Empire Control and Civilian Economy in Aurora

[sloanjh (OP)]

It breaks consistency with TN materials not actually being important to civilians and instead more of an abstract that can be used as a cash cow or useful source of minerals. I mean, Civilian Mining Colonies are worth 10 Automated Mines, but Automated Mines cost 120 Duranium and 120 Corundum each so that's 2400 in minerals right there for each CMC. [SNIP]

Agreed.  At present, I would argue that Aurora is already extremely unrealistic in terms of the level of detail and control that a single individual (the player) has over the empire.  Even (especially?) autocrats have to cope with bureaucrats who don't do as they're told. 

IIRC, the civ economy was intended to simulate the uncertainty/lack of control/initiative of individuals in the economy by assuming that "untracked" TN materials are used in daily life and that the player-owned facilities are intended to be increments on top of that. 

I fear that the primary effect of requiring the player to create and ship infrastructure to any (non-0 hab index) colony world would simply be to increase the micromanagement of these worlds without a corresponding increase in game enjoyment.

John

PS - If this sub-thread goes much longer, we should probably break it out of the main suggestions thread.

[ardem]

Agreed.  At present, I would argue that Aurora is already extremely unrealistic in terms of the level of detail and control that a single individual (the player) has over the empire.  Even (especially?) autocrats have to cope with bureaucrats who don't do as they're told. 

See my thoughts are very different here. I am not playing my games as one person I am playing them as multiple people who run an empire. Last thing I want is lack of detail to play all the aspects of the game (not saying you are suggesting that). I shift my perspective to the design bureau of my empire, or the Admiralty. I am not playing from a single point of view, and I dislike games that make me play from one point of view. So I am the empire, not the head or the a cog. So in my view it is still very realistic, I guess it how you see yourself, as a single entity or a collection of government departments. That or my split personalities are playing up again hehehe

[Person012345]

See my thoughts are very different here. I am not playing my games as one person I am playing them as multiple people who run an empire. Last thing I want is lack of detail to play all the aspects of the game (not saying you are suggesting that). I shift my perspective to the design bureau of my empire, or the Admiralty. I am not playing from a single point of view, and I dislike games that make me play from one point of view. So I am the empire, not the head or the a cog. So in my view it is still very realistic, I guess it how you see yourself, as a single entity or a collection of government departments. That or my split personalities are playing up again hehehe

Indeed, I can't think of any strategy game, much less a 4X, where you realistically play as just one person. You as a player usually represent the overall power apparatus that is required to get things done.

[Garfunkel]

That would be Crusader Kings, where you actually play as a single individual and even if you're the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, you have to fight to impose your will upon your vassals and allies. But that's also a completely different beast and something I don't want to see Aurora go towards, as cool as CK2 in Space a'la Dune could be.

[sloanjh (OP)]

I went ahead and broke this out into a separate thread, as I see a lot of potential for my heretical comments to generate a lot of responses

Agreed.  At present, I would argue that Aurora is already extremely unrealistic in terms of the level of detail and control that a single individual (the player) has over the empire.  Even (especially?) autocrats have to cope with bureaucrats who don't do as they're told. 

See my thoughts are very different here. I am not playing my games as one person I am playing them as multiple people who run an empire. Last thing I want is lack of detail to play all the aspects of the game (not saying you are suggesting that). I shift my perspective to the design bureau of my empire, or the Admiralty. I am not playing from a single point of view, and I dislike games that make me play from one point of view. So I am the empire, not the head or the a cog. So in my view it is still very realistic, I guess it how you see yourself, as a single entity or a collection of government departments. That or my split personalities are playing up again hehehe

As you surmised, I'm not suggesting only being able to play from a single point of view/role/"hat".  What I'm doing is making two observations:

1) In my opinion, any single "hat" has WAY too much control and predictive power over the results of decisions, relative to reality.  Mining schedules are always kept.  Factory production schedules are exact.  Ships always deploy exactly on time, without any crew AWOL on departure.  Design of new systems don't have schedule overruns.  This is what I mean when I talk about level control being unrealistic - the coupling between what you direct your organization to do (whichever hat you're wearing) and the results of that direction are MUCH stronger (IMO) than in real life.

2)  The game tries to work at many different levels of control, without abstraction of either the lower or the higher levels, and without strong AI agents that can be assigned to other nodes in the org chart to relieve the player from the burden of making every decision in the empire.  I think it's fair to say that Aurora depends on the player to make every decision in the military organization of the empire, from ship design and production to individual weapons targeting.

