Axioms Of Administration

What was administration like in history and how can you make interesting decisions about it

Introduction

This post is primarily about Administration but it will touch on a few other topics that are heavily interrelated like growth and decline of state power and territory. I’m going to describe what counts as administration, a brief outline of how it developed historically and why, and then how Axioms represents the differenc aspects and why.

Axioms can technically be described as a strategy/rpg/social sim hybrid but in actually it is a game designed to enable the player to immerse themselves an experience like the kind described in a fantasy novel or a historical biography. You should feel like you are living the life, moderately edited of tedium, of a medieval noble or fantasy wizard, or even a chosen one. In fact Axioms will have a few starting conditions including a portal fantasy mode.

So Administration in Axioms is designed to be loosely grounded in history and sociology and anthropology while also making you feel like you are guiding the structure of a bureaucracy and making fundamental decisions about the future of your society. Of course some character styles will have more or less Administration. An archmage leading a magical school or a merchant/factor leading a merchant house will have more Administration in their experience than a mercenary mage or an adventurer or a young scion of a powerful family who has not or will not assume their family title. Generals will have Logistics which is somewhat similar. You can also play a primarily administrative role like a Roman-analogue magistrate or the steward of a lord.

Governmental administration is a crucial driver of history and culture. Administration is adjacent to politics but it is more about delivering on political promises effectively than raw political interaction. Many people argue that the taxability of settled agriculture is what drove it forward as the dominant form of society. The ability to take something like a primitive census and to calculate the total productive value of a society with much less effort was a definitive advantage.

In history society slowly advanced towards more and more centralized administration until hit with setbacks, such as the rise and fall of Rome, until finally the technology and in some ways culture stabilized into the absolute monarchs of the pre-modern and industrial eras where the central government fundamentally has all the meaningful power.

The March Of Administrative History

The rise of government administration correlates very strongly with agricultural societies located along fertile river networks. This describes the earliest advanced societies like Egypt, northern India, China, and Mesopotamia among others. Typically crop surpluses allowed both population growth, dense living, and eventually classes of non-farmers. Sedentary agriculture was also important because it allowed for relatively static populations and predictable food surplus and because it was much easier to *survey* these populations and their agricultural production. After all you could in theory move livestock or hide hunting products or gathered plants. You cannot really hide large scale cultivation and during the proper season the success of your efforts is there for all to see.

How is this relevant? Because it is what drives the constant climb towards absolutist centralization. Axioms attempts to provide a variety of counter pressures and pressure valves, for instance superior livestock, and hunting and gathering options. Magic has some effect as well. Axioms also uses sort of government type modifiers where centralization creates negative opinion effects that are maybe a bit more powerful than in history.

In reality the way that the cycle works, especially with Rome, is that very productive agricultural zones, and yes Italy had quite a bit of valuable arable land even though it lacked an iconic super-river, create surpluses which create non-farming classes which allows them to conquer nearby less advanced societies. Then their technological and cultural achievements allows those lesser areas to advance as well above subsistence levels.

Most advanced societies in the pre-modern world fell due to a sort of effective death spiral where they lost wars or dealt with climate change after stretching to the limits of their surpluse wealth. Devastation from warfare creates both unrest and economic damage. Trade is cut off which causes heavy specialization to break down. Marginal societies then come in. The Sea Peoples collapsed the earliest empires in combination with the same climate change issues which cause their own migration. Egypt was perhaps the only society that somewhat weathered this crisis both due to location and superior agricultural surplus. Other societies fell to major volcanic eruptions.

The Romans of course hit a series of internal issues and bad luck just as the famous Great Migrations began. Slowly over time lower agricultural output drove new populations towards Rome, harmed the Roman economy directly, several revolts and bad emperors expended large amounts of resources and destabalized trade, and then the germanic tribes finished the job. The fall of western Rome even as wealth concentrated in the hands of large landholders is what created the shift from slavery to serfdom. Additionally Rome lacked an easy source of new slaves which damaged their economic engine and new land to settle ex-soldiers in which cause unrest.

