One of the big pieces missing from Stellaris is the absence of any internal politics. I've been tinkering with some ideas about how an internal politics model might work, and I put together the ideas below as a coherent whole. Would love to hear what you guys think about it.
Factions
There will be one faction per ethic in all empires (assuming you have citizens of that ethic). These would be immediately present as soon as you have any citizens that have that ethic.
Factions will have these values:
1) Happiness - how this faction feels about your government
2) % of Citizen Population - just the number of citizen pops empire-wide with this ethic
3) Mobilization - how active this faction currently is (see below)
As it works currently, you will get influence from factions. There is some total amount of "faction influence", and you get the sum of (faction % of population * faction happiness) for all factions.
Faction happiness is partly based on the current state of your empire (as it is now) as permanent (but small) modifiers, and partly based on recent actions (as larger, temporary modifiers). As an example, the egalitarian faction would have a small positive permanent happiness modifier for having universal citizenship, and a larger positive temporary happiness modifier (that ticks down) for accepting refugees, for instance.
Faction mobilization is driven by the same factors as faction happiness, but it is doubled for negative modifiers. So actions that a faction dislikes will rile them up more, compared to actions they do like. This too ticks down to zero over time for temporary modifiers, but not for permanent ones. Faction mobilization multiplied by % of citizen population determines "faction power", that is the amount of say that faction has in determining internal affairs. This is treated as a fraction of the total "faction power" of all the factions, so you can say for instance, that the egalitarian faction has 24% of total faction power among all the factions.
Powerful, unhappy factions will make demands that you adopt certain policies, certain traditions, or take certain actions (with more/less player input depending on the form of government). If they are particularly numerous in certain colonies, they may declare independence. If they are spread out, they may start a civil war.
Policies
Instead of being a list of choices, which you can change freely, policies will be displayed visually as a web of icons (or concentric circles, if you prefer), with the ethics on each axis (i.e. all the egalitarian positions on one side, and all the authoritarian positions on the opposite side). At any one time, your empire will have a set of policy positions, and you can only move your policy positions one step at a time (i.e. each policy has pre-reqisite policy positions that you need before it can be adopted, and you can move back and forth in the web). At the middle of the web are the more moderate positions, and towards the edges are the more extreme policy positions in each ethic direction. So for instance, you might imagine "AI rights" would be one line of policy positions, with "AI banned" on the spiritualist end, and "AI citizen rights" on the materialist end (with an egalitarian element), but with intermediate positions in between you have to move through to get from one to the other.
Moving policy positions will cost influence. The amount of influence depends on a few factors: 1) how extreme the position is, 2) the power of the relevant faction(s), and their opponents, 3) how large your citizen population is and 4) your government form (democracies get more of a discount for popular policy changes, but also more of a penalty for unpopular policy changes, whereas oligarchies, imperial and dictatorships progressively experience less cost differences regardless of the policy's support). Each policy in a faction's direction gives a permanent modifer to that faction's happiness and mobilization, but also a negative modifier to the opposite faction's happiness and mobilization. Each policy move also gives a temporary modifier, again to the relevant ethic's faction and it's opposite. Some policies might be shared between two different ethics, which would result in smaller changes towards both ethics (and also smaller negative changes to the opposing ethics). The form of your government is itself a policy position (this would lie on the egalitarian/authoritarian axis).
As an extension of this, an empire's overall ethics is now dependent on the sum of their policy positions. As you shift your policy positions around, your nation's ethics might change as a result.
Faction Demands
Factions will make their demands heard - particularly in more participatory forms of government. Once every few years, if there is a policy position that is supported by faction(s) that have over 50% faction power that you can move to, but you haven't adopted, the factions in question will ask you to adopt that policy position. If there are multiple such positions, then the one with the most support will be the one chosen. Accepting will change your policy position, but declining will make those factions unhappy temporarily (and more mobilized). Note that this might temporarily drive your influence into the negatives if that is necessary to take that position.
Note that for this purpose, declaring rivalries, wars, signing treaties, etc. as well as edicts also count as policy positions. So a powerful militarist faction might team up with the egalitarians to demand you declare war on the slavers, for instance.
The more authoritarian your government, the higher the percentage of faction power is necessary before the factions ask you to do something. This means that dictatorships might experience very few such demands, but when you get them, the support behind the policy is huge, and it may be unwise to decline.
Diplomatic Actions & Civic Changes
These now require influence as well, and the influence cost is scaled as if they were policy positions in and of themselves. So if you have a powerful pacifist faction, declaring war is going to be very expensive (or indeed unaffordable), particularly if no other faction supports the war; and even if you can pay the cost, you're going to have a really pissed off pacifist faction.
Traditions
I'm not entirely sure about this, but one idea might be to merge the tradition trees into the policy system, and merge unity production into influence production. The idea here is that to adopt certain traditions is effectively moving in certain policy directions, and this would further differentiate different nations apart, because you can't adopt opposing traditions. The other side to this is that it gives you some way to boost influence/unity income, while the scaling cost of policies and claiming distant star systems should still increase further than however much you can increase your income. In some extent, this represents the effective political power of your government. In this case, unity modifiers would also apply to all influence cost modifiers (i.e. a traditional species would make it cheaper to change policies).
