The Axioms Of Dominion: Delegation

What is it, what is it good for, and how do you do it?

Introduction

Some of the most popular mechanics that people ask for in medieval strategy games are councils and regents. I’ve written a post here before about whether Axioms has councils and because the answer is complicated I am not very satisfied with that post. I think that things will be clearer if I include things like councils and regencies together within a larget superset of delegatory mechanics. Administrators, bureaucrats, magistrates, military leaders, and in some cases vassals. Vassals after all are basically hereditary sub-regents or administrators.

Like the 80s-90s fantasy novels it is attempting to make the player feel like a protagonist of “Axioms Of Dominion” is mostly just a set of thematically appropriate general descriptors. The ____ Of _____ And _____ right? Ot in the simpler case _____ Of _____. You see this in other games of course. Age Of Wonders? Does that really tell you anything about the game? Genre? No. Mechanics? No. Setting? Sort of. So the title of this post is a bit tongue in cheek. But in this case a bit correct. Delegation is a top 5 capability and area of study in leadership, of kingdoms or otherwise.

Councils, Regents, And Advisors

This blog already has a post about councils but it really only says vaguely that you can have them using a set of broad mechanics related to administration. I think part of the difficulty is making a long post about such a specific thing. I’m going to compare and contrast how “delegation” defines the idea of a council vs a regent vs a bureaucrat and other similar positions of borrowed authority.

The usual council has a position devoted to war, one to management, one to diplomacy, and then you might have religious or intrigue positions but sometimes you’ll have a mage advisor or an industrial advisor or something instead. These are almost always predefined posts, and even with mods you can’t have new positions comparable to the developer defined ones, generally.

In Axioms “Councils” are not predefined. There’s no “council tab” with 5 slots for guys who represent different portfolios. Instead Councils fit within the broader “Delegation” systems and mechanics along with Regents or individual Advisors and so forth. Indeed the words “Council”, “Regent”, and “Advisor” are not part of the source code at all.

You may represent various non-landed positions, permanent or ephemeral, with a massive degree of freedom. You provide your own title for a position, although the NPCs will generally use a title defined in the data files as a preset rather than make up their own for obvious reasons. Then you’ll give them goals, assignments, and directives, and then you’ll provide them with backing of some kind.

This system applies to all sorts of leaders including generals, spymasters, mages, administrators, and so forth. Leaders under your authority will have a variable that defines their level of authority in their area, and this will be decided by the person delegating power and will modify the “authority” of the “delegater” themselves when other characters are using that value in their decision making while also including relevant variables of the “delegatee”.

For instance trust/honor for the superior and the subordinate will combine to a number that other people will act on. Will the superior stand by the decisions of the subordinate and is the subordinate representing their level of borrowed authority properly and are they themselves trustworthy?

The real difference between a regent and a seneschal or diplomat is the degree and direction of the authority invested on behalf of their liege. Why limit ourselves to a small number of predefined possibilities if we don’t have to? Examples of people with delegated authority are military leaders, in the Roman style for instance, the quartermasters in their armies, sub-commanders, and so forth.

Medieval kings would often delegate requisitional authority to lower officials to commandeer ships or provisions for their military adventures. In Axioms you can delegate any part of your authority including the ability to “sub-delegate” that authority to an even lower tier. Afterall just as a ruler can’t command an army from the palace or control two armies in different locations neither can a general handle their own payroll or supply easily.

Now in some cases you won’t delegate to a specific character, since we can’t simulate more than 100k or so characters without requiring significant amounts of RAM. In that case just as discussed in the recent post on the army system you’ll have to provide broad and rigid orders and a Character won’t be adapting things to the circumstances.

Mechanics

If you’ve kept up with the many, many long posts on this blog you’ll have some awareness of the “Commitment system”. Since there isn’t a super in detail discussion in one place I’ll provide a basic outline here.

Characters have special Opinion modifiers currently called “Trust” and “Honor”. Honor is more general as far as keeping your word and Trust is more personal between two people or a small similar group of people. This is on top of Opinion which is generally how much you like a person.

Connected to that are Commitments. These can be Oaths to political/secular entities, personal Promises to individuals to do or not do something, Pacts to vassals and Lieges, Pledges to social/military organizations, a Geas for a religion, and other stuff.

The way that delegation works is that you’ll pick someone to delegate power too, and then you’ll use some form of Commitment to stand by their decisions. You can save various configs as well so you don’t have to redo everything every time. The delegation is pretty granular, can they build buildings, change taxes, levy troops, make diplomatic agreements and so forth.

System Integration

There are various games that have tried to do something like regencies and it has been a mess in most cases. Axioms uses the foundational set of social and political simulation to create a unique experience for something like a regency. The power a regent has is based on the actual authority they are delegated as well as the political position of the liege and the political position of the regent. So in the case of on and off regencies there is a sort of automagical thread of connection. Regents can use the position to gain favors and secrets and aid or inhibit enemies and allies.

