That will surely take much time to figure out what features nudge a species’ political beliefs towards one extreme or another. Perhaps some species would be even missing certain axes, whereas others would have more of them?
you don’t want to compare different possibilities?
There’s a clear distinction of categorizing the possibilities, their attributes and what psychologically different species evolution might produce, compared to starting a major debate on which ideologies on earth are good (and to some extent what their effects are as those points will also be contested).
That latter discussion heats up fast as people from different ideological bubbles will clash. And that is not something we want here as it takes up a ton of moderating resources to even try to keep such a thing civil. So we just ban it entirely so that we can keep things clean without massive amount of moderating effort.
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People already get tunnel vision on Earth when thinking about ideologies - just look at the Political Compass Test. Ideologies are extremely complex, and shoehorning them into whatever’s prominent in our current culture just wouldn’t work.
Also, even if analogous ideologies to ours developed, they might still have different impacts. A species more inclined towards community gain as opposed to individual gain would probably be more economically productive under a communist system as humans were. That’s another factor to consider - is an ideology the same ideology when it’s in a fundamentally different context from whatever you’re comparing it to?
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That’s why “alien ideologies” probably shouldn’t have 1:1 names with their Terran “counterparts”, perhaps instead they could be called “(ideology)-like” or something, as they might not share all the attributes with their “counterparts”.
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I think it’s possible to implement a faction-based politics system (somewhat similar to vic3). Factions here are groups with similar worldviews and goals. Factions in the state are divided into ruling, legal and illegal, depending on your laws. Factions also have a radicalization parameter, which is responsible for how radical the faction’s ideas are and how aggressive it acts.
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How would this evolve through the stages? I can guess by mid space it’d have declined in importance…
I mean galactic civil wars are a really fun idea, I’d say victoria 3 in space isn’t a downside in any way.
Through at some point you transistion from a “country” to a “civ” composed of countries on the various planets and other objects across space.
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Well, if you use an imperial strategy of forced naturalization into your culture and have a centralized government, you’re one big country, and if your UN analogue is in charge you’re basically a weak confederacy, barely a civ, you could have completely different people working as part of your civ. Basically, how much the transition actually matters should be based on how you play. In space you’ll likely have more opportunity to become something that doesn’t have to deal with rebellion, but you could always end up a in a traditional faction problem…
If we’re assuming non-scifi, then communicating with colonies in other star systems makes it really hard to create coherent states spanning multiple systems.
We’re not. We assume some form of ftl, which if it works for ships, put the information needed to run the state on the ships.
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Just how fast would the ftl be here through?
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I think this will work as in the case of highly isolated colonies (for example, located on another continent) at the industrial/society stage.
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Except these colonies might just aswell break off once they’re strong enough and self-sufficient…
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Slavery Take Two
Just how much populace could such an empire have and still be ruled by, well, an emperor without parts of the state just breaking off since more people = higher chance of anti-ruler conspiracy?
Unsure. The thing is, being cruel to your subjects is a horrible idea, because there’s enough people for a massive subculture that is based solely on things you don’t like to exist, easily. If you want to be an empire and last, you might be able to force a rather vague culture on your subjects at the time of your conquering them, before letting them drift around, so long as they were exposed to enough cultural media from far reaches of the empire they would all trend towards a moderate form of your culture. If you aren’t cruel to you subjects and the rules are pretty lax, easy to follow, and permits exist for the belgiums who really want to do something you feel needs to be regulated, you might be able to avoid rebellions forever, excluding extenuating circumstances. If you’re at war, the far side of the empire could very well attempt to break off because why should they care about this war? They don’t like paying taxes or their volunteers dying for someone halfway across the galaxy. In general, extenuating circumstances would be when you need to use one part of the civilization to buff the other. If, for example, you could make a system where you owe regional governments favors when you do this, you might be able to get away with it. Similarly if you maintain state monopolies on something and while you aren’t stingy with it, you make sure to reward helpful provinces with it. I’m very unsure how to translate this to gameplay.
This also applies to some society stage civs I’d imagine.
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Sorry everybody for necroposting for my first but I wanna try and say things on this topic I think. 
I feel like an interest group-based approach to modelling governments and politics is definitely the best here. Although, I’m unsure of it being like vic3 specifically, since those interest groups are heavily simplified. I think having governance be a simple “I choose the direct democracy setting” or “I adjust my slider more towards democracy/authoritarianism” is a bit insane given the actual complexity of governing bodies present and historical. I think just having interest groups be ruling vs legal vs illegal is also a bit inaccurate. Rather, I think different interest groups should be enfranchised/disenfranchised (sometimes to the point of being destroyed in their entirety) depending on ruling structure and technology. Ruling structure itself should be made up of components (kind of similar to Vic3). For example (and I hope it’s not controversial at all to say this) but the USSR and other states following Marxist-Leninist doctrine did not in fact establish a classless society. Instead, a new interest group (or set of interest groups, I’m not too well versed on the history of the Soviet Union) usually referred to as the “Nomenklatura” (I think that’s how you spell it) appeared, which was the state bureaucracy. I do think that the ruling vs legal vs illegal distinction is still useful, and I think there should be a difference between political disenfranchisement and disenfranchising power. After all, a nation that has laws against trade unions may still have trade unions in the country if the organizational base of the economic system that allowed for trade unions to exist in the first place is not changed, and those unions will act as interest groups, even if minimally affecting the political sphere.
Also, as for what those components that make up a ruling structure, I believe there are too many to possibly fit into a game to a reasonable level and simplifications will have to be made. Should we even have a very deep system for politics? I don’t really know, but I feel like societal organisms deserve as much love as biological ones sometimes. Also, sorry if this was a bit all over the place, I was not thinking a singular train of thought while writing this.
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