Well, obviously if a building or something effects allegiance, it should be listed in the description and/or popup.Geoff the Medio wrote:The conception I had was to move the "history" tracking from the actual loyalty value into the things that cause the loyalty value. So, an event affect loyalty wouldn't be just "+10" on the turn it occurred...
But i don't see how this would work for "events". If half the planet gets blown up, i don't see where the player can look up this kind of event and see how it effected allegiance.
Perhaps i should more clearly explain the kind of inputs i'm expecting for these meters:
1) one-time-events: Things that aren't ongoing, i.e. a military victory or defeat, or random events like earthquake. These effect the current value of the meter directly.
2) statuses: These may last an arbitrary number of turns. They effect determine the target value of the meter.
So for instance "Famine" is a status, which effect the target meter as long as it continues, while deaths from the famine would effect the current value directly.
It would also be possible for status to have a one-time-event effect when that status was initiated. This might be necessary to make noticable statuses which tend to have short durations.
The reason for this distinction is to make the numbers work in a reasonably intuitive way. To strike a balance between the brief and the long-term.
Why is this better than having events change the meter once and then let the meter decay at a consistent rate?Geoff the Medio wrote:So, an event affect loyalty wouldn't be just "+10" on the turn it occurred; instead, events could have various long-term time-dependent / repeating effects on a given turn's loyalty level. ... One-time events would have a decay profile over time, giving, for example, +10 on the first turn, then +9, +8, +7 ... +2, +1, 0 and then be finished / disappear.
The obvious difference seems uncompelling: i.e. with this system events could decay at different rates regardless of their magnitude, or even "decay" is a cyclical up-and-down manner.
It seems simpler and better to me to let the meters in an empire decay at the same rate. That makes it easy to change the rate globally for fine-tuning, or to make some effects and/or species have longer or shorter historical memories.
Yes, i didn't think to add any buildings to my previous example, but i basically agree with this part. As m_k pointed out previously it's functionally equivalent to to add a +3 to the meter every turn (with exponential decay of 10%) as to add 30 to that target value of the meter.Geoff the Medio wrote:A building might give +3 every turn while active, regardless of time since it was built, or an unpopular social engineering choice might give -5 every turn. Most modifications would be of this sort, giving the same increase or decrease every turn, like most effects on max meter values.
However if we with to vary the decay rate for various species (or at least leave it variable
for fine-tuning), the same +3 per turn will produce a very different result. That's why i was defining effects by the change to the target value. The appropriate +/- per turn can be calculated off of the decay rate as it is in my spreadsheet.