Dev Diary #45 - Elections

[sbadkins4]

In terms of suffrage and work, this seems… almost entirely backwards? Women (and indeed, children) were mass employed (in agriculture, in textiles, and more) long before they gained the right to vote. In fact, logically, women working should drive increased suffrage demands, not voting increasing how many people work. That said, in most of the industrializing nations of this time period, pretty much everyone worked. They were sending nine year olds to mine coal and sweep chimneys. So if anything, workforce participation should decline with progress, not increase.

 

[UnenthusiasticClownJob]

It's funny that you guys are using the electoral college as an argument for why it's reasonable that the loser of the popular vote can win the election by being put in government, when not only is there no electoral college in Vicky 3, there is no government. There's no upper or lower houses, there's no judicial branch, there's no federalism, there's no difference in laws between states with the sole exception of slavery--everything is abstracted to the point where we have no clue what the government actually looks like beyond who the president is and who the 'leaders' of each 'interest group' is.

You can't use a second instance of abstraction to defend the same abstraction. We're already at an abstract enough point where votes, IGs, parties, and laws do not actually represent any government mechanisms, they simply represent end results. Being able to decide who "really" won the election afterwards is insane because all the considerations are already factored in. Everything to do with internal management has been reduced to the clout of IG groups. You can't further reduce it to literally just player choice. At that point, none of the mechanics have any meaning at all. There isn't actually an election being simulated, there's a vague suggestion on what the devs might think would happen if maybe an election was called at this point but ultimately it's up to you to just dictatorially decide what happened. You're reaching a point of abstraction where we've completely left simulation behind and we're just playing a Sid Meier game, where "democracy" means +2 Trade Value in every city.

You are counting the abstraction twice in the same calculation. It's getting absurd. At this point I expect the next layer to be "Actually, the amount of votes an IG got don't actually represent the number of votes cast in the election", and after that "Actually, the interest groups in government don't actually represent the government at all."

 

[Avian Overlord]

EDIT (Not OPB): Whilst this might not make it in time for release, I do hope that in very future patches down the line once it’s released, it will be looked into. The abstraction for me feels rather disconnected from the nation which I’m governing, in my personal opinion. The presence of Seats in Parliament/Senate should be included imo.

The problem with a legislative seat mechanic is that the government is more than the just the legislature. In just the United States you have the President, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the federal departments, the state governors and the state legislators. I prefer a system that allows for the fuzziness of how all these elements interact with each other, albeit abstractly, rather than a detailed simulation of one part that neglects the rest of it.

 

[Juanvito]

Why is it disappointing? I find the interest group system attractive because it allows for autocracies, oligarchies, etc. to be represented better than they were before. There are no more bizarre parties like the Tsarist party or Metternich's Faction. Having elections this way complements that system, makes it deeper. Allowing the player to continue to select interest groups at a hit to legitimacy can be thought of as rigging an election.

Because, if you can take the hit to legitimacy, elections don't matter. Just like every economic system plays as planned economy in practice, every political system can be a dictatorship of the player.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Please make it so IGs can be split by parties, as this shows how 2 party systems and the like come to be.

This would kind of defeat the purpose of both interest groups and parties, in terms of gameplay. If you have POPs split themselves among Interest Groups, *and* Interest Groups split themselves among Parties, then all you've done is make Interest Groups a pointless middleman and you might as well skip that step. And then we're back to the problems of Victoria 2's parties.

To have both, you need to have either POPs join Interest Groups as a whole or Interest Groups join Parties as a whole. And Interest Groups joining Parties makes a lot more sense. Interest Groups having split loyalties between Parties can then easily be represented by IGs dynamically forming and leaving parties, so the heavily divided IGs would swing from party to party depending on the leader or the party's particular strength.

 

[Cracky]

I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the idea of "In Government" and forgetting what it actually _means_ for gameplay. Groups in government let the player direct the passing of laws that those groups like, but if you tank your legitimacy so much that passing a law will take forever anyways then this is all for naught. Meanwhile the other way to affect legal change, political movements, is expressly available to IGs _not_ in government, and given that in such a scenario those IGs may hold a lot of clout, then that further hampers the player's ability to pass a law while at the same time causing these IGs to lead towards using radicalism to pass whatever laws they want without player direction.

You may be able to get away with marginal cases; but putting a weak coalition in power and leaving out the real winners isn't those groups taking power, it's those groups obstructing the normal function of government so that _nothing_ gets done. And from a gaemplay standpoint it seems to not be an "I win button", and quite the opposite in fact.

 

[nikkythegreat]

I hope not all countries have a two party system. Let a few have have like 3 or 4.

 

[MrRazza]

So, say an election gives us a Conservative Party backed by landowners, church, middle class something like 45%, a Labour Party backed by trade unions, working class 35%, and a Liberal Party backed by industrialists and intellectuals 20%.