Again, these are observations (in the agile retrospective sense), not criticisms.  I understand that a lot of people have fun jumping into this level of control and detail over everything that happens in the empire, and the difficulty of programming good AI and/or abstractions gives them good reason to prefer this mode of play.  I have a lot of the same drivers: I want to be able to fight tactical battles, design ships, decide strategy as to where bases and fleet deployments go, etc.  I also enjoy "fiddling" with my empire to optimize output (for example, I never use the governors in Civilization N), and in Aurora I do surveys myself rather than putting them on autopilot.  I also infer this (highly detailed) is the sort of game Steve likes and since he's the one coding it, he gets to do what he wants to do

So my primary goal in the above is mostly self-knowledge; acknowledging that Aurora is rife with extreme detail and control.  It's ok to agree to that and say "but that's the kind of game that's fun for me", but we're kidding ourselves if we think that's how empires are actually run (especially at the ministerial level).

That being said, however, I *am* advocating as much abstraction as possible in non-core areas of the game, where I consider core areas to be tactical combat, strategic fleet maneuver, ship design, colonization direction and economic emphasis (I may have missed a few).  Generally, I think the limitation here is the difficulty in getting the abstraction and/or AI correct.  One of the things I think has worked very well in Aurora is the colonization and civilian trade abstractions.  Yes, they have a few hiccups, but overall new colony creation is very much "fire and forget" - dump some colonists and/or infrastructure on a world and the civies will take care of the rest for you.  I would (as I suspect many would) like to see better auto-targeting based on player guidance, but again, that's hard.  So I'd rather see more non-core stuff go this way than less, especially from the point of view of the civilian economy.

On the multi-layer empire abstraction front, I think the game that's come closest to "getting it right" that I've seen is Rule the Waves.  You're a pre-Dreadnought navy minister, so you have budgetary and such edicts coming down on you from on high.  You get to prioritize research spending, but research progress is random.  You get to design your ships and build out your fleet, but your control of that fleet extends to deployments to various zones on a timescale of months.  Combat is generated randomly if countries at war occupy the same zone, with a random OOB, at which point you're put into position as the fleet Admiral.  There's a lot of room for improvement, but I think it does a great job of abstracting away the non-core functions and throwing uncertainty into the game experience.

Ok - the above was a bit of a ramble, but I'm going to go ahead and post anyway

[Garfunkel]

Putting in a small random variant to the efficiency of mines, factories, refineries and shipyards would be welcome in that sense. But on the other hand, what's the point? If it's very small, it doesn't matter - being in a situation where having 10 more tons of Duranium or having to wait 1 more industrial production cycle for something to finish making an actual difference is extremely rare. And then if it's a really big random element - hundreds of tons or months of delay - it causes aggravation, especially if the player has little control over it, so that it just comes across as the game showing you the middle finger.

[boggo2300]

That would be Crusader Kings, where you actually play as a single individual and even if you're the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, you have to fight to impose your will upon your vassals and allies. But that's also a completely different beast and something I don't want to see Aurora go towards, as cool as CK2 in Space a'la Dune could be.

er that's called Stellaris

[Hazard]

er that's called Stellaris

Sort of yes, sort of no.

Stellaris is more like Europa Universalis in space than Crusader Kings in space. Not least of which because Crusader Kings actively simulates every barony and up. It'd be like if every square on every planet in Stellaris was a fully active AI participant in the game with its own goals and priorities and you had to deal with them and their attempts at dynasty building to remain in charge of your empire. And it's not; most of it is simply abstracted away into larger entities that matter.

[Conscript Gary]

It's funny, sloanjh- as I was reading your post I was already getting ready to provide RTW as a contrasting example, but you beat me to the punch in the same breath! While I don't think that atmosphere is appropriate for Aurora, it's still educational to see alternate approaches like that.

[Barkhorn]

I don't know if this is in the cards for Aurora, but I would love to see it happen.  I would love a system like Europa Universalis 3's "Mean Time To Happen" mechanic.  Just about everything that could possibly have an element of uncertainty did not just happen based on a progress bar.  It had a percent chance to occur every day, such that sometimes things would happen ahead of schedule, some would be behind schedule.  Usually they also weren't binary; it wasn't a percent chance to convert X province to Y religion, for instance.  It was a chance to make progress on converting the province.

This way you have much less knowledge and control over how and when things happen.

