In the original Victoria, each PoP had but one ideology and just 2 issues, and these were reset every 13 days or so. Now for those of you who paid attention to the screenshot in last week’s developer diary you will have noticed that this is no longer the case and this week’s developer diary will tell you why we are doing this and a bit on how it will work.
So first off let’s describe a bit about how the new system works. Each ideology and issue gets given a weight, calculated using context sensitive MTTH triggers. This is then translated into a percentage support value for each ideology and issue that the POP should have. Each day the POP then compares what it should have with its current values and gradually moves them towards where they should be.
We can do lots of cool things with this by making economic and tariff policy much more sensitive to the POPs current economic condition. So if you have a free trade government and your POPs are getting their luxury needs then they will see the benefits of free trade. We have also made the decision to give labourers and craftsmen very low default weights for all party policies and ideologies. In an industrial economy this should form one of the largest voting blocks and they have the largest sensitivity to the current country situation. This creates a block of swing voters who could form the backbone of a socialist movement, they could be the supporters of liberalism or they could be bulwark of conservatism. Our goal is to make later game politics more historic, where every country is not hard coded to have a massive socialist party. It also become much more responsive to what you have done with your country.
Now this system has a lot of nice consequences. First of the famous election events. Now in Victoria these events did pop up a lot but because of the issue reset every 13 days had little or no effect. However with the gradual shift each election event will make a difference, especially the closer you get to polling day. However these events are not so strong that you can totally alter the outcome of an election, but you can nudge the result in a particular direction. The new look issue system and election events fits in well with our ideas that you should have these levers to steer a country without total control.
The other thing we have added is reforms as issues; POPs will agitate for certain reforms, as they believe these are important to them. Reform wants translate into militancy gains for your POPs, thus as a country you have not only the reforms that you think we suit your country, but also the reforms that your people want. So we keep the classic patriarchal system, where you decide what is good for your people. However, we are trying to create bottom up pressure on the government, where you as a government have your POPs demanding certain reforms and granting these is the best way to keep your country happy and quiet.
The final point is that all POPs are defined with weights towards all Ideologies. This means that Aristocrats have a strong affinity to conservatism, however some will be liberals. A small number, when persuaded by their moralist brethren to read this book by a bearded man get the wrong book, will find Communism attractive. Which is all very realistic, aristocrats inside a province were not monolithic, there were the small radical fringe who thought communism was the answer. Then as your country changes so too will the relative strengths of these ideologies.
Well that wraps up our first foray into ideology and issue. We will return to this later to discuss how this feeds into things like elections.
As a bonus with this week’s developer diary you get two screenshots instead of the usual one. Here are tow zoomed views of the map, one political and one terrain. The terrain map is still looking very nice, even at high zoom. While our political map is looking a lot like a real map would.
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Still has some issues (for instance shouldn't Rajasthan be mostly dessert?) but a huge improvement 
Originally Posted by RedRalphWiggum
