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!

Social Model Version 3

Descriptive Document
October/2001

I. Overview

This model only describes how people can be characterized through cultural attributes and which mechanisms exist to make attributes change overtime according to the civ's experiences. The effects of culture in the game are supposed to be managed in the rest models. The model should be seen mostly as an "information source model": it generates people's cultural data to be used in other aspects of the game, while providing nearly null outputs visible to the player. The Riots and Government models greatly depend on the info produced by this model, but the Social Model should also serve others, helping determine, for example, how tech development can depend on cultural characteristics.

Population will be divided in "Ethnic Groups". An Ethnic Group (EG) has a description of its culture via some attributes such as "individualism" and has a religion. The model alters EG's cultural profile according to the environment the EG lives in, takes care of religion conversion and controls its very existence, since some of them may disappear along the game.

The exact definition of EG has led to some controversy in the Clash Forums since the concept was introduced in version 2, so here I present the form it should be understood from now on: An EG is a culturally homogeneous group of people, sharing the same religion and same nationality. Culture here is a set of attributes taking given values. The model doesn't use "identifiers" or things like that to individualize a culture, so there's no such thing as a "German culture", for example. An EG having the German nationality in one province may have slightly different cultural attributes than a German EG in another province. The absence of culture as a "thing" beyond the EG is key to model cultural evolution sensitive to environment, so Germans living under roman rule may evolve differently than those beyond roman borders.

II. The Ethnic Group

An EG has:

A nationality

A population

A religion

A religious discrimination factor that describes in which degree the EG is discriminated by the govt because of its religion.

A ethnic discrimination factor that describes in which degree the EG is discriminated by the govt because of its nationality.

A set of cultural attributes divided in two parts, "basic attributes" and "moral code".

II.1. Basic Attributes

Traditionalism, Nationalism, Land Connection, Importance of Religion and Corruption.

Traditionalism: This represents people's desire to preserve their current culture. High traditionalism implies dislike for change, while low scores mean people value innovation.

Nationalism: People's relation with their nationality. Nationalism is considered in reference to the EG's nationality, so if an EG has "Persian" for nationality, a high nationalism means people see themselves as Persians, while a low nationalism represents a state of transition, where people see themselves partly Persian, but also something else. A high nationalism implies people aware of who they are and the rejection to be ruled by others. Low nationalism implies a vague self identity and a strong provincialism. It's important not to confuse a high nationalism with a fanatic love for the nation or the scorning of other nations.

Land Connection: This is the people’s feeling of belonging to the territory they occupy. The love for where they live and the idea that the land they occupy belongs to them.

Importance of Religion: How much influence religion has in people's lives and how much passion people have for religious issues. High values indicate religion is central, with mysticism covering every aspect of human life. Low values are associated to today's western view of religion.

Corruption: People's inclination to corruption.

II.2. Moral Code Attributes

Ethnic Tolerance, Religious Tolerance, Aggressiveness, Asceticism, Individualism, Obedience and Natural Affinity.

Ethnic Tolerance: It represents how you see other tribes and what kind of relationship you think exists between your tribe and others. A low ET means you feel your tribe is superior and the rest hardly qualify as human beings. A high ET means you respect other tribes and you're willing to live together with them.

Religious Tolerance: This is the tolerance of other religions (by other I mean the ones not followed by the EG). Low scores mean people feel upset about having to live with people with other cults.

Aggressiveness: This defines how aggressive the culture is. A high score indicates a very warlike culture while a low score indicates peaceful.

Asceticism: This represents the people’s desire for material goods. A high score indicates a lack of interest in material goods, while a low score indicates lots are wanted.

Individualism: The people’s value of self. It's considered mainly in the economic sphere, so an individualistic society is more inclined toward capitalism and the less individualistic, the more socialistic.

Obedience: People's acceptance of a pyramidal social structure. High values imply people's acceptance of a despotic, elitist govt deciding things for them and low values imply people's preference for a more equal society in terms of rights and participation.

