One-feature-a-day articles: #13 Population Militancy and Satisfaction

[DooberGuy]

This is a re-posting of Pocus's original posting on the Paradox forum. I believe he has probably been insanely busy getting PoN ready for us, so I am only attempting to help him out.



One-feature-a-day articles: #13 Population Militancy and Satisfaction

An important aspect of Pride of Nations is how you’ll handle your national population. National population welfare is primordial, as not taking care of your people can mean your demise in the end. Even if you consider only the material aspect of the problem, you will do much better if you address the problems of your people as opposed to ignoring them.

There are two main aspects to consider. First, you’ll want your metropolitan population to be furnished with a lot of goods and merchandises, because it means more income for your private sector, and thus indirectly because of taxes, more income also for the state. That alone is a pretty big incentive! This can be achieved by being successful in industrializing your country, and if you are already well down this path, by further expanding your economy with more production sites, and several merchant fleets. Production sites are often limited by your availability of resources, but this is where colonial territories can also be of great interest. Barring that, you can also invest in some other countries, provided they are not closed to outside investment.

But an equally important aspect must also be considered when dealing with national population. Your people tend to expect that you will provide the home market with a variety of goods. Goods are split into three categories: foods, common goods, and luxury goods. Each social class will accept more or less of each type, but the common concept is that the more diverse the goods are, the happier the people will be. PON won’t ask you to provide specifically tea, wine and cigars to your upper class though, so you won’t have to hunt for one last merchandise that is necessary, because no merchandise by itself is that essential that the system would grind to an halt without it. But … should your national market not be very well furnished, population satisfaction will start to lower.


Reforms and laws are always available as a tool to shape your nation.


Adding oil to the fire, national population has also a regional rating named Militancy. It grows faster in democracies or parliamentary kingdoms than in fully authoritarian countries, but in the latter you have less means to fight this growth (you can use martial law though). Militancy is the need and desire of the people for reforms, more liberties and such like. Should you fail to act regularly to lower militancy, it will start to take a heavy toll on the population satisfaction rating, to the point that even a well supplied market is not enough to keep people in line. In the end, you’ll generally have no other choice but to enact costly social reforms, to appease your population.
Here you’ll have to consider if you go for a short term effect or a long term one. Short term effect is generally when a reform boosts immediately and significantly population satisfaction. This is a short term measure because the underlying militancy problem is not fixed, so contentment will soon start to diminish. Longer term reforms are costlier, but ‘fix things for good’, i.e they lower militancy, and also reduce satisfaction a little bit. Both types have their uses though, so you can consider them as two quite valid tools to rule wisely.

You may have noted that we spoke of metropolitan or national populations several times. This is because population that is not national to your country is handled in another way. Here, there is no population satisfaction, but a revolt risk. The risk of revolt depends on how you handle your minorities (ethnic minority, religious minority) and colonies (if in colonial territory) so this is another set of problems altogether.