Introduction
One of the biggest goals of Axioms is to portray other aspects of Map&Menu world simulation at the same level of depth as is done for combat. An adjacent goal of Axioms is to simulate all the war-adjacent systems including logistics and administration. The purpose of this post is to outline my design for the more political aspects of war. Specifically this post will attempt to effectively outline three distinct aspects of war-related diplomacy and politics.
Firstly is the issue of cause. What does a society consider a legitimate cause for war? Furthermore we have the “theory of mind” of war. What does a society expect *other* societies to accept as a legitimate cause? You need to not only convince your personal allies and vassals of the need for war but also your general population, at least to some degree, and ideally you’d want to persuade internal hostile entities as well. Then you would like foreign third parties to stay out of things. You need to manage international opinion as well as intranational opinion.
Secondly we have the issue of enthusiasm and/or exhaustion. So you have a coordinated group who agrees with your purpose theoretically. But what about the actual effort you’ll need to expend? They’ll need to believe that victory is possible, especially for military action that is less defensive in nature. Following this you’ll have to manage morale when your plan comes into contact with reality. Do you act aggressively to take advantage of currently advantageous circumstances? Do you act carefully in case problems arise? How do you handle it when the conflict dissolves into one of attrition?
Finally we get to the issue of goals. You have a grand narrative that is both performative and concrete but you also need to consider what you hope to achieve. Total victory? A showing of mettle? Agreements about the future? Did you want territory? Plunder? Fame? Goals should ideally play into the overarching cause of the war and must be reasonable given the mood of the army and the populace at home.
Like pretty much every system in Axioms the plan is to represent a more detailed and granular experience of the social aspect of war and to avoid easily exploitable mechanics which are common with stacking modifiers and more simplistic and abstract representations.
Public, Private, and Personal Causes Of War
The causes of war in the real world are quite varied and often unique to specific regions, cultures, circumstances, and personal situations. As part of the effort to provide a wider social simulation Axioms allows for wars at the discretion of a ruling character. Your “true” reasons will be contained in the data of the game and potentially accessible through the mechanics but you don’t have to publicly declare actual causes or goals nor is consistency required in presentation.
Both the players and the NPCs may present public and private reasons for military action and they may vary these depending on the target even relating to the same conflict. Public or official reasons will be known by all characters. You may present one or more reasons to different allies and supporters as you please and they may differ from your performative claims.
Finally you’ll be required to provide a “true” reason. You could of course lie about the true reason but you’ll take “dissonance damage”, as explained in previous posts if this differs too heavily from your Consciousness. Additionally these reasons will be available to magical investigations. In many cases magical espionage or divination won’t be a significant factor in your situation depending on the state of the world.
Militaristic societies might not require any meaningful cause for war. You could declare a war with the public goal being a socially understood reason like “glory”. Indeed you might even declare “glory” to be your private reason. Of course different ideologies or personalities will weight the validity of your cause differently as far as how it impacts their opinion of you.
Ideology and Personality are also relevant in cases where your public, private, and personal reasons are in conflict. Many characters might not consider lying to enemies to be wrong and others might have a sort of “realpolitik” attitude about leaders not being perfectly honest. And of course nearly all characters value lying to others vs themselves as different.
There are many benefits beyond those of verisimilitude to the way Axioms details social mores related to war. It is much harder to cheese than the simplistic mechanics which are used in many other games. It also allows personal relationships and thus characters to have more meaning. It represents the truth of the world more accurately. It opens up space for intrigue. A dynamic and flexible system is just more interesting and engaging, except in cases where you specifically *want* to min-max modifiers and simple equations like you do in an idle game. I almost forgot to mention that you also open up way more space for integration with other unique and iconic systems in Axioms like Commitments and Propaganda.
Enthusiasm And Exhaustion
Different existing games have a variety of methods for handling war weariness and public support for conflicts, especially drawn out and deadly ones. You can see how this is meaningful and interesting even in contemporary politics and the examples overflow as you go back into history. And of course most people have personal experience to draw upon based on more individual social situations like jobs or projects. Everyone is pretty chill and helpful until things get messy.
