So I've had an idea for some time to try and make political parties a more relevant thing again to make them more interactive (as they used to be pre-utopia, with slave uprisings etc) than they are today (glorified influence smuggling mules).
And I've had a few ideas in the past - like event driven factions - but one ive seized on over the past few days is Radical Ethics.
Support can be calculated in several ways - seemingly via coded commands, so it's fast too - You could stipulate only Slaves, only enslaved robots, rulers, specialists, workers, any non citizen (e.g. for resident aliens of all kinds demanding citizenship rights), all pops on a specific world, or in a specific sector (not 100% sure on how to do this one yet) for secession crises - potentially even pops working certain jobs - like Alloy unionists going on strike lol etc.
I've implemented this quickly to give an example of how it could work (and to be sure that it would work - it does).
Some pissed off chattel slaves drawn to the new emancipationism ethos
some indentured servitude "master" (lol) slaves minding their own business - not drawn to Emancipationism (at least, based on my current ruleset)
A new faction emerges (....without loc text)
They want just one thing (And I forgot to add a line to forbid existing leaders from becoming this faction's leader, rather the game should generate a random person to act as the slaves "Spokesperson")
It turns out you can actually do a fair bit just by manipulating the faction actions.
The menu will even update available actions, too.
A collection of Ideas I've come up with for Radical ethics - Only actively worked on the emancipationists and pretender heirs so far.
One of the other Radical Ethics on my wheel above is "Pretender Heir / Candidate"
UI issues and a constant need to edit both the 00_ethics and factions files (this is more or less scattered over 2 or 3 files) aside, you can actually do some involved things, especially when coupled with other ancillary events.
This could have massive implications for both internal politics AND diplomacy.
All of my above tests were done on Imperial and Dictatorial governments, as they're the most straightforward. But:
Thoughts / opinions on all of this? Or anyone know of other mods that have delved deep into factions? (I know about the extra ethics mods but not seen any that screw with factions themselves much)
Edit: I'm still working my way through the various script examples and calculation systems (and referencing old versions of the game where needed too) but It looks like it might be possible to do all of the above just using the vanilla 8 ethics, it's just going to take a few extra calculation steps (eating into performance), rather than adding extra ethos - which eats into mod compatibility.
And I've had a few ideas in the past - like event driven factions - but one ive seized on over the past few days is Radical Ethics.
- Essentially a Radical ethic is a non-governing ethic, that you can't normally get, rather it arises in pops under certain circumstances.
- Each one would be a "radical" and "short term" (compared to regular ethics) ethic, leading to a new political party rising up over 1-3 political issues, usually culminating in rioting, a civil war or a secession crisis if left unchecked.
- In and of itself this new ethic (Emancipationism) does nothing,
- but the political party would push for the banning of slavery within the empire.
- A monthly check would calculate factional support, as a % of overall pops in the empire
- (can be handled a few ways either taking #emancipationists/total_pops*100, or #emancipationists&0.5*egalitarian_pops/total_pops*100 etc)
- And when this hits a separately defined threshold (E.g. when 40% of the total number of slaves in an empire embrace emancipationism) it will begin
- Firing short "rogue slave" events - like terror events, killing overseers, disrupting stability etc.
- After a while (say 18 months) start firing "slave uprising" events on planets with unhappy slaves, (there are plenty of ways to further tune this, like inspecting slave ratios, numbers of slaves, army types etc) forcing planetary conflict.
- After a while again (say 36 months) fire an "ultimatum" event that forces you to either accept the Ban Slavery Ultimatum or refuse and trigger a civil war [req. 2+ owned colonies] in a short while after closing the event screen.
I've implemented this quickly to give an example of how it could work (and to be sure that it would work - it does).
A collection of Ideas I've come up with for Radical ethics - Only actively worked on the emancipationists and pretender heirs so far.