Factions
There will be one faction per ethic in all empires (assuming you have citizens of that ethic). These would be immediately present as soon as you have any citizens that have that ethic.
Factions will have these values:
1) Happiness - how this faction feels about your government
2) % of Citizen Population - just the number of citizen pops empire-wide with this ethic
3) Mobilization - how active this faction currently is (see below)
As it works currently, you will get influence from factions. There is some total amount of "faction influence", and you get the sum of (faction % of population * faction happiness) for all factions.
Faction happiness is partly based on the current state of your empire (as it is now) as permanent (but small) modifiers, and partly based on recent actions (as larger, temporary modifiers). As an example, the egalitarian faction would have a small positive permanent happiness modifier for having universal citizenship, and a larger positive temporary happiness modifier (that ticks down) for accepting refugees, for instance.
Faction mobilization is driven by the same factors as faction happiness, but it is doubled for negative modifiers. So actions that a faction dislikes will rile them up more, compared to actions they do like. This too ticks down to zero over time for temporary modifiers, but not for permanent ones. Faction mobilization multiplied by % of citizen population determines "faction power", that is the amount of say that faction has in determining internal affairs. This is treated as a fraction of the total "faction power" of all the factions, so you can say for instance, that the egalitarian faction has 24% of total faction power among all the factions.
Powerful, unhappy factions will make demands that you adopt certain policies, certain traditions, or take certain actions (with more/less player input depending on the form of government). If they are particularly numerous in certain colonies, they may declare independence. If they are spread out, they may start a civil war.
Policies
Instead of being a list of choices, which you can change freely, policies will be displayed visually as a web of icons (or concentric circles, if you prefer), with the ethics on each axis (i.e. all the egalitarian positions on one side, and all the authoritarian positions on the opposite side). At any one time, your empire will have a set of policy positions, and you can only move your policy positions one step at a time (i.e. each policy has pre-reqisite policy positions that you need before it can be adopted, and you can move back and forth in the web). At the middle of the web are the more moderate positions, and towards the edges are the more extreme policy positions in each ethic direction. So for instance, you might imagine "AI rights" would be one line of policy positions, with "AI banned" on the spiritualist end, and "AI citizen rights" on the materialist end (with an egalitarian element), but with intermediate positions in between you have to move through to get from one to the other.
Moving policy positions will cost influence. The amount of influence depends on a few factors: 1) how extreme the position is, 2) the power of the relevant faction(s), and their opponents, 3) how large your citizen population is and 4) your government form (democracies get more of a discount for popular policy changes, but also more of a penalty for unpopular policy changes, whereas oligarchies, imperial and dictatorships progressively experience less cost differences regardless of the policy's support). Each policy in a faction's direction gives a permanent modifer to that faction's happiness and mobilization, but also a negative modifier to the opposite faction's happiness and mobilization. Each policy move also gives a temporary modifier, again to the relevant ethic's faction and it's opposite. Some policies might be shared between two different ethics, which would result in smaller changes towards both ethics (and also smaller negative changes to the opposing ethics). The form of your government is itself a policy position (this would lie on the egalitarian/authoritarian axis).
As an extension of this, an empire's overall ethics is now dependent on the sum of their policy positions. As you shift your policy positions around, your nation's ethics might change as a result.
Faction Demands
Factions will make their demands heard - particularly in more participatory forms of government. Once every few years, if there is a policy position that is supported by faction(s) that have over 50% faction power that you can move to, but you haven't adopted, the factions in question will ask you to adopt that policy position. If there are multiple such positions, then the one with the most support will be the one chosen. Accepting will change your policy position, but declining will make those factions unhappy temporarily (and more mobilized). Note that this might temporarily drive your influence into the negatives if that is necessary to take that position.
Note that for this purpose, declaring rivalries, wars, signing treaties, etc. as well as edicts also count as policy positions. So a powerful militarist faction might team up with the egalitarians to demand you declare war on the slavers, for instance.
The more authoritarian your government, the higher the percentage of faction power is necessary before the factions ask you to do something. This means that dictatorships might experience very few such demands, but when you get them, the support behind the policy is huge, and it may be unwise to decline.
Diplomatic Actions & Civic Changes
These now require influence as well, and the influence cost is scaled as if they were policy positions in and of themselves. So if you have a powerful pacifist faction, declaring war is going to be very expensive (or indeed unaffordable), particularly if no other faction supports the war; and even if you can pay the cost, you're going to have a really pissed off pacifist faction.
Traditions
I'm not entirely sure about this, but one idea might be to merge the tradition trees into the policy system, and merge unity production into influence production. The idea here is that to adopt certain traditions is effectively moving in certain policy directions, and this would further differentiate different nations apart, because you can't adopt opposing traditions. The other side to this is that it gives you some way to boost influence/unity income, while the scaling cost of policies and claiming distant star systems should still increase further than however much you can increase your income. In some extent, this represents the effective political power of your government. In this case, unity modifiers would also apply to all influence cost modifiers (i.e. a traditional species would make it cheaper to change policies).
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