"Exert yourself in every direction to earn men's good word, not with a view to rival others, but to surpass yourself."
— Cicero’s advice to his brother Quintus, who had become governor of Asia (Cicero, Ad Quintum Fratrem, Book 1, Letter 1).
Hi! Lucas here.
In this dev diary, I’m going to cover the “high-level concept” for provincial administration in Historia Realis. In other words, I'll talk about the experience that Historia Realis intends to provide to players in terms of being a governor, or of being in a governor's staff.
I won’t get into specific mechanics — instead, I’ll talk about my historical research, design goals and the “pre-production” of my prototype for this system. Next time, I’ll cover the actual prototype, and that diary will have lots of examples and images. But this one is all text, no pretty pictures. Still interesting stuff, I think!
I’ll focus on the administration of “peaceful” provinces here, sometimes called permanent or territorial provinces — those that had already been conquered and just needed maintenance. War and conquest will be left for another time.
A fancy new banner!
Mistakes I Tried to Avoid
I've had to kill a few sacred cows — or sacred geese, if we’re sticking to the Roman theme — in order to create a historically accurate experience.
Without studying the history, there are many naive approaches to systems design that I could’ve taken. Here are a few common strategy gaming tropes, and why it would be a mistake to implement them:
Common mechanics that would be a mistake | The reality of things |
|---|---|
ːsteamthumbsdownː Building: The player would be able to construct and “level up” several buildings. | ːsteamthumbsupː Roman republican governors had no substantial treasury, and did not commission or initiate many public works, if any. |
ːsteamthumbsdownː Recruitment: You’d have a variety of “troop types” to choose from and compose your army. | ːsteamthumbsupː Troops in Roman provinces were either garrisoned legions assigned by the Senate, legions assigned to a specific war, or local militia. Either way, the governor had no meaningful way of increasing the number of troops — at least not as a rule. There were exceptions, like Caesar in Gaul. |
ːsteamthumbsdownː Economy: You’d produce, sell and buy different resources: food, wood, stone and such. You’d also set and collect taxes, and increase your revenue in order to build more buildings and recruit more troops. | ːsteamthumbsupː The economy was mostly in the hands of the locals and the publicani, private contractors. Taxes were collected by the publicani and sent directly to Rome, not going through the governor. Building contracts were assigned in Rome to the publicani, not by the provincial governor. |
Other common tropes are tech trees, diplomacy, moving troops in a map, etc.
All these elements can —and probably will— show up in some form. They’re not entirely out of place and wrong. But, when making the core of a new system, I have to think of the general rule rather than the exceptions, and what matches historical evidence.
These tropes also miss some important aspects: local autonomy, law, order and corruption. And they don’t capture what it was like to be a Roman governor.
What I did instead
I took a first principles approach, and ignored gaming tropes. My question was: what was the experience of being a governor actually like? What choices did one have to make? And what mechanics better convey that experience?
The mechanics I’ve arrived at so far are not things like “spend 100 gold to build a winery” or “move troops from here to there”. But something much more interesting — at least to me.
An (Optional) Note On Realism vs Fun
I had written here about realism and fun, but it was a bit of a long digression so I removed it. The TLDR is: a game can be both ‘realistic’ and fun, and I’m aiming for both. I'll make the full text available on our Discord server, so join us if you want to read more on that!
Being a Roman Governor — An Overview
Historian Peter Brunt points out four main tasks of provincial government, to which I added some specific examples:
Finances
Conducting the census.
Auditing provincial accounts.
Taxation (during the Republic, mostly collected by publicani or locals and sent to Rome, therefore not paid to the governor nor to the province, but still his responsibility).
Law
Settling disputes.
Touring the cities to make legal decisions.
Receiving petitions.
Management
Supervising the staff.
Supervising local government and councils.
“Networking” with local elites and publicani.
Defence
Taking care of internal order.
Building and maintaining forts, walls, supplies.
Commanding troops when necessary.
There was a lot more, of course, and for that I recommend his book:
P. A. Brunt - Roman Imperial Themes. Oxford University Press (1990).
The Appointment of a Governor
Generally, provinces would be assigned a random governor from a list of current and former consuls and praetors. This process was called sortitio.
However, this is Roman history we’re talking about, so of course it was more complicated in practice! Active consuls were more likely to get provinces with wars. The Senate would sometimes assign them directly by name and not by random lot. Other times, an assigned magistrate would trade his posting with someone else (famously, Cicero yielded his assignment as governor of Macedonia to Antonius Hybrida in exchange for favors).
But I won’t go deep into this here, as the focus here is on provincial administration and not allocations, so I’ll just recommend this fantastic book on the subject:
David Rafferty - Provincial Allocations in Rome (123-52 BCE). Franz Steiner Verlag (2019).