Natural Affinity: People's respect for the natural environment. Willingness to live in harmony with it.

The concept of "moral code" is introduced in this version to model in a better way the influence of religions, the influence of the government and the influence of other cultures over the EG. The decision to put a given attribute in the moral code set or in the basic set is a little arbitrary, but a rule to determine this may be given by the following: Attributes included in the moral code are those that can be greatly influenced by "others". The basic set contains the rest attributes, that is, those where it doesn't make much sense to determine their values through the imitation of values given by "others". For example, Land Connection's value must only rise as time passes, regardless of what feelings others have for their land.

III. Religions

A religion has:

A name,

A type,

A Family value,

An Attractiveness value,

A Holy Land,

And a moral code (same attributes as in chapter II).

The type may be "Ethnic Religion" (E-Religion) or "Multiethnic Religion" (ME-Religion). This replaces the designations "Primitive Religion" and "Great Religion of the World" used in version 2, but the difference remains: E-Religions aren't allowed to spread to other EG's and ME-Religions are. Here the main objective is the same: make the multitude of religions at the beginning of the game go down to just a few large world wide religions. However, it's not just a change of names. In the old system a Primitive Religion found itself in a situation where it was nearly impossible to survive in the presence of a GRW. This isn't so anymore because the relative strength of religions will be given now, as will be shown ahead, by the difference in attractiveness values (new variable). The type now only defines the capacity of the religion to be embraced by other EG's.

Holy Land is a variable that indicates a place on the map that's considered holy. Although the variable is not yet incorporated anywhere in the model (or in the govt or riots models), it'll eventually help model things like crusades.

Finally, the family value is a way to introduce "religion branches", like Catholics and Protestants in Christianity. Two religions in the same family have the same family value. The value itself is unimportant.

One important difference with the previous version is that EG's can only follow just one religion (in version 2 the EG could follow partly its primitive religion and partly a great religion of the world). However, now one ethnicity may follow more than one religion. It's important not to confuse "ethnicity" (nationality) with "ethnic group". A given province may have two EG's with the same nationality but with different religions (for example, Jewish Americans and catholic American).

IV. Nationalities

Nationalities and nationalism are one of the important aspects of the model. Some tribes may disappear along the game, absorbed by others, like Celts, latins or Aztecs. On the other side, some new nationalities may appear through the integration of different tribes, like the case of France. The nationalistic info is also very important to model nationalistic uprisings that may help destroy an empire from the inside, like it happened with the ottomans (uprisings being modeled in the Riots Model using info from this model).

The model assumes the civ's govt has a nationality that has a "presence" or "force" over the civ's territory. The Government Nationality's Force (GNF) on a given province depends on how far the province is from the capital province (where "far" is a combination of distance, communications and transportation infra and tech levels), how representative the govt is and the level of a "Nationalism" tech.

Nationalism Tech represents the development of the concept of "Nation" as a territory where people with the same nationality lives in and that's self-determined in terms of not accepting a rule from foreign people. In the Tech Model, this tech should be placed somewhere in the industrial era and its purpose is to help model in the game the rise of modern nations as we understand them today.

The model assumes the govt tries to encourage the idea of Nation and people's adoption of govt's nationality, but this is only possible as long as the concept of Nation is well refined. Assumes also it's harder to do it for far away territories and it's easier for people to embrace govt's nationality if the govt is representative.

This affects people's nationalism differently depending if they already have the nationality that's being encouraged or if they have other.

EG has the same nationality: Its nationalism is given by the GNF level. The higher GNF is, the more nationalistic. The low nationalism that's a result of a low GNF should be understood as a provincialism and a lack of commitment/loyalty to the central govt that may lead to independence attempts (Riots Model).

