Models for Society

All the things we may generally refer as "social issues" like politics, government, revolutions, culture evolution, religion, etc., appear to be inevitably linked with each other. It isn't easy to draw lines and create individual modeling for all the social effects we'd desire for Clash. This is why the three models proposed here covering society and its behavior should be seen as one, like sub-models of something bigger. Coherency between them has been carefully taken care of. Each one performs a particular task providing many of the elements we want, but some of the most interesting social effects are a result of the interactions between them three.

The three models are the Social Model, the Government Model and the Riots Model. I suggest you to read them in this same order for better understanding. This is what they do in a very general sense:

Social Model: Simulates culture evolution.

Government Model: Simulates politics within the civ's government.

Riots Model: Simulates people's discontent and what they do about it.

Note: Check out the new Coding The "Society Model" Structure!

Government Model Version 3.1
Model Description
October/2001

I. Overview

The model simulates what happens inside a civ's government. We'll understand "government" as all the persons who take part in the decision making. In a typical modern democracy the government includes the President and the members of the Congress. In an ancient divine monarchy it includes the King, the high members of the Church and probably some military leaders. An so on.

The model makes the members of the govt interact in order to find, based on what each want for the govt policies, a final "setting". Here, the ruler/player is seen as just one more person in these interactions. Although in the game he'll be able to do a couple of things the rest actors can't, in general he's no different from the rest.

What makes a difference between an actor and another, is the amount of power they control. The model assumes total power is divided among the actors, and then makes them interact using that power so they can try to impose each his particular view.

While that may sound perfectly right for a representative govt, but questionable for more despotic regimes, it should be clear that this way to tackle the problem allows any form of govt. A pure despotism is nothing but a division of power that concentrates 100% on the ruler (no division, actually). Even better, you can have different degrees of despotism (or any other regime), just adjusting slightly the division of power. This allows a huge variety of regimes. That's also why the ruler/player doesn't need special treatment. With enough power, he can simply overshadow the rest of the govt and do what he wants.

As said earlier, the political actors are trying to define govt policies according to what they think is best, interacting with each other to accomplish it. The policies (or laws) they are "negotiating", are very few and they represent general guidelines for different areas of the civ. A given setting of policies (final values found through the negotiation) will affect the civ in several ways, including the form of economy, religious and ethnic discriminations and the level of aggressiveness allowed in the international arena.

Furthermore, political actors are allowed to negotiate the division of power too. The Church, for example, may be looking to increase its power in the govt. Using their current power, they can try to do it and be maybe even helped by other sectors of society who consider they deserve more power. The govt structure, then, can gradually change, just slightly, or dramatically in the long run.

Of course, some times in history changes do not occur peacefully and gradually, but through revolutions and violent events. This kind of changes, though, are not modeled here. They're handled in the Riots Model, based a lot, of course, in info taken from the govt model. The govt model is only meant to simulate the gradual changes in policies and the power structure over the years and centuries.

One important characteristic of the final "negotiated" setting for the power structure and govt policies, is that it is a merged or combined solution of the initial desires of each actor. On one side, this is a way to guarantee the gradual change, avoiding "jumps" from one setting to another. And on the other, and more importantly, it's a way to achieve more realism. The combined solution reflects a lot of forms of interactions between actors, like alliances between groups or parties or things like "I give you this, and you give me that". To say it with an example, in the US the republicans have won many elections, but the nation has never had a fully "pure" republican scheme. It has always been something in between democrats and republicans, sometimes a little more republican, sometimes a little more democrat.

Of course, the power each faction (actor) has is very important for the above. While in the US there's a communist party, the govt is far from being influenced by them. The model recognizes this type of things making the final combined solution sensitive to the amount of power each actor controls. The more power an actor has, the more similar the final setting and the actor's desires will be. Again, this is why the ruler doesn't need special treatment. The final setting will be pretty much a copy of what the ruler wants if he is powerful enough.

