As this is long-winded I’ve made it a separate topic.
It’s also probably fair to point out that my experience with Aurora is less than a month so I’m either here with the benefit of fresh eyes or overburdened with ignorance, hubris and an excess of Vegemite.
The Premise
It strikes me that Aurora models an Empire that is in a number of ways similar to that of Rome or Alexander the Great. Communication links are somewhat nebulous, distances are vast and the ability to get from A to B involves big chunks of time.
Contrast that with the present day where the only major ‘Empire’, America, benefits from near instantaneous communications and the fact that most places on the planet can be reached from Washington D.C in 48 hours or less.
As a consequence the American ‘Empire’ is easily – I’m taking a very broad historical perspective here – micro-managed from the Capitol. Unlike the Roman or Greek Empires where their influence waned in direct proportion to the distance from their respective Capitols.
The Romans and the Greeks invested enormous power in their Provincial Consuls as a matter of necessity. Relying on the Senate in Roman to decide on pressing local provincial matters was not feasible given the distance and communication impediments of the day.
This heavy emphasis on decentralised Empire management had its benefits as well as its disadvantages. Prime among these being corruption, break-away independence movements and convoluted politics.
Aurora-based fledgling empires, I’d contend, would suffer similar curses for similar reasons.
I can easily imagine a Colony founded on Titan demanding independence from an Earth-based Administration due to the differing needs and priorities of the two. With a Colony two jumps and 40 AU away anything is liable to happen.
The Ticking Clocks
Aurora, from my experience, places two separate ticking clocks on the player. The first is the looming mineral depletion crisis that is built in from the get go. Either expand to find new resources or take the fast train to oblivion.
The second is the presence of NPRs. If you don’t expand and continually ramp up your technology at some point you’ll be steamrollered into mush by a more advanced civilisation.
How valid this actually is in Aurora I can’t really say given my limited experience. I’d imagine that, given the complexity of the game, programming an AI that enables an NPR to effectively expand and exterminate would be well nigh impossible.
Never-the-less I’m certain that a player strategy of hedge-hogging themselves into one little corner of the galaxy and not bothering to do much research or development would eventually be penalised by NPR’s in one way or another.
I can – other’s might not – see that there is room for a third ticking clock. An internal one brought about by the expansion of a player’s own empire. This may take the form of increasing levels of corruption, independent minded Colonies breaking away from the Empire or growing levels of Byzantine politics.
The rest of this post explores ideas for this hypothetical third clock.
Central Underlying Theme
Each Colony has an administrator acting as their Governor. These are the key people in your Empire. The people with the power.
I’d suggest two things here. One that appointing a Governor to a Colony is a major decision, one not easily reversed. A Governor, once appointed, must serve out a fixed term (say three years, for example) before the opportunity to change them arises.
If you swapped them out earlier than their anointed term then the Colony would suffer an immediate unrest penalty with the size of the penalty proportional to the abruptness of the change. Eg. The less time they served the larger the unrest.
So fixed terms and significant penalties for anything less. Governors aren’t easily shifted from their intricately constructed networks of power and influence. Do so at your peril.
This creates interesting decision points for the player. Appointing a Governor to a Colony becomes a Big Deal. Which it should be.
The second suggestion would be that Administrators (eg. your pool of potential Governors) be given additional trait/s. What these might be would depend on what particular ‘curse’ you (in the broad sense of the community and specifically Steve) chose to emphasise.
Of course you may not feel the need for any of this in which case thanks for reading. What follows is a bunch of ideas. Not suggestions or demands, just ideas.
Ideas. More dangerous than bullets. More insidious than rust. Viral Voodoo.
Ideas in Practice – Corruption
Corruption. Each administrator is assigned Corruption rating (%). Some are honest, some are far from it. Where an administrator sits within the spectrum of greasy fingers is reflected in this separate trait (you couldn’t call this a bonus).
The trait would be HIDDEN. Important point here.
It is unlikely you’d have any idea of how honest a particular administrator was until they were given a posting. So a tried and tested strategy would be to send your new blood to the smaller, closer Colonies first before risking them on a major posting.
The quality of your human resources have to be ascertained from experience, a bit like real life.
Mechanism could go something like this. Each five day period each colony gets tested to see if it’s level of corruption increases by a set amount (eg. plus one percent). The chance of that happening would be greater the further the distance the Colony is from your Capitol. Eg. The Distance Factor.