One of the other Radical Ethics on my wheel above is "Pretender Heir / Candidate"
- The death of an imperial or dictatorial leader could lead to a random small percentage of happy pops and a random large percentage of unhappy (non-egalitarian) pops adopting a "Pretender Supporter" Ethic.
- A new Pretender party would be formed, with a leader (the Pretender), with support ramping up initially, then decaying slowly over time - some events could re-invigorate it. and this may lead to civil wars, riots, uprisings, all that fun stuff.
- But you could have more than 2 ways of dealing with the situation, such as:
UI issues and a constant need to edit both the 00_ethics and factions files (this is more or less scattered over 2 or 3 files) aside, you can actually do some involved things, especially when coupled with other ancillary events.
- You can even have multiple of the same faction appear - all vanilla ones have this setting set to NO - you could make it so that N pretender factions appear (there might need to be some extra maths to make support work correctly here) [pre 1.5 pretender & independence factions did this]
- e.g. one for each sector in your empire leading to a massive, say, 5-way duel for the "imperial throne" that your ruler occupies, Imagine a situation where a dictator dies and every admiral in his Navy suddenly goes rogue, duking it out under their own banner, every governor declares independence, balkanising a once great empire.
- you could deal with each one differently, discrediting one heir (reducing their faction support), challenging another to a duel (chance to die, but if you kill them, their faction dissolves), bribing admirals to serve you again etc.
- Edit: Costs dont have to be influence either. You could have a religious schism faction for spiritualists that costs "unity" to make go away (or risk religious riots) or just go for persecuting religious minorities, randomly killing some supporters for unfluence - that was always an option in history too.
- Things like relative ruler vs pretender age (younger wins) and levels (higher level wins) or certain traits (like cybernetic, very strong, weak) could skew fights from a 50:50 odd, one way or the other.
- Ending the secession crisis would fire an event to "clean up" all the pops and force them to re-evaluate back towards the "normal" 8 ethics.
- Whoever wins (assuming its the player) gets a fat stack of influence and unity - and free claims on all former star systems (if any pretender wars ended in a white-peace).
- Edit: theoretically I could add a few event-based leader traits - or even just flags (Weak claimant, Average claimant, Strong claimant) on the leaders, and use these to bias pretender support, to keep things variable and interesting.
This could have massive implications for both internal politics AND diplomacy.
All of my above tests were done on Imperial and Dictatorial governments, as they're the most straightforward. But:
- For Gestalts:
- You could actually have special factions for Gestalts - Maybe some machines desire to become rogue servitors after seeing two biologicals waging war with eachother.
- Maybe some other machines think those two empires waging war (or a neighbouring spiritual empire) could be a threat and want to purge them first - pushing to become a FP.
- Maybe a 3rd faction arises arguing that more knowlege is needed and those biologicals could be useful, if integrated.
- Then all 3 factions could challenge the overmind, leading to a Machine empire civil war - leaving all the other biological empires utterly confused.
- For Democracies - extra one party factions could make democratic elections and oligarchic/MC nominations quite interesting.
- One-policy parties could have unique mandates "build a border citadel " that lead to far larger unity/resource rewards if met - but also more severe consequences if they arent fulfilled ("Xenophobic uprising - border citadel not built").
- I'd have to look into how voting is actually done, and if it is possible to "double count" votes (e.g. the spiritualist and anti-robotics parties could multiply support by a collective amount, emulating a joint-party/coallition structure),
- more reading to see how moddable elections are, though.
Thoughts / opinions on all of this? Or anyone know of other mods that have delved deep into factions? (I know about the extra ethics mods but not seen any that screw with factions themselves much)
Edit: I'm still working my way through the various script examples and calculation systems (and referencing old versions of the game where needed too) but It looks like it might be possible to do all of the above just using the vanilla 8 ethics, it's just going to take a few extra calculation steps (eating into performance), rather than adding extra ethos - which eats into mod compatibility.
Last edited:
- 23
- 18
- 7
- 2
- 1