How the player fits in here? He must insert, via an interface, what values he prefers for each govt policy and what form of power distribution he thinks is best. The model then takes these preferences and makes them interact with the preferences of all actors. According to how much power each has, the model finds a final setting. This one is considered the "Government Profile" and used in other parts of the game to affect the civ.

The player uses the interface only when he wants to change his preferences. He doesn't need to get into it every turn. The model simulates the ruler playing every turn, interacting with the other actors who control power, to every turn compute a new govt setting. The changes occur every turn, but will be smooth in magnitude, so the player really operates the govt just in "cruise" mode, making changes only every once in a while. This, in conjunction with the fact that there're few policies and they're broad, is coherent with the general philosophy of Clash to avoid micro-management. The player should not be preoccupied about govt every turn or with a large list of very specific, low-level laws and regulations.

The player also will be allowed to use bribes and threats, kill political enemies, create propaganda or ban some forms of thinking, as well as other actions that can help him get what he wants. All, of course, at some cost.

Is there any fun in this? Yes, as long as you like a challenge. If you want to have a great amount of power and through it have a tight control of your civ, you'll be able to do it. You'll face the costs, though, of a despotism. Protests, riots, rebellions, attempts to murder you, etc. can happen if the people don't like you having too much power or don't like the way you're ruling the civ. If, on the other side, you choose to share some power with others, you'll have to accept govt policies may not be exactly what you wanted. Or, you can try to stay powerful but do more as the people claims. Wisely deciding when to make changes, how to distribute power avoiding giving it to those who think differently, how much do as you want and how much as the people want, who to bribe, etc. is the difficulty to face.

II. Government Policies

These are the policies that need to be negotiated:

Private Property (PP): How much lies in the hands of the private sector vs how much is held by the State (or King for ancient regimes).

Social Policies (SP): How much redistribution of wealth should be made.

Civil Rights (CR): The level of liberties the people enjoy.

Foreign Affairs (FA): The level of aggressiveness allowed in the international arena.

Religious Discrimination (RD): Defines if there's or not an official religion, and if there is, how discriminated are the rest cults.

Ethnic Discrimination (ED): Defines if there's a preferred or privileged ethnic group in the civ, and if there is, how discriminated the rest are.

Slavery (SL): Level of slavery allowed in the civ.

III. Social Classes

Ethnic groups (defined in the social model) are assumed to be divided in social classes. A social class is a group of people who share the same social role and because of this, have a common mentality. Social classes are introduced in the game to create different groups with different interests so they can interact in the govt negotiations.

Social roles define what the class is and do in society. Social roles are:

Ethics: A class having this role has a leadership in the religious field.

Warfare: Leadership in the military field.

Administration: Social classes that cooperate with the govt's administration.

Kapital: Classes that control capital in the economic field posses this role.

Labor: Classes that provide labor for the economy have this role.

Human: The condition of being "human". Almost all classes have it at a 100%, but classes whose members are in some way deemed as "sub-human", should have a lower value. This is how the game will introduce slave classes.

Each role is defined with a certain value (0 if you don't want the class to have that role), so you can have a class that provides more ethics than another (bishops class vs monks class, perhaps?). The role values are fixed. They're built-in the game as default or defined by a scenario designer. Through the social classes with their respective social role values, you define what classes you'll have in the game and what to expect from them. Classes can appear or disappear. If slavery is abolished, you expect the slave social classes to vanish. At the same time, classes that exist in one EG may not in another. This could happen with slaves in a discriminated EG vs an EG that's not discriminated. So, EGs have a dynamic list of social classes.

The Administration and Labor social role are used together to define administrative social classes. If a class has A>0 and L>0 then it's a class that "works" for the govt (like public servants). If A>0 and L=0, then the social class has a high level, directive "job". Nobility would be an example.

Using the role values we'll define the social class mentality, which is the main purpose of social roles. The class mentality, that we'll call "Ideological Profile", is nothing but a given set of values for each of the govt policies and the power structure.

