What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) or find out more on Steam page.
This dev diary is partially outdated. Populations in the game are now implemented mainly through actor mechanics.
Hello there!
After introduction of Views & Ideologies in the previous dev diary, today we take a quick look at holders of these beliefs: populations.
Common folk forms the backbone of historical simulation in Espiocracy. Representation of populations is tailored to the Cold War processes, such as migrations, conflicts, and decolonization. Role of the masses in the game can be summarized in two words: political impact.
Transcript: Population of a country is described by geographic distribution of ethnic groups which hold views and have parameters. Populations make history in elections, movements, influential actors, and participation in conflicts. They are affected by propaganda campaigns, history before 1946, crises, conflicts, policies, migration.
Population Distribution
Instead of provinces known from other grand strategy games, Espiocracy proposes area-based representation of world data. Currently, the design relies on population grids of cells 50 by 50 kilometers.
Transcript: Czechoslovakia is covered by 19 cells with different shades of blue, corresponding to population density.
Every cell - in addition to classic terrain modifiers, supplied by history and economy - contains number of people belonging to specific ethnic group. It allows fairly granular gameplay around internal conflicts: ethnic animosities within the same area, civil wars and local interaction with them, separatist campaigns with whole regions pressing for independence. At the same time, cells assist international conflicts, up to nuclear war and famous comparison of "dense and vulnerable USA" to "vast and hard to target USSR". (In case it's not clear: cells reside only in the population layer, borders won't be square-ish!)
Most populous places - capitals, aglomerations, industrial complexes - have special status of a population center. First and foremost, it defines them as locations of intelligence operations, providing different environments within the same country (for instance: West German Frankfurt in comparison to West Berlin). Moreover, they play important role in conflicts - their takeover in a civil war can be a decisive event, loss in the conventional war is also significant (to mention again West Berlin, the game gives Soviets important reasons to capture the zone), and you can be sure that mutually assured destruction will target these places. In addition, population centers also play role in migrations, both internal (urbanization process) and external (foreign immigration to New York or Paris instead of countryside, advancing internationalization of large cities).
Population Groups
There are various possible ways to divide population - by occupation, wealth, religion. Espiocracy will divide populations by ethnicity (understood more widely than usual, that is including religion in certain regions).
Ethnic groups won't possess any innate parameters. They will be characterized by spatial and quantitative distribution, dictated by starting date of 1946 and ongoing simulation. Moreover, they will be compared on matrix of social proximity: any two given groups will have a single value, which attempts to summarize how close they are in terms of history, language, and culture. On the one hand, it is designed for espionage-focused gameplay (as in the old joke about an American spying in Russia). On the other hand, it will assist state-ordered discrimination, internal conflicts, assimilation, and decolonization struggles.
Activity
Populations do not have any kind of unrest parameter. Instead, their discontent is represented organically by views. But how do they translate views into political impact, apart from elections if they happen to live on the democratic side of the world?
Activity of the population is distilled into active entities, called influential actors. An actor can be anything that has concrete goals, agenda, possible actions, and - as the name suggests - real influence. In the context of population, influential actors can be:
- campaigners
- movements
- trade unions
- terror groups
- guerilla groups
- political leaders
Any of them can directly emerge from population - especially in times of crises and conflicts. This is the most important part of the gameplay: influential actors are an absolute core of Espiocracy, the most central element, on which relies the simulation and with which the player constantly interacts - and there will be more than one whole dev diary dedicated to them.
Coming back to elections, political parties are also influential actors. Their support by the population is primarily materialized in elections, but autocracies also can be politically active - for instance, banned ideologies and political parties can still function in the underground. Details of parties as a special case of an influential actor are coming in two weeks.
Final remarks
The next dev diary - "Political parties" - will be posted on September 3rd.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
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"The liberal reward of labour, as it is to the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population" - Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations