Civil unrest

[Ablaze]

I’ve been thinking about how civil unrest could be implemented. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Each society has a preference for how their ruler acts. There are a limited number of unrest profiles that you can choose from, and each profile takes a different number of racial picks.

One type of society might become unhappy unless your empire engages in battle at least once every 8 turns or so. Another empire might become unhappy if you attack someone who hasn’t first attacked one of your planets. Each of these profiles also contain their own ways of dealing with unrest. For instance, the first profile would require you to have a standing army on a planet in order to quell unrest. The second would require you to spend money on them.

Unrest can also be caused by other things, like enemy spy activity. There would also be a profile (hive mind) in which unrest is impossible, this profile would take a large number of racial picks.

If unrest gets too high then several things can happen. The first thing that will happen is that that planet will become less desirable and people will tend to emigrate. Another thing that can happen is a resistance could form. Left alone the resistance will eventually split off and form a neutral empire. This would take a lot of unrest for a long time, and would be pretty easy to avoid. A much greater threat is that an enemy empire (through spies or during ground combat) could take over the resistance and start providing funding. This would allow them to turn a small invasion into a large one, or perhaps even to take over your planet without ever even sending a fleet.

High moral is also a good thing. Some of the more advanced treaties (like alliance) would require a high moral to implement. In some profiles people work harder when they have a high moral. It also encourages immigration.

Anyway, anyone have any ideas on how to expand/improve this?

[Geoff the Medio]

Three comments...

1) Good stuff.

2) IMO this sort of thing would be best tied into a comprehensive factions system, as discussed in various brainstorming threads

3) My #1 desire for unrest in general: Make unrest more than just a reason to keep your taxes low.

[skdiw]

I think it's good start.

The biggiest thing I worry about is too many concepts that do basically the same game effect, that is slowing your empire down. I don't like unrest, morale, dessertion... all treated as seperate game features, but rather, I prefer a comprehensive system like the one proposed. So maybe at high morale, you the colony gets a economy boost and pop growth boost; at really low morale, you may get "unrest" so ppl move out or defect. On the other hand, at unrest, the colony may revolt and change society profile.

I think GalCiv got a good system to get some ideas off of. In GalCiv, the is morale meter. At 100%, you get a pop growth bonus, and 50% or lower, you get pop loss and increase susceptability to unrest/defection. The way the system work is population keeps increasing until some limit when the citizen feels crowded so the morale decreases. That in turn decreases the pop growth until it's negative so pop decrease until morale starts climbing again. The taxation has a S-curve effect on morale so decreasing taxation will have a diminishing effect on increasing morale. Each colony aslo have a propaganda factor which you can increase to increase the morale locally.

I think different unrest profile is an excellent idea. The profiles could be tied into government forms rather than racial pick. Maybe as racial pick, you pick your starting government form like in moo2.

If there is inter-empire population traffics, I like it to be simple, if we use any system at all. So if Psilons starts to live in your Burathi empire, the Psilons citizen is treated as the same as a Burathi citizen without the rp racial bonus. We could do a system with racial bonus, but it can get complicated very quickly.

[Velizar]

Indeed. A great idea. Finally someone found a use for moral/unrest!

Perhaps high moral could be only one of the many requirements for unlocking certain understandable diplomatic options. Example, to have the POSSIBILITY to forge an alliance you'd need to have at least 3-4 of these: High Moral, Low Cause for War, Good Current Relations, Honorable Reputation/Common Interest, Alignment: Similar, Culture: Similar, Religion: Compatible, Customary Bribe! The more you have, the greater the chance that the xenosophonts would agree to the threaty.

Also, it adds more flavor and personality to the races. Great for immersion.

[Ablaze]

Your right, cross empire emigration doesn’t really fit cleanly into the freeorion framework. Subspace returns (the game I’m building) uses it as one of the core game mechanics: When you start out you can pick from a few generic races. When you control the population of another race (through capturing planets, cultural conquest, ect) then you can choose to make a chimera race at a large cost. This will transform the population of the other race into your race and allow you to increase one of the attributes of your own race. As you absorb more and more of the other race’s population your race’s stats will continue to increase.

I’m not sure how much of that can fit into the freeorion framework, probably none.

[Geoff the Medio]

I think GalCiv got a good system to get some ideas off of. In GalCiv, the is morale meter. At 100%, you get a pop growth bonus, and 50% or lower, you get pop loss and increase susceptability to unrest/defection. The way the system work is population keeps increasing until some limit when the citizen feels crowded so the morale decreases. That in turn decreases the pop growth until it's negative so pop decrease until morale starts climbing again.