According to a class' social roles and the current power distribution, the class can control some level of power in the govt. When we say "a social class has power", we're really saying "the class has representatives in govt". In the model overview above, when I said "actors" I really meant "social class' representatives".

IV. Political Blocks and Power Structure

It'll be possible to define a lot of social classes. Since they are "contained" in ethnic groups and, in time, you can have several of these in one civ, you'd have a multitude of "factions" in the govt interacting (assuming social classes are enjoying some power). To handle this in simpler terms, social classes are grouped or aggregated into political blocks prior to the negotiation. The number of PBs is fixed (5) and only the number of classes it contains can vary. A PB has, then, a mentality that's given by the aggregation of social classes, and it's these PB mentalities the ones that are considered for the negotiation (plus the ruler's mentality, of course).

The PB aggregation is made along a social role. For example, the Army Political Block is an aggregation of all classes having a warfare role. Note doing this can produce a social class being aggregated in more than one PB (if it has more than one role). That's alright, and only recognizes the fact that a given social class can enjoy influence in more than one PB.

The 5 PBs are:

Army PB (role warfare)

Church PB (role ethics)

Bureaucracy PB (role administration)

People PB (role human)

Capitalist PB (role kapital)

Note role Labor has no associated PB. That's because having it would only introduce a "sci fi" effect, just like creating a tech social role and its associated PB. To understand this, first let's introduce the Power Structure. It's a division of power, expressed in percentage, among the PBs. Something, for example, like:

Entity	Power
Ruler	60%
Army PB	7%
Church PB	3%
Bureaucracy PB	10%
People PB	5%
Capitalists PB	15%

People of all classes enjoy a part of the 5% given to the People PB, just because they're "human". But social classes that also have a, for example, ethic role, enjoy an extra power because of the power assigned to the Church PB. In other words, this is an unequal distribution where some classes have more power, a privilege over the regular people. That said, a "Workers PB" (associated to the Labor role), with a power>0%, would imply that workers have a privilege over the rest people.... since this has never been the case anywhere, not even in a theoretical communism (where power just should lie in people in general), then there's no point in having that PB. The same would happen with a PB associated to classes with a tech social role.

The above is really a way to draw the line of expandability. Technocracies, "Proletacracies", and other things associated to "Magic social roles" or stuff like that, were not meant for this game, so I'm not covering them. Anything around that issue should be left for the future to be discussed whether or not they should be possible.

V. Political Power

The pol. power (or just "power") measures the ability to impose one's view on the issue of govt policies and political structure (power distribution). "one's view" is important here. The model handles political actors as selfish in the sense that they try to impose their view exclusively (although that view may not be selfish in itself). This is specially important for social classes with an administrative role. If you have a governor in a province, you don't want him to do what he wants, but in your name do what you want. You want him to do as you say, so he shouldn't have any political power. This is why the model considers empowered bureaucracy is unwanted. However, the model acknowledges it's impossible to control every bureaucrat to do what's told to do, so they in fact have some power and that's why the Bureaucracy PB is there.

The value itself (for example, a 40% power) should only be interpreted as "40% of total power".

The negotiated political structure that determines pol.powers is said to be only "nominal". The "real" pol.power distribution is a combination of the nominal values and the "De Facto Influences" of political blocks. De Facto Influences are all the things happening behind the scene that may increase the power of some. For example, the ruler may use bribes and with them make political actors support him, which in modeling terms is handled with a rise in ruler's De Facto Influence.

VI. Regimes

(these were called "ideologies" in version 2)

In order to create a social class Ideological Profile (mentality), we make social classes choose a Regime out of a pool of alternatives (the ones known by the civ). A regime includes a description of values for the power distribution and for the economic policies (private property and social policies). Regimes have fixed values through the game and these values are built-in the game as default or modified by an scenario designer. Along the game classes simply change their options.

The list of regimes includes monarchy, despotism, oligarchy, democracy, etc. And it can be as large as we want.

