scarab wrote:
I thinks the same things about the Horatios, but the real problem is not to integrate the alien: is to make them citizen of the empire. I’m pretty sure that the amoeba will turn their aliens civilian into citizen, but will all empire do the same? It don’t seems to me that the Horatios will allow a non-Horatio to vote.

Ooh, good point. This does get a little dicey in terms of theme and lore when it comes to the voting mechanic of the game...

Unless we can give a reason where planets pull some 2/3 slave vote in the hands of the imperial citizens... or somthing like that...



OTHERWISE, just saying, this just gives all the more reason for people to rebel/revolt n' stuff... maybe...

Hi all,



We usually implement VIP feedback at the end of the document, but this time we’ll break the rules. The political ideology (we sometimes talk about "politics" for short) system and the Senate are at the heart of empire management, and since we presented it to the VIPs it evolved a lot from their feedback and our own perception.

• Initially, we had 8 political ideologies, but it was hard to balance properly what could affect each of them without redundancy; thus we've decided to remove two of them.
• The law management has been completely reworked in order to be simplified and more interesting.

RATIONALE





On one hand, we have the political ideology that drives the empire, on the other hand we have the Senate that allows the player to manage their empire thanks to the dominant ideologies. Political ideologies are here to represent the population’s opinion in a given empire. Over the course of the game, the population will be open to more and more political ideologies, based on what happened to them. Still, we want to build a system that is easy to understand for the player and that relies on the player’s actions as well as gameplay events.



In order to do that, there are three layers of effects on the population’s ideological votes: The populations’ own cultural inclination, the conditions of the system they live in and the conditions of the empire they preside under. The Senate is meant to represent the empire management and allow the player to customise their empire throughout the game. The Senate emphasises the opinions of the population, forcing the player to play with that to achieve their goals. Still, they can choose a government type to control their significance. And keep in mind that population is also a tool under your control (to some extent), on which we’ll delve deeper later.



Controlling the Senate is mandatory to grow and develop your empire! Thus, the player is going to be challenged, as any action might affect the population and thus on a bigger scale, the Senate.







POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES





The ideology wheel



We divide the potential political ideology into 6 ideologies, each opposed to one another. Keep in mind that the names are temporary / work in progress:

• Industrialists: people focusing on industrialization, improving their system and valuing work more than other moral values.
• Ecologists: people who want to preserve the planets they live on ; they want to live in harmony with their environment.
• Scientists: people pushed by the will of experimenting, thrilled by discoveries and inexplicable phenomena.
• Religious: people who find comfort and value in the power of individuals. They nurture and worship great heroes!
• Pacifists: people who value peace and diplomatic relations ; they want to forge the greatest alliances and reap mutual benefits.
• Militarists: people attracted by war, blood and violence. Conquests and fights entertain them. They want to live in a secure place and they are pleased by an authoritarian system.

These different ideologies allow us to cover all the aspects of the gameplay, and we’ve been able to build a wheel to set relationships between the ideologies over this opposition. This allows us to use that for other game systems such as diplomacy.





Unlocking political ideologies



At the beginning of the game, each faction starts with one or two political ideologies unlocked, depending on their population. The other political ideologies are then unlocked over the course of the game, depending on the score they accumulate. To unlock a new political ideology, one needs to reach a certain threshold ; the value of this threshold depends on the number of unlocked political ideologies: the more political ideologies are unlocked the harder it is to unlock a new one. Thus, we can spread over a long period the appearance of the different ideologies and make each empire follow a more unique path.







Unlocking political ideologies is important as only known ideologies can be represented in the Senate!





Assigning scores to political ideologies



The political ideology have scores assigned to each of them that will evolve over the course of the game. The score at a given time is the sum of all modifiers applied to it. We have two types of score modifiers:

• The population’s identity: each population (Sophons, Cravers, UNREVEALED FACTIONS …) within the game has a static “political belief” that defines its affinity toward ideologies.
  
  
  • This belief is shared by all populations of a race, independently of the empire.
  • This belief can be modified through rare events, otherwise it’s a static score.
  • The score attached to the belief is multiplied by the population count.
• Game events and state modifiers: these are more diversified. They are providing a default score for a specific political ideology. Events and states are linked to the player’s actions (signing a diplomatic treaty, being under invasion, searching a technology…). In addition to their default value, they will also provide additional effect depending on the concerned population. Each population has a list of psychological traits that defines how they react to their environment (and thus which ideology they will lean towards depending on the stimulus they receive). The events and state provide temporary score, that will disappear after a certain duration or when the state is removed.