1) Are those interest groups 100% committed to those parties? No split in the intellectuals group to reflect that some are rather attracted to Labour's socialism? That doesn't feel very representative of how ideology can cut across these groups.

2) Will the impact of these vote totals in any way change based on some sort of "electoral system" policy? Under First Past the Post, the Conservatives would win a majority here, but under PR, it seems entirely plausible a Labour/Liberal coalition would take power instead.

3) On a similar note, do elections really do nothing more than just hit interest group clout? That feels a bit... lacking. Under many systems an election winner simply takes power. Under many others it is almost impossible to ignore winners - and while I appreciate the current system may allow for that it seems to me that it really, really shouldn't be feasible for any democracy to have this election result and have the player simply choose to have a government of intellectuals. It also wouldn't really make much sense if the player could choose a government of industrialists, trade unions, and the church, taking from all the parties.

This is a step in the right direction, but it seems to me we could still be a bit short of really getting a proper political system here. Elections should matter more than it sounds they will, and while I look forward to hearing more next week, it still sounds like parties still aren't really doing what they should be either. Hope we can keep making progress on this.

 

[UnenthusiasticClownJob]

Right, so the player has to facilitate negotiations between the interest groups he wants in power, or does all of this happen automatically?

Ideally the player has to facilitate it by interacting with the IGs and balancing their desires, instead of unilaterally deciding things and having the entirety of the country haplessly pulled along.

Your issue doesn't seem to be with the abstraction of political power and clout

My issue is that the first layer of abstraction, "Interest Groups accumulate Political Clout based on how much influence they have over the nation", is overruled by the next layer of abstraction, "The IGs have no say in what the end result of the government is"

but rather the abstraction of the negotiation and coalition building,

there is no abstraction of negotiation and coalition building. That's the problem. There's no negotiation. There's no election. There isn't even really a coalition. The player just chooses what he thinks is best, and if he's a roleplayer, has to come up with the negotiation and coalition building in his head. The IGs and POPs have no proactive power, will not veto things that are obviously against their interests when by all rights they should have the power, and they don't have opinions on each other.

The IGs cannot say "I will never ally with my diametrical opposite", the only issue after the fact is that you can't satisfy both of their law requests fully. They won't even note that they're in government with their diametrical opposite, they'll only note how the player is fulfilling their needs.

The IGs cannot say "I will rig this election in my favor" or "Overwhelming popular support means I must be in government", they can only have an abstract amount of political clout which represents this, which is then abstracted away again by the fact that the player is the one who decides the outcome of every election.

The IGs cannot even say "I want to build a coalition with this IG and not the other one", because as far as we've been shown, they have no opinion on who else is in the government. They only have an opinion on whether they are in the government, their standard of living, and what laws have been enacted.

The layers of abstraction are colliding with each other, and at points do not even exist because nothing is even modeled by the game at all. Where there could have been an abstraction, there's nothing but players roleplaying, and where there are abstractions, they either overwrite each other, or are overwritten by the player.

The system is fighting itself and cannot accurately simulate elections. The only saving grace anyone has been able to prop up for it is "Well, I can imagine there was a better system instead while I'm playing." That's the problem.

And it only furthers the concern that it seems ridiculously easy to restructure your society however you want (I.E. instant socialist utopia canada AAR). I've thusfar not complained about that much, because it seems like balancing issues that obviously are going to exist in the beta AARs and will almost certainly be patched later, but this is not a balancing issue, this is a game design issue.

 

[LucasG21]

So parties give bonuses to IGs, rather than the other way around, interesting.

Shouldn't Landed Voting also benefit Farmers as well as the Upper Strata, though? I thought they were supposed to represent middling landholders and experienced agricultural managers.

 

[Andrzej2]

You're reaching a point of abstraction where we've completely left simulation behind and we're just playing a Sid Meier game, where "democracy" means +2 Trade Value in every city.

Well said. It bugs me that there is no real gameplay difference between democracies and monarchies. In both player have absolute power and assign interest groups to the government. Only difference is some numbers in political strenght after election.

Its the same game design like in economy. There is also no gameplay difference between playing with liberal economic laws and planned economy. Player decides all - only difference is within some modifiers to buildings or having extra pool of money from capitalist investments.

 

[Juanvito]

The level of fanfiction people are going through to pretend "player picks government always" has some hidden depth is astounding.

 

[Xain]

What does having a certain party in government mean, gameplay-wise?

Also, I hope a party having 100% of the votes is a situation that never happens in the final release. Even sham elections in the most dictatorial country rarely reach 100%

 

[Andrzej2]

But if instead you’re trying to preserve the aristocracy and maintain a conservative nation then not only will your ruling Interest Groups strongly disapprove of Women’s Suffrage but it will also be very harmful to their political power.

