Grand Strategy Annexation, Cultural Acceptance, and Suboridnate States

[MoLAoS]

So I spent a long time considering what to do with certain elements of political simulation. Since Paradox is really the only extant example I draw my comparisons and contrasts there but I didn't base my ideas off of theirs.

Consider how EU4 handles what they call diplomatic annexation. There is a 10 year timer from establishing a vassal. You must pay bird mana and it takes a few years to absorb the state. You get bonuses based on religion and culture.

This is extremely limiting and abstract, even aside from all vassals behaving identically across the whole world with identical duties.

The system I am currently planning on implementing works this way:
There is no such thing as a hardcoded vassal, protectorate, or colony. As part of the diplomatic system there are many different terms one can put into a treaty. Treaties can be performed in peace with all options in play aside from a truce since there is no war. A war treaty is the same a peace one excepting the truce, and a certain pressure to assent to terms based on the current state of the war. Treaties contain various terms regarding money sent back and forth, royal marriage, hostages, fostering, land exchanges of many kinds, defense pacts, offense pacts and so forth. A nation may exist as a series of states with various agreements in place. You may use tiers based on a template treaty to represent something like the members, electors, free cities, and emperor of the HRE.

Directly controlled land allows full sovereignty and control. You may perform any province based action. This is land directly controlled by your character. You may establish a bureaucracy of non noble offices to administer your land. You will assign them goals and duties and access to resources with which to act. Since such people don't have any significant power they will not be represented in game by an actual character and cannot perform actions characters can. You will pay a general fee to these people to operate your stuff for you. So a large bureaucracy is expensive but cannot initiate rebellions the same way characters can. However bureaucrats are represented as a population as you assign them. Based on racial traits and your experience with institutional bureaucracy they can handle more duties. The default base is 2. You'll actually assign duties to the population itself, not an individual member since they are not characters. Other populations will react poorly if a specific race, religion, nation of origin, and so forth gets all the cushy posts.

Governors or nobles will be full characters which can handle far more work than a bureaucrat. But they can amass personal wealth and power and have standing with all relevant populations, so they can secede or engage in plots and do other crap. Nobles can act among themselves, moving lands and such things around but they maintain populace opinion whereas a governor who dies loses all standing and a new governor lacks any standing upon appointment. Populations will have similar reactions if all governors or nobles are of a given demographic. Governors are not a hardcoded system, its simply a flavor way to differentiate between hereditary and non-hereditary positions within my posts.

Why am I talking about administrative stuff in a post about annexation and cultural acceptance? Because that is how it is defined. You can levy taxes and other obligations on populations any way you like. But this affects their opinion of you personally and how they regard your state. Instead of some stupid base tax calculation or a change culture button or w/e, how your state treats people determines their feelings about the state. Citizens will be willing to meet more obligations if they feel more represented and accepted in a state. There is also an affect based on how populations view each other. If your state is 70% main culture and main culture hates your minorities they have a worse opinion of you and the state. If you work to change their status they like you more and if your actions cause the majority population to like them more they are more loyal to the state.

Note that nobles and governors have their own relations and acceptances. Both them personally and the land they control work the same way as your personal land. But its not as easy as just giving proportional aristocratic, bureaucratic, and administrative positions to out. Because previously privileged populations will dislike governors of other groups if they have a poor opinion of that group. And they will dislike you for appointing them. Populations are divided among religion, race, caste, nation of origin, and also faction. Some populations will have the faction for racial purity or the faction for nationalism or w/e.

Note that its no use being a beacon of cultural acceptance if you cause your main population to hate you and revolt. All characters have more than a faction. Part of their consciousness data involves desires that can relate to race, land, religion, political appointments and so forth. If for whatever reason you appoint a minority to a position and a certain noble wanted it he will be mad at both you and that guy who "stole" his job. He may initiate plots or propaganda campaigns against you and/or that person.

