Why Do Empires Fall?
Historical empires usually fell due to a myriad of factors intersecting at one point. The state had a certain amount of political capital and once it was depleted collapse happened.
The Sassanid Persian Empire was overrun by the Muslim expansion because they had had a devastating civil war just as it was taking off and then their generals made a series of critical mistakes about the brilliant Muslim general Khalid which caused multiple devastating military defeats.
The Western Roman Empire collapsed due to a variety of factors slightly more varied. United Rome was always unstable around the peak of expansion and was basically held up by circumstance. The onset of natural climate change in Europe and the surrounding area caused “barbarian” peoples to travel south and west in successive waves which destabilized the border. Rome had a very delicate trade network which required peace and stability to function. Even a few cogs being unaligned was capable of crashing the whole system. As soon as internal division and a few unfortunate circumstances intersected with the outside factors the empire became unsustainable.
Most empires which persisted longer than a few generations possessed an equilibrium which could sustain a moderate amount of misfortune. The key was to move beyond being carried by a few individual geniuses or charistmatic founders. What even the most well managed state couldn’t stand was a confluence of many distinct problems. This probably sounds pretty obvious but I bring it up for a reason.
Why Can’t Strategy Games Represent This?
Even the most “complex” strategy games, whether you are talking about Field Of Glory: Empires, Total War, or a grand strategy title, have almost no real simulation of networks and systems. They can’t represent the fall of empires because they don’t have enough detail in the relevant mechanics.
Trade in basically every strategy game, even Imperator: Rome, is really just a set of identical “blocks” that add up to your trade income total. There is no supply chain, you don’t have tiers of processing, at most perhaps holding a particular good gives some arbitrary bonus or is required for a single not that powerful unit type. The latter is the method of Civilization and clones.
For this reason there is functionally no possibility of “disruption”. Every territory is replaceable by any other undifferentiated store for an abstracted “income” integer. Trade a flood plain for a mountain and as long as the net income is the same it doesn’t matter.
Imperator actually does the most to represent trade, with often significant modifiers based on trade route management, but it is mostly a facade. There’s no “infrastructure” which can be lost and cause a retreat to low surplus localized interactions.
Similarly different societies in these games aren’t meaningfully different. Both Civ and Paradox mainly apply abstract modifiers to “food production” or “industry”. Looking purely at the mechanics and not the art assets, voice acting, and flavor text you can’t really distinguish different polities.
Internal Politics
The vast majority of strategy games allow you to rule as an immortal hivemind where a single intelligence directly controls every action and lives centuries to millennia.
CK3 supposedly mitigates this with the “Stress” system but that only impacts a small number of mechanical decisions. It doesn’t impact goals or long term planning. The Stress system is useful but it doesn’t do the job by itself. The NPCs have to be proactive instead of reactive as they typically are in Paradox games.
Internal politics are what create the precipe which an empire is pushed over by external factors. Both civilians and the military in ancient societies had to be managed to keep them from revolting and this basically doesn’t happen in any existing strategy game. Blobbing is thus unfettered.
Glory And Decadence
Perhaps the most underutilized explanation for imperial decline is totally ignored in most games. CK2 had the Muslim Decadance system and Field Of Glory: Empires had the Glory/Decadance system but these are heavily abstracted and don’t derive from the circumstances of the civilization in any meaningful way.
In Republican Rome the patrician class derived glory from military adventures, usually during their time as Consul, and this drove the politics and fortunes of the Republic. Rome was at war for essentially every single year of the Republic. While other imperialist states were perhaps slightly less aggressive it was very typical that a king would gain most of his respect and especially support from the military through successful wars which brought both glory and wealth from victory.
Many polities declined following a series of military failures, not because they couldn’t have kept fighting materially but because the population had no faith in the leadership. There were non-military factors however.
Large empires had access to a variety of foods and other goods which placated the people. Material surplus was a key part of having a store of political capital with which to engage the elite and the populace. Once material conditions significantly declined it was very, very difficult to reverse the trend.
Imperial Decline In Axioms
Axioms provides a simulation which deals with all of the major factors of the rise and fall of empires historically. Of course if you’ve read other design posts you know the level of detail and integration as far as external diplomacy, internal politics, and shadowy intrigue.
However a distinguishing feature of Axioms is the economic simulation. Axioms allows for tiers of production, from raw Resources to processed Products, which can be refined into even more processed Products, all the way to Items, which include military equipment and economc capital. Finally Buildings and Boats, and so forth at the highest level. Buildings can have “Modules” which are just a complex substype of Items.
The loss of key production or harvesting provinces can massively impact the economy of a society although only the really fancy fantasy magical stuff is typically confined to production in a single province. Piracy and banditry can cripple the economy as surely as total war.
Axioms has an additional unique factor which I discussed a little bit. Populations become used to their material circumstances. Whether we are talking about staple or luxury foods, important Goods like clothes and tools or other such things. Essentially you get a QoL/Happiness bonus that pools with other aspect of “political capital”.
Populations with more food variety, access to more goods, both luxury and practical, and Amenities(an aspect of buildings and services) like plumbing, entertainment and such, are happier. When you lose these material goods not only do you lose the bonus but you get a ticking negative penalty beyond that.
Populations, and actually characters as well, will attribute misfortune to certain leaders, dynasties, organizations, or states, to some degree. That is the ticking bonus doesn’t apply to a new leader if they are sufficiently distinct. Of coure the QoL bonus is lost unless the food, good, or amenity is restored. The “causer” of this misfortune can of course restore the value themselves if they can hold things together. The ticking penalty will then slowly reverse.
Ideology And Other Factors
You also have to deal with the ideology of your populations and characters. So a “militaristic” society where you have political capital due to success in conflict can obviously fall apart if you lose wars or simply if you have no one else to really fight. Some territory may be more trouble to control than the value you get if your capital is too far or you have all the resources it produces in abundance. Consider the Romans and their decisions about the land that makes up modern day Germany. At that point you lose access to an easy source of Opinion/Respect/Honor/Prestige. As the glory of old conquests fades you have nothing with which to replace it.
This equation applies to other things as well. Long running economic growth, cultural/religious advances, technological gains, etc. Basically there are a lot of decaying bonuses to general Opinion and Prestige and so forth based on Ideology and other factors and if you push your political capital to the max in order to pursue new wars or social reforms or w/e you could be in trouble as you are reduced to your stable political capital.
A Militaristic/Expansionist polity might give you +50 of some sort of political capital factor for conquering a province. That would be stable as long as you controlled the land. But they could also give you a decaying bonus of ~+40 which has to be refreshed by new conquest at some point. Maybe you lose a point a year or a point every 2 years or w/e.
This will be the subject of another major post but you “expend” these bonuses by accruing negative modifiers in various ways. So a war that takes a long time and people die or their lives are disrupted. Or if you institute a social reform that is not popular you get penalties. As a player your goal is to manage your excess bonuses and penalties in order to do things. This is why I say all these different factors sort of pool into “political capital” as an abstract resource. That isn’t something actually defined in the game but an explanation of how the system operates.
Conclusion
Axioms offers a detailed and integrated simulation with high verisimilitude. Polities rise and fall in the game based on both external and internal factors which are organized to replicate a degree of realism based on the historical record. Rather than providing very rigid and hard coded mechanics like “Stability” or “Autonomy” which are just integers you modify with mana points and cooldown timers the game actually represents these real life concepts. Similarly “Decadance” is just having an elite that is used to a high QoL that is difficult to sustain over long time periods.