One-feature-a-day articles: #10 Population Definitions

[Pocus]

[INDENT] In Pride of Nations each region has population, split in several social classes: Aristocrats, Upper-class, Middle-class, Workers, Peasants and Serviles. The big initial question for us was how to handle the complexity linked to that; should we go the Victoria way, with ‘pop bricks’ or not? Clearly doing it the Victoria way was a possibility, but we did not feel people wanted to have Pride of Nations be a Victoria clone. Plus the game is already so rich that this would be going overboard to have a system as detailed as Victoria’s for population. So we decided to have the region be the root concept, with population definition linked to the region itself.

This means that population handling is much simpler here! But being simpler means you can (as we did in development) spend more time on other aspects of the game, like the colonial game, which is very rich, vast and colorful in PON. Or the nice commerce and industrial system that is detailed while also being manageable almost on auto-pilot.

Practically, how does population work? First, the region is the reference for population. For example the region where London resides is defined with these population numbers:


Aristocrats: 158
Upper-Class: 220
Middle-Class: 598
Workers: 1228
Peasants: 945


These figures are in thousands of people, but here we are only counting the ‘productive’ population, excluding child and old people.
In addition to that, the region is defined with others parameters: The militancy rating, indicating how much people are eager for reforms (or want changes), the contentment level (50 being neutral, 100 being ecstatic toward your enlightened reign, 0 being in open revolt against the State). Plus, for good measure, Education rating, Ethnicity, and Religion.





This seems fairly detailed isn’t it? But this is still rather abstracted, as these percentages or values are at the region level. It means for example that the education level is perhaps 70% regionally. And you want to know exactly what is the education level of Aristocrats? Well, you can’t. But the good news is … you don’t care either! Except for your personal enlightenment, there is no great interest to the system in PON to know that the education level for Aristocrats specifically is 80%, while the workers are at 50%. What is important in the end is that the education level average of your population can hamper or speed up research, that a higher education generally means a lower growth rate, and that the higher the education, the easier it is for a social class to change (slowly) to another.

Sure, this also means we are approximating quite a lot of concepts (workers and peasants benefit somehow from the average education percentage, for example), but the approximation is 99% correct in its end effect… which is all what matters in the end.

We shall explain later in another feature the impact of Ethnics and Religion, knowing they work in the same, simplified, way as the Education.
Also we shall explain what each class of the population brings as benefits or liabilities…
Stay tuned. [/INDENT]

[DooberGuy]

Do these population change over time? And if they do is the change annual or is it event driven?

e.g. If I enact public education my literacy rates rise.

[NefariousKoel]

Judging by his mention of higher education equaling lower growth rate, I'd say it's dynamic.

[DooberGuy]

You may have a valid point

[Pocus]

indeed

[gchristie]

Judging by his mention of higher education equaling lower growth rate, I'd say it's dynamic.

Assuming they aren't reading the Kama Sutra ;-)

[Hohenlohe]

Assuming they aren't reading the Kama Sutra ;-)

Is that the Indian comment to Sun Tzu...??*grin*

greetings

Hohenlohe aka Mike