Yes, there is propaganda. Its sort of like the espionage system. You spend resources to promote ideas, appoint people from populations who agree, and so forth. Your propaganda can slowly change the political beliefs of your populace over time. Certain populations take more effect from certain propaganda.

Also note that if you assign a state religion or religions people of those religions will like you more and people not of them will like you less. Also the more you add the more diluted the bonuses are. Well the hate of non-sanctioned religions grows as more others are accepted and theirs aren't.

As far as vassal states themselves, any land not directly controlled by you or your governors is not really YOUR land per say. Nobles are basically part of your state by treaty. The noble family and the populace become more and more in favor of the treaty over time as it persists, though the populace and the nobles have distinct feelings about it. Thusly, if you create a new subordinate ruler and state, the populace will retain their current feelings about you and have positive feelings about the treaty. As will the noble. If you conquer a noble and/or their land by force or build up support and progressively more powerful treaties, support starts at 0 and builds up. To "integrate" a vassal state you keep it in treaty for a long time, slowly add duties that it must meet towards you, and slowly appoint its nobles or populace to positions of power and authority within your lands and vassals' lands. Integration is more about the chance of the treaty being broken and the vassal or populace receding or rebelling. You must perform actions and dedicate resources after the treaty is initially signed in order to convince the ruler and/or populace that a stronger treaty will benefit them.

Ways outside of taxes and treaties and appointments and building relations with the ruling classes to make a state want to be diplomatically more integrated involve preventing them from being damaged by conflict, spending from the national treasury to build up their state, assigning more troops and so forth. Propaganda campaigns also slowly increase their opinion of you over time.

You get substantial bonuses to "integration" speed if you have a high respect rating with the ruling classes and the populace. Respect indicates peoples' opinion of you as a ruler. How you treat citizens and nobles and so forth, whether you keep your word. Fear is how seriously they take threats. Regular opinion/influence is the slow build up of good feelings by being part of your state for a long time. Acceptance of a leading religious figure of the proper kind also has benefits.

As far as breaking your word, when you sign treaties you'll agree to certain things, perhaps protection and tax limits and money to build or rebuild infrastructure or provide positions and offices. When you break such a treaty this lowers the respect value of interested parties based on their closeness to you and the people you broke trust with.

Anyway a major theme of my game that infuses all the mechanics is the idea of direct action and gradual change rather than abstraction, timers, and arbitrary button clicking.

 

[tuluse]

What you've described here seems interesting from a simulation aspect, but I think in gameplay there would be problems. It would be extremely micro management heavy dealing with multiple "units" for each province. I think I'd get bored or get a headache going past 5 provinces with this system. Additionally, you have so many inputs into everything, it's going to be very hard to understand why stuff is happening. This can be worked around, but you'll need amazing tool tops, data mining, and data presentation. It could easily turn into excel spreadsheets: the game.

I think a big reason for the amount of abstraction in strategy games (in addition to easier to program and design) is so that a human can understand what's going on quickly enough to have fun manipulating it.

 

[MoLAoS]

What you've described here seems interesting from a simulation aspect, but I think in gameplay there would be problems. It would be extremely micro management heavy dealing with multiple "units" for each province. I think I'd get bored or get a headache going past 5 provinces with this system. Additionally, you have so many inputs into everything, it's going to be very hard to understand why stuff is happening. This can be worked around, but you'll need amazing tool tops, data mining, and data presentation. It could easily turn into excel spreadsheets: the game.

I think a big reason for the amount of abstraction in strategy games (in addition to easier to program and design) is so that a human can understand what's going on quickly enough to have fun manipulating it.

A lot of the interesting things that happen in real life result from having imperfect information or having too much information to easily process. Abstraction in games takes away from this for the purposes of making stuff seem easier to understand. I attempted to have the fewest number of inputs I could to allow for the possibilities I wanted.