As far as I know quite often liberals were also against women's voting because at that time more women than men were religious and conservative.

The actual makeup of your government is still up to you

Shouldn't it be a separate law? Nomination of the government: Head of state/Parlament.

The issue whether the government and ministers are responsible before the king or before the chamber was pretty important but it looks like it's not a thing in Vic3.

Where is the senate? In Vic2 I liked to have senate by appointment and universal suffrage lower chamber.


You promised that we will have a pie charts but so far I didn't see much of them. Will we have a pie charts in government window showing interest groups and parties?


Im still not convinced to this legitimacy thing. If the only thing it does is making passing laws harder then it's not really an obstacle and I can have minority government no problem. I understand that I can nominate any minor interest group to government so I unlock their laws and then pass them after some time of waiting even if the chance of passing is like 5% it will pass sooner or later.

 

[shadowofneptune]

Because, if you can take the hit to legitimacy, elections don't matter. Just like every economic system plays as planned economy in practice, every political system can be a dictatorship of the player.

Can be. Perhaps not should be. The impression the diaries on politics have given is that it is easy to cause lots of radicals by messing too much with the natural coalitions. Let's remember that in the past game, most countries could arbitrarily change their ruling party with no real feedback on if that angered people. This time, you have a pretty clear incentive to not rock the boat.

 

[shadowofneptune]

In Vicky 2 you could only arbitrarily change the ruling party in authoritarian systems (and your options depend on the kind of authoritarianism), and in HM;s Govs at a big cost in militancy. This one allows you to do it even in democracies.

I think a way to think about it is that the president of a democratic country always could order his personal guard to walk into the legislature and arrest everyone when a vote doesn't go their way. They don't because it'd be suicide most of the time.

I see a tendency in some of these responses to want the politics section of the game to be more of a model parliament. In those it makes sense to have some obvious actions be impossible, since it defeats the point. In this game though there can be rather sensible consequences to breaking the rules, since the game is more than just a political system. Consider how CK2 doesn't force you to be a good king. Instead, players learn that being a Macbeth is a quick way to not have a fun game as you die or are facing rebels constantly.

 

[bigrigg47]

Please make it so IGs can be split by parties, as this shows how 2 party systems and the like come to be.

That's simply not how 2 party systems came to be. 2 party systems mostly function as two competing gigantic alliances of a bunch of different interest groups - very easy to represent with this system. And those parties changing over time can be pretty easily represented by interest groups eventually switching allegiances. There's no need for them to be split between the parties.

 

[wilcoxchar]

One thing I'm still confused about. When you're selecting your government and you have elections with parties, do you choose how to form your government by bringing parties in as a whole or picking individual interest groups still?

It'd be kind of disappointing to still choose individual interest groups. Bringing whole parties into the government and having the trade-off of potentially bringing interest groups you don't want but may have to if they're in the same party as a desired interest group was one of the big benefits having political parties would bring to the political system of democracies. It also would make a lot more sense than still being able to cherry pick individual interest groups even if they're in opposing parties.

 

[Brinf]

Awesome dev diary — I think this approach is much more dynamic than Victoria 2’a system.

I think the suggestions I’m about to propose would be more suited to a DLC (you can happily take my money for this), because while I think the political foundation of this game is rock-solid, it needs a lot of work.

Somebody mentioned their (disappointment?) that parties are abstractions that boost IGs, rather than the other way around. Perhaps Parties could, in the future, not simply be effectively buffers to IGs but institutions unto themselves. Right now, they don’t seem to have any depth. Could a future expansion give parties the depth proper to them in this era? Parties are basically coalitions of IGs — maybe there can be representations of splits or combinations.

I also really liked HOI3’s ministry. I always thought this would be cool for a Victoria game, but Victoria games never had characters — until now. Why not include ministry positions? Let’s say I want Cornelius Vanderbilt as my Secretary of Education — thus boosting industrialist IGs and riling up the plebs. Or, if I have a parliament like the UK, doesn’t it make more sense to see Benjamin Disraeli as PM while Victoria sits as Head of State? Or Bismarck in Chancellor position, while the Kaiser sits on the throne? Maybe Tukachevsky becomes Minister of War, giving some minor approval to the Landowners due to his aristocratic background (represented as a personality trait rather than an ideology or IG for him). Either way, I imagine a cross between the court positions of CK3 Royal Court and the ministry system in HOI3. I think Vic 3 could pull this off — and it’d be a lot of fun here.