It is notable that the Romans weathered a series of “stumbles” in their “march” which did not bring them crashing down. Small changes for or against them could easily have rushed or delayed their fall. Even late into the medieval era the Eastern Roman Empire gained and lost large amounts of western Roman land.

How Axioms Simulates Historical Events Related To Administration

In a typical strategy game of any kind, whether wargame, gsg, 4x, or w/e the player rarely loses ground. There’s an endless rise until the game becomes a tedious cleanup and never a fall. Axioms simulates politics, intrigue, and diplomacy in a unique and detailed way. But it also simulates the struggles of effective administration.

In most strategy games “tech” is relatively unintegrated into the game. It doesn’t have a maintenance cost or depend on economy or administration. You literally can’t lose it, even in grand strategy games. Even as you sit in one dilapidated province/city you have full tech advancement. Even games about frigging Rome! The original Rome: Total War actually sorta had this because tech was based on buildings. But they didn’t push that forward in expansions or sequels.

Advanced administration requires an initial surplus to get going, often requires highly integrated trade to support advanced skills and industries, and also requires a sort of continuing cultural production of and maintenance of practical knowledge. You also have a sort of cultural memory of how things should be or can be. Both the people and the powerful need to believe in the value of advanced administration.

Administrative efficiency and proficiency builds up over time from stability and surplus and breaks down over time as it lacks those two factors. This is how you get the spiral into decadence and/or decay. You lose efficiency which further lowers your economic output. Finally you get down to something like feudalism which is heavily decentralized and quite inefficient as far as tax value and military might.

Technology And Administration

So Axioms holds a sort of passive tech advancement, similar to learn by doing from MMOs but for populations, in areas like construction or agriculture. So societies that live in mountains will slowly build up what we might called “terraced agriculture” for flavor over the decades and centuries. And they learn to grow specific crops proper to the climate/weather/biome/terrain.

That knowledge does not translate heavily to flood agriculture, like Egypt used because of the Nile, and so conquest or migration or colonizing certain areas your society is inexperienced with is not as good as expanding to areas like your homeland. You can do things like trade for books or hire experts or bring in immigrants and so forth to help with this.

There are lots of decisions related to population and integration and assimilation and all that to be made due to this. You can do stuff like leave land to native ruling classes or create a special status for a population so that they retain agricultural expertise. A major key to Axioms is that all major games systems are integrated/interactive to/with other game systems. Your decisions are driven by realistic and immersive factors but you aren’t roleplaying, though you can, you are responding to incentives and considering tradeoffs.

Similarly you can make short term vs long term choices. Part of Rome falling was that they did things like split the empire or accept Germanic tribes as feudatories which later cost them quite a bit. These groups grew fat on Roman wealth and gained knowledge and skills that they later turned against the Romans. Choices you made for convenience earlier and meant to clean up later can cause real problems when another issue crops up and distracts you.

How Does Administration Play Into Scale/Scope And Micro Reduction

Axioms tries to warn you of dangers over a period rather than springing random issues on you but it also allows you get in above your head. A key aspect of Axioms is the Attention Point System. You can expand too quickly or take shortcuts and then later realize you just don’t have the bandwidth to manage the consequences. Compared to things like “overextension” or going over the “vassal limit” in Paradox games Attention Points punish overexpansion in a plausible way. You generally want to plan your expansion in a smart way.

In fact part of the value of the Attention Point system is that it sort of naturally incentivizes you to change your play as you scale your territory. Creating loyal and effective vassals or bureaucracies to manage marginal lands you already control, setting up a vassal to take over your new conquests while keeping your current land, getting the populace or lower tier power characters on your side to restrain existing powerful nobles.

Lots of games that give you deity or hive mind like control over every aspect of your society end up with huge micro-hell problems at scale. Both the Character and Attention systems help Axioms deal with the issue naturally, as does Administration. Specific Administration mechanics allow you to manage larger amounts of land with fewer clicks as you climb up the ladder of power.

Administration And Politics

Part of how you manage administration is appointing Characters and sometimes groups of various populations into positions and staffs. Having high Character/Population skills/stats and “experience/technology/concepts” allows you to manage large numbers of people and provinces more efficiently. You also deal with the cost of paying for those. Additionally you can apply Items and Buildings which will improve the Administration.

