Ideology
In order to establish a superior political simulation, for the purposes of enabling more interesting gameplay outside of warfare, I added a model for various real life things that are relevant to politics. Axioms is a DIP game, as it says on the about page. I define, for convenience, politics as internal politics, diplomacy as external politics, and intrigue as behind the scenes politics.
Ideology is an obvious addition though people will have varying levels of agreement with the implementation. In my version each character and population has an ideology which contains currently 10 spectra:
Tradition/Reform
Militaristic/Pacifist
Expansionist/Isolationist
Individualism/Communalism
Diversity/Purity
Devolution/Centralization
Autocracy/Democracy
Agrarianism/Industrialism
Elitism/Egalitarianism
Pluralism/Extremism
These are not necessarily final whether that means slight adjustments to the terms and purposes or wholesale replacements. I might also add some more.
These are somewhat comparable to the “ideologies/ethics” in Stellaris although I paused serious development of Axioms roughly a year before Stellaris released. The last wiki changes have time stamps in mid to late 2015. I suppose once should expect some level of convergent evolution. CK3 later added Secrets and “unique vassal agreements” for instance.
Although in all cases Paradox didn’t take their ideas very far. Fanatic Militarist provides only +20% ship fire rate and -40% claim cost. Additionally there are only 4, 5 if you count nothingness, discrete “steps” on their spectrums. Axioms lacks the mana of Paradox games. As mentioned in a previous post your political capital is all from opinion modifiers. You don’t have “influence”, “bird mana”, or “time to claim by chancellor” or whatever.
Ideology functionally moderates opinion impacts from actions taken by characters. An Expansionist/Militaristic/Elitist/Autocracy population wants a leader who engages in military conflict and conquest, that holds that population’s traits up in ways like limiting government jobs to those like them, and support authoritarian action against others. You actually get a slight decrease in lowered opinion for said actions against the pop itself but for action against people who share fewer traits you might even gain opinion.
Note that your various populations can be inherently in conflict. Obviously Elitist populations need someone to eat shit and the people in your state that eat shit will be pretty upset about eating shit. The key here is probably to have a diverse set of lower classes who are also antagonistic. A set of populations comprising the oppressed who are pluralist/egalitarian/reformist/militaristic are somewhat of a worse case as they could cooperate to a higher degree.
Propaganda
I’m going to take a short digression to Propaganda here. The Propaganda system allows chracters to provide resources to their Intelligence Networks to slowly modify ideologies, raw opinion, push specific actions, and so forth. So you probably want to employ this ability against oppressed classes if you are playing a ruthless despot. Someone on a Star Dynasty review expressed sadness that to play a diplomatic game and prevent lots of betrayals you had to be a good boy. Not in Axioms.
Axioms also has a fear/respect type system, subject to changes or becoming obsolete. Tyranny in CK2 is the closest comparison though it isn’t quite the same. When you successfully put down rebellions, imprison or kill enemies, and other similar stuff, and if you kill a guy who got far away or was protected, the AI remembers that and is afraid. Conversely if you make threats and then the other party rejects that or if you fail to harm enemies then Fear is less. You do generate Fear just by being ruthless against people who didn’t have a chance to escape or fight back but that can piss people off. Of course being ruthless against a group hated by another group can help you with the second group.
Quality Of Life
Quality of Life will be detailed more heavily in another post. Basically it represents the relative material conditions of your populations and characters. Axioms has a pretty detailed city-builder-esque economic system. Having access to varied and high quality food is pretty important for boosting your opinion/political capital. Populations also compare themselves to nearby populations, especially of different polities.
The game also has an Amenity system although unlike the similarly named system in Civ 6 it is quite entangled with other aspects of the game. Shelter, waste, water, air, architecture, hygiene, etc. Resources in the game have a quality and provide various impacts to Amenities on top of their usage in Items. Resources aren’t just checkboxes as in most games but extant objects like in city builders. They have amounts and locations and making buildings and items has resource costs. Rituals and a few other things also interact with resources, products, and items. Populations need to be fed, clothed, housed, etc. Well technically they only need food and lacking the other stuff won’t kill them but they’ll be upset.
Notably populations can be moved and your military draws on your population as well as their characteristics. Humans vs elves vs dwarves, and a few dozen other races. Additionally you can impact the traits of races or specific populations with magical effects that are temporary or permanent. A lot depends on the time since the start of history and access to magical resources.
Populations have different languages, cultures, and histories, and the first two especially are relevant to positive opinion and various administrative actions and situations. I think CK3 maybe is adding in languages, in a much simpler form, as a key part of gameplay. Maybe the devs read my old blog from 2014.
The Cinnamon Wars
One consequence of quality of life is that economic prosperity can be disrupted. A popular post I wrote last time I was seriously working on the project discussed a hypothetical war over access to cinnamon. In this example cinnamon was a long term and traditional part of the national diet, even for the lower classes if you count holidays. The way food works is that access to diverse foods increases happiness which boosts opinions of the ruler which means you have a bigger buffer for doing generally unpopular or merely divisive stuff.
The longer a food is part of the diet of a population the more painful it is for them to lose that food. For staples and even semi-staples you can end up down more than the food initially added. For stuff that flickers in and out of availability the penalty is usually smaller. So lacking this high quality and also popular part of your cuisine creates a ticking penalty until you restore access. Then the penalty ticks down till it goes away. If a ruler is cutting things close on purpose or is merely in a sticky situation at the moment you could essentially collapse a polity or force them to engage in an effort requiring significant resources to restore access.
Perhaps they need to conquer a province that produces cinnamon, perhaps they just need to find a new supplier, perhaps they offer a bribe to you or something. the AI should be able to handle this, but I believe the quality of AI required will impact turn times. Hopefully not too much.
Of course this kind of action won’t always be sufficient to cause such drastic problems. It may have to be part of a larger strategy in the style of the Conspiracy system I discussed in another post.