agreements with them.)
Certainly this by itself provides fewer hooks for citizen reactions to diplomacy, but as i've been thinking about it, i'm not sure "1-meter-per-empire-per-planet", would lead to a very user-friendly system. If every single planet potentially has a different set of allegiances toward every other empire, getting a clear picture on how your empire would react to any diplomatic decision could be prohibitively complicated. It seems more like a MoO3 simulation-ist mechanic.

And i'm not even sure that we should assume citizens should have loyalty towards a long-time ally. After all, a really war-like species could be happy to fight anyone, and true pacifists would hate any war. Of course not all species would fall into one of these extremes, but i believe this is a more compelling source of citizen reaction to diplomacy-- though not necessarily a mutually exclusive one.

But if we did decide we needed a system where citizens would prefer different diplomatic relationships with different empires, IMHO a higher level, more easily understandable (for the player) system could be devised.


Further Comments on only having Allegiance measured towards a Planet's owning Empire

The more i think about it, the more i like this idea. You do loose the ability to make some potentially interesting distinctions. But the cost in complexity is very much lower. The most valuable thing you loose is the potential for a captured planet to retain a specific loyalty to its former well-loved empire. But in most cases using the capture-reverses-loyalty idea, it would work out much the same way:

The Puppeteers on planet Phobos love their Yellow empire. When the Black empire conquers them, their very high allegiance Yellow is reversed to a very low allegiance to their new empire, Black. Phobos' allegiance to any other empire than Black is not explicitly kept track of. But if Yellow takes Phobos back, the allegiance will reverse again, and Phobos will once again have high allegiance to their ruling empire.

Of course, if a third empire, Blue, captures Phobos from Black, they will get the same initial allegiance that Yellow would get. Perhaps not exactly what you would expect, but not shockingly counter-intuitive. The Blue empire did, after all, rescue Phobos from an empire they hated. And both Black and Blue aren't stuck with Phobos' initial allegiance-- additional actions will change it for good or ill.


Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote: * Make allegiance a zero-sum game. Something like Civ IV, there is only one bar, and each empire may (or might not) have a segment of that bar. Whichever empire has the largest piece of the bar would be the most popular. Possibly there could also be allegiance on this bar to empire "none" for when citizen hate their empire, but don't like any of the other's either. This would be quite different from what we've been discussing, though possibly it could meet most of the same functional requirements.
This doesn’t really simplify the system too much, you still need 1 bit of data/empire/planet (note in Civ IV there isn’t actually ‘one bar’ each empire has an amount of culture that goes from 0 to infinity... the bar just represents their portion of the total..... but that is the important thing)
I don't really know how this works under the hood, but it is certainly simpler in it's player comprehensibility. Also in Civ IV, unless there is an encroaching cultural border, or the city had a former owner, the meter seems to alway be at 100% to it's owning empire.

Krikkitone wrote:...and I think that the diplomatic possibilities of “citizen action” ie riots and rebellions are Key to helping make a game where diplomacy with AI players isn’t playing by different rules than diplomacy with human players.
Obviously we want the AI and human players to have the same rules in diplomacy. But we don't need citizen reactions to diplomacy to make that possible. We simply need to omit techs and pics that give a diplomatic bonus/malus.

Krikkitone wrote:I think “Relative Allegiance” should be important for the generation of citizen response... ie you can look at your world and see how close it is to rebellion.
However, the “Absolute Allegiance” should be important for diplomacy.
Using the same variable in a relative and absolute way for different purposes seems needlessly confusing. We should IMHO either:
A) use either absolute or relative for both purposes, or
B) develop an entirely different meter for diplomacy.

Krikkitone wrote:However, I do agree that just because allegiance for my empire is ‘80’ that doesn’t mean I should be safe from riots/rebellions... because it should be competitive... If there is a nearby empire with an allegiance of ‘90’ then there might be “riots/rebellions” perhaps because of the high allegiance they would be low level.... causing my allegiance to drop, and continually becoming more severe.
This doesn't seem necessary to me. From a common-sense standpoint, citizens don't start rioting and rebelling unless they like a different empire a lot more, or really dislike their current empire

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#72 Post by Krikkitone »

eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote: * Only have one allegiance meter per planet-- it measure how much a planet likes it's ruling empire.
This seems reasonable, but I think it also eliminates the possibility of enriching diplomacy.
Certainly this by itself provides fewer hooks for citizen reactions to diplomacy, but as i've been thinking about it, i'm not sure "1-meter-per-empire-per-planet", would lead to a very user-friendly system. If every single planet potentially has a different set of allegiances toward every other empire, getting a clear picture on how your empire would react to any diplomatic decision could be prohibitively complicated. It seems more like a MoO3 simulation-ist mechanic.
Well assuming that diplomatic actions can be simplified as
Good/Bad for Empire X
then you simply need to see your citizen’s level of allegiance to Empire X... display a list of planets sorted by allegiance to Empire X, the one’s that are too high/too low are likely to have problems with your work.