There are many games which represent the limitations of manpower or economics, and fewer that represent logistics, but even the most intense grand strategy games tend to really simplify the social/emotional impacts of conflict. They also usually fail to represent any meaningful differentiation between cultures. The Roman Republic was at war for almost the entirety of their history. Imagine centuries of endless war and how modern cultures would respond. Defense is one thing but expansion that took centuries and a constant and painful consumption of blood and treasure? Never.
Axioms both represents this key aspect of military conflict in detail and with quite a bit of variety. At the Character level how different NPCs feel about a given conflict is impacted by their ideology, their personality, and the personal impact on them. Is their land taking the brunt of the devastation? Who is getting the spoils? Are their friends and family harmed? Do they care about the cause of the war?
For Populations there is a similar if more passive evaluation. What populations are doing the dying? Which are benefitting? Who leads the armies and who follows? Is the enemy the enemy of the people or the rulers? Ideology applies to Populations as well as Characters even if Personality doesn’t. Are the people warlike? Do they seek glory?
Some conflicts have narratives that almost eliminate the concern about suffering. Some see only summer soldiers who quickly began to lose enthusiasm if things aren’t going well. Sometimes the spoils of war outweigh the losses. One aspect of coalition war mastered by the Romans was the distribution of loot. The Socii, “the allies”, of the Romans were rarely screwed over when the time came to divide the spoils.
If you choose to play as a ruling character in Axioms you have some level of say, depending on your specific position in the hierarchy, over who fights for you, who benefits from victory, and so forth. A top level ruler can, in theory, make decisions about the sturcture of their society that mimic the Roman style. They could also be exclusionary of minorities or lower classes.
There are no quick fixes or buttons to press that arbitrarily improve support for the war or prevent revolts or desertion. Any action you take has to actually do something to alter the situation. In many games almost every nation or faction fights like Rome going on even after massive losses defeating the enemy through attrition. In some cases a society will act like a full on hive mind. Not in Axioms.
Goals
There are no hard limits on what you can do through warfare. No arbitrary restrictions. War arguably isn’t even a binary state like in many games. You can make or break treaties at any time. What you gain or lose is whatever the entity you have a treaty with can be made to agree to. Informal or low level conflict is totally possible. In some ways declaring a war or signing a treaty is more of a formality comprised of a set of Commitments. In fact “rules of war” can ever be agreed upon among different entities in the game.
Without the straight jacket of history it is a lot easier to implement such a system. In our real history there is in fact no grand narrative or “correct” result. History is what *did happen* rather than what *had to happen*. Many games struggle to create or enforce “historical” system and situations and this is incredibly difficult to do in a sandbox because these games not only simulate at a level too high to create “historical” results but also don’t simulate many things that were important reasons why things happened as they did historically.
Why did the US South grow and export tons of cotton but not make clothes? Why did they US North import large quantities of Southern cotton and export textiles? Well it was because of the water table and altitude of those geographic areas and the consequences for water power and water transport. Good luck representing that in a so called “grand strategy” or even “4X” game. Many otherwise non-sensical or frustrating mechanics in war and diplomacy in those genres are inherently flawed attemps to metaphorically railroad things to be more “historical”. Which, again, makes little sense since history was quite random even with proper scaffolding.
Axioms will not likely spit out “rules of war” like those of Christian medieval or pre-modern Europe. Substantially similar? Sure. Identical? No. Similarly you might not see the NPCs running on procedural and emergent gameplay clone the diplomatic and political systems of the Roman Empire. Are *most* of the seperate pieces available? Yes. Can a player, or a modder making a custom world, represent these things pretty accurately with gameplay differentiation and intense flavor? Yes.
As noted in an earlier design post the standard/basic “faction/nation/politics” map visualization will not be the core representation and further you’ll be cycling between 4-8 key modes, depending on your character role. We can, and should, represent “ownership” of a province in a deeper and more meaningful way. Don’t confuse the map for the territory. In Axioms for various reasons maps will be used to represent resource and population control in a way most map games don’t engage with.