The Governor’s Staff
"You must keep your eyes open and vigilant, in order that in the guardianship of your province you may be considered to vouch to the allies, the citizens, and the state, not for yourself alone, but for all the subordinates of your government. However, you have in the persons of your legati men likely to have a regard for their own reputation."
— Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus
The governor wasn’t alone. There were apparitores, minor civil servants, and more. But I’ll focus on the big fish, the inner circle of the governor:
Legates
(Senior officers)
The Governor chose a few legates, who were his secretaries or military officers in times of war. Some sources say there were often 3 legates, but the number varies.
They were often friends of the governor, and this was to be expected. The Romans saw no problem in a governor taking his friends to help him in his assigned province. It was only natural, he needed men he could trust.
Prefects
(Junior officers)
These were younger men (usually between 17 and 30) who gained experience in the provinces. They were chosen from the network of clients of the legates and the governor, and were often family members (sons, nephews, sons-in-law, etc).
There were several kinds of junior officers under the legates and the governor himself. I’ve settled on the word Prefect over the word Tribune to avoid confusion with the office of Plebeian Tribune, which was held only at the city of Rome itself. Sometimes the word comites also shows up in reference to them.
The Quaestor
One elected Quaestor was randomly assigned to each province to serve under the governor there.
This man was the second-in-command of a province, and probably ensured that Roman interests were taken care of, counterbalancing the “nepotism” of the rest of the staff. At least in theory.
I said no pretty images, but here's one: character stats, an important aspect of staff selection.
The Powers in a Province
"But while you resist, as you do, money, pleasure, and every kind of desire yourself, there will be a risk of your not being able to suppress some fraudulent banker or some rather over-extortionate tax-collector!"
— Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus
The special ingredient in drama is conflict. And for conflict, you need opposing forces, or at least forces with conflicting interests.
The governor and his staff were not the only powerful people in a province. These were the 3 groups and their responsibilities:
1. Governor and Staff
Represented Rome and had the responsibilities I already outlined: finances, law, management and defence. They could make extraordinary requests on the provincials, and execute anyone they judged guilty, and could, in theory, rule as an absolute despot. However, this total power was checked by them having to return to Rome after their term and possibly face prosecution and exile.
Sometimes, completely honest and competent men would face prosecution and exile, just because they had enemies in Rome. See the case of Publius Rutilius Rufus.
2. Local Elites
These could be called civitates or peregrini, though these words have more specific meanings. Each city or community had their own, and their role in the province was either to work autonomously for their own aims or to appeal to the governor if necessary — perhaps to settle a dispute, or ask for economic relief, which would often come from other nearby communities, urged by the governor.
3. The Publicani
They were rich men who organized themselves in companies (societates publicanorum). They had bid for public contracts in Rome, and now were in the province to fulfill those contracts, either to collect taxes or to build and maintain public works (ports, roads, acqueducts…). Like the Monty Python quote goes, “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
They were members of the equestrian order (equites), and probably the richest among them. Sometimes richer than Senators, but, since they were directly involved in business, they couldn’t be in politics (the line was blurry, but that was the idea).
There was a tension between the Roman governors and the publicani, as the latter were incentivized to extract as much resources from the province as possible, and the former had to try to stop them. That’s because of how Roman taxation worked. Rome would estimate how much a province would yield in taxes for the next 5 years, and then these private companies would bid for the right to collect those taxes. Then, the contractors would go to the province and collect everything they could, in order to make their money back, and hopefully some profit — or a lot of profit, if they could really milk the provincials.
In other words, Rome didn’t collect its provincial taxes. Rome sold the rights to collect those taxes to private citizens and was paid beforehand by them, and then the contractors would collect whatever they could from the provincials in order to fill their own pockets. A rather strange system, but one that worked for them during the Republic!
The governor was a balancing force, preventing the publicani from exploiting too much — sometimes. Other times, governors would get bribed to help the publicani do the milking. See Verres in Sicily. But generally, the governor had little incentive to help the publicani collect too much, since those taxes would be pocketed by the publicani themselves, and not by the governor nor by Rome. At the same time, it was the governor’s implied threat of violence, through his control over the provincial army, that ensured that the publicani could demand taxes in the first place.
Between the publicani and the locals, there was a more obvious tension: the publicani were tax collectors first and foremost, so they were generally despised.
Here are a couple of authors that really helped me understand these dynamics:
Ernst Badian - Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman Republic. Blackwell (1972).
James Tan - Competition Between Public and Private Revenues in Roman Social and Political History. Columbia University (2011).
James Tan - Power and public finance at Rome (264-49 BCE). Oxford University Press (2018).