The results of the actions of the regent are saved in the Opinion system even after the liege retakes his authority. So you can use the power to build yourself up over time. Whereas in many games the regency ending effectively deletes the effects and efforts of the regent.

Similarly Axioms already has a non-regency based set of coup/rebel/conspiracy systems. So any sort of chicanery the regent engages in draws on those mechanical capabilities rather than having progress meters or power tiers or other gamey/artificial mechanics involved. Regents can make false promises using their delegated power just as they would with their regular/real/personal power to trick supporters and allies of their liege.

A liege would need to engage in standard intrigue/gossip/intel actions to discover regent duplicity. Perhaps a suspicious character who supports the liege, or just a general snitch, involved in the specific area of the crime would report to the liege.

The integrated existence of hidden information that is relatively unique to Axioms allows for this kind of situation to have far more verisimilitude. Instead of arbitrary timers and progress bar mimicking a coup situation the possibility for a coup is created organically by the simulation. No artificial modifier stacking or hard coded “special mechanics” required. Being in a regency would empower the regent to engage in shady behavior only because they’d have access to more resources and the ability to order about allies and supporters of their liege such that they could create distractions for loyal troops or commanders or move them away from places of power while they moved loyal troops in.

For games, which I’ll avoid naming as a courtesy, where troops aren’t meaningfully located anywhere and for similar limitations in other areas of the simulation this of course isn’t really possible except perhaps as an “event” that artificially replicates such a situation beyond the actual world of the sim. One might almost, very ironically in this case, refer to such mechanisms as “supernatural” or “extraordinary”. There is a degree of meaningfulness in the case of Axioms of saying that possession is nine tenths of the law. If you have “physical/proximal” control over the treatury or the capital or w/e and the de jure owner does not, at best that means he can employ diplomatic or political pressure to rectify that, assuming any outsiders or rebels are willing to back him up on that basis.

Verisimilitude

Axioms is not, in some sense, a strategy game or a simulator. It is an interactive experience engine. The goal is to make the player feel as though they are the protagonist of a fantasy or historical novel, experiencing the same situations and narrative as a novel protagonist would. To some degree you can choose to be a slice of life, or drama of manners, character or a protagonist of a story about a merchant or a mage, or something but generally the primary target is an adventurer or an aristocrat or at least some sort of leader like a general or diplomat.

For these reasons it is important to ask myself when developing a feature how “real” the feature makes the gameplay feel. It isn’t about stacking magical modifiers out of nowhere but having each action and reaction rooted in the world and the narrative. You can’t push a button to add a “tax modifiers” or a “production bonus” or something as you would in a 4X or even a grand strategy game. Or in an idle clicker with map as some games can be described. Not that those systems are bad, I enjoy several idle clicker adjacent games or dice/class based RPGs. But that isn’t the goal or gameplay of Axioms.

Axioms has many systems that exist, even though they can be complex or even sometimes constricting, to achieve this goal. The Attention Point system provides a flavorful and flexible way to represent the idea that you cannot do everything yourself. Excessivley pausing in a real time game or taking super long turns fiddling with every detail while expecting the End Turn function to resolve quickly would be a good example. That can improve the raw “gamey” experience. I loved Master of Magic and Civ 3 and Total War even though they heavily lean into this format. But that is not a goal of Axioms.

Indeed the whole value from delegating intrinsically derives from the limitations imposed by Attention. You need to delegate authority so that another character can expend *their* Attention for your benefit, and their own.

In most “strategy” games you are a hivemind controlling a single purpose drone society and not only that but you have the attention to personally direct drones in precise ways. Additionally these drones execute commands consistently and flawlessly.

You also have the ability to rewind time, to freeze time for cogitating on your next move, to fully restart the world over and over, and to contact other fellow deities through the aether to take advantage of their experience, often experience engaging in a functionally identical reality to your own. You may refer to this latter power as “reading an internet guide”. You can still do that, in a limited way, for Axioms. But you are restricted in how much personal attention you have which must be spread over all aspects of your dominion.

The character social simulation then exists for the purposes of allowing you to employ your managerial and delegatory skills. Your goal is to ideally create a team of trusted subordinates, peers, and even a trusted superior potentially, to spread the burden. I invested a lot of thought into how to make that experience interesting and to make it feel realistic. For those who don’t want to crack out a dictionary for everyone of my walls of text, verisimilitude means the experience of feeling true or real.

Conclusion

Axioms is all about the dynamic and flexibile representation of historical and especially fantastical realms and activities. You should be able to replicate the experience of your favorite fantasy novel, or with mods that turn off magic, your favorite historical systems and events.

Most strategy games do not effectively differentiate between societies. Aside from surface stuff like units, usually only varying by minor statistical changes, there’s rarely a huge gameplay difference between Rome or Greece; the Rohirrim or Gondor.

Sure the graphical elements are distinct but the mechanics rarely are. Even when developers add a dozen rigid and limited mechanics with handcrafted UI elements on top of the core systems it doesn’t always create an effective facade when you still engage with the core systems far more than the gilding on top.