Alright, now let's tackle GDD n°5 - Politics & Senate! 

As usual, the summary of the state of the EA version at the end of the post  

• 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 customize their empire throughout the game. The Senate emphasizes 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. 

• 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 symbolized 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 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. To do so, the player can either simply give their official support to a candidate or 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
• 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 is automatically cancelled.

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.
• 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 favorite 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.

 HOW'S THE EARLY ACCESS VERSION ON THIS ASPECT?

The election process

• Now, "Official Support" is one of the actions available to influence the outcome of an election so the player can either chose to officially support a candidate or to take any other action, but not both at the same time

Could you please explain connection between discontent and election results/player's election campaign actions?

How can I change a leader of a party?