What do Pops Represent?: Gameplay Mechanics and Historical Simulation Discussion

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Trin Tragula

Design Lead - Crusader Kings 3
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Aug 1, 2003
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On the tribesmen/freemen split, I think it might more useful to, rather than attempt to find some abstract theoretical category that we can match either to, or engaging with the game's flavour text, examine the mechanical differences between the two and determine what the semantics of the system are communicating with this distinction.

Tribesmen are:
  • Associated with tribes. By default, a tribal state is an undifferentiated mass of tribesmen; only if they have cities will their pops gravitate to other types. By default, a non-tribal state will have no tribesmen whatsoever; only while they are integrating tribal territory will they contain tribesmen.
  • Less valuable to the state than other pop types. They produce less.
  • Are slightly less participatory in the political process than freemen. Their political weight is 75%.
  • Are naturally happy. They are the only pop type with a positive base happiness.
  • Dislike "civilisation". Their happiness is negatively impacted as a territory's "civilisation value" increases. Whatever that means.
Freemen are:
  • Associated with cities and non-tribal states.
  • Represent some sort of intermediate position in a social hierarchy, between slaves and citizens. The game's primary coding for civic rights is which stratum a pop of a particular culture may advance to- envisaged as a linear progression from slave, to freeman, to citizen, to noble.
  • More valuable to the state than tribesmen. They produce more.
  • Are fully participatory in the political process. They have a political weight of 100%.
  • Are naturally unhappy, though not to the degree that citizens or nobles are.
  • Like "civilisation". Their happiness is positively affected by civilisation.
So, interpretation: what does this mean? Well, it's bound up in how we interpret two other closely-related systems: government type and civilisation.

With government type there's a three-way partition into "tribes", "monarchies" and "republics", but the major divide is between tribes and non-tribes. These are not exactly unfraught terms: there's a lot of historical baggage here and it's not clear that Paradox are handling the concepts with due care. Nevertheless, between things like tribal centralisation as a sort of tribe/non-tribe gradient and the existence of clan chiefs as alternate poles of power, I think we can be fairly safe in asserting that this is a distinction between strong and weak states. Not necessarily strong and weak executives- the republic/monarchic divide seems to be one of differing levels of autocracy, but both are presented as equally distinct from tribes- but how cohesive the state is as an actor.

Civilisation is stranger. There's a soft relationship between it and government type, but not as strong as the one with centralisation. The flavour text (breaking my own rules here for a second) claims it represents the level of "level of infrastructure and urbanization", but this is rather dubious. Two major pieces of infrastructure- roads, buildings- are broken out as separate systems, and urbanisation seems extremely strongly represented by the presence or absence of cities and metropoleis in a territory (civilisation predates that system, so this is somewhat a product of vestigiality, but the system's still hanging around so it's fair game imo). We're forced to assume that this is representing some unclear mix of whatever material conditions aren't already covered and the presence of social norms that are associated with strong states and strongly preferred by non-tribal pops, especially elites.

So, with that in mind:

The associations with the different forms of government is interesting. The fact that tribal states are, ceteris paribus, 100% tribesmen, is especially interesting. Imperator tells us that the founding of cities and the strengthening of states means, necessarily, the introduction of a social hierarchy. We move from an egalitarian society to a stratified one; tribesmen are replaced by slaves, freemen, citizens, nobles. That's almost profound! I'm not certain it would be unreservedly supported by the scholarship, but I don't think it would be entirely rejected, either- I see a lot of, just to name one name, James C. Scott in this analysis.

The lower outputs and the lower political weight seem to go hand in hand, to me. As @Samitte notes above, there's a sense that these are groups that are somewhat less bound to the state. There's a potential reading here where the lower outputs are a sort of mindless encoding of antiquated notions of "primitive" peoples and "barbarians"- that their returns to the treasury are less because they're just producing less. But slaves are also the largest producer of tax, while citizens and nobles produce non at all. If we are to read citizens as skilled labour, that seems to make little sense. In this context, in seems more reasonable to interpret a pop type's outputs as having less to do with their actual productive capacity and more with the state's ability to extract their product from them- how alienated they are from their labour value. Slaves are totally so, and so you reap the most tax from them. Political weight is straightforwardly a indication of tied into the state's workings a group is- though this time in the other direction. It's a measure of how able the state is to ignore the desires of those groups.

Also emerging here is a statement that states are motivated to create hierarchies because it produces social segments that the state is better able to extract resources from. Again this is a really interesting statement about the way states and societies work, and I think it makes Imperator interesting to think about as a text on this level.