[Person012345]

That would be Crusader Kings, where you actually play as a single individual and even if you're the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, you have to fight to impose your will upon your vassals and allies. But that's also a completely different beast and something I don't want to see Aurora go towards, as cool as CK2 in Space a'la Dune could be.

CKII is perhaps the closest thing, but even then you have far more control and information than any one person would have had. When you're moving an army around and you can see the map without a several month delay regardless of whether you're there or not with orders not taking the same sort of time to execute, you cease to be playing as a single person for example. At that point it's clear you represent a more generalised command structure. It's far from a realistic representation of playing a single individual. All strategy games have to concede to playability in some areas giving the player the sort of control they could only have if they were representing multiple individuals with no conflicting wills.

Ultimately Aurora isn't even trying to do what CKII is trying to do and so it makes sense to have more concessions. In the interests of playabilty, you really shouldn't be representing a single person. I'm not sue how much unpredictability I want my orders to have either. It sounds like it would just be frustrating.

[Zincat]

I am frankly a bit perplexed at some of the posts in this thread. They are very different from my way of thinking 
Of COURSE one person does not have that much influence in a nation. But then again, of COURSE I am not playing a person.

When I play Aurora, I AM my nation. From the highest official, to the lowliest gunner aboard a warship. I am the entire population of the race I'm playing.

How else would I instantly know what is happening to every ship, even when they all alone in a system far away? Because I impersonate and roleplay the entire civilization. As such there is no thing as too much control, because I am every single fictional person of the entire race.

Which is why, by the way, I dislike civilians, period. I can understand how they fit into some possible roleplays of a nation, I just don't like them all that much, because I can control them way too little.


I do agree however that civilians need to be developed a lot better, if they are to stay. Steve's latest changes to civilian trade and movements of installations are a step in the right direction, but in my opinion they are not enough.
IF one plays with the civilians, I do not have that much of a problem with "Phantom fuel and minerals" that the civilians seem to be able to obtain. I too have always roleplayed it as the civilians getting their hands of low-grade TN minerals that the state dos not see as pure enough to use. Although I don't like it, as stated above, it's the least "offensive" way to think of the situation.

Specifically however, I think the following capabilities should be added, in order to flesh out the civilians more:
- The ability to ship everything the nation asks for. Minerals, installations, trade goods, ship parts.
- The ability to prioritize a cargo transfer request, if the nation pays more. In that case a civilian ship should ignore other possible routes, and just go and ship that one thing
- The ability to interdict civilians from certain places. If I don't want civilians to go into a system for whatever reason, I should be able to block them. If not, I'll blow them up. Because I refuse to lose my civilization because idiot civilians went into a system with an invader wormhole while I'm trying to lay low. Roleplay is everything.
- The ability to subsidize a planet's production of certain trade goods, if I want to do so, or to avoid the production of certain trade goods. Because when I roleplay an autocratic nation, I should definitely be able to do so.
- A more proportionate civilian fleet, based on the size of the nation / of the number of colonies / of the size of those colonies. Because no matter how rich a shipping line is, it makes no sense for them to create many ships if all I have is a 2 million colony on the Moon. I am unsure if Steve already added something along these lines.
- The existence of "shipping line shipyards". Because it makes no sense that shipping lines can create ships from nothingness. They need to have their own "company shipyard", which can also be blown up. It should cost wealth and time for them to rebuild it if it gets blown up.

I think all these would definitely be steps in the right direction.

[sloanjh (OP)]

It's funny, sloanjh- as I was reading your post I was already getting ready to provide RTW as a contrasting example, but you beat me to the punch in the same breath! While I don't think that atmosphere is appropriate for Aurora, it's still educational to see alternate approaches like that.

Did you post about it (RTW) here (in Off Topic) before?  Because I'm pretty sure  the Aurora board is where I found out about it, so if you did then I suspect the info simply came full circle

John

[Zincat]

Breaking up my original post because it was getting too long. Regarding the possibility of adding uncertainty in general into the control of the empire.

Apart from the issue of civilians, which I wrote in the post above, I too agree that the outcome of certain actions should be less "certain". However I do not see it as a matter of "having less control" over the nation, but rather on having uncertain results in what you do.

A small degree of uncertainty in a game is certainly welcome. It makes the game more interesting in my opinion, less predictable. But that should not, in my opinion, be because the "civilization" gave the "wrong order". But rather due to the uncertain nature of things. In some fields it is already so, of course. For example in combat, the very fact that the resolution system works with chances means that combat is by nature uncertain. A lot of other things, however, are set in stone and perfectly predictable and it's not very realistic.