I'm not a fan of relating population / growth to happiness in that way... One issue is described here. And IMO, having more "substantial" reasons for (un)happiness is more fun and interesting and useful for strategic gameplay-setting-up. eg. The population on planet Q isn't happen because faction X has a major presence there, and faction X likes empire N, who you just started a war with. Or faction Y has a major presence on planet R, but so does faction Z, and factions Y and Z dislike eachother, so are fighting. Or a civ-barbarians-like pirate raiding base, or nest of space monsters, has appeared in an uninhabited system or planet near planet S, and every few turns a pirate raider ship attacks planet S, which makes them unhappy until you root out the pirates.

Regarding Ablaze's original post,

Each society has a preference for how their ruler acts.

This could be implemented as a bias towards certain factions being more popular in your empire, or could be done as a selection bias on the agendas of the factions that appear in your empire.

I think different unrest profile is an excellent idea. The profiles could be tied into government forms rather than racial pick. Maybe as racial pick, you pick your starting government form like in moo2.

IMO it's be better to tie profiles to races, and have the profile contain preferences for certain types of governments / SE choices. Thus you can pick the Democratic SE choice, but doing so might make your race unhappy if they (or the factions they adhere to due to their profile) prefer a Dictatorship or Meritocracy.

If there is inter-empire population traffics, I like it to be simple, if we use any system at all. So if Psilons starts to live in your Burathi empire, the Psilons citizen is treated as the same as a Burathi citizen without the rp racial bonus. We could do a system with racial bonus, but it can get complicated very quickly.

Based on discussions here, there will not be more than one race of population on each planet. As such, rather than unintuitively treating a population of one race as another, or magically transforming population when it migrates, I'd suggest not allowing migration between planets with different races.

However, there could be a system set up where you can designate an unpopulated planet in a system you control as an officially sanctioned migration destination for population of a certain race. Then if nearby planets of other empires were experiencing massive emigration, the population could settle in your empire even if you didn't already have a planet (nearby) populated by the same race.

[Ablaze]

Perhaps instead of a migration point you could simply have a designated race on each planet and if you tried to import the people from another race (your race for instance) then it would change the planet’s race. All of the indigenous population would immediately stop working for you and try to emigrate. Any population that couldn’t emigrate would be systematically killed off.

[Geoff the Medio]

Perhaps instead of a migration point you could simply have a designated race on each planet

My initial reaction is that the player should also be able to mark planets as ok / off limits for immigration, but this could be done just as easily by considering all planets not marked for a particular race to be off limits.

Also, perhaps you could mark planets owned by other empires for immigration. People you send to other empires are more likely, when they arrive, to be aligned to a faction that likes your empire, despite being under the control of the other empire. The speed (or whether at all) this occurs would likely depend on your diplomatic status or cultural factors.

This would make it more difficult to break long-term alliances, as you'd have a bunch of population from the other empire on some of your planets, which wouldn't like the broken alliance.

Depending on their "border controls", you could send people to other empire's planet even if you weren't diplomatically good with them as well, to similar effects (ie. make it harder for them to be at war with you or to influence their policies.

Also, as a tradeoff, perhaps the population of your planets that is willing to migrate to new worlds, particularly enemy worlds, is more likely to be loyal to your empire, rather than most factions. Thus exporting people from your planets might actually make those planets less loyal to you.

However, there could also be some factions that want to be near a particular planet for fluff reasions, eg. religion, who want to migrate, if you'll let them.

...and if you tried to import the people from another race (your race for instance) then it would change the planet’s race. All of the indigenous population would immediately stop working for you and try to emigrate. Any population that couldn’t emigrate would be systematically killed off.

Rather than automatic killing or emigration, I suspect you'll have to vacate a planet of one race before you could settle with another. The "ruling" seems to be that you can only have one race on a planet. Since emigration will likely take a few turns to happen (which is probably necessary to avoid loopholes where you can move population around faster than you should), it won't be possible to have a bunch population of one race on a planet waiting around to emigrate while the other new race is settling in...

[Ablaze]

Rather than automatic killing or emigration, I suspect you'll have to vacate a planet of one race before you could settle with another. The "ruling" seems to be that you can only have one race on a planet. Since emigration will likely take a few turns to happen (which is probably necessary to avoid loopholes where you can move population around faster than you should), it won't be possible to have a bunch population of one race on a planet waiting around to emigrate while the other new race is settling in...

I don't see why not. There are rather significant logistical problems that would have to be solved if you had two races working on the same planet. Problems like whose terraforming preferences you would use, how you would combine racial bonuses, and which race gets to grow once the planet is filled up. All of these problems disappear, however, if the indigenous population 1) doesn’t work, and 2) always has negative growth.