The happiness transition is strongly tied to "civilisation", which, again, is poorly defined, so any interpretation we make is necessarily going to be weakly founded. What we can say for sure is that tribesmen are pretty happy just chilling, being themselves, while the non-tribal pop types seem to be kind of like hot house flowers- happy in the comfort of their natural environment, but highly sensitive to local conditions. That this is more extreme the more privileged a pop is is suggestive, but not conclusive. This could be purely a facile "pampered nobles can't hack in the wilds, but tribesmen are hard men" narrative. Again, though, there doesn't seem to be much else to support the idea that "civilisation" has much to do with material conditions. An alternative is that the social norms that civilisation encodes are hierarchical norms- the actual rather than theoretical strength of hierarchy prevailing in the region. That's attractive, given that it would seem to agree with the happiness gradient- the further up the tower of privilege you are, the more you benefit from hierarchy, and so the happier you are, and slaves don't benefit at all. But there are problems- would elites really be basally unhappy- tremendously so!- in weak hierarchies, if they have no memory of a strong hierarchy to compare it to? Contrariwise, are freemen far enough up the chain for their happiness to increase with increasing hierarchy? Something that may alleviate the latter is the thought that civilisation may encode not just the strength of hierarchy, but how naturalised hierarchy is in social narratives.

Ultimately, I think we have a moderately confident case that the tribesman/non-tribesman split encodes an division between egalitarian and hierarchical societies, and the tribesman/freeman split encodes a division between reconciled and unreconciled mid-stratum groups in hierarchies. This is weakly contraindicated in places- tribesmen actually produce more tax than freemen, though the difference is slight- but I think it's a workable as a reading.

So, that established, are these ideas worth encoding in system, and if they are, is the pop system an appropriate place for them?

To the former, I have to say yes. Like I said, I think this is one of the most interesting parts of Imperator as a text, and I think it's extremely valuable, both to that and to the gameplay, that it attempts to model this transition from weak to strong states as something other than some sort of transformation in abstract "government types" (alienated, somehow, from the actual legal and socioeconomic structures of the society??). I greatly like that it reaches all the way down to the fundament. I wish it was even more involved, even. Get rid of the pop type attraction on government types, push that all onto city status and civilisation, make civilisation dependent civilisation. Make founding cities the fundamental action of transforming society and strengthening the state. Have that feedback into government type. Maybe clan chiefs aren't just abstractly fundamental to "tribal" government types, maybe you've got a clan chief for every majority-tribal province. Dissolve the tribal/non-tribal government binary entirely. Put that on a gradient.

To the latter, I say kinda-sorta. This idea of the tribesman as the everyman pop, living in undifferentiated egalitarianism, functions as a relation between state and populace, but it's not, quite, an economic mode, which is a problem for various reasons that others have outlined above. The tribesman-freeman distinction is particularly problematic because, as noted above, in a lot of places the way of life is going to look very simple- free farmers, and the egalitarian-hierarchical split is already sufficiently encoded by the lack of elites into tribal societies: it does not require a new middle stratum. However, there are groups that are economically distinct from these farmers and which I think can be strongly matched to the "inner barbarians" concept that @Samitte raised previously; the unintegrated, politically inaccessible groups that cling on in peripheral areas even in strong states. These are non-farmers- pastoralists and hunter-gathers, mostly- groups that have historically proven difficult for states to grapple with, as their ways of life- less bound to immobile capital stock- make them more fluid and less vulnerable than city dwellers and sedentary farmers.

For what it is worth this is actually pretty close to how I see the pops.
Tribesmen are indeed the people who live in a less stratified society, where a tribesman pop is expected to be able to contain people that can perform just about every bit of job there is in a community. As the game sees it when you transition to to the more institution and legislation based countries the tribesmen are either unhappy or they take their place in the new stratified social order. And the transition from being a tribe involves founding cities where this process will start to happen regardless of how things are in the rest of your country. Likewise conquered cities will likely retain their pre-existing largely stratified socities as a microcosm inside your tribe.
Likewise tribesmen don't necessarily go away immediately when a country that isn't considered tribal expands into a region that is. They stay around, and as your mode of society spreads to the region they will either promote to the other pop types, until they do they will be increasingly unhappy about the rising "civilization level" as it rises to catch up with the rest of your realm.

These are all generalizations of course. And as an interpretation of human society in general I wouldn't want to champion this as an all encompassing model, but this is the way it works in the game and how we felt it best to portray the meaningful distinctions between tribal and non-tribal societies based in the historical interpretations that exist of societies of the era :)
It is a generalized model, because something like a game has to be, but one that allows for all kinds of interesting transitional states around the world (or indeed even inside the same empire), and in that it is at least much like real history.

Lastly the above is the rationale for the current way things are. As the game develops we've not been averse to expanding or changing around the pop system, but I wouldn't expect anything like that for 2.0 :)
 
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