Indeed you could display ‘average allegiance’ to Empire X throughout your empire, and display the ‘Average allegiance change’ to Empire X if you performed a specific action

You could also display the ‘average allegiance’ of Empire X’s planets to you... and the average effect of a particular action
eleazar wrote: And i'm not even sure that we should assume citizens should have loyalty towards a long-time ally. After all, a really war-like species could be happy to fight anyone, and true pacifists would hate any war. Of course not all species would fall into one of these extremes, but i believe this is a more compelling source of citizen reaction to diplomacy-- though not necessarily a mutually exclusive one.

But if we did decide we needed a system where citizens would prefer different diplomatic relationships with different empires, IMHO a higher level, more easily understandable (for the player) system could be devised.
Well I think it is less compelling because it offers less opportunity for players to affect it in the way they can affect AI diplomacy in single player empire builders. Having that ability to “play the diplomatic game” is good... especially if it can be done to you in a managable way.
eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote: * Make allegiance a zero-sum game. Something like Civ IV, there is only one bar, and each empire may (or might not) have a segment of that bar. Whichever empire has the largest piece of the bar would be the most popular. Possibly there could also be allegiance on this bar to empire "none" for when citizen hate their empire, but don't like any of the other's either. This would be quite different from what we've been discussing, though possibly it could meet most of the same functional requirements.
This doesn’t really simplify the system too much, you still need 1 bit of data/empire/planet (note in Civ IV there isn’t actually ‘one bar’ each empire has an amount of culture that goes from 0 to infinity... the bar just represents their portion of the total..... but that is the important thing)
I don't really know how this works under the hood, but it is certainly simpler in it's player comprehensibility. Also in Civ IV, unless there is an encroaching cultural border, or the city had a former owner, the meter seems to alway be at 100% to it's owning empire.
Actually, under the hood it is terrifically complicated, in its player comprehensibility, it is very difficult to know how that meter will shift over time without complicated calculations. Hence I think it is a bad model.

Also it is very terrain limited, usually only one or two empires is involved and it is primarily functioning for determining ‘ownership’.
eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:...and I think that the diplomatic possibilities of “citizen action” ie riots and rebellions are Key to helping make a game where diplomacy with AI players isn’t playing by different rules than diplomacy with human players.
Obviously we want the AI and human players to have the same rules in diplomacy. But we don't need citizen reactions to diplomacy to make that possible. We simply need to omit techs and pics that give a diplomatic bonus/malus.
The point is that by having citizen reactions then techs, picks, and most importantly player actions that give a diplomatic bonus/malus can be used on both the human and AI player.
eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:I think “Relative Allegiance” should be important for the generation of citizen response... ie you can look at your world and see how close it is to rebellion.
However, the “Absolute Allegiance” should be important for diplomacy.
Using the same variable in a relative and absolute way for different purposes seems needlessly confusing. We should IMHO either:
A) use either absolute or relative for both purposes, or
B) develop an entirely different meter for diplomacy.
Well by relative allegiance I am thinking more of the example below which would still be understandable.
eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:However, I do agree that just because allegiance for my empire is ‘80’ that doesn’t mean I should be safe from riots/rebellions... because it should be competitive... If there is a nearby empire with an allegiance of ‘90’ then there might be “riots/rebellions” perhaps because of the high allegiance they would be low level.... causing my allegiance to drop, and continually becoming more severe.
This doesn't seem necessary to me. From a common-sense standpoint, citizens don't start rioting and rebelling unless they like a different empire a lot more, or really dislike their current empire
Well, perhaps just the competition... ie if they like another empire more then they will start liking yours less. So if another empire has an allegiance of more than yours, you would have to maintain very good relations with that empire or your allegiance would begin dropping on your world.

This way the ‘high allegiance’ is more of a buffer against others.

You still don’t get “negative effects” until your Allegiance is below 20, but if your allegiance was 75 instead of 60, it wouldn’t have started dropping against an enemy allegiance of 80.

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Re: Simulating Citizens

#73 Post by eleazar »

Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote: This seems reasonable, but I think it also eliminates the possibility of enriching diplomacy.
Certainly this by itself provides fewer hooks for citizen reactions to diplomacy, but as i've been thinking about it, i'm not sure "1-meter-per-empire-per-planet", would lead to a very user-friendly system. If every single planet potentially has a different set of allegiances toward every other empire, getting a clear picture on how your empire would react to any diplomatic decision could be prohibitively complicated. It seems more like a MoO3 simulation-ist mechanic.
Well assuming that diplomatic actions can be simplified as
Good/Bad for Empire X
then you simply need to see your citizen’s level of allegiance to Empire X... display a list of planets sorted by allegiance to Empire X, the one’s that are too high/too low are likely to have problems with your work.