The level of corruption in a Colony gradually increases until it is capped. The cap is provided by your Governor’s trait. Eg. somebody with a Corruption trait of 10% would cap their colonies level of Corruption at the same 10%.
As KPMG and Deliottes , who know more about corruption than most and who probably could afford the odd spaceship or two, are still checking the books the level of corruption in any Colony could easily be seen in the reports. What you wouldn’t know is how high it is likely to go as your Governor has his Corruption trait hidden. Only time will tell.
Colony Corruption would be a direct hit on its Wealth generation and possibly it’s Mineral output depending on how severe a crimp you wanted it to be.
When an Administrator is generated by a Military Academy they are given a random Corruption %. The RANGE that the trait is randomly generated within is linked to the size of the player’s Empire.
Bigger the Empire, greater the opportunities for corruption and the more difficult it is to maintain effective oversight.
You could, for example, start the range at 0 – 5% and then ramp it up +5% for every additional Colony in your Empire. So for an Empire of say two colonies you’d have a range of 0 – 15%.
Which means you could still generate a totally honest (0%) administrator but the probability is that they will become increasingly corrupt as the empire expands.
The maggots eating away from within.
For those that have more faith in their fellow humans I’d suggest trying to find an example in history of an Empire that didn’t follow the trajectory above.
As Corruption is straight from the dark side of the moon in terms of game mechanics you’d probably need to liven it up a bit with the ability to form ‘Internal Investigation’ Teams made up of those rare honest citizens who tirelessly frequent-fly their way around the Space Lanes stamping out evil where-ever it is found.
Guillotines. That’s the secret.
Ideas in Practise – Independence Movements
Try and think of a Colony founded by one of the European Powers in the Age of Discovery that didn’t, at some point, demand independence. Human nature being what it is nobody likes to be told what to do by box-heads living in far away country.
Aurora with its Colonies not just on the other side of the world but in the far flung reaches of space would, I think, only accentuate this tendency. Tame teams of ‘Yes-Men’ don’t form new Colonies. Rough riders, who don’t say ‘Sir’ to anyone, do.
Back to the Governors. Rather than making them a negative force I’d go the other way here. I’d make them a positive influence whose purpose is to help hold your Empire together, with matches and glue if necessary.
Each Colony would have an inbuilt tendency towards Independence. Once again directly proportional to its distance from the Capitol and tested, like Corruption, once every five days to see if it increments upwards.
There would be no cap. It continues squeaking noisily upwards until a threshold is reached and a test for Independence is made. If so it effectively becomes a breakaway NPR with all that this entails.
To simplify the programming (and based on previous comments that Steve has made regarding player-made empires being unable to convert to NPRs) you could have the breakaway Colony remain static with no impetus to develop etc.
Either way, they are now no longer part of your Empire and must be either dealt with forcibly or accommodated.
But what about the Governors?
Colony Governors would act as a counter weight. They would have a trait reflecting their ‘Colony Management’ ability. Not sure if that’s what you’d call it. But in essence it would be their ability to keep a lid on the Colony’s Independence Movement pressure cooker by providing competent leadership.
Their trait would act as a restraining modifier to the Colonies five day check on their level of Independence tendencies. Stronger the trait, bigger the modifier.
Unlike Corruption this trait would be fully visible to the player. People tend to have their good qualities on full display.
A far flung rapidly growing Colony would need a very good Governor to ensure that it remains within the despostic gorilla-like embrace of your empire.
The problem would be that no Administrator would have sufficient ‘management’ skills initially to tackle such a task. They would have to be given a posting or two before their experience was sufficient for the challenge.
In effect you would have to nurture your Governors through a series of postings in order to develop the experienced core cadre needed to cope with the demands of an expanding Empire.
Some fun character management to be had here.
Ideas in Practice – Politics
I’ve read Steve’s Trans-Newtonian Campaign AAR (part of it) and what I liked most was the multiple factions competing with each other. I see that others have used a similar theme for their AAR’s with success.
Having to deal with various factions from the start makes the game a lot more interesting than a solo development arc that eventually, one day, bumps you into an NPR (I’m not complaining here, just contrasting).
The downside is having to physically play the various factions yourself. Higher levels of dedication than I possess are required.
So with a sweep of my magic wand and flourish of my top hat I offer up POLITICS as a way of providing – in a very rough form – a similar experience.
Admittedly equating politics with enjoyment requires a certain suspension of belief but read on…
A future over-populated environmentally-ravaged Earth would likely have it’s population fixated upon it’s first meaningful steps into Space. If I lived on that version of Earth I’d be busting my balls to get off this shagged-out rock and to start a new life on a new world.
