Incline Propaganda In Strategy Games

[MoLAoS]

I've made a decision in my game to try and add certain aspects of real life that have significant effects on politics and diplomacy because of the way that my project is focused on bringing more stuff into the game besides combat. I've described many of these things in previous threads but I have not yet addressed propaganda.

Propaganda/messaging/w.e you want to call it has several powerful effects in the game. You can use propaganda for all sorts of purposes and all characters in the game are capable of utilizing it to push their agenda.

Instead of clicking fabricate claim or forging a trade war you can apply propaganda to build support for any issue and other actors can counter you. Propaganda also applies to the beliefs of the people and characters in your nation on various political issues. Including imaginary ones like magic vs tech and whether dragons are good or bad or racial interbreeding.

Propaganda needn't be uniformly applied either. You may only need to use it on specific characters or populations especially depending on your government. Propaganda costs money but it also costs time. A low spending level over time can achieve impressive results especially if combined with more nefarious methods.

Does your enemy have magical weapons on mass destruction? Who knows but he is a filthy foreigner and you control the intelligence services and the media anyways and he blew up the Summer Palace with suicide dragons. Let's color bomb that fucker. Yes, false flag attacks are in.

Your effectiveness at propaganda has many modifiers. Intelligence score, the many relationship factors of the people you are trying to convince, magical bonuses, relationship between the target audience and the goal.

Pushing your society towards becoming more accepting of change or magic or war are all options.

I am currently designing the baseline systems for espionage/intelligence and propaganda/campaigning and trying to find a good balance between performance, granularity, and implementation/data. Hopefully by the end of the week I will be testing a working version in various ways.

 

[a Goat]

Play HoI3, check threat/national unity mechanics. It's literally propaganda.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Some things I haven't seen in strategy games that I think might work.

False flag attacks: Either by disguising an army in your enemies uniforms and going to battle with a third country in an effort to convince that third country that they have been attacked by your enemy. Or, sending out an inept saboteur to perform some mischief with incriminating details that point to an enemy country. There are a dozen ways to do success / failure mechanisms for a system like this but I think the broad concept is workable in a propaganda strategy game.

Sabotaging your own country as a justification for a war. People fight harder in a war when they have proper justification. Could be implemented in some sort of moral system I suppose.

If you have a system in a strategy game that requires time for the construction of buildings / ports / castles / etc... then you could create a system of bribery where you can attempt to convince the foreman of the building project to intentionally put weaknesses into the structure, hidden tunnels through walls or if it's a port and they are building a fleet of ships to come after you intentionally put in weaknesses like inadequate keels or weakened below water wood planks. Maybe siege equipment that malfunctions.

Although any system that is too complicated really breaks down because most strategy games focus entirely on fighting and battles and the economics and politic aspects are just and after thought to the fielding of majestic armies. If you make a system too complicated and ineffective in a game people will just ignore it and stick with slaughtering each other in battles. If you make the propaganda system too useful / common place then it becomes an exploit and abused. It's really a narrow path to walk.

 

[MoLAoS]

Play HoI3, check threat/national unity mechanics. It's literally propaganda.

Yes but like everything in a Paradox game its always one step short from being awesome.

 

[MoLAoS]

Some things I haven't seen in strategy games that I think might work.

False flag attacks: Either by disguising an army in your enemies uniforms and going to battle with a third country in an effort to convince that third country that they have been attacked by your enemy. Or, sending out an inept saboteur to perform some mischief with incriminating details that point to an enemy country. There are a dozen ways to do success / failure mechanisms for a system like this but I think the broad concept is workable in a propaganda strategy game.

Sabotaging your own country as a justification for a war. People fight harder in a war when they have proper justification. Could be implemented in some sort of moral system I suppose.

If you have a system in a strategy game that requires time for the construction of buildings / ports / castles / etc... then you could create a system of bribery where you can attempt to convince the foreman of the building project to intentionally put weaknesses into the structure, hidden tunnels through walls or if it's a port and they are building a fleet of ships to come after you intentionally put in weaknesses like inadequate keels or weakened below water wood planks. Maybe siege equipment that malfunctions.

Although any system that is too complicated really breaks down because most strategy games focus entirely on fighting and battles and the economics and politic aspects are just and after thought to the fielding of majestic armies. If you make a system too complicated and ineffective in a game people will just ignore it and stick with slaughtering each other in battles. If you make the propaganda system too useful / common place then it becomes an exploit and abused. It's really a narrow path to walk.

Its not more complicated than the combat or economic system will be.

 

[Tigranes]

I think one way to do it is to build in any system that works 'earnestly', and then consider how corruption, deliberate sabotage, propaganda, etc. could work. E.g. you have a basic calculation of provincial unrest based on taxation, culture, etc. like in EU games. But then you can obviously add (1) efforts to plant agents and stir up unrest, as again exists in EU; (2) incite problematic elements within that province to unrest so that you can destroy them, e.g. kill off that bloody Catholic minority by making them rebel; (3) produce propaganda targeted at a given province or a given type of population, whose reach and effectiveness would depend on existing unrest by that group as well as the efficacy of your propaganda mechanism, etc.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4 had some interesting options for sabotage, though these involved actual covert ops rather than sabotage: e.g. you could bribe an enemy general, after which he would remain in the enemy camp, sometimes retain titles or governorships, with an agreement that when you met on the field of battle or when you declared war on that faction, he would turncoat with his army or his city. One could apply this to forms of propaganda: e.g. options to open secret negotiations with characters or factions in the enemy state, and then maybe push them to vote against the current Leader or vote for a free trade deal with your country, etc. This is not a particularly complicated system. E.g. if we were working with CK2 as base: you secretly contact a character governing province X, and depending on his loyalty, he consents to the chat. Depending on his Ambitions he will have demands - e.g. I will help incite rebellion or I will help spread denunciations of Protestantism, if you make me Chancellor of the region once you conquer or if you give me gold, etc.

Alternatively or in complement, you might consider a mass communication based propaganda system, basically modeled after the US strategy of 'winning hearts and minds' in the 20th century (e.g. Voice of America). In this case, it can be as simple as a slider for annual funding for propaganda and a tick-box for what you want to build support in (your religion, your culture, your war against X nation, etc). Or it can be as complicated as assigning specific propaganda missions, e.g. spend $X to sponsor a new radio channel over Y province, and then select your strategy (cultural / entertainment, religious propaganda, democracy propaganda...), etc. This would work well in a world which has some kind of international arbitrating body, so that the player might be scheming to get votes from other countries to invade X country or whatnot.

 

[MoLAoS]

Yeah, so I have all that and a lot more. Stop thinking so small. I'm separating espionage from propaganda, you should ready my espionage thread. Propaganda is just about your last paragraph. You can set a budget, some characters to assist, and target a group based on many factors with a specific message. Populations in the game have a race, caste, nation of origin, religion, and faction. They'll also have opinions on various political theories. You can target based on province, nation, any of those categories, etc.

Again covert ops and sabotage and espionage is a separate and very detailed thread.