I did give you an example of this, before your introduction of Propaganda:Bigjoe5 wrote: My point is that balancing this aspect of the game will be no more difficult or complex than balancing any other aspect of the game. Of course it will require a bit of tweaking, but so will everything. Feel free to explain in detail though, why the dependency between alignment and propaganda and diplomacy is so much more complex than the relationship between industry production and focus settings and buildings and ship hulls/parts, and therefore massively complex to balance.
Adding in propaganda is giving you another balancing factor to consider on top of that, and now you're involving trade in the equation as well. The point is that values that continue to change and change and change on their own is ugly. Straight up, the idea of constantly changing alignment, constantly changing happiness, and constantly changing allegiance is a bit much, so you throw in an additional factor as a way of now spending trade resources in an effort to keep it stable? Why not just use a system that is inherently stable to begin with and save all that hassle? The major qualm I have isn't with alignments or the definitions or how they are derived.. It's with using a system of unchecked growth rates to track them instead of a vastly simpler and more intuitive sum-of-all-parts method.I am in a 2-player game, and half my planets are a warlike/elitist race, half are pacifistic/egalitarian. I want to keep my war/peace alignment scale neutral. The other player has declared war on me so we are in a state of war. My alignment meter then constantly drifts towards warlike because I am involved in a war. I need to offset this somehow, so I need to go into an entirely different factor and perhaps give the peaceful race a higher social status than the warlike one. I'm still getting more warlike, (and possibly also getting more elitist, which might actually be making my situation worse), but at least the peaceful race is staying relatively content because of their rank bonus. However, now I've set other scales into motion which are shifting away unchecked and could have other consequences later, for example I'm still getting more and more elitist so I need to offset this with something else, introducing even more runaway variables. Or perhaps one bonus isn't growing as fast as the other and I will eventually need to make more changes later to further offset this, adding in even more variables running off on their own as well. Now we're starting to get complicated, and we're only talking about 2 races.
By integer-based I just meant a system that relied on sum-of-parts instead of a growth rate. Poor choice of words on my part.Integer based? I fail to see what that has to do with anything. You could multiply all my values by 10, and they'd be integers, but it would still be the same system.
I'll assume you mean "the player only makes a very small number of additional decisions regarding the propaganda scale", because they will still have had to make all their real decisions and are now trying to use propaganda in order to make them work. Now their strategy depends on whether they have enough trade to buy enough propaganda to enable them to enact that strategy.In other words, the complexity of a system is too great when the player has to repeatedly make decisions which have very little obvious bearing on the outcome of the game. In my system, the player only makes a very small number of decisions regarding the propaganda scale, which have an obvious and predictable effect, and are strategically very important in that they support and enhance the player's overall strategy.
I would say it's no more clearly defined or better defended than the sum-of-parts method described 5 pages back. The devil is only in the details, not in the overall construction.I am sticking to my system, not because it is mine, but because it is the most clearly defined, well-defended and macro system out of any that has been proposed.
Your method of: Taking a factor, deciding how important it is, converting the weight into a growth rate, and modifying the parent attribute based on growth,
Is more complicated than: Taking a factor, deciding how important it is, and summing it into it's parent attribute.
The entire concept of propaganda used in this manner is only necessary because you need some way of stabilizing a system which is by design unstable.
The only difference you really have proposed here is that you have summed up "all persistant effects" to mean "target", and "all one-time/diminishing effects" to mean "current". All I care about is the events that are summed up to make a meaningful happiness or allegiance value. Again, I'm going for as simple as possible:Krikkitone wrote:Entire First Half
Basic Model (using happiness as an example):
Every event that is currently affecting happiness on a world added together = target value.
Whatever happiness is on a world right at this moment = current value (used for gamplay purposes, ie rebellion)
Each turn, current happiness moves closer to target value at a (fixed, proportional, fibbonaci sequential, whatever) rate.
(major events requiring instant changes in current happiness are handled by special rules, though gradual = better imo)
Your system:
Persistant effects = target
Short-term effects = current
Happiness = target+current
(calculated instantly and applied turn by turn)
The important thing, in both systems is that the short term effects decay on their own and eventually go away. This in itself is going to cause happiness/allegiance/etc to change more or less gradually anyways. That being said, I see no reason to separate events into persistant and short-term. They have the same magnitude of effect on the final result, so why bother? It's like saying I want to add 2 and 2 together, but first I have to separate them into 1's and then add all four 1's together for some reason. It's just an extra step.
As far as "I want happiness/allegiance effects to be instantaneous", this is a really crappy situation for the player. If he loses his homeworld and takes a big hit to happiness, then he should be given a short period of time to try to get it back before he gets buried in rebellious workers, otherwise you have a potentially unbalanced conquest strategy of simply gunning for homeworlds to shut down an opponent's production. Every change to happiness should be at least a little gradual to represent species adjustment/assimilation periods.
Both work, but in the interest of keeping it simple, a sum-of-parts system (5 more warlike for starting a war, 5 more expansionist for conquering a world, etc.) is just easier to implement. Designer's choice, I'm not the one doing the coding (though I am willing to construct mathematical framework).Now there are a few remaining issues that people seem to disagree on
1. How should Alignments change.
Big Joe's model has the Target basically always be 0 or 100, and the rate of change is slow but manipulatable.
All other models have the Target Alignment possibly be anything and have the rate of change relatively fixed (either a fixed number or a fixed proportion of difference).
Would depend on the exact action. I guess this kind of depends on your definition of diplomacy. Things might have multiple ramifications.2. How Empire Specific Diplomacy is plugged in.
For example:
Starting a war makes you more warlike (+5 to warlike alignment)
Being in a war makes Warlike species like you more (+2 to allegiance for that race)
Being in a war makes Peaceful species hate you more (-2 to allegiance for that race)
My feeling is that ACTIONS should affect alignment. CONDITIONS should effect allegiance.
Slaughtering a race makes you more warlike (alignment).
Being slaughtered makes a race unhappy (allegiance).
Enslaving a race makes you more elitist (alignment).
Being enslaved makes a race unhappy (allegiance).
Yes, there is synergy between the two factors, so a single action might have two effects, because the Action causes a change in alignment, and the new Condition causes a change in allegiance. This follows logic.
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I'm still not sold on one thing.. I don't really think it should matter to you how much the races in the other empires like their masters. This necessitates adding in factors like:
At war with an empire that this race likes more than you (-5 to allegiance for that race)
Trade pact with an empire that this race likes alot (+3 to allegiance for that race)
Which, again, makes sense, but complicates things considerably. I don't want to have to care about the allegiance meters of other races to other empires when I am making my decisions. I probably shouldn't even know what they are unless I'm spying on them. If you're set on the idea, the framework can accomodate it, but I'd consider carefully how much of an effect you want it to have, and if it isn't huge, is it worth the trouble of including it in the first place?
-Ty.