Colonies would represent the future hopes of mankind. I can easily imagine that the various political factions would be trying their utmost to promote their version of mankind’s future by exerting control over individual Colonies.
And similarly the Colonies themselves would have a political impact way out of proportion to the miniscule population they may have.
If you choose to start as a Totalitarian Dictatorship then the whole concept is a moot point but if you opt for the standard ‘Player Race’ then it would be reasonable to assume that you have a measure of democracy in play.
Likewise it’s conceivable that there would be a certain number of political factions active within your starting 500 odd million pixelated citizens. Which means every so often, (3 year fixed terms?) you need to have an election.
Whatever the result of an election you, the player, would still be in control.
The consequence of an election is that one faction potentially gains the upper hand and dominates for the next three years. Each faction has a particular bent or barrow they are pushing. Funny that.
For example the Industrialist Party (pretty bland, I’m sure that Steve could come up with a more interesting listing or enable the player to name their own) might provide a global +20% bonus to your construction rate. Whoopee!
The flip side is that each faction has its blind spot. So while the Military faction gives you a big bonus to your Shipbuilding rate it lumbers you with a -25% malus to your research rate. Who needs scientists when you’ve got grunts with guns? Laser guns.
So you’d start the game with a set number of factions (perhaps six), each with it’s own agenda (a bonus and a malus). The percentage support that each faction commands from the population could be randomly set at the start or perhaps levelled.
Every five days there could be a check to see if the support level of a faction goes up or down. I’m thinking of a reversion to the mean algorithm here where any faction that gets too much out of line with the others eventually heads back to the median point.
Now your home planet would contain the seat of government and all the heavy hitting political action. But it would be influenced by the Colonies. Each of which would command seats in the Senate (or equivalent).
You’d need a simple mechanism here to reflect how much influence a particular Colony exerted. Having a large population could be important but a mining colonies impact, for instance, could be significant if it was supplying scarce resources even though it has only two men and a dog to its name. Think Dune.
Perhaps you could give each Colony a fixed – meaningful - level of default influence and then tweak it if there population rose over a certain point.
To represent Senatorial/Colony influence model without getting bogged down in political claptrap I’d give every Administrator a political leaning. Whenever a new one is generated they are assigned a random faction leaning. Eg. if there are six factions then they could come out of the gate supporting the Xenophobia Party for instance.
Once an administrator is assigned to a Colony as its Governor then the Colony takes on the political leaning of its Governor.
Coming back to the five day check for the support level of the various parties/factions on your home planet – the algorithm that decides whether support goes up or down is ‘pulled’ in the upward direction by the Colonies supporting it.
The more supporting Colonies the more ‘pull’ they exert and the greater the odds of that particular faction increasing its level of support. Eg. the Colonies effect is to yank the factions support level away from the mean. Break the cycle so to speak.
Conversely any faction without off-world support would suffer in the polls.
That’s the basic idea. Fine tuned with stuff like at Election time you’d want to throw in a random element to represent the unpredictability of the political process but not too much that you’d make it a crap shoot.
You could also insist that any Governor supporting the Faction currently in power can’t be replaced and is effectively cemented to their seat until another party becomes ascendant. Friends in high places. Factions wanting to maintain their power base.
From a game play perspective you have the situation that within 3 years (?) you are faced with your first election. There is another reason to start Colonising and installing, hopefully, favourable Governors. In the early stages of your empire the impact of having a particular faction running it's agenda would be relatively mild compared to latter on once your empire has grown in size.
The influence of Politics, like Corruption and Independence above, dynamically adjust to your ambitions.
Once again you have to make some very careful Governor placement decisions in order that you maintain the development track that you’re after. Which may not be easy given a limited pool of potential candidates.
As your empire expands this balancing act becomes more and more difficult and the factions become more unruly.
I can see lots of immersion and role-playing potential here.
Summary
Give yourself a medal for wading through the world’s longest post.
Yogi Bear once said – in a rare moment of man-in-a-bear-suit lucidity – that if you’re going to have a thought then don’t mess about.
He didn’t phrase it quite like that.
I remember a bunch of ‘beeps’ while watching him windmilling his big furry arms all over creation on the television and I suspect that he might have been drunk ‘cause there was a commercial break immediately after.
Nevertheless I’ve taken Yogi’s wisdom to heart and made it my own.
Cheers,
Plugger