Indeed you could display ‘average allegiance’ to Empire X throughout your empire, and display the ‘Average allegiance change’ to Empire X if you performed a specific action
Certainly there is a need for a sortable list to display planet information.

But with the system you've outlined (as i understand it) listing the allegiance of all your planets per all empires isn't enough to let you understand the diplomatic ramification of a decision. Because the citizens of other empires would react negatively if you befriended their enemy or visa versa. And what about the friend of an enemy of a friend-- wouldn't that bleed through a little? Presumably, in most cases you won't have up-to-date or complete information on most planets of other empires.

It looks like it would inevitably be a MoO3-style black box. Lots of information presented, but even more hidden, and little chance to figure out what's really going on.


But perhaps more too the point, Diplomacy is inherently a macro-level aspect of a 4X game. It's about the relationships between empires. Diplomatic relations can be rich and challenging when you only consider the repercussions in the opinions of another dozen or so empires. FO could not be faulted if it only went that far. But we also may make the different species (as a whole, or the subset in each empire) as entities that must be considered in the diplomatic game.
Bringing in each planet in a galaxy of hundreds or thousands would make it a better simulation, but i don't understand any of your explanations how it would make FO a better game.

Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote:And i'm not even sure that we should assume citizens should have loyalty towards a long-time ally. After all, a really war-like species could be happy to fight anyone, and true pacifists would hate any war. Of course not all species would fall into one of these extremes, but i believe this is a more compelling source of citizen reaction to diplomacy-- though not necessarily a mutually exclusive one.

But if we did decide we needed a system where citizens would prefer different diplomatic relationships with different empires, IMHO a higher level, more easily understandable (for the player) system could be devised.
Well I think it is less compelling because it offers less opportunity for players to affect it in the way they can affect AI diplomacy in single player empire builders. Having that ability to “play the diplomatic game” is good... especially if it can be done to you in a managable way.
I don't understand what you are saying here at all. I don't see that previous 4X games that didn't have per city/planet reactions to diplomacy didn't have the ability to “play the diplomatic game”.

eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:...and I think that the diplomatic possibilities of “citizen action” ie riots and rebellions are Key to helping make a game where diplomacy with AI players isn’t playing by different rules than diplomacy with human players.
Obviously we want the AI and human players to have the same rules in diplomacy. But we don't need citizen reactions to diplomacy to make that possible. We simply need to omit techs and pics that give a diplomatic bonus/malus.
The point is that by having citizen reactions then techs, picks, and most importantly player actions that give a diplomatic bonus/malus can be used on both the human and AI player.[/quote]

To clarify, i'm not saying that citizens shouldn't react to their own empire's diplomatic actions. I just think it can be done more simply and comprehensibly than by giving each planet an allegiance to every empire.

Either way a "Propaganda" tech could decrease negative citizen reaction to your actions. Pics probably apply to species, not empires, so there will be no precise parallel to playing a diplomatic empire as with MoO1 Humans.

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#74 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Do we want a three-way war to turn into a waiting game, where each side is hesitant to attack the other's colony, because it's more valuable after the third party has already captured it? That's what will happen when three empires with fairly high allegiance are at war if there is only one allegiance meter per planet. IMO, that introduces an unappealing new strategic factor into wars with three or more empires.

There is no need for allegiance to be affected for a specific planet due to actions agains that planet if happiness serves that role.

If the effect of allegiance is the same on all planets with the same ethos in an empire, there is no need for them to have distinct meters (i.e. a meter can be displayed on each planet for convenience, but it's actually the same meter for every planet of the same ethos)

However, citizens will only respond to events which are visible to their empire. This can lead to a situation in which an empire where lots of Trith in the Blue empire have high loyalty to the Black empire because they go around annihilating planets, but they are unaware that the Black empire has an alliance with the Pink empire, who has set up a multi-governmental body to promote galactic peace, and more importantly (to Pink, not the Trith), collect membership dues in resources. If the Blue empire captures a Trith planet in the Black or Pink empires however, they will have less loyalty to the Black empire because those Trith knew that Black was allied with Pink. So what happens? Do the Trith on that planet magically forget about Black's alliance with Pink? No.

Instead, Blue, by capturing a Trith planet, gained knowledge of all the events contributing to those Trith's allegiance meter, which means that capturing planets has informative value as well. Now that all the Trith in Blue know about Black's scandalous alliance with Pink, their allegiance to Black will drop to the same level as the new Trith planet which was captured from Black.

