Krikkitone wrote:Higher allegiance=greater Defense against Other empire's spying activity if you control the planet. Lesser chance of planet surrender to besieging enemies. Greater opportunity for You to spy on the planet if other empires control it.
OK, yes allegiance/happiness also functions as a defense against spies. But i don't think this effect should be over-emphasized. Certainly it is significant if the spy is trying to start a rebellion. But i don't think the difference between a moderately happy planet and an extremely happy planet should have a significant effect (if any) on the ability of spies to perform other spy functions.
Krikkitone wrote:The reason I don't like "happiness" getting used for better economies is that blunts the political use of "happiness". It makes the game much less political. A happiness boost is the same as an economic boost, they should Not be interchangable... otherwise there is no point to happiness.
"otherwise there is no point to happiness"? I don't why that could be true.
Krikkitone wrote:the same reason we decided money can't buy production/research, happiness shouldn't 'buy' economic output... it might be a reqirement for economic output, but it shouldn't be a primary determiner of it.
That is not relevant. Money/Production/Research are all different kinds of resources. The argument was made that if the resources are convertible into each other then, we don't have multiple resources, we just have a single resource that comes in many forms. This discussion was before my time, but i've read the threads.
But Happiness is not a resource. This argument does not prevent other non-resource meters from effecting the production of a resource. For instance planet type, planet size, population, and various buildings effect the amount of resources which can be produced. This is not a valid reason why "happiness" should not effect resource generation.
Krikkitone wrote:If your "conditions" (unsafe/poorly fed/little goods) are bad, then SOMEONE gets blamed for it... that lowers your allegiance to whatever empire you blame.
In a war, you feel unsafe.. who do you blame, the enemy (most often) or your own side (Russia WWI) for not providing the proper defense. That would depend on the sitruation, but either one is possibe, so you do not become more unhappy, you lose allegiance to one of the two sides (or both)
You have appealed to this "blame" idea before to support your proposal. But i don't think you have really explained how a planet decides who to blame, unless they always blame whoever they hate more. This doesn't seem like it would work to me. Not ever situation is part of a cut-and-dried conflict between two parties. How do they decide when to "lose allegiance to one of the two sides (or both)"? What happens when a bad (or good) event is brought about by the actions of multiple parties which the planet has neutral allegiance to?
For instance:
Planet X belongs to and is highly loyal to the Blue empire. It receives it's food via a trade route through the neutral empire, Green. However the Purple Empire (which is distant to Blue, and thus X also has a neutral opinion of it) has attacked a distant part of Green, and thus the trade route is broken, and X's food is cut off.
How does X decide who to "blame"?
Or for another example, the same loyal planet X is attacked and blockaded by a super-powerful space monster. Half it's population is killed. Who does it blame for this? Why would this be different than if the same devastation was caused by an empire that it hated?
One of the distinctions i'd make between allegiance and happiness is that happiness would tend to change more quickly than allegiance. It doesn't seem right that a major bad event could happen to a planet and either nothing happens (because they "blame" an external empire) or they blame their empire, and get pushed a long way towards rebellion.
Krikkitone wrote:As for Current v. Historical, the Easiest thing is to include some form of decay....
I get the impression that you are making some of the same points that m_k did, however most of your post from this point on is incomprehensible to me. Maybe it's my modest math skills, but if you want to get your ideas across, at least to me, you'll have to find a clearer way to express yourself. Even without the math, your posts tend to have a stream-of-consciousness like style that makes it harder for me to understand. It's hard to communicate these abstract game concepts anyway— especially as we are all making it up as we go along.
I think what we need is some sort of more complete simulation to test these ideas out, and see how natural the reactions feel. m_k's two graphs went a long way towards making me confident that the empathy idea could really work. The allegiance situation (weather or not happiness is a distinct meter) seems to be a more complex problem, and even more worthy of some sort of proving. I don't know if it could be set up in a spread-sheet, or would need a more "real" language. But if we could create a simulation where the user could plug in events and watch the planet's allegiance change, it would be a very useful proof of concept, and also would be much easier to tweak than compiling and loading up the actual program.