Why not include all policies in regimes? Because the pool would have to be huge to cover all possible combinations of values. Why, then, have regimes at all? why not just let people choose a value individually for each policy and each individual power level for each entity? Because regimes help social classes make coherent picks. The usual example I state here is that if a social class chooses a combination of economic variables that define a communism, then you want the social class to choose also a Capitalist PB with power=0%. You also want its choice in the political structure to sum up 100%. Having regimes as a "thing" also helps flavoring the game in other aspects. You can this way model ideological confrontations. A revolution can have a flag: "We want to overthrow the Monarchy and institute a Democracy!!"

We'll call Private Property and Social Policies Regime Policies, because they come from the regime choice. And we'll call Religious Discrimination, Ethnic Discr., Slavery, Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs, Direct Policies, because the model calculates directly and individually for each one of these, what is that the social class wants for them.

Note: A Regime doesn't include the Bureaucracy PB's Power. This is because the regime is an idealization of a form of govt and because bureaucracy power is considered unwanted, it should always be zero.

VII. The Model at Work

Social Classes' Ideological Profile

The IP of a social class (i.e. social class' mentality) is conformed, as said earlier, by a pick of regime and the definition of desired values for the Direct Policies. This sections explains how this is made in general terms.

The model assumes a person in a social class is driven mostly by its culture. Since a social class is within an ethnic group and since an EG contains a description of the cultural characteristics of the people, the equations take this cultural info to compute the class' preferences. For example, the EG cultural attribute Ethnic Tolerance is used to define the preference for the Ethnic Discrimination policy.

That would imply that all social classes would end with the same preferences. To fix this, the model uses the social role values Ethics, Warfare, etc, as cultural modifiers. So, for example, the warfare role value increases the EG cultural characteristic "aggressiveness". Doing this the social classes take different options. In particular, the ethics role is used to modify culture making it more similar to the doctrine of the religion followed by the EG, so social classes with an ethic role would appear more religious. It should be remembered here that the social model already makes the EG as a whole sensitive to the religion doctrine, so the effect of ethics should be seen as an "extra", which is coherent with the fact that the social class was defined as religious.

The choice of Regime is based on the same idea, but a couple of comments should be made:

1) The list of regimes social classes can opt to is conformed by the built-in ones, plus two more. These two are the "Conservative Regime" and the "Ruler's Regime". The first one has variable values (as opposed to the fixed values in built-in regimes) and is a copy of the current govt profile. The second is also variable and a copy of the values the player introduced in the interface. The idea is to allow social classes to opt for the type of regime the player wants (and, then, support him) or to opt to keep things like they currently are (conservative). The model actually increases the attractiveness of the latter according to the Traditionalism of the ethnic group.

2) A social class doesn't choose just one regime, but instead is considered to be divided among the available options. Something like:

Regime1	Regime2	Regime3
25%	60%	15%

In this way you can have, for example, some of the aristocracy supporting Republic and some supporting Oligarchy. This is the lowest level the model goes. People is divided in ethnic groups, these in social classes, these in regime preferences (that we can call political factions).

So the Ideological Profile of a class is simply the values for each Direct Policy and a Support Regime Vector, like the matrix above.

Building the Political Block Aggregation

The PB mentality is an aggregation of the mentalities of the social classes that conform it. The question now is how much each class weights in the aggregation. The answer is "weights proportionally to its relative population and relative role value". For example, if the Army PB needs to be computed, we take all classes in all ethnic groups and look at their warfare social role value as well as at their populations. We'll consider each person in a class generates W "units" of military leadership, where W is the role value Warfare for that class. Multiplying it for the class population, we have the total military leadership produced by the class (let's call this C). Summing that production over all social classes in all ethnic groups, we have the total military leadership produced in the civ (T). The class, then, weights in the Army PB as C/T.

Two corollaries:

1) The social role value itself is unimportant when you define it for each class. Just the relative proportion between them (along classes) counts.

2) The higher the social role values a class has, the more influential in politics will be (relative to others).