Research for example. Real world dictates that research is a hard to predict thing. Yet in Aurora, I can know years beforehand the exact day a research will finish. That can certainly be improved.
Production and ship construction is, likewise, something that can be worked upon. In this case, the issue is possible mishaps during the production chain. I think modeling these would be nice.

That said, the issue becomes how to put all these things in the game while avoiding too much micro and avoiding all this becoming just some "things that just annoy the player"

I can think of two ways to do this.
1) Making the cost / time required for certain activities random inside a certain range. For example, researching red lasers costs 1500-2500 research points. You do not know beforehand the exact number, you know only the interval. In truth, the exact number gets chosen in secret by the program, maybe even at game start. But when starting to research red lasers, you do not know in advance when the research will end exactly. This method works well for research, less so for things like production
2) Add a "random events" system with breakthroughs, setbacks and mishaps. This would work equally well for research and production. We already have something similar with ships, with maintenance and component failures. At certain predetermined intervals a chance gets rolled for these events which can speed up (in case of research) or impede (for both research and production) your capabilities and progress.

I believe the second way would work better. However it would be a pretty large change to the game, and a lot of players would probably not like it.

[sloanjh (OP)]

Not sure if I'm one of the ones perplexing you.  Let me start with I think your requests for civilians [EDIT] and research etc in your second post [/EDIT] are reasonable and very much in line with the sorts of things I'm talking about.  So I think we're mostly in violent agreement

How else would I instantly know what is happening to every ship, even when they all alone in a system far away? Because I impersonate and roleplay the entire civilization. As such there is no thing as too much control, because I am every single fictional person of the entire race.

Very well phrased - I think this is exactly the point I'm trying to make about the most extreme level of detail, stated much more succinctly.  This leads to several observations/ramifications:

1)  It is a lot of work.  If your race has a population of a billion, then every second of game clock time corresponds to a billion seconds (~30 years IIRC) of race experience.  This means that there has to be a HUGE level of abstracting away of uninteresting/irrelevant details in order to make the game playable in a reasonable amount of time; for a rate of play of 1 game month = 1 clock hour (which would still require 1200 hours of game-play for a 100-year empire) the compression rate would be ~700 billion : 1.  So the essence of a good design is figuring out the best way to pull the most interesting one-trillionth of the racial experience out and give it to the player.

Note that this is actually the issue that I'm most concerned about from a game play point of view.  Every decision to give up an abstraction in favor of player control without providing a mechanism for the player to put the abstraction back in increases the burden of playing the game.  This is also the reason I'm so keen for the civilian sector - it abstracts away details I find un-fun. (In fact, I have a vague recollection that I might have been the one that suggested it oh so many years ago.) 

2)  The thing that first struck me when I read your post was "aha!  And the civilization is a hive mind!".  One of the issues with Aurora is having to roleplay fog-of-war; even if you're trying to, it's very difficult.  I remember the days right after Steve introduced AI for the alien races - it was like night and day in terms of the level of tension in the game.  Beforehand, you knew exactly what was out there in the strange unexplored system; afterwards it was more like stumbling around in the dark being afraid of being eaten by a grue.  I just realized what I think is a great comparison: before AI aliens Aurora was basically like a complicated jigsaw puzzle - the trick was putting together the pieces in the right way (although there was random tension when rolling up the aliens the moment you generated a new system).  After AI aliens it was much more of an adventure.  A tough nut to crack is "how to let the player experience the adventure of the scout ship captain that's probing a newly discovered alien system" while at the same time avoiding universal omnipotence.  This is actually one of the reasons I like to handle scouting myself - I always send in two ships and leave one at the jump point to roleplay being able to get the scouting information out.

3)  I see you posted while I typing the above, and what you posted about is exactly where I was going with my third point (perfect predictability).  I was going to mention cost/schedule overruns on Ford and F-35.  I would also love it if, when one made a tech system, one didn't know the real statistics of the system; instead one would have to discover them (I think I got this idea from another recent thread). 

One could also play the same game with officers - not know that one of them has a high political rating, but instead have it look like a high command rating would be a more realistic abstraction, IMO.  This would better emulate the officer's superiors mis-evaluating him or her for command.  The problem with adding this mechanism comes back to the cognitive burden issue: the player doesn't have enough attention to pay to every officer in the chain of command (or even a few for a significant amount of time outside of combat) to be able to discover the true information about the officer's abilities.

To repeat for the record:  I think the suggestions for changes in both of your posts are reasonable in terms of making the abstractions better.

John