Micromanagement wise there is an issue. There is some automation and passing over stuff to other characters will reduce your workload as well. If you try to excel spreadsheet it you are doing it wrong. There is no ironman, no achievements, no multiplayer. There is no victory condition or time limit like in a Paradox game. In fact there is a per turn time limit instead. If you spend too long trying to make the perfect move you won't have time to make dozens of imperfect moves. Your ability to rule the world is actually sort of limited by the natural capabilities of your own brain. You could mod or hack that stuff out of the game but that's how its intended to be played.

 

[mondblut]

No game about "cultural acceptance" is complete without good old genocide. If you want to make minorities sabotage my blob, give me the most feasible tool to get rid of them altogether.

 

[MoLAoS]

No game about "cultural acceptance" is complete without good old genocide. If you want to make minorities sabotage my blob, give me the most feasible tool to get rid of them altogether.

You have the option of genocide if you want it. You also have many other distasteful options. Of course at the same time your various populations can revolt or flee or do other such things or other groups can respond. Further if you commit genocide it changes the dynamics of war with every other group in the game to various degrees. Genocide isn't a quick fix, it creates other problems. Well, depending upon the specific political context. There may be a situation where there are few repercussions for an act of genocide. But that's probably uncommon.

 

[mondblut]

You have the option of genocide if you want it. You also have many other distasteful options. Of course at the same time your various populations can revolt or flee or do other such things or other groups can respond. Further if you commit genocide it changes the dynamics of war with every other group in the game to various degrees. Genocide isn't a quick fix, it creates other problems. Well, depending upon the specific political context. There may be a situation where there are few repercussions for an act of genocide. But that's probably uncommon.

That much is obvious. Thing is, games tend to shun this option because reasons, even though gameplay is literally begging for it, as minorities mean trouble. Take MOO2, "natives" are occupying the precious pop slots of your stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms, and you can't do shit about it short of vaporizing the planet altogether. As for other equally worthless occupants, all you can do is manually ship them to some tiny toxic planet where they would eventually almost, but not quite, die out. Where is mah "round them all up and put against a wall" option so ubiquious in non-game scifi media (for bad guys, ofc...duh, what if my stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms happen to be bad guys)?

 

[MoLAoS]

That much is obvious. Thing is, games tend to shun this option because reasons, even though gameplay is literally begging for it, as minorities mean trouble. Take MOO2, "natives" are occupying the precious pop slots of your stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms, and you can't do shit about it short of vaporizing the planet altogether. As for other equally worthless occupants, all you can do is manually ship them to some tiny toxic planet where they would eventually almost, but not quite, die out. Where is mah "round them all up and put against a wall" option so ubiquious in non-game scifi media (for bad guys, ofc...duh, what if my stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms happen to be bad guys)?

Sorry I'm confused, the post you quoted was saying that stuff exists in my game. You can attempt to genocide anyone you want. Depending on how your society is structured you could even get total elimination. You have the option for this stuff both in peace and at war.

I am perfectly aware other games don't allow this, although Paradox accidentally added a genocide button in EU4, "Change Culture." I am saying mine does.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

That much is obvious. Thing is, games tend to shun this option because reasons, even though gameplay is literally begging for it, as minorities mean trouble. Take MOO2, "natives" are occupying the precious pop slots of your stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms, and you can't do shit about it short of vaporizing the planet altogether. As for other equally worthless occupants, all you can do is manually ship them to some tiny toxic planet where they would eventually almost, but not quite, die out. Where is mah "round them all up and put against a wall" option so ubiquious in non-game scifi media (for bad guys, ofc...duh, what if my stone-eating cybernetic ethereal flying worms happen to be bad guys)?

One of the things I liked about Distant Worlds was being able to commit to a policy of mass genocide and slavery. What bothered me was that I couldn't single out specific races, or even specific race "families." I could only set policy for my own family and all others. So if I wanted to get rid of those useless bloody Atuuk scum on my planets I had to murder all of the other not as useless races as well.