Gains
Axioms has no magical modifiers based on your goals. Taking back land you once ruled can indeed limit the amount of negative response compared to aggressively expanding to new lands. But you can’t cheese it down to nothing. How much land you can take at once is uncapped.
If you can truly *conquer* the land or use diplomacy to gain massive concessions then good for you. However there are no abstract shortcuts to the problems thus created. In many cases you can create a society that can conquer territory as fast as the Ottomans or the Mongols once did but that usually requires similar tradeoffs to the ones those societies took.
Most games cap your potential territory games in a single war in some way. They often also allow for either instant trouble or no trouble once you take that land. In Axioms there is a spectrum whereby you can gather extensive short term gains for a cost in the long term.
The fall of the Romans wasn’t assured per say but it was, looking back, not surprising. With no more land to plunder their economic system was difficult to support. When you build your empire on slave conquest you have a problem when there are no more easy slaves to take.
The Ottoman Empire expanded at a stunning rate and use a sort of plurality social structure to integrate but not assimilate new populatioms. Rome by contrast was much more assimilative and used a unique form of military colonization as well to see heavily pro-Republic populations in newly conquered lands. Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire would gain a sort of pseudo-acceptance and sanction from the state in exchange for paying a special tax.
The Ottomans also had a system of “slave-soldiers” raised from birth to be loyal to the leadership to offset reliance on the native nobility. Eventually this group became *too* powerful and the balance cracked. In contrast slower growing societies had much more complete cohesion within their social contract. That made them relatively stable but limited their ability to expand militarily.
Conclusion
Most map games have very rigid and abstract representations of war. Axioms attempts to create a dynamic and concrete representation of war and war adjacent systems. Of course all computer games are objectively very abstract and rigid. I use these terms only to compare to existing games. There is no “reduce war exhaustion” button with a cooldown or “resource/capacity/mana” cost. You need to perform much more flavorful, grounded, and society appropriate actions and these impact Opinion directly.
Indeed Axioms doesn’t have “war exhaustion” per say. Most of the simulation is based on the Opinion system in complex ways. Happiness is calculated off of Opinion, not as a distinct variable but as an amalgamated variable, and either Opinion directly or negative or low Happiness result in things like revolts.
I think a lot of games use sort of “intermediary variables/modifiers” in an excessive way and then you have very abstract actions that are often hard coded for different factions that impact these and only then do these impact core variables. This allows for a very idle game style min-maxing puzzle. Which to be fair I enjoy both in blatant idle games and in “obfuscated” idle games. But it harms attempts at simulation once you try to lower the abstraction level.
Oh you can only get 100 points of positives in a treaty? Here is a “treaty demand cost modifier” that lets you get more stuff. And no you can’t trade negatives to get more positives. Here is an intermediary modifier that boosts the “lowered treaty demand cost modifier” and also boosts the amount of “newly conquered land” you can have before you get a “too much foreign land penalty” and 5 other things. And sometimes a modifier have multiple levels of “modifier indirection”. If a game doesn’t simulate communication speed or military movement speed which were advanced by technology advancement it makes sense that you need some sort of “centralization” type mechanic because that is easier to code.
And then you have factions with special mechanics, that add even more levels of indirection. The game becomes all about stacking these modifiers in a way the developers didn’t notice. Not in Axioms. A benefit of having a more detailed simulation is flattening the indirection level. Of course we add complexity somewhere else in exchange for reducing it here, but in theory you achieve more verisimilitude which is sort of like a feeling of authenticity. For example actually engaging in social interactions with other characters makes it feel more authentic to how a medieval monarch experienced life compared to a bunch of indirect modifiers and having hivemind control over the military and so forth.
This post is a bit rambly and unfocused but I do think the digressions help to paint the wider picture of my goal in the design of the game and how it will impact the experience and feel of the game.