When summing up these scores, we’re then able to define what the beliefs’ repartition on a system are.









Tracking political ideology



The player can track the repartition of the political ideologies between their populations in each system within the interface. We’re displaying a percentage repartition based on the sum of the scores of the different political ideologies. This representation allows the player to have an idea of the political state of the different systems, as well as the reasons behind them.







THE SENATE



The conclusion of the political ideologies system is symbolised by the Senate. The Senate is here to replace the tools we gave to players in our previous game (Tax Rates and Empire Plans).

The senate gives the opportunity to vote laws, attached to political ideologies. Laws have to be considered as what we called traits in the previous game: powerful modifiers / game changer abilities.

With the Senate, we want the player to be able to adapt their empire and refine it over the course of the game. However, it’s going to cost Influence, and having the wanted political ideologies will require long term investments as all actions matter!





The election process



Every 20/40 turns, an election renews the Senate, based on the political beliefs of the population. The process is divided into 3 steps, but only the first one is interactive:

• The candidate presentation: here the player can see the different political ideologies that will receive votes during the next step. Each ideology is represented, and the player has to support one. The one supported will have a popularity boost and will have more chance to gather votes. In addition, the player can pay to trigger different actions that will help the supported candidate.
• The local election: during this step, each system is going to compute representatives. Depending on the government the process will be different. In one hand it can use a majority or a proportional system and in the other hand rely on the population count or relative system value (the best systems have more weight on the election). In any case, we’ll output representatives for each systems that are assigned to a political ideology.
• The Election’s results: in this screen, we display the results of the election, summing all the representatives attached to each political ideology to obtain the percentage of support they receive: only the four best ideologies are represented at the Senate.
  
  

In addition, we also list the laws unlocked for the first time, and any game events that could have been triggered by this election. We consider the ideology with the most support as the Main Political Ideology, which defines the global political ideologies for the Empire (used for instance for the diplomacy).





Using the senate



Laws

Laws depend on the Political Ideology. When an ideology is elected in the Senate, all the categories of laws linked to it are available.



Example: When a Militarist and a Scientific Political Ideology have been elected, the player can choose the Militarist and Scientific laws.



In order to unlock laws, the empire needs to reach a certain support attached to the law. The support is divided into different levels which allows the player to unlock a certain number of laws.

For instance, a support between 0 and 10% is considered as low, and will unlock all laws requiring a low support while a support above 50% is considered as consequent and will unlock all laws requiring a consequent support and below.

The available laws are clickable in the Senate Screen. In addition to the support, we have other prerequisites that unlock the access of additional laws:

• Technology unlocked
• Government type
• Faction affinity
• Etc.

Voting a law

The player can select any available law to vote it.

• Voting a law requires to pay its cost immediately. The cost can be anything even if design-wise it’s going to mainly be Influence.
• The cost of a law is computed based on:
  
  
  
  
  • The support required to unlock the law: the higher, the more expensive
  • the number of systems
  
  
  
• Voting a law activates its effect immediately
• Voting a law requires a free slot: the number of active laws is limited!

Cancelling a law

When a law is activated, it will cost influence to cancel it for a predefined duration. Once enough time elapsed, cancelling the law is free.

Cancelling a law immediately remove its effects.



Maintaining a Law

By default a law doesn’t require any maintenance however, if a law becomes illegal after an election, it will cost influence to be maintained. The amount of influence points is defined by the power of the law and will be a fixed number.

If the law’s maintenance cannot be paid, said law is automatically cancelled, starting with the one costing the most, until the player has enough influence to support the remaining ones.





Government

In addition to voting laws, the player can manage the government of their empire from the Senate. A government affects the following elements:

• Empire bonuses: each government directly affects the whole empire economy.
• Available laws: some laws can only be available under a certain government type.
• Election process: the government especially affects the elections at different levels, from the available actions to the way the local elections are run. Choosing a government can deeply affect how the different political ideologies will share power in the Senate. Some governments are perfect to favourite a political ideology and build an empire around a unique and powerful ideology, but remove flexibility. Others help the various ideologies to coexist, providing a wider set of laws which are, however, more standard.

Let us know what you think!

Ashbery76 wrote:
My only issue is thematically the Cravers and maybe the Horatio would not keep aliens populations based on the their lore.You get a disconnect with the system.

I think for the Cravers it's pretty clear -- those are not alien populations; those are sources of nourishment and slaves.