So that's 1 meter per ethos per empire per enemy empire, which is even simpler than 1 meter per species per empire per enemy empire. There will be many races, but for ethos, I think now that it's best to go with something like MoO2's governments, where you had to choose between Feudal, Dictatorship, Democracy and Unification. There can be a few more options if desired, and they should obviously be entirely different than those government options and of course ethos is no substitute for government in FO (or is it?), but you get the idea. You have to pick one ethos out of a fairly small number of preset choices which will make the race respond in predictable ways to specific events such as the one's listed here. Furthermore, there's no silly things going on like in eleazar's previous example, since allegiance is entirely objective, so planets won't necessarily tend to have low allegiance towards their enemies.

edit: this system implies that there are certain things which cannot have effects on allegiance which persist when the planet is captured. If there was a specific fleet of ships or a building that a specific race didn't like for whatever reason, the effects of that fleet on allegiance would just have to go away once the fleet or building was no longer visible to them because they got captured - you can't just give visibility of a fleet to the capturing empire. So distinguishing between localized and non-localized objects is important. Non-localized objects such as treaties and techs can have a lasting effect on allegiance since it's not game-breaking and in fact enhances strategy if an empire can gain information about them by capturing a planet. Localized objects should not be revealed to the player in this manner, so to avoid having weird situations with allegiance and visibility, and to keep allegiance consistent throughout an ethos within an empire, captured races would just have to forget about localized allegiance-altering objects when their empire no longer has visibility of them. Which seems reasonable.
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eleazar
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Re: Simulating Citizens

#75 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:Do we want a three-way war to turn into a waiting game, where each side is hesitant to attack the other's colony, because it's more valuable to them after the third party has already captured it? That's what will happen when three empires with fairly high allegiance are at war if there is only one allegiance meter per planet. IMO, that introduces an unappealing new strategic factor into wars with three or more empires.
It seems to me unlikely that this will over-influence the strategy of war.
1) The probably loss of population, infrastructure, and buildings decreases the value of a colony each time it is captured.
2) A successful attack depends on timing. It's unlikely an empire could guarantee that it would be the 2nd conqueror, unless he was significantly smarter or stronger.
3) In a 3-way war there is a parallel theoretical advantage to the empire that strikes last, since the first two who fight experience losses. However, this doesn't ruin the strategy of warfare.
Bigjoe5 wrote:There is no need for allegiance to be affected for a specific planet due to actions agains that planet if happiness serves that role.

If the effect of allegiance is the same on all planets with the same ethos in an empire, there is no need for them to have distinct meters (i.e. a meter can be displayed on each planet for convenience, but it's actually the same meter for every planet of the same ethos)
This is an interesting idea that deserves some consideration.
Bigjoe5 wrote:However, citizens will only respond to events which are visible to their empire....
That seems reasonable, though depending on how things are calculated may not be entirely practicable.
Bigjoe5 wrote:...Instead, Blue, by capturing a Trith planet, gained knowledge of all the events contributing to those Trith's allegiance meter, which means that capturing planets has informative value as well...
This seems like going too far. It seems this would work out as apparently random fluctuations in allegiance. How would you convey the information to either player that a scandal has been uncovered? In fact it could be advantageous (in your example) for black or pink to allow a minor Trith planet to be captured by Blue, if they wanted to hurt blue. But how would they know this?

Bigjoe5 wrote:So that's 1 meter per ethos per empire per enemy empire, which is even simpler than 1 meter per species per empire per enemy empire. There will be many races, but for ethos, I think now that it's best to go with something like MoO2's governments, where you had to choose between Feudal, Dictatorship, Democracy and Unification. There can be a few more options if desired, and they should obviously be entirely different than those government options and of course ethos is no substitute for government in FO (or is it?), but you get the idea.
Governments are provisionally planed to be something like SMAC or CIV, nice macro choices you can make in different areas (economy, industry, security, etc), as opposed to MoO2 Governments which are built into a empire/species from the start.

Ethos, as i envision it, is unique to every species. This is to counter-balance the gotta-catch-em-all strategy that would dominate if there were no negatives to having an increasingly large number of species as part of your empire. But an ethos could be made out of standardized, and thus predictable components. I.E. the Eaxaw might have an ethos made up of Bloodthirst, Xenophobia, and Expansionism. Other species might have any of these values, but theoretically no other species would have the exact same combination.

But weather it is based on Ethos or Species, 1 meter per empire per known empire seems manageable. We just need to think it through to see if it makes sense in various situation.

Bigjoe5 wrote:... since allegiance is entirely objective, so planets won't necessarily tend to have low allegiance towards their enemies.
I can live with that.

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