When doing these calculations, the model also introduces "discrimination factors". An ethnic group has DFs reflecting how discriminated it is by the govt. The factors reduce the production of each social role (C) for all classes in that EG, so discriminated EGs will see its influence in the PB reduced. In the future the model will also include the effect of distance, making EGs living in distant provinces less capable of affecting govt.

The Negotiation

To do the negotiation you need 2 elements. First, the mentality of each PB. Second, how much power each PB has (this info is stored in the current power structure). The method to determine the new policies and new political structure is a 2 steps method.

Step1: Political Blocks negotiate with each other (ruler ignored)

A "Society' Govt profile" (representing the preferences of all social classes with power) is created simply as a weighted average (variable by variable) of the PBs' mentalities, using "normalized powers" as the weights. For example, if you have this info for policy Private Property:

	Army PB	Church PB	Capitalist PB	Bureaucracy PB	People PB
Desired Private Property	30	66	75	55	10
Power	10%	20%	5%	8%	0%
Normalized Power	23%	47%	12%	19%	0%

then the Private Property resulting would be the sum of 30*23%+66*47%+75*12%+ 55*19%+60*0%, that is, 56. "Normalized Power" of a given PB is simply its power over the sum of all PB powers. It's a way to know the relative power of PBs in the absence of the ruler.

Doing that for each policy and for each political power you generate the Society's Govt Profile.

Step2: Ruler's Intervention

The results, a preliminary govt profile, is "presented" to the ruler. Depending on how much power he currently has (in this case it can be known from the second row of the above matrix that he has 57% of total power), he can change the preliminary values according to what he wants. Using a formula that depend on ruler's power, we compute a maximum modifier. Let's assume that for 57% power the maximum modifier returns 15. Given this, the ruler can set private property anywhere in a range centered at the Society's Govt Profile's value. In this case the range is [56-15, 56+15]. Assume the player put in the interface earlier (maybe several game turns earlier) that he wanted a private property of 50. The new govt profile, then, is set to 50, since its within the range. If he would have chosen 80, the final value would have been set in 56+15=71, because that's the highest he can get with his power.

Every policy value is computed the same way. But for the political power values, something slightly different must be made. In step2 the system used doesn't guarantee that doing that for each power value the final sum of power will give 100%. To solve it, we'll use an iterative procedure that looks for a coherent ruler's intervention. The process is based, however, in the same philosophy of step2.

Changing the Policies and Political Structure

The negotiated govt profile is stored as a "target" and in the following game turns the model moves slowly the current govt profile toward that target. This is to simulate the necessity of time for changes to become really operative and "real". It also represent the time that negotiations take and because of this the time needed for the current govt profile to achieve the target depends on the political structure. If it's mainly despotic, it'll take little time (few real negotiations).

VIII. Administrating the Empire

Geography

This section explains how geography (distance) affects administration. The goal here is to model the difficulties of administrating a large empire and to introduce the geographic dimension of political power distribution. The latter having a great importance in modeling independence movements, for example.

The elements used for this modeling:

1) Province Isolation (PI): This is a variable measuring how distant a province is from the capital, considering the actual distance (in km or miles or mapsquares), the existing transportation infrastructure and modified by the current level of transportation and communications techs and infra.

2) Local Government: It's assumed that each province has a local administration. The local govt deals with all sorts of low-level decisions, including directing buildings construction, running the police, collecting taxes, administrating courts of law, managing State owned economic activities, setting local pollution regulations, and a very long etc. By this I'm saying the local govt takes a lot of decisions, but it's not allowed to change central govt policies described earlier (private property, etc). These can only be changed at the central govt, valid for all provinces. In other words, the central govt is "strategic" and the local govt is "operative" or "tactic".

Like the central govt (all chapters before this one), the local administration can be as simple as a warlord running the province, or as sophisticated as a whole set of institutions with all types of democratic representation. It's assumed the local govt's political structure imitates the central govt, so if the civ has a despotic rule, the same happens at the local level.