Victoria 2 has de-facto genocide, though, even though I'm unsure of how intentional it was. Every time nationalist rebels rise up and you kill them, the cultural pops that they rose up from are destroyed and you decrease the population of that people overall.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Victoria 2 on the other hand is pretty good at physical elimination, though it does take a little active work on your own part to piss said minority off repeatedly so they keep rebelling again and again.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Victoria 2 on the other hand is pretty good at physical elimination, though it does take a little active work on your own part to piss said minority off repeatedly so they keep rebelling again and again.

Pissing off minorities fortunately isn't very difficult, though.

Just like in real life.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea but you need to do it a lot and repeatedly if you want to achieve even slight cultural shift in, say, conquered France.

 

[MoLAoS]

One of the things I liked about Distant Worlds was being able to commit to a policy of mass genocide and slavery. What bothered me was that I couldn't single out specific races, or even specific race "families." I could only set policy for my own family and all others. So if I wanted to get rid of those useless bloody Atuuk scum on my planets I had to murder all of the other not as useless races as well.

Victoria 2 has de-facto genocide, though, even though I'm unsure of how intentional it was. Every time nationalist rebels rise up and you kill them, the cultural pops that they rose up from are destroyed and you decrease the population of that people overall.

In my system you can target any group based on any characteristic or even combination. You only apply a policy to the group you want to apply it to. Whether that's lowering taxes on them or wiping them out. Some people say this causes micromanagement but I don't care. Sometimes filthy tree loving elves who feel kinship with sea dragons just need to die and better to have extra micro than to destroy their totally acceptable ice dragon loving brethren as well as them.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Yea but you need to do it a lot and repeatedly if you want to achieve even slight cultural shift in, say, conquered France.

This is true. You can also use national focuses to target immigration, though. I always use that to replace the Africans when I colonise since they never seem to want to revolt for me.
Edit: One thing I might change is make the immigration national focus give a minor buff to the cultural assimilation rate. Nothing that'll convert frogs to aryans in staggering numbers, but a subtle enough effect to facilitate playing as a fascist government.

In my system you can target any group based on any characteristic or even combination. You only apply a policy to the group you want to apply it to. Whether that's lowering taxes on them or wiping them out. Some people say this causes micromanagement but I don't care. Sometimes filthy tree loving elves who feel kinship with sea dragons just need to die and better to have extra micro than to destroy their totally acceptable ice dragon loving brethren as well as them.

I don't really understand people who complain about micromanagement in 4x/grand strategy games if it's something that actually has gameplay benefits. Those people are an ethnic group that needs to be targeted just like the elves.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Bah it's trivial to do that in the colonies because of the way you'll vastly outnumber the colonial pops of Africa 90% of the time so it becomes only a matter of bleed-off from mainland.

 

[MoLAoS]

This is true. You can also use national focuses to target immigration, though. I always use that to replace the Africans when I colonise since they never seem to want to revolt for me.


I don't really understand people who complain about micromanagement in 4x/grand strategy games if it's something that actually has gameplay benefits. Those people are an ethnic group that needs to be targeted just like the elves.

Yeah its pretty weird. I mean, the problem with micro is when you have to do the same action over and over every turn without making a new decision. But people expand this to all micro and blather on about excess complexity. I mean sure, if you have 1000 provinces and have to build 10 of the same building in each province every turn that's a problem and its not interesting. But the solution is better automation. Alternatively stop conquering 1000 provinces if you can't handle it.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

If every micromanagement feature had an "automate every turn" button, I don't think the sheer level of pedantic micromanagement that devs want to shove into the game would even cause problems for anybody. That's one of the massive upsides of Distant Worlds, you can micromanage nearly every aspect of your empire if you want to, but you can also automate the things you don't want to pay attention to.

 

[dag0net]

<3


except the automation is in broad strokes for ease of implementation, automating most things in DW causes as many problems as it solves.

One of the things the paradox titles do well is targeted disruption, 'random' events based on your policy settings.