More interestingly is that Populations, and Characters, react to the composition of your Administration/Buereaucracy. So every Population/Character is happier the more power their in-group wields. They may also have opinions on the status of other Populations or Characters. Do you give all the power to your core populations or spread it out?

Axioms also has Laws which are a detailed and dynamic set of policies that influence how your Populations and Characters feel based on their Ideologies. Laws include the various statuses of different parts of your society as far as rights and privileges. Who can hold religious or military or administrative positions. Who can hold property or titles. Who can marry who. Some games like GSGs have some kind of legal mechanic but nothing with the depth and breadth of Axioms.

Historical situations like those of the Mamlukes and Janissaries fall under the legal system. Citizenship status like that in Roman or Greek cities, discussed in a previous post, are part of Administration.

Administrative choices that start as large benefits can degrade over time to the point that they result in coups.

Administration And Government

Administration is not quite synonymous with government but they are interrelated. You could argue that Administration is a subset of government. Indeed some might argue that legislation and Administration are very distinct. Administration is more about implementation. Some of what I wrote above doesn’t really connect with that.

In any case the Romans will again be a good example for my purposes. The Romans had a Senate, as well as some lower assemblies like the tribal assemblies, and while the Senate is very famous abstractly a lot of the stuff you hear most about is the magistrates. The most famous were probably the Consuls. Administration in Rome was handled by magistrates who held both executive and judicial powers of some kind, the most famous being imperium.

Magistrates were electd by the citizens from whom their authority was derived. In contrast in feudal society power flowed to officials from the relevant aristocrat for an area. Roman magistrates had different levels of power in Rome compared to elsewhere. Romans had a sort of budy system for higher magistrates like the consuls. This helped prevent abuse and also provided legitimacy because the Romans were afraid of tyranny by a single leader. This is why the office of dictator was for emergency purposes only and theoretically had a very strict term limit.

In Axioms there are minor opinion boosts for the division of power at upper levels. This helps create stability for more equal societies. Of course these boosts are traded off against a diffusion of power which causes slower action and sometimes internal conflict.

Populations and Characters also have opinions on the nature of power. This is passively impacted by the success of their society and that of their neighbors. You can actively impact this through the Propaganda system and through Religious and Administrative reforms. As can other characters.

Legitimacy of rule and happines of the people, and major Characters, can be modified by a wide variety of levels including Administrative ones. Diffusing power on average makes your people happier. High wealth and/or access to commodities is also relevant. Personal opinion of leadership is a factor. Personality, Ideology, Honor, Trust, Respect, Fear, legal status of different groups, and so forth matter as well. And Propaganda of course.

Diffuse power also provides stability because killing a single character or having them die is less likely to upset the entire power structure. Everyone who has played grand strategy games knows the dangers of succession wars.

Every choice you make in Axioms flows through the system in a predictable but not totally predictable way. How you construct your societal institutions is very important to your success. And the success of a given system is modified by circumstance.

Actual Administrative Decision Making

I added this section because I worried that previous sections didn’t contain enough concrete examples. This post got away from me unfortunately.

The top level decision maker of a given state/society/nation can delegate their powers to lower levels. Or if they’ve already delegated work with those in power to engage in further delegation.

For instance do you assign religious, military, and civil powers to the same position? Both the power of a Roman consul and the pontifex maximus? What specific powers does each position hold? Is it hereditary?

Perhaps you have a mid tier Roman magistrate-like position that has a budget and a staff and sells state land to individuals, or not, in a single province and is not hereditary.

Perhaps a tax collector who collects a centrally defined tax from local merchants in a specific province.

Does a magistrate in a given position hire their own staff? Are they allowed to hire family if so?

Does a magistrate in a given role have state provided housing?

Can a military leader claim land or spoils from their battles or does it go to the state? How do you decide on who gets to lead in what conflict?

As you might note from these examples I’m personally planning to try and play a fantasy Rome type society with a variety of changes. I really want to experience being a major but not dominating power in a large advanced non-feudal society. I’m sure I’ll play a more god king style bronze age society as well, though.