All that said, we don't model the local govt. We don't model its local politics, its decisions or anything. But by acknowledging its existence, we model the consequences of it.

3) Province's Autonomy Level (PAL): It's a variable describing how much autonomy the local govt has. A low PAL means the local govt mostly just follows instructions from the central govt, while a high PAL means the local govt is left to resolve province problems the way it considers it best. Here it's important to emphasize again that the local govt, no matter how much autonomy has, remains "operative", so central govt policies remain always intact. The more autonomous a province is, a bigger part of the tax collection is kept in it (not collected by the central govt and therefore out of reach of ruler's hands) and also, if autonomous enough, some military autonomy is gained, meaning the ruler can recruit less troops in the province. Depending on the regime, the military autonomy can also imply the formation of local military units called "Feudal Units".

PAL is set by the ruler individually for each province.

4) Feudal Units: As said in 2), local govt's political structure resembles the central govt's one. If in the latter the combined political power of the military and the ruler is high, then we assume in local authorities there're important numbers of warlords and such. If a province has sufficient autonomy, these warlords "take over", forming their own military forces (Feudal Units) to protect their interests. Feudal Units obey the warlords, so they're not controlled by the ruler (player), but by the AI. They have only a defensive role, fighting foreign invasions coming into the province, so most of the time they remain inactive. The taking over by warlords doesn't imply a secession, so the province remains under ruler's control like any other.

5) Administration Effectiveness Level (AEL): It's a variable describing how effective is administration in dealing with province's local problems.

6) Administrators: Social classes having the Administrative social role are the ones that perform the actual administration. You need a certain number of administrators for each existing unit of Institutional Infrastructure.

7) Administration Costs: There're 3 costs. The first is the maintenance cost of ININ. The second is the cost of paying administrators' salaries. The third is the communications and logistic cost of running the province from the central govt, so this one depends on PAL and PI.

How things work

a) For optimum administration effectiveness, you need X units of ININ per inhabitant. X is given by the sum of a Base plus values that depend on Social Policies and Private Property. The higher SP is and the lower PP is, the higher X is. That's because you need a bigger bureaucracy to support social policies and State held economic activities.

b) The number of administrators needed is Y per ININ unit, modified by the current level of a "management" tech, so in modern times with computers and all, you'd need less administrators for the same level of ININ. Players won't be able to decide how many administrators to hire. They're automatically hired depending on ININ, which is the side controlled by the player.

c) AEL is determined comparing actual ININ with X and then applying a "distance penalty". The distance penalty is determined via PAL and PI and the idea of the penalty is to reflect the incapacity of the central govt to resolve the problems of an isolated province (low PAL, high PI).

d) The logistic and communications costs are determined via PI and PAL. The higher PI and the lower PAL, the higher the cost. This cost is paid by the central govt.

e) The costs of ININ maintenance and administrators' salaries are paid partly by the local govt and partly by the central govt depending on PAL. As PAL increases, the local govt faces a bigger share of the cost.

f) Any value below 100% for AEL implies unhappiness in the Riots Model (handled there through the Poor Welfare Feeling PAF). The lower AEL, the greater the unhappiness.

g) Although Feudal Units are loyal to the civ's ruler and aren't, therefore, "enemies", they want to preserve their autonomy. To simulate this, the number of Feudal Units present in a given province defines a minimum PAL. The ruler can't decrease PAL beyond that limit. In order to do it, he'd have to fight and destroy Feudal Units.

As can be seen, the rules for administration are simple and follow an intuitive philosophy. The player needs institutional infra and administrators to produce the administration and he needs to pay for them. As the civ covers a greater territory, costs of communications and logistic appear, being sensitive to distance and transportation and communications infra. As technology progress, provinces that where considered isolated are now close. The player can run the civ in a centralized way, making the central govt take every detailed decision for all provinces, or give autonomy to the local govts. By giving autonomy the local govts work better in solving local problems and administration effectiveness increases, while at the same time the central govt faces less costs. But, of course, as more autonomy a province enjoys, the risks of secession rise. In particular, a civ may be feudalized, meaning the central govt is not able to establish its authority and administration in full over some territories, forming a vacuum that's in time filled by local lords. Once there, these lords will try to protect their own existence. But the lords don't necessarily mean trouble. A weak civ with cash problems may consider useful a feudal system in terms of the defense feudal units provide for free and the lower costs of administration.

