Building Political Capital And State Capacity

How does a leader create a political environment where others support their goals and where the state can actually execute on their ambitions?

Introduction

In the previous post I gave a broad overview of some of the unique aspects of Axioms as far as dominion and empire. My current plan for the next few posts is to expand on each of the main ideas in turn. Here I’m going to go deeper and ideally fill out the mechanical implementation of the abstract ideas from the high level post. There are two basic things you need when you want to achieve something as a king or emperor fight against external enemies. You need the support of your magnates and ideally your populace, and you need the material ability to execute your plan successfully. How those things are represented in Axioms will be detailed in the two major sections of this post.

Political Capital

If you’ve managed to grind through all the previous design discussion posts on this blog you’ll probably have a general idea of how to boost your political capital, and stuff I’ll be referencing will be recalled by your memory relatively quickly.

In some sense your Opinion values are representative of your overall political capital. Well maybe “core political capital” is a better label. Most of the things you do to engage with Characters and Populations primarily impact their Opinion of you.

Populations also have Happiness but that is, you guessed it, heavily impacted by their Opinion of their direct Leader and the superiors of that Leader. Every Population typically has a single direct leader, although a Character can be the Leader of more than one Population. I am looking at the potential for Populations to have more than one direct Leader but probably not until an expansion. Populations can have opinions over their potential direct leaders as well, such as heirs in an aristocracy but that sort of operates indirectly.

In most cases Opinion isn’t directly required to do things but it impacts the consequences of your actions, such as raising troops. The Opinion of a Population towards various Characters will modify their Morale for instance. And depending on the details of the system for raising troops involved it can impact volunteer numbers and other stuff.

You can generate Opinion Modifiers for specific Actions or large undertakings such as a war with specific goals. This might involve the Propaganda system. Building up support for specific things is one feature of Propaganda. Support for a war, for example, also has to do with the Opinion of the Populations of each party to the war vs the Characters and Populations of the other party.

Political capital is not a specific variable in game, but essentially an emergent amalgam of relevant variables related to a task. The most common and often powerful being Opinion. Raising Taxes lowers Opinion of targets and potentially raises that of beneficiaries. Opinion functions implicitly as political capital since it is heavily referenced for unrest related calculations and diplomatic calculations and other political things.

Variables like Happiness, military power, relationships with Characters and other things also contribute to the political capital amalgam but generally to a smaller degree. Generally so many factors are already compiled under Opinion, like religion, race, taxes, laws etc, that they don’t need to be applied outside of that.

Material Capacity

Even those who are very up to date on my posts will struggle a bit in generating an effective and accurate overview of how Axioms provides unique support for building and managing material capacity. Especially recently my posts have focused more on the social and political sides of the game. Therefore this section will be longer and more detailed than the prior one.

As noted in the post immediately prior to this one Material Capacity involves the tools and resources and infrastructure that you and your Characters and Populations will use to achieve the goal, once they’ve commited to it.

Axioms has a detailed Supply system, a detailed set of Infrastructure systems, a detailed Transport system involving Population carrying capacity and tools like packs of various kinds, beasts of burden, things like carts and wagons and ships and so forth. All of this determines your ability to *project power*.

Populations, Animals/Creatures, and to a lesser degree Characters all require certain things to survive and thrive. They need local access to these supplies to operate at full physical and mental capacity and to not get sick and injured or die.

Axioms doesn’t really have “attrition” as a special variable/modifier. Attrition is an amalgam, yes I know, of a variety of factors like calories, nutrition/variety of food, access to clothes and shelter, water, and various other goods. Many supplies impact morale rather than health, and of course health and hunger affect morale as well as physical capacity.

On top of health and morale you generally want, but do not necessarily require, equipment. Logistical equipment increases your speed and time in the field before you start getting attrition. Military equipment is a force multiplier that modifies the capacity of the Units in your Armies, made of of small temporary Populations, to weaken and kill enemies enemies. Equipment can range from cloth armor and wooden spears to metal swords, shields, and cuirasses, and also to artillery and magical equipment.

You’ll also often be moving construction materials and other supplies that are used *after* you win any military engagements. That is on top of equipment for stuff like fortifications, bridges, and other support infrastructure.

You need to be able to deploy military forces for longer periods and across larger distances and with faster travel than your enemies in order to succeed.