EG has other nationality: Here there's a struggle between keeping the current nationality and adopt the govt's one. The higher GNF is, the less nationalistic the EG becomes because it's harder to maintain own ethnic identity and the EG feels a pressure to adopt the govt's nationality. However, the current Ethnic Discrimination level (see Govt Model) also plays a role, because the govt may be encouraging nationalism in its people and at the same time being intolerant with other nationalities. This "marks" the ethnic difference and the EG is able to keep its national identity. Two other factors intervene in Nationalism. First, the demographic share of the EG's nationality in the province. If the EG's nationality is important in terms of population in the province, then the govt's nationality appears to them more "foreign" and has less effect. On the contrary, an EG living surrounded by other cultures tends to lose identity. Second, just like the govt uses the Nationalism Tech, the EG may use it too to strengthen its identity. This last effect is, though, useful only if EG's nationalism isn't too low already (i.e. only if there's still some identity left to save).

An EG with different nationality whose nationalism becomes too low starts the transformation to the govt's nationality if GNF is high enough. Note both effects are necessary for nationality shift. If nationalism is low but GNF isn't strong enough, then we consider the EG has conceived a provincial sense of identity. If the two effects are present and the transformation should take place, then EG's population is drained slowly and passed to an EG with the govt's nationality having the same religion as the "dying EG" (if such EG does not exist, it's created as a copy of the original EG but with different nationality). If nothing changes, the EG eventually disappears.

The rise of new nationalities will be the result of ruler intervention. At any time, the ruler may create a new nationality and set it as the govt's one. This would be an excellent strategy to "unite the tribes" if EG's in the civ have low nationalism. Obviously, the strategy will only work if the GNF is high enough to produce the nationality shift (that simply follow the rules explained above).

V. Philosophy

Following the release of version 2 there were two criticisms to the model that I tried to tackle here. The first was that the player was unable to intervene in cultural evolution and some form of "social engineering" should be available. The second was that some forms of philosophy in history encouraged rules of behavior like religions do, but without the mystic elements of religions. Confucianism in China being maybe the clearest example.

In this version both criticisms are incorporated via the "Philosophy" concept. Here, Philosophy will be a moral code (i.e. a set of cultural attributes) the ruler, as the govt's lead, may encourage in his people. These philosophical moral codes should be available as applications from the Tech Model as the game progresses, so the ruler would have to pick the one he prefers (although he might as well don't choose any at all). For example, somewhere in the beginning of the 20th century a "Fascism" philosophy could be available with high aggressiveness and low ethnic tolerance. With a sufficiently high level of development of some other techs like Sociology, it'd be also possible for the player to create his own philosophy.

Although this approach serves pretty well for social engineering, it's limited for the other aspect. Moral codes as a form of philosophy aren't necessarily restricted to a govt "implementing" them from top to bottom. The best in terms of realism would be to treat them more like religions, but this would greatly complicate the model because we'd have to model things like "philosophy spreading" and, more importantly, define rules to determine why a certain philosophy finds supporters and others don't. What is proposed here is therefore a compromise between realism and implementation.

VI. The Model at Work

The model can be divided in 4 sub-models:

Cultural Change Sub-Model

Religion Spreading Sub-Model

Nationality Shift Sub-Model

Religions Grand Scheme Sub-Model

VI.1. Cultural Change Sub-Model

Since changes in culture are slow and occur over considerable time, what the model does is to compute the value each attribute should tend to in the long run given the current environment the EG is subject to, and then move slightly the current values toward this "tendency value". The first part, computing the tendency values, is by far the most complex part of the social model.

VI.1.1. Generating Tendency Values

For each attribute the model determines its tendency value through the relation that should exist between it and the rest attributes and the impact of the natural world (science, specially) over it. This is called the "Nature" factor because it represents the forces of nature over the EG. Tendency values for the Basic Attributes are directly these "natural" values, but for the Moral Code, since it can be influenced by other moral codes, Nature is considered just one more factor in play.