The system provides a realistic form of administration, considering money costs, political implications and different degrees of adm. effectiveness. At the same time, it allows modeling Feudalism, understood as a geographic distribution of powerful lords. The possibility to fight feudal units provides the processes of "reunification" many civs had to go through in real life.

Spending Public Funds

Not resolved yet.

IX. Demographics

One of the costs of having a flexible set of social classes is you have to model demographics more carefully. Here demographics means how many people each social class has. The set of social classes becomes dynamic, so, for example, if slavery exists, then slave classes must too, but they have to vanish when slavery is abolished. That's handled through demographics, imposing zero population for some classes when certain conditions are met.

This part of the model is still under development.

XI. Ruler's Tools (Player's Interface)

His main form of affecting the govt is creating the Ruler's Government Profile, where he determines the political structure and policies he desires.

Another important form of control is setting the autonomy level for each province.

Foul Plays

These are things the ruler may implement:

Goons Squad: The ruler can use agents to "convince" the opposition. These include extortion, threats and "hits" of political adversaries. As a result, the ruler's De Facto Power increases. The squad costs money to operate and as a down side it increases the probabilities of social classes trying to replace the ruler (Riots Model)

Bribes: This is a less violent way to achieve what the goons squad does. It increases ruler's De Facto Power and reduces probabilities of events against him (Riots Model). The down side is it promotes corruption on population (Social Model).

Propaganda: Increases the attractiveness of the Ruler's Govt Profile when social classes choose their preferred regimes. Costs money.

Internal Intelligence Service: Acts over the Riots Model decreasing all events probabilities, representing the effort to destroy adversaries' capacities to threaten the establishment. Costs money and increases the Influence of the Military Political Block.

One Time Hits

These are things the ruler can do with an instantaneous effect:

Government Rearrangement: The ruler ignores all the process of negotiations and changes the govt's profile at will, making the change immediately valid (i.e. no slow time of transition is made). Depending on the magnitude of the change and the despotic level he had previous to the change, the Empire's Stability variable is reduced. At the same time, the Circumstances Term for all social classes is increased (Riots Model).

XII. Differences With Version 2 and Final Comments

A lot of minor things have not been mentioned in order to have a "readable" document from where to understand the model. One of the parts that's not covered is the effect of "Representation", but that perfectly can wait.

Why this model is better than the version 2?

1) Because is more flexible in the number of social classes. The old version worked with a very specific and fixed pool of classes (upper class, lower class, military class, religious class, bureaucratic elite class). With the "social role values" system, it can be expanded interestingly. Some examples of the new possibilities:

Nobility A>0 K>0 W>0

Landed/Capitalist Clergy K>0 E>0

Slaves H=0

Jenizars/Mamelucs W>0 H<rest of classes

Holy Warriors W>0 E>0

And with different numbers for the social role values you can increase the diversity, like the bishops vs monks example described earlier. Of course, forget about Jedi Knights, Ninja Turtles and stuff. This gives a reasonable set of possibilities, useful for historic scenarios.

2) Because treats better discrimination. Before it was an all-or-nothing thing. Now there're degrees of discrimination.

3) Because the current system for negotiating the govt profile doesn't have the "machiavellian effect", a problem where the player had to "lie" to the interface to get what he wanted, strategically choosing values in a way that greatly encouraged the trial-and-error that's unpleasant to deal with. At the same time, it was too easy for the ruler to overshadow the rest actors.

4) Social classes are now defined as parts of the ethnic groups, which is much better, coherent and allows greater flexibility (thanks to F_Smith).