The reason I bring this up is that.. say you're a euro nation and your game gives ppl the option of wiping out the berbers in yor african territories. Now, as a player you have nicely delineated culture groups, but your SimSubjects don't, you say "I hate berbers" and your soldiers & governors don't know the difference between a berber village and a jungle full of eskimo's. That and the method by which you propagate the hate/disdain might spill over into effecting race relations with other cultures than the targeted one. Getmeyo?

Wars create refugees, so do pogroms & economic collapses, it isn't a modern phenomenon.
eu's system of forcing the government to pay for colonial expeditions is insane.

language barriers are massive factors & cultural integration slows when civilians have ahard time moving about in an area Back to eu again.. eh.. paradox pretty much pretended there were what, a dozen languages in the whole world.

I've not played eu4 in quite some time, but I'd sugest something akin to the cot routing system but more variable and probably largely hidden from user view connecting provinces with other provinces on the basis of road quality, language & historic ties, economic exchange & various other factors that influences how regions behave, should bear in mind that it's not a simple matter of the bigger power overawing the smaller power either, no culture survives contact with the alien intact.

some thoughts anyway, gl.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

automating most things in DW causes as many problems as it solves.

I think that's more of the AI's fault than it is the feature itself. The problem with automating things is that it is handled by the AI from that point onwards, which means the sector that you've automated is going to be just as useless as the AI is if the game's AI is bad, but at least its performance will be uniform. You do reach a point though where you're doing so well that a particular section of your country that's too huge to micromanage effectively anymore is acceptable if it underperforms slightly.

 

[dag0net]

Clearly you're right sometimes, but I wouldn't have bothered saying it if it was just down to bad AI.

No, I was referring more to situations when the option to automate or not is too broad or narrow, not actually suited to choices a player is likely to make. I can automate the ship, but then it'll refuel, I don't want to tell the whole class to ignore refuel automation.

You are right tho in many instances, exploration ships are an ass in DW, can't be trusted and you get fuck all return information on what they're doing unless you follow each individual one.

"do this and then automate" options would normally be fine.
Or say egosoft's X automation. Where your focus is, stuff runs in one fashion, where the players focus is not, it runs in another.That's a broadly sensible way to run things.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

"do this and then automate" is an option, though. You give them an order, and then you press automate. They'll automate after finishing what you told them.

 

[dag0net]

Yes, the sentence says I think that's a good thing.

[Often in games giving an instruction will halt automation altogether and the element then has to be tracked or potentially forgotten. A good system of user notifications can avoid many of the problems involved in this, without requiring better AI]

I forget which EU game, maybe all, but say with fleet movements in that. I want to know when a particular fleet arrives at it's destination, not every fleet. Notifications and automation that are set in broad rules often aren't ever used because whilst useful they clutter.


I'm not out to trash DW, the reason I talk about DW is because it does a lot of things well, starting from something that does nothing well wouldn't be very useful.

 

[a Goat]

There is also an affect based on how populations view each other. If your state is 70% main culture and main culture hates your minorities they have a worse opinion of you and the state. If you work to change their status they like you more and if your actions cause the majority population to like them more they are more loyal to the state.

You see it's little more complicated. Ideas come and gone and so on...

Before 18th or 19th century such thing didn't really mattered.

I mean how could you explain a serf that he has to fight for his country? Did it mattered to him if he was in one country or another? Not at all. In "old" nations, the "glueing" factor was a person of a ruler, religion, culture or force. For example - in 17th century Danzig, which was under Potato rule back then, you'd find easier time talking with a random guy in English than in Potato. Of course German was even more popular. Nationality didn't mattered, what mattered was that the city was part of the Commonwealth which had a right to rule them on little bit irrational ground when compared to civil contract.

So for EU, having different culture giving you slight modifier to stuff(based mostly on linguistic difficulties) rather than like it works today is much better.

Even the language barrier is stretching it a bit. I grew up in a town where very old people, who remembered interwar period spoke fluid Yiddish because 3/4th of its pre-war population were jews. After war it has changed we all know why, but local old potatoes still knew Yiddish.