To determine tendency values for the Moral Code, the model considers there're several moral codes in EG's environment, each affecting it in a different degree. Moral codes are combined with different weights to determine tendency values. The moral codes in play come from these sources:

Nature: (described above)

Tradition: People's tendency to keep the current moral code.

Religion: People try to incorporate in their behavior the moral code their religion encourages.

Culture Mix: When living in contact with other cultures, people imitate aspects of others' moral codes.

Government Influence: The moral code encouraged by the govt.

VI.1.1.1. Nature Values

Here's a brief description of how the Nature values are created:

Traditionalism: Here I considered a society becomes less traditionalistic the faster the world around it changes (i.e. an adaptive response), and I considered science as the main factor of environmental change. Traditionalism will depend of the number of Applications (from the Tech Model) available in the civ. This will be interesting because the Tech Model should consider Traditionalism as one of the key factors in research points production, so one will feed the other and produce feedback. A civ creating new ideas will push society to a less traditionalistic behavior encouraging yet more innovation.

Nationalism: This value changes as explained in chapter IV.

Land Connection: The value is a constant equal to "1".

Importance of Religion: Its value depends on the number of tech applications available in the civ and the value of Empire's Stability, a Govt Model's variable that describes how stable people feel the civ is. The assumption here is science takes away the role of religion as a source of explanations for what happens in the world and that people seek shelter in religion when surrounded by a chaotic, unstable world.

Corruption: Defined by the size of govt's bureaucracy, govt's administration effectiveness and quality of Media coverage, measured by a Media Tech level and the Civil Rights govt's policy (to determine the liberty with which media runs). The level of bribes used by the ruler is also considered, reflecting how it can corrupt society downwards.

Ethnic Tolerance: Here the assumption is intolerance is driven mostly by ignorance of other realities. As people enter in contact with other societies and try to understand them, tolerance increases. The Communications Tech is used here to reflect the knowledge of other worlds. On the other side, a high Nationalism may reduce tolerance for those EG's living in provinces with nationalistic diversity because people want to make real the idea of a "Nation".

Religious Tolerance: The lower Importance of Religion is, the higher tolerance to other beliefs. And, again, Communications Tech is used to represent less ignorance about other cults (and therefore more tolerance).

Aggressiveness: The less tolerant in the ethnic and religious fields, the more aggressive.

Individualism: Decreases as Nationalism Tech level increases, representing people's willingness to help and cooperate with the rest of the nation.

Obedience: Decreases with Nationalism Tech level and increases with Importance of Religion. The first effect exists because behind the idea of Nation lies a sense of equality. The second effect exists because, as religion becomes more central, there's a growing need of seeking spiritual guidance and, in time, the need to leave decisions in these (holy) leaders.

Asceticism: The bigger Natural Affinity, the more ascetic. The lower individualism, the more ascetic.

Natural Affinity: The more pollution (I'm assuming some model will handle that) and the higher the level of an Environmentalism Tech, the greater the value for NA.

VI.1.1.2. Cultural Mix

Moral codes of all EG's in the province are combined through a weighted exponential sum to form a "Mixed Culture". The weights are generated with a combination of relative populations and the relative values of ethnic and religious discrimination factors. In this way an EG that is a minority in terms of population or is more discriminated than others is less able to influence the culture of others.

The use of an exponential combination instead of a lineal one ensures an EG with a small weight won't affect other cultures at all. Otherwise an EG would always be forced to change its moral code in the presence of others, no matter how insignificant others are.

VI.1.1.3. Government Influence

Govt Influence is a combination of two elements: Code of Law and Philosophy.

Code of Law: The government has a code of law to regulate the society it rules. These laws, that are a reflection of the type of government and its policies, encourage a given form of life which is incorporated in people's moral code.

Philosophy: (as described in chapter V)

To create the Code of Law, the set of govt policies and the political structure (see Govt Model) are "translated" into a moral code. For example, if the govt has a capitalistic economy, the Individualism value in this moral code will be high.

