Castes, Classes, Assemblies, Curias, And Other Legislative Bodies

How republican and or democratic polities operate in Axioms

Introduction

A core aspect of Axioms is the idea that different goverments are mechanically distinct. Instead of a special action or two and some minor modifiers the difference is in both the character interaction and the interaction with the people. Different governments do have different strengths and weaknesses but they are not defined by abstract integers and percents.

I’ve previously talked about the Laws system in Axioms where you can apply limitations and restrictions as well as inducements to nearly any action or entity in the game. You can find that post here:

I’ve also commented on certain Character focused aspects of government. Diluted authority makes Populations happier, especially in cases where authority is accessed by Characters with similar demographics to a given Population. The trade off is that you need more Characters to come to a consensus to achieve things and you have to keep more people happy. Authority concentrated with one or only a few people generates negative opinion and potentially tyranny implications.

This post is about governments forms that are more “equitable” than autocracy, theocracy, monarchy, or feudalism. Specifically I want to discuss republics and democracies of various kinds. I will be using historical examples including Rome and Greece for this purpose and perhaps the medieval merchant republics as well. I’ve previously used Rome as a major reference point both because of the ubiquity of the concepts and because I would love to support a historical classical period mod where you really feel like a Greek or a Roman or an Egyptian, or even a Gaul.

Axioms actually had castes and economic classes and “jobs” all the way back in 2012-2014 in the basic Population/Demographics code. But I never got around to writing a design post on the old blog about it.

If you look at Imperator: Rome that is, roughly, a very simplified version of how it works in Axioms. But Imperator has a very limited selection of “laws” and “population statuses” and it doesn’t have anything like the 4 major Roman citizen assemblies at all. Nor do the Greek states really have “democratic assemblies” in their style. Government in typical Paradox form is just a set of modifiers and then a couple “player chosen modifier” slots.

World Generation Relevant Information Summary

At the start of world generation before any time passes you have some number of undifferentiated Populations each with an associated “Leader” Character. Then the game generates a Spouse and a Brother and a Sister for each of these Characters. You can fiddle with the number of Populations and also the “Families” of leader Characters in settings. Think something vaguely like the Family Creator system for the player character in Star Dynasties.

Once you’ve done all the settings and generated the map and then the world what happens is that you set a number of years to pass and walk away. Unfortunately this is an insanely intense process. The game will come with several worlds with different settings and sizes generated by me. Some computers may take very long periods to create worlds with multiple thousands of years of history. Societies advance towards more regional integration and complexity over time. Worlds with a short history will be blander.

In Axioms there is mechanical support for a dynamic and flexible set of emergent political assemblies and the social/economic classes/castes to go with them. As the world advances through “pre-history”, aka the automated turns in world generation, societies will on average advance beyond small and simple organization. History is relatively random in the real world, but we only have the one and no “extant comparison” so people often struggle to understand this.

As such a world in Axioms will not advance linearly through the ages of real world history. There will be some materialist restrictions on societal advancement and makeup of course. Communication, travel, population, production methods. I won’t say you should read Marx because not all of his ideas are correct but the general idea is important. There’s some effort in the design for “chaos” to bring down large and specialized societies to create “ages” but it isn’t super strong. Some worlds may have few or no “crashes”.

In any case there are various pressures towards democratic or republican societies and some are “cultural/ideological” rather than materialist so there should be some natural variety in the societies in the world since Ideology and “culture stuff” is randomly generated for Populations and Characters. And of course Characters have Personalities which can impact this also and which are semi-random.

Castes And Classes

Populations in Axioms have all sorts of “demographic data” but what interests us here is how that interacts with legal and political systems. Characters can have all sorts of rights and privileges in their polity based on a variety of factors. And of course Characters who have de facto and de jure power can push their polity in various directions. Ideology among the Populations themselves is also an important factor.

Depending on various characteristics of a Population they might be “citizens”, “residents”, “foreigners”, “slaves”, “immigrants”, and so forth. They also have “races”, “religions”, “nationalities/ethnicities”, and other categories. Any of these can be assigned rights on an independent basis. Voting, property/land, travel, trade, guild membership, military service, marriage, political service, temple service, etc. I’m sure everyone can think of a dozen more similar things. And gender is involved in a lot of this stuff, varying by society.