And as for the Horatio, there is an uneasy tension in the population between giving menial tasks to someone who looks like Horatio, and imposing menial tasks on someone who looks less like Horatio than you do... Frankly it is easier to have servants and other lower order beings around to handle the drudgery - agriculture, science, construction - while the Horatios focus on creating art (primarily by dressing better and looking more beautiful ).

Garak wrote:
The Horatio would keep aliens around, as long as they promised to all wear paper bags over their heads with a picture of Horatio taped to the front.

Or, y'know, sew a yellow star on all their clothing...



Sooo.... does this mean we get to be little Hitlers if we want to?

Ashbery76 wrote:
My only issue is thematically the Cravers and maybe the Horatio would not keep aliens populations based on the their lore.You get a disconnect with the system.

The Horatio would keep aliens around, as long as they promised to all wear paper bags over their heads with a picture of Horatio taped to the front.

Meedoc wrote:


When you invade a system, we keep all the existing population that was living there. Meaning, if you invade a Sophon’s system with your Cravers faction, you’ll have a system full of Sophons.

Options linked to the invasion process will allow you to get rid of the population the invaded system; and laws will be able to favor your main population.

Overall, we still want to encourage some kind of diversity which will bring variation in the political beliefs of the empire.

My only issue is thematically the Cravers and maybe the Horatio would not keep aliens populations based on the their lore.You get a disconnect with the system.

Also i've read about choosing goeverment types. Each faction will use different goverment like Imperium or Democracy or another word for politics?

Personally, a system where the factions are blocked in a type of government is not interesting. For me, the lore of a faction exist to fix a start for the player, not to forbid "what if" player's ideas. It's more fun that the factions have a favor type of gameplay than a fixed gameplay. But it's cool be interesting to have differences in the faction base government. In Civilization games, it's logic that the states have the same primitive type of government. But in ES universe, the factions have a more important story to explain the differences.

As Metalynx said, we’re going to have several governments. We’re using the word senate in the GDD as a gameplay term as the democracy was our basic government type. However, the factions will start with different government types activated, and then over the course of the game the player will be able to change the active government (each one having its own advantages).



For giving lore names we’ll see: on one hand it’s really nice for the lore but on the other hand it’s harder to remember as a player (with 4 government and 8 factions, it means you have to memorize 24 names).

- I have read that the political ideologies names are temporary. Will it be possible to define / mod the names (and the descriptions ) of political ideologies for a faction in particular? For exemple, the political party "militarist" should be named "Uniformity" in horatio faction and "Solar system's defenders" for United Empire...

For now we plan to have only one set of names for political ideologies independently of the faction; as for the government it’s for the sake of understanding and memorization. If we want to use the political ideologies of another empire in diplomacy or other systems, we need to keep it simple. Besides that, we’d like to use the descriptions of political ideologies to convey the type of laws they will provide.

In terms of modding, I don’t think it’s possible as it is now to change the name and description per faction, but we’ll see if we can open that.

- What are the conditions required to change the government? Technologies? Senat support? Resources? ...

For now, the change of government type is based on the empire’s approval: the higher it is, the easier it becomes to change the government type. When you change your government type, you’ll suffer from a period of anarchy; its duration will be increased if you don’t meet the happiness requirement.



During this period, you have no active laws; that’s why you won’t change your government too often.

Unlocking new government types will happen through technology progress.

- The duration between two senat election is based on the game speed option or other things (type of goverment, laws...)?

The duration is going to be based on the game speed, and in addition, they will be additional elections just after a change of government (without affecting the normal pace of elections).

What abou alien populations in our systems?

When you invade a system, we keep all the existing population that was living there. Meaning, if you invade a Sophon’s system with your Cravers faction, you’ll have a system full of Sophons.

Options linked to the invasion process will allow you to get rid of the population the invaded system; and laws will be able to favor your main population.

Overall, we still want to encourage some kind of diversity which will bring variation in the political beliefs of the empire.

What about the idea of hybrid laws?

For now, we want to focus on having 1 Law = 1 Political ideology; with similar laws in different ideologies. But it's still doable; and it could be interesting to unlock that later in the game!

What about the idea of hybrid laws? You said in your first post that if you have both militarists and scientists in the majority, you could enact the respective laws for those factions. I think it would be interesting to be able to enact laws that benefit the interests of two factions of population. However, I do think it would be a good idea to exclude the faction pairings that oppose each other, like militarists and pacifists.