The Philosophy moral code is given by the philosophy the ruler chooses among those available from the Tech Model.

Both moral codes are combined through a simple average.

VI.1.1.4. Tendency Values for EG's Moral Code

The moral codes the EG is exposed to are combined through a weighted sum to form the Tendency Values. Weights, in terms of equations, are created in such way that they ensure:

1) The influence of the religion's moral code over the EG increases with Importance of Religion.

2) The tendency to keep current culture for a longer period increases with Traditionalism.

3) The magnitude with which the govt can influence EG's moral code depends on how "present" the govt is in the province the EG lives in. Here "presence" means govt's capacity of providing an administration the people can "feel" in their daily lives. The Administration Effectiveness Level (AEL) is used for this purpose (see Govt Model).

VI.1.2. Making the Cultural Change

EG's attributes are replaced with the result of a weighted sum of the current attributes values and the tendency values, where the weights are determined by the length of the game turn (in months). The more time involved in a game turn, the higher the weight associated to the tendency values.

VI.2. Religion Spreading Sub-Model

VI.2.1 Within the Province

In each province there's a dynamic list of present religions. Each religion is said to produce "faith points". In simple terms, the more faith points a religion produces, the more followers it'll have under a scheme of competition between religions. The number of faith points produced by a given religion is the sum of:

a) The religion's attractiveness value.

b) The amount of religious infrastructure of that particular religion existing in the province (it's therefore necessary for the econ/infra model to handle religion infra divided for each religion) multiplied by some factor converting infra units into faith points.

c) A value that's function of the govt's official religion and govt's religious discrimination, so that if there's a mismatch between the religion and the official religion then the value of this term is zero and is greater than zero otherwise.

d) The number of followers of the religion multiplied by some factor converting followers into faith points.

The sub-model handles each nationality at a time (note this isn't the same as saying "each EG at a time"). This is made to avoid nationality conversion by mistake, which could happen given the way the system works.

For a given nationality not all religions compete for followers. All ME-Religions are considered but in the case of E-Religions, only those that currently have followers of this nationality are considered. For this set of religions, faith points are used to determine the demographic distribution of religions that should exist. For example, if we're talking about Greeks, we want to know what share of them are Greek pagans, what share are Christians and what share are Muslims, assuming the only two ME-Religions in the province are Christianity and Islam and that already there're Greeks with an E-Religion called "Greek Paganism".

Then we force the actual demographic distribution to be a little more similar to the one that should exist. At doing this it may be necessary for the model to create new EG's. If there were only greek pagans in our example and if both Christianity and Islam are producing enough faith points, then two new EG's would appear: greek christians and greek muslims. On the other side, it'd be possible for an EG to disappear.

VI.2.2. Province-to-Province Spreading

Probably the main factor providing spreading through the world will be migrations (that won't be handled in this model). Here we'll consider the effect of trade as a vehicle of religion spreading. Every time a trading relation is established between two provinces, their list of present religions is updated for ME-Religions. For instance, if one province has Christianity and other has Islam, trade between them would imply both will have Christianity and Islam.

It can be concluded from the above that when we say "religion X is present in the province" it doesn't necessarily imply there're followers or buildings of religion X in the province, but that at least there's some sort of contact with it.

VI.3. Nationality Shift Sub-Model

The process has already been explained in chapter IV. Here's a copy of the relevant paragraph for this sub-model:

VI.4. Religions Grand Scheme Sub-Model

Modeling the processes triggering the rise of a new religion or a new religion branch is considered too difficult because of the diversity of reasons that existed behind them in real life. So, here I've taken a very simple approach: At the beginning of the game a Grand Scheme for religions will be created. The scheme is a set of dates defining when a new religion or brand should appear. The dates are randomly created.

Every game turn the game engine checks the dates and, if a new religion or branch is programmed for the current date, the following steps are taken:

1) A random, high value is created as religion attractiveness for the new religion.