You can get a right by any number of qualifications. Wealthy non-core ethinicity residents might be able to vote while anyone of the proper ethinicity could vote. The same for military service or marriage or w/e.

Assemblies

In societies which have democratic or republican institutions the right to participate in a given assembly can be conferred or denied by anything in the above section.

Rome specifically had 4 voting assemblies, plus the Senate for advice/consent. Those eligible for military service assembled, on the Campus Martius even, “as an army”, to vote in the Comitia Centuriata. And they assembled by various levels of status and the voting power of different groups was different. This assembly elected magistrates who had military authority among other duties, such as Consuls.

The Comitia Tributa was where the Romans voted in their famous “tribes”, 4 urban and 31 rural. The Urban Tribes were much more populous but did not have commensurate voting power. Indeed the wealthy Romans typically registered for voting at their country estates to improve their voting heft. This assembly could be called by Praetors and Consuls.

The Comitia Plebis Tributa was added during the Struggle of the Orders and was only for plebians. Patricians were not allowed to vote. These laws here originally only impacted the plebians as well. This assembly was called by the tribunes only.

The final assembly was sort of “deprecated” and had existed primarly in the time of the Roman kings.

Greek assemblies were typically far more limited to the highly restricted wealthy citizen class and typically were not one of several distinct assemblies in the polity.

Note that Roman magistrates proposed laws and they were passed in assemblies with a yes or no only. There was some amount of “campaigning” prior to voting. Assemblies had to be formed and do their business in a single day since the auguries of the gods which were cast prior were only valid for that long.

Because assemblies in Axioms are generated emergently from their polities you won’t actually end up with one that is identical to the assemblies of the Romans or the Greeks. However modders can of course hand-craft assemblies, castes/classes, and magistraces if they want a historical classical period setting. I’ve discussed magistraces in another post, these are generally “judges/leaders” who can propose laws where appropriate and carry out executive/judicial duties related to enforcing the laws. A magistrate in the ancient world was often and administrative as well as a legal office.

Political Bodies

Modern representative democracies did not really exist in the ancient world. Romans did not elect subsets of their populace to make laws. However Axioms is not historical and also acknowledges the “accident of history” and so the game, and the player, can forge political, legislatives, and administrative bodies of many, many different kinds. The legal system design outline of Axioms is linked above and it explains how laws can be applied to almost any “entity/object” in the game world.

What laws a given assembly can pass, what magistrates, or other leaders it can elect, and who can participate are widely open to NPCs or players to define. This is very similar to the freedom of design for feudal, imperial, theocratic, and autocratic goverments and societies. Democracies and Republicans in Axioms actually vote and operate through meaningful and detailed mechanics.

Individual and collective political actors including but not limited to Characters, Populations, Administrations, and then informal collections of Characters and Populations can engage in many kinds of interaction to decide who controls the power in a polity.

Something like modern interest groups, associations, clubs, cabals, conspiracies, and political parties modern and pre-modern are all possible. Both Character Personalities and Ideologies shape what any given NPC agent prefers to do. This “Character Consciouness” or “Metadata” is real for the Character it is connected to.

Of course the player exists outside of the game but that’s why they are encouraged to put their thoughts and desires into the game and why their actual actions create Dissonance based on their Character’s Consciousness. Commitments are an important part of Axioms that even players must engage with. If you tell the world or a Character you plan or want to do something or not and you violate that Commitment that impacts how people view you.

Conclusion

Axioms makes a massive and comprehensive effort to represent the actual concrete differences between governments specifically and polities/societies generally in a way no existing strategy game does. This isn’t just because of a fetish for simulation but because this “metadata and mechanics” combination existing in the game world allows for both interesting historical outcomes and for actually engaging with and experiencing the situations that make iconic fantasy and alt history literature impactful.

The Great Man Theory Of History overstates the power of individual actors but those actors do in fact matter. They just need to be balanced by population/society dynamics and by the material circumstances of the world in which great men and collections of regular people live.

No more bland and interchangeable “nations/factions” that all play the same. You should have to engage with concretely different systems and mechanics and NPC agents based on who you choose to play as. A church mage and a military officer should feel different as characters internally and with how they engage the external world.

Democracies, republics, oligarchies, theocracies, and monarchies/autocracies should provide vastly different choices and decisions and struggles and they should have real and concrete strengths and weaknesses.