I really like what I've read in this GDD.

And judging by the footage in the IGN interview way back, they have at least considered representing different population groups in a single system (in that case the Harushan minor faction).

I hope ideologies and government types will be open to modding.



But even if they aren't, they have pretty explicitly stated that the government type influences the way elections work, which could have some drastic impact. As some examples:

Direct Repesentation: The "Senate" pretty much ends up directly mirroring your populations opinions. If there's even one pacifist in your empire, then you get a few percent of pacifism in your senate.

System-Delegates: The "Senate" is composed based on systems: If a system is 49% pacifist and 51% militarist, you get a militarist vote in the senate.

Dictatorship: Forget votes. Whatever ideology you support during the "present candidates" step gets 100% support.



They could even have "weighted" voting systems: More populous systems get more votes, more productive systems get more votes, systems in your home constellation get more votes, etc.





So if they're bold enough, I'm sure they can create a system suitable for a hive mind, the UE "corporate feudalism," whatever you call the hierarchy Horatio uses (which is, obviously, the most elegant and beautiful government in the galaxy), or what have you.

Brazilian_Joe wrote:
What abou alien populations in our systems?



If I am a Sophon but I annex a Human planet, does it mean that I annihilated every last human being? I am inclined to think 'no'. I would harbor 'alien civilians' with varying degrees of freedom.



* Alien Slaves - upkeep reduction. :approvalenalty. planetary battle defense penalty proportional do slave population (on war they revolt). Alien population has the smallest influence in the Senate.

* Alien Occupants - freedom rights, but no representation/voting rights. bonus. penalty. Alien population has average influence in the Senate.

* Alien Citizens - treated as citizens with equal rights. Influence and bonus. Alien population has the largest influence in the Senate.



In the first place, Laws would set up 'what to do with the aliens'.

Secondly, each annexed a planet would do a large shift in the representativity of the senate and what was easy to approve may not be as easy afterwards.

Slave and occupants make aliens have less of an influence on the government.



Laws for e.g. Alien population control may restrict birthrights to aliens even, to make the navite population gradually overcome the alien.



I love "build-as-you-go" governments where we can change the traits.

Agreed.This is sort of politics that should be voted in the senate.Actual politics.I think this would also play into the roleplaying aspect.

Brazilian_Joe wrote:
What abou alien populations in our systems?

Bouncing off of that idea a bit... what about revolution?

I realize this would be a major addition/change to the game as it is now... but, suppose you are an autocratic government that is highly militant, but you have a planet that is highly in favor of peace... wouldn't the people try to rebel? Go on Strike or sabotage equipment? Revolt and join an empire that aligns with their ideologies or otherwise form an independent empire?



I mean, all of that happened in the history of the endless, why not make it a mechanic somehow?



Suppose that, within each ideology, there were loyalists and separatists?

Happiness and/or Fear (through the presence of a military force on the planet) make Separatists become Loyalists to a certain degree...

But unhappiness and generally acting against a certain ideology turn loyalists into separatists



Autocracies and Democracies would have different risks when it comes to maintaining control... Autocracies would always make many separatists out of the faction they oppose, But democracies, while creating fewer separatists all in all, would be at risk for making separatist all across the spectrum of ideologies.





I dunno, just saying, realistically, even a king has to keep the people happy. And if that fails, he has to keep them afraid. Plus, it kindof makes for a neat little addition to empire management...

Any chance for something like this making its way in if not already planned? ^_^

What abou alien populations in our systems?



If I am a Sophon but I annex a Human planet, does it mean that I annihilated every last human being? I am inclined to think 'no'. I would harbor 'alien civilians' with varying degrees of freedom.



* Alien Slaves - upkeep reduction. :approvalenalty. planetary battle defense penalty proportional do slave population (on war they revolt). Alien population has the smallest influence in the Senate.

* Alien Occupants - freedom rights, but no representation/voting rights. bonus. penalty. Alien population has average influence in the Senate.

* Alien Citizens - treated as citizens with equal rights. Influence and bonus. Alien population has the largest influence in the Senate.



In the first place, Laws would set up 'what to do with the aliens'.

Secondly, each annexed a planet would do a large shift in the representativity of the senate and what was easy to approve may not be as easy afterwards.

Slave and occupants make aliens have less of an influence on the government.



Laws for e.g. Alien population control may restrict birthrights to aliens even, to make the navite population gradually overcome the alien.



I love "build-as-you-go" governments where we can change the traits.