It's not like you need some official education to learn another language, if those people interacted with each other, they've learned it themselves(also note that regional dialects were far more prominent back in the times). And I dislike the notion people give that humans were somehow less intelligent back in let's say antics than they are nowadays. No they were not. They were less educated, sure, but not dumber by themselves. As such I am fairly sure that bilingual people were common back in the let's say 1700's like I know they were in 1950's or whatever.

So the game you're talking about here isn't EU but Victoria. Here it makes sense.

As for vassals - it, again, depends on period, region and so on. For example the way Wallachia and Moldova were Ottoman vassals is different from the way HRE duchies were emperor's vassals and then different from the way French duchies like Foix were French king's vassals. The complexity of such simulation is quite huge and we have to ask ourselves a question of whether it is worth it or not. I mean there are pointless mechanics that are plain interesting when playing(chain of command in HoI3 - at first I hated it, then I've started to learn it and now I must say I enjoy it in some weird autistic way) but there are also the ones that simply never make sense and are always useless(entire vassalage system in EU, I mean, you have national ideas that let you create vassal-centric empires but it's plain tiresome and inferior to old school blobbing, with vassals being temporary solution).

 

[MoLAoS]

You see it's little more complicated. Ideas come and gone and so on...

Before 18th or 19th century such thing didn't really mattered.

I mean how could you explain a serf that he has to fight for his country? Did it mattered to him if he was in one country or another? Not at all. In "old" nations, the "glueing" factor was a person of a ruler, religion, culture or force. For example - in 17th century Danzig, which was under Potato rule back then, you'd find easier time talking with a random guy in English than in Potato. Of course German was even more popular. Nationality didn't mattered, what mattered was that the city was part of the Commonwealth which had a right to rule them on little bit irrational ground when compared to civil contract.

So for EU, having different culture giving you slight modifier to stuff(based mostly on linguistic difficulties) rather than like it works today is much better.

Even the language barrier is stretching it a bit. I grew up in a town where very old people, who remembered interwar period spoke fluid Yiddish because 3/4th of its pre-war population were jews. After war it has changed we all know why, but local old potatoes still knew Yiddish.

It's not like you need some official education to learn another language, if those people interacted with each other, they've learned it themselves(also note that regional dialects were far more prominent back in the times). And I dislike the notion people give that humans were somehow less intelligent back in let's say antics than they are nowadays. No they were not. They were less educated, sure, but not dumber by themselves. As such I am fairly sure that bilingual people were common back in the let's say 1700's like I know they were in 1950's or whatever.

So the game you're talking about here isn't EU but Victoria. Here it makes sense.

As for vassals - it, again, depends on period, region and so on. For example the way Wallachia and Moldova were Ottoman vassals is different from the way HRE duchies were emperor's vassals and then different from the way French duchies like Foix were French king's vassals. The complexity of such simulation is quite huge and we have to ask ourselves a question of whether it is worth it or not. I mean there are pointless mechanics that are plain interesting when playing(chain of command in HoI3 - at first I hated it, then I've started to learn it and now I must say I enjoy it in some weird autistic way) but there are also the ones that simply never make sense and are always useless(entire vassalage system in EU, I mean, you have national ideas that let you create vassal-centric empires but it's plain tiresome and inferior to old school blobbing, with vassals being temporary solution).

As I noted in the post, you have control over the way you deal with unintegrated provinces and populations. So you could make an Ottoman style vassal or an HRE style one or w/e you want.

Vassals aren't actually a real concept the same way they are in Paradox games. The interactions between characters and provinces on the atomic level is how things interact. You could look at an in game relationship and declare it to be a vassalage but the game doesn't explicitly represent that. There aren't 40 defined ways to have vassals that you pick and choose from. There are actions you can take and policies you can put into place and if you used a specific combination it might resemble a specific class of real world vassal.