Also, what happened to upper/lower house? Maybe Paradox could come out with a DLC that reps legislative houses in systems that allow them. If you allow voting, you are—depending on your government type—given different legislative bodies. For instance, if you’ve got a Parliamentary Republic, you get a… parliament! Versus a Presidential Republic, where you maybe get a bicameral legislature if you’re in the US. Or, if you’re q council republic, you get a Supreme Council or Congress of Workers and Peasants deputies (which can be flavored in game — as the Supreme Soviet in Russia for instance, or Duma in normal Russian republics or Constitutional Monarchy). Seats could be fixed in game or determined by the size of your country, but either way, I think some kind of system that visually shows the organs of government could EASILY fit in here.
Honestly, it’s not even crazy to include the court system. I mean, in the US at least it was huge in determining the shape of laws. US could have a unique feature for this, maybe — even the selection of justices which would have their own ideology and shape the outcome of laws (e.g., maybe you are trying to pass equal protection laws for racial minorities, and it’s got a lot of support — WELL, the Courts, who your old president chose, are mostly conservative, and they strike the law down!). This would get over the absurdity that popular and even overwhelming support for laws = their eventual enactment, which is historically false and determinative especially in the USA. It could act as a dynamic, in-game protective barrier against the tendency towards automatic liberal utopia as time goes on that featured heavily in Victoria 2: now you are faced with a Justice system which disfavors the legislature. Checks and balances should be represented!

Another concern of mine is that parties only exist in democracies. This makes sense to a certain extent, but doesn’t at all represent, for instance, a group like the Bolsheviks (who were half underground, half parliamentary). What about parties as concrete bodies of political change that you can suppress, and which can even exist independently of support of an entire IG? Going back to Russia: perhaps the Bolsheviks represent, say, 38% of the trade unions, 25% of soldiers, and 5% of farmers, while the Mensheviks represent another 45% of trade unionists, 5% of capitalists, and 10% of intellectuals. My basic underlying question is: how do you deal with parties who warred over these interest groups, and did not secure a majority/representation of them? How would you deal with SRs versus Bolsheviks versus Mensheviks? I don’t think this is quibbling either. Combine this with the Parliament/legislature proposal, and this could form some cool features: parties allying over certain issues, or splitting over others.

Most importantly though, I’m just gonna miss the representation of the upper house in Vic2 and hope it makes some kind of comeback in Vic3 DLC. I also think ministries should really be considered as a way to further nuance politics and IG control of government…

EDIT:

Also, I know someone who has some experience with the game (I KNOW, I oppose this too, etc etc), and they told me a little about something that threw them off. AFAIK, the oligarchic council republic boosts the rich IGs. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense given the direction the devs are probably trying to go with this. I think oligarchic council republic is supposed to represent collective rule by the party nomenklatura or revolutionary elite — bureaucrats and intelligentsia in-game. But doesn’t it defeat the purpose when you have an oligarchy council republic, translating to increased clout for the rich? Shouldn’t bureaucrats and intellectuals get buffed?

EDIT2: Could peasants ever become insurrectionary? Peasant revolts are a thang. Could a party ever rep the peasants, as opposed to farmers?

 

[Lamartine]

I think the idea of the player being able to choose who takes power, regardless of their political strength, is just much better for gameplay than a sort of automatic election -> government system. In Victoria 2, if you wanted, for example, the Communists in power, often you would have to intentionally sabotage the country in order to make everyone mad enough, and only then could they take power through rebellion and actually try to make themselves popular enough to hold power through governing well. The self-sabotage was always utterly bizarre.

I agree that giving the player more control in this case is progress. I regularly had to tank my economy in Victoria II to get the reforms I wanted. It was not fun game design so the change here is great.

The problem I see is that the choices players now have in forming a government out of interest groups is stale and it's a weird model of political behaviour.

If the only constraint on who is in power is keeping a lid on (il) legitimacy, then players will probably develop a really easy to follow rule of thumb around that. Just don't let legitimacy fall below x% and any combination is fine. There's a risk that that will lead to stale game play.

It's also kind of strange. Imagine that you're playing the USA with the Slave Planters in Government. The Republicans win 51%of the vote and eek out a bare majority in both houses while also taking the presidency. The player notes that forming another slave planter government would now reduce their legitimacy by X, but that's still well above the rule of thumb threshold for legitimacy so the player ignores the Republican landslide and forms another slave planter government.

What does that say about the agency of the Republican party who just won government? Abe Lincoln sighs "I'm powerless to stop the formation of another pro slavery government. I'm just the Chief Executive of the Federal Government with a double majority to pass laws governing these United States. Utterly powerless. I'll just sit quietly for the next four years because...
The spirit of the nation demands it?"

What might be more interesting is if the choice of interest groups in government was less generic than simply lower legitimacy. It would be better to have choices like two parties or interest groups falling out during the election and refusing to enter coalition together. A party leader dies and although their party has a majority it cannot form government until they settle the succession. One party refuses to join a coalition unless the other party commits to enact certain laws.

Those would be interesting choices and they would illustrate the agency of the political actors in a way that explains why they do or do not cooperate with each other.