Some methods of recruiting and equiping and training troops require the Populations you draw the troops from to equip themselves, sometimes feed themselves, train themselves, and so forth. Other methods do not. Some methods involve existing forces promoting compliance with drafting while others require voluntary or socially promoted compliance.

The Roman “dilectus” involved a census of the wealth and population of Roman settlements generally every 5 years and a voluntary annual call up of eligible citizens. Once troops were called and selected from all eligible persons presenting themselves in Rome itself they were then organized and dismissed home to gather their equipment as appropriate to their economic class. They were generally expect to present themselves and then if selected return with equipment with no or limited oversight. Social and cultural pressures generally accounted for their compliance.

The Roman Socii, the allies, were given notice of required levies based on the Roman numbers and were left to their own devices as to how to raise the troops. The Romans only cared that they met their obligation as client states. The Romans generally provided 1/3 of the troops in their armies and usually the most well trained and well equipped though they relied on the Socii and later Foederati for the vast majority of the cavalry while Romans focused on heavy infantry.

Conversely during the rule of Habsburg Spain private recruiters were sent out to the towns and villages to recruit a given number of men based on a contract and to return and be rewarded based on success and generally soldiers were not required to provide their own gear or have miltia training.

Medieval peasant levies were mandatory and raised by force by the local lord in order to meet obligations to their liege. They were often not annual, and the Spanish efforts were definitely not so, but unlike Spanish volunteerism and Roman social pressure peasants were not volunteers. Roman soldiers served for honor and glory, the Spanish soldiers for fortune, and the peasant soldiers by force.

Axioms will allow for a broad and varied mix of systems including most historical systems based on ideology, laws, traditions, and such of the relevant polities. NPC leaders will generally stick to their traditional forces unless the leader has high a low opinion of tradition and a high value for reform/progress/innovation.

NPCs will rarely engage in Marian, Philipian, or Peterian style army, and/or administrative, reforms, again depending on their natures also with some impact based on the effectiveness of their existing forces. I’ve dicussed in previous posts how the player can, in the right circumstances, create a brain trust/cabal of fellow reformist allies and follow the path of Philip II of Macedon or the British “CABAL Ministry” in ambitious reform efforts. This will be less common but still possible for groups of NPCs.

While some of the most famous reformers focused on the army, or navy, you can also push forward large or small civilian administrative reforms. Additionally Characters will engage in actions that don’t quite reach the level of reform. Leaders, especially monarchs, will focus on different aspects of rulership based on their Personality, Ideology, Interests, and Desires. Some rulers will crack down on internal strife involving bandits or general crime, some will focus on political unity, others on strong alliances, some on intrigue, and some on economic infrasturcture and so forth.

Some rulers will explore their existing territory for new resources and discoveries. Axioms has a variety of exploration opportunities with each province having a sort of “survey completion level”. This is similar to Eador: Genesis/Imperium although you won’t be fighting as many battles. Different Characters will have different knowledge of a Province and you can have secret discoveries as noted in a previous post. Players might be advised to spend some effort raising their knowledge of their lands and looking for new things to extract or exploit.

Conclusion

While this post didn’t contain any screenshots or outline specific mechanics with a detailed representation of all the variables involved and the potential actions with concrete numbers connected I hope it effectively explains the idea of how the game systems and mechanics will function. Axioms has a lot of gameplay that isn’t just a rehash or a shaken up version of mechanics from existing strategy games but which is qualitatively different from what could be done in previous titles.

A lot of people tell me, reasonably, that they can’t read 1000 detailed posts on a game, even if it was already released much less still in development, but in my experience on various webforums and subreddits I feel like I haven’t effectively conveyed the large differences between Axioms and existing games. Of course this could simply be that I’m not a great communicator but I think the scale of the difference is the primary driver.

I think the experience of playing Axioms, both because of the Attention system and character/population representation, and the focus on [D][I][P](D iplomacy, I ntrigue, P olitics) will create a core gameplay loop that is quite distinct from both strategy and rpg games despite the similar setting and themes. Hopefully at some point I’ll generate a really effective elucidation of this.

I’ve come up with various concise elevator pitches but I’m not sure people take them seriously enough":

“Imagine a strategy game where the experience of the general, king, diplomay, merchant, priest, and magus have equal depth and verisimilitude”.

“The goal of the game is to replicate the feeling of being any kind of iconic fantasy novel protagonist with detail and rigor”.

“Every part of Axioms contains the depth of the military aspect/focus of most military/map games”.

Thoughts?