2) Choose a random province anywhere in the world.

3) Choose a random EG within the province.

4) If the EG has an E-Religion, then:

- Assign to the new religion a new family value, different from any other existing religion.

- Define randomly if the new religion will be multiethnic or not.

If the EG has a ME-Religion, then:

- Assign to the new religion the same family value the EG's current religion has (branch being created).

- Define the religion as multiethnic.

5) Take the EG's moral code, make a copy of it and then move its values randomly around the original ones to create the new religion's moral code. This is made in order to make the new religion's moral code not too different to the EG's that is creating it.

6) Create a copy of the EG, assign it the new religion and assign it a small population and subtract the same amount of population from the original EG (conversion)

7) Define a random map square in the province as Holy Land.

Note in step 1 a high attr. value is given to the new religion. This is equivalent as saying the Grand Scheme handles the creation of Great Religions of the World (although the concept doesn't exist anymore). But in this case a Great Religion can be ethnic (Judaism, Hinduism) or multiethnic (Christianity, Islam) and the name "Great Religion" only serves as a way to say "this is a religion with huge chances of surviving the test of time, with huge chances to replace other cults".

VII. Differences With Older Versions and Final Comments

One of the important changes compared with the last version is things have been rearranged to be more "modular" or "encapsulated" so now the model should be easier to code in an object oriented fashion.

Another relevant change is now people may follow more than one religion. Although the EG is restricted to one religion, a people, understood as all EG's with the same nationality, aren't restricted, so nations with multiple religions are now possible.

The introduction of a religion attractiveness as a religion's inherent characteristic is very useful, in combination with the old system of religions that can spread and that can not, to model better some religions such as Judaism. In the old model Judaism couldn't fit anywhere correctly.

The introduction of the above two elements are responsible for the change of the religion spreading system. But additionally, the system was simplified.

Cultural Mix is back in the model (it existed in version 1 and was eliminated in version 2).

The introduction of philosophies is another novelty. The existence of the new concept "Moral Code" appears as a result of the introduction of Philosophy, the introduction of Cultural Mix and the new arrangement of old variables and their effects (Code of Law).

The handling of nationalities and nationalism has been enhanced. I know the mechanics of it may sound a little confusing, but in terms of equations is simple and it should provide more realism for a greater variety of cases compared to the old system.

More use of info from the Tech Model is also present. This eases the modeling of cultural change and should help realism.

The introduction of religion branches is another novelty. The main effect of this is religions that are considered belonging to the same family will "get along" better. A Protestant won't suffer the same discrimination as a muslim in a civ having Catholicism as the official religion, for example.

A couple of new cultural attributes have been added as suggested by some team members. The "Sacrifice" attribute of religions of version 2 has been eliminated and its role, which is to determine how much money people are willing to spend in religious infra (Economy Model), should be taken now by Importance of Religion.

EG's can now be discriminated in different degrees as opposed to the all-or-nothing strategy of the old version. Also, enslavement disappears from this model and is passed to the Govt Model in the form of enslaved social classes.

In the old version there was a "dominant culture" effect, representing how the "ruling" ethnicity exports its culture to minorities. Although the concept is not there explicitly in this new version, the effect is still there. It enters in 4 ways: First, through cultural mix (remember the cultural mix is sensitive to the level of discrimination, so the less discriminated, the more successful in exporting culture). Second, through Code of Law (although this one depends on the ruler's despotic level). Third, through the existence of an official religion and the effect of this in faith points production (encouraging other peoples to embrace the "ruling" religion). Fourth, through GNF and nationality shift.

As with dominant culture, the concept of "multiethnic civ" existing in the last version was eliminated. Again, the concept doesn't exist explicitly, but all the effects remain there "hidden" behind the new enhanced modeling of nationalities and nationalism. Also, in this new model these things are handled more smoothly and no discrete jumps from multiethnic to mono-ethnic govt (or vise versa) exist.