societal continuums

[bvanevery]

I ran into a thread in the archives about whether various faction bonuses and penalties were "realistic".  Like, why should the Believers be worse at dealing with Planet than, say, an industrial magnate?  Why should an authoritarian leader be able to get people to breed more; is the premise that Yang is personally inseminating the womenfolk?  Couldn't Gaians develop "free love" and make plenty more babies that way?  Why should religious people be better at creating super-spies than an authoritarian leader who likes to do Police States?  The answer in all these cases, is that the factions were given different game mechanical attributes to balance their strengths and weaknesses.  But when one attemps to view them as credible narratives, they often fall short.  Sure you could believe in a Hive that breeds better than other factions, if you just accept what you're told at face value and don't think about it.  But any thought about it, is quickly going to lead to the conclusion "because he doesn't get to use Democracy for growth, duh".

This causes me to muse on the arbitrary capriciousness of the various social models themselves.  The most noticeable one to me has always been the split between Police State and Fundamentalist societies.  Real fundamentalist societies are police states!  We already knew this about Iran for a long time.  Then we got the planes dropped on us on 9/11 and we learend all about the authoritarian Taliban, making sure everyone had beards and whatnot.  More recently, ISIS throwing homosexuals off the top of minarets and so forth.  Can anybody think of an example of a Theocracy that wasn't a police state?  I can't.  What do you expect from the Spanish Inquisition?  Monty Python references aside, a hot poker up the ass, that's what.

Some posters in the archive commented that all SMAC societies have people engaged in specific social roles in them.  Believers do have some scientists, the Hive does have some businesspeople, the University does have some soldiers, etc.  It is tempting to model societies along more of a social continuum, where perhaps we talk about the % of militarism vs. other social values, rather than a bright line POWER social choice.  However, this might erode the exaggerated personas which are presented as "faction leaders" for the SMAC player audience.  Theater is exaggeration; if the audience is not looking at pantomime political glam, will they still perceive the differences?

The Civ games go mostly the opposite way.  All societies are carbon copies of each other, chasing up the same tech tree, that in most of the Civs has only 1 or 2 best ways to get through.  "Americans" vs. "Germans" will have a special military unit for flavor, that's it.  Pretty much distinction without a difference, or a very limited invitation to try specific play mechanics.  Like the Aztec Jaguar scout that could move 2 squares at the very beginning of the game instead of 1.  Yep it was useful in that early era; ok, next!  Anyways, the Civ tech tree models the Western cultural concept of technology as progress, with the most advanced society perceived as forever "upwards and better".  Not so coincidentally, with the right to rule other societies.

BTW I always play with Blind Research.  Anything else IMO is cheating.  The Alien factions get to do directed research, that's their faction ability.  Any part of the game where factions generally can't do something, but 1 faction can... throwing the switch for everyone is cheating.  Aki Zeta-5 gets to steal a tech from a base, no one else.  Yeah, you can argue that they designed the game wrong / it's no fun / it's boring to be made to wait / or something like that.  But when you flip those switches you're still cheating.

[Unorthodox]

Endless Space 2. 

Their political system is one of the better ones I've played (though it's a little unbalanced towards certain policies)  You Civ starts leaning towards certain political alignments (much as the SMAC ones), but it evolves through your in game decisions and actions.