[skdiw]

I'm not a fan of relating population / growth to happiness in that way... One issue is described here.

That player isn't player GalCiv correctly. At saturation or peak performance, the morale is suppose to be ~55%. You don't sacrifice population to increase morale, that acutally lowers your overall economy because your workforce is lower even though you get a small boost in efficiency for being happier.

I'm just coming out with some ideas. We could take into account the stuff you mentioned. I just like how GalCiv ties many ideas into one system.

IMO it's be better to tie profiles to races, and have the profile contain preferences for certain types of governments / SE choices. Thus you can pick the Democratic SE choice, but doing so might make your race unhappy if they (or the factions they adhere to due to their profile) prefer a Dictatorship or Meritocracy.

I think you are right. The game prolly play better if it's tied to race.

I was just worried about what if a war race who prefer dictatorship researched a higher government form of dictatorship. In concept, the race should adopt dictatorship II and not be penaltized for it. So I guess the player picks a race with a profile, and a set of government is tied to some profile like you said. Or we do Ablazes original idea of tie race with profile, then connection other game features like government indirectly. So like a pacifist government doesn't allow any wars, so a must-have-combat profile won't work well with pacifist government even though there is no direct penalities for using that combination.



I really don't have any idea for emigration problem, but right now I'm happy with numbers magically increase or decrease automatically.

[Geoff the Medio]

...it won't be possible to have a bunch population of one race on a planet waiting around to emigrate while the other new race is settling in...

I don't see why not. There are rather significant logistical problems that would have to be solved if you had two races working on the same planet. Problems like whose terraforming preferences you would use, how you would combine racial bonuses, and which race gets to grow once the planet is filled up. All of these problems disappear, however, if the indigenous population 1) doesn’t work, and 2) always has negative growth.

Two main reasons...

1)

We did decide a while back that there would only be one 'PC' race per planet - not like MOO3 where you would have a mix of population.

2) It just seems unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive and difficult to effectively represent in the UI (if not generally designed around having more than one race) to have significant amounts of population on a planet that aren't working because they're of a different race than the one you just colonized with, and to separately represent the emigration / immigration of the two races and such...

What would the advantages be in allowing multiple races of population in the way you proposed? (compared to only having one race, not compared to having many races simultaneously working, which is definitely out)

That player isn't player GalCiv correctly. At saturation or peak performance, the morale is suppose to be ~55%. You don't sacrifice population to increase morale, that acutally lowers your overall economy because your workforce is lower even though you get a small boost in efficiency for being happier.

I figured there was more of a penalty to having low morale than just lowered production... I seem to recall there were elections that depended on the morale of your planets, and you could culture-flip, which probably depended on morale...

I was just worried about what if a war race who prefer dictatorship researched a higher government form of dictatorship. In concept, the race should adopt dictatorship II and not be penaltized for it.

I don't anticipate this being a problem... Depending on how "dictatorship II" differs from "dictatorship", we could either make the race be happy (perhaps to slightly differeing degrees) with either, or make the difference a function of other SE choices which are not relevant to the race's preferences.

[Ablaze]

What would the advantages be in allowing multiple races of population in the way you proposed? (compared to only having one race, not compared to having many races simultaneously working, which is definitely out)

In many space strategy games there are no racial bonuses, so the population is interchangeable. In this one, however, they aren't going to be. You have a problem and one way or another you are going to have to solve it.

Here are the solutions I can think of:

1) As soon as you capture a population it turns into your race. This often seems kind of silly in simple games, but when races have unique bonuses and/or unique artwork it would seem downright absurd.

2) You can never capture another race's population. Your only choice is to exterminate the planet before you can use it. The only advantage to capturing an enemy planet over colonizing a new one is that the enemy planet would allow you to rebuild quickly since there is already a skeleton infrastructure in place. Or perhaps you can't even leave a skeleton infrastructure in place, and colony ships would be an essential part of your invasion force even late game. This option could severely hamper gameplay.

3) The species that starts a colony is the only species that can live on that colony. This is the way MOO2 did it. You had one option at the beginning to exterminate the native population and replace it with your own, and if you missed that chance your only option was to sell that colony's defenses, give it to an enemy, and then reconcur it. I found this very annoying.

4) There could be an option in the UI to switch the colony to another race. This is what I was originally thinking, but its major problem is that it would clutter the UI.

5) Transporting a species to a colony that you own will atomically change that colony's species. The displaced population will be shoved into the background and will still be a factor in behind the scene calculations (like immigration) but the player won't have to deal with them anymore.

[Geoff the Medio]

4) There could be an option in the UI to switch the colony to another race. This is what I was originally thinking, but its major problem is that it would clutter the UI.

Rather than just a "switch to other race" option, we could have a variety of options to depopulate a planet...

a) Encourage Emigration - population grudgingly or willingly leaves, settling on any available planets marked for Immigration by that race. Rate should be fast enough in most cases to depopulate the planet, slowly. Eventually, it will be fully depopulated, and you can recolonize with the race of your chosing. Advantage of this is that it is politically palatable and causes only moderate discontent amongst those emigrating. Disadvantages are the rather long time it takes to work, espeically for very large populations, and the potential that a faction might refuse to emigrate (if the planet has some significance to them, eg. it is their holy land, or its proximity to an empire ruled by their race).

b) Force Emigration with Ground Troops - population grudgingly or angrily leaves, settling on any planets you've marked for immigration by that race because you drop troops and make them do so.
Advantage of this is the moderate (not long) time taken. Disadvantage is the significant discontent amongst those being emigrated, and potential political problems depending on your race and government and factional disposition towards the race being emigrated. Might also be a prime target for an enemy agent to cause some "incedents" of abuse. Also require troops to do the forcing, in some ratio to the planet's population or in proportion to the rate of emigration.

c) Force Emigration with Famine, Embargos and/or Blockades - population grudgingly or angrily leaves because you threaten to stop feeding them if they don't. Similar to Forced Emigration with Ground Troops, but not useful if the planet is self-sufficient. Thus you must first get the planet "hooked" on the imperial supply chain, so as to have leverage to force them to move when you cut it off. Very prone to causing the population to ignore your orders and rebel from your control entirely, if adequately self-sufficient

d) Surface Genocide - population is killed off by your troops on the ground. Advantage is the quick time taken. Disadvantage is the fact that when you do this, the entire population effectively becomes a ground army of conscripts fighting you. You have to drop a bunch of troops to do the killing. Depending on your government / race and disposition towards the target race, there could be political ramifications. There might also be inter-empire Galactic Senate sanctions against you for this. This could actually be a way to provoke another empire into declaring war against you, if they have a lot population of the target race. Factions in other empires that dislike your race would appear or increase in size. There may also be some infrastructure damage as you fight a brief ground war.

e) Orbital Bombardment - You blast the planet from space with your fleet. Advantage is the very fast completion of the job. Disadvantages are political / social, like with Surface Genocide, but also you may damage the planet to some extent. Likely you'll avoid glassing it, but some environmental damage will occur, as well as significant infrastructure damage.

f) Biological Genocide - You engineer a plague that wipes out the race you want to get rid of. Advantage is the very very fast completion of the job, no environmental damage or infrastructure damage, and potentially no political consequences if you can do the job without being caught (ie. it appears to be a natural plague). Disadvantages are the potential the plague could spread or mutate or infect your own / other races, or that you are found out by enemy spy actions, resulting in political or social consequences similar to Ground Genocide or Orbital Bombardment.

g) Unofficially Sponsoring Emigration - I suppose you could also just make the population really unhappy / the planet a bad place to live by building an offensive building nearby, hiring some pirate to annoy them, secretly sabotaging the economy, building an unhappiness ray gun or by some other method. You'd then get emigration without actually specifically asking for or demanding it, and without killing the population.

... Anyways... I suppose that goes above and beyond your concerns about UI clutter... Hopefully sufficiently interesting as to warrart some screen real-estate for these controls and feedback displays. Probably we don't need all those options, but a subset covering the "Please leave...", a variety or two of "DIE!" and/or the "Leave or else" options would be good.

[noelte]

1) As soon as you capture a population it turns into your race. This often seems kind of silly in simple games, but when races have unique bonuses and/or unique artwork it would seem downright absurd.

By now there are to possibilities for fo. First, you add the foreign people into you empire (with their abilities) or second, you can magicly convert the foreigns into your own species. Both choises are not very satisfying, but fo can only handle one species per planet.

2) You can never capture another race's population. Your only choice is to exterminate the planet before you can use it. The only advantage to capturing an enemy planet over colonizing a new one is that the enemy planet would allow you to rebuild quickly since there is already a skeleton infrastructure in place. Or perhaps you can't even leave a skeleton infrastructure in place, and colony ships would be an essential part of your invasion force even late game. This option could severely hamper gameplay.

I also would like to see multiple races per planet ....

3) The species that starts a colony is the only species that can live on that colony. This is the way MOO2 did it. You had one option at the beginning to exterminate the native population and replace it with your own, and if you missed that chance your only option was to sell that colony's defenses, give it to an enemy, and then reconcur it. I found this very annoying.

You could also send those people to an already fully occupied planet ....

[noelte]

@Geoff: IMO, you suggestion won't work, because fo can only handle one race per planet