Design Goals
Whenever I’m making a prototype or implementing a feature, I like to have clarity on the problem I’m trying to solve. Otherwise, it’s easy to get lost in iterating forever, and not knowing if I’m making things better or worse. So let’s look at some goals to measure the success of the prototype against.
Design Pillars
These have always been my 3 priorities for this game:
Historical Realism: The game cares deeply about history.
Deep Simulation: Non-arcadey gameplay, whatever that means.
Emergent Stories: Characters are alive, and their lives are interesting.
As such, any sub-system needs to follow the guidelines above.
You can sign up for the alpha HERE!
Those pillars have always been displayed on the game's site, linked above.
Province Prototype Design Goals
With those in mind, here are my other, more particular goals for this specific prototype:
The mechanics are realistic representations of Roman provincial management. But they don’t have to be boring just because of that. To use a better word, the mechanics are good representations.
The mechanics are light, yet impactful. What’s there in the core mechanics are the most important elements. The content will handle exceptions, complexity and edge cases — the core mechanics will stay light.
It’s easy to play, and meaningful (not necessarily hard) to master. By meaningful I mean that mastering the system means that you can come back to it again and again and derive different meanings and stories from it. By easy to play, I mean that it’s not convoluted, and interactions are simple but have deep consequences.
It fits into the bigger game. Even though I’m prototyping separately from the rest, kind of like making a standalone game, I need to think of the spaces where this sub-system will interact with the whole.
No % chances of success. This one is a personal thing. I want to make careful use of RNG, and prefer “input randomness” over “output randomness”. That is, randomness should happen before the player makes a choice, not after. To make up an example: instead of a coin flip to decide an outcome, you flip 5 coins and then decide how to use them. This way, there’s still randomness to create interesting situations, but you get to direct it.
Player Experience Goals
Taking a player-centric approach, I also came up with these goals:
Experience what it was like: The theme of provincial management is not incidental, but central. You’re not just moving numbers around, optimizing them and not seeing what thematic meaning they have. Each player interaction tells a story: what it was really like to be a Roman administrator in a province.
Be your own kind of Governor or staff member: You’re able to roleplay as the kind of governor you want to be. Be corrupt or clean. Work hard or slack off. Help the locals or the tax collectors. There is plenty of space for self-expression.
The province is alive: Things are happening without you. You can participate, or you can be hands-off. Others are not waiting on you, they’re doing their own thing. But you’re still a part of it, and you can influence how things go.
What This All Means
Historia Realis is meant to be a drama-filled experience of emergent narrative.
Changing the tax rate from 6% to 7% to gain +50 gold is not very dramatic, and wouldn’t fit the design goals, nor the subject matter. Therefore, it’s not a mechanic.
There is a lot of granularity that would be possible to do, but that does not deliver the intended experience. Whenever I catch myself wanting to implement something just for the sake of it, without delivering on the promised experience, I stop myself and try to find an implementation that gives the player more bang for their buck.
Other Elements
Corruption
"The better a man is, the less he suspects others of being bad."
— Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus
Corruption was a major problem in the provinces, not only perpetrated by the publicani and the governors, but also by the local elites.
I’ve given corruption an important role — I think I’ll dedicate a whole dev diary to it later. For now, I’ll just say it’s a pretty cool mechanic and you can either be corrupt or fight corruption, and much more! It’s not just a -10% yield modifier or something silly like that.
Provincial Revolts (and their lack)
Roman republican provinces were quite stable. You might expect the provinces to be trying to free themselves from Roman rule quite often, but that wasn’t the case. If we look at this list, there are a few early revolts in Italy, and then the following revolts are generally fought to gain Roman citizenship rather than to secede.
There are slave revolts and civil wars, but virtually no provincial revolts, considering the centuries of Roman rule. The notable exceptions seem to be Hispania (Iberian Revolt, Numantine War, 1st and 2nd Celtiberian Wars) and Gaul. Towards the Principate, we also see revolts in Egypt, Thrace and Judea. But I’ll not get into the Empire right now, as I’m focusing on the Republican system. Regardless, those are still quite few in my view!
With this general lack of provincial revolts, I’ve decided not to model them in my initial protoype — yet. What I tried to convey was the core of provincial administration first, and exceptions (like revolts) will be added later.
What else I left out
Some things were intentionally left out of my initial design. Like I said above, first I’m designing the general rule, and then I’ll cover exceptions. As books sometimes say, “this page intentionally left blank”.
Here’s some of what I left out:
Warfare, conquest and revolts (as explained above).
Roman Colonization and the relations between locals and Roman colonists (thanks to community member Cicer Tarquini on our Discord for sending me some great material on this subject!).
Content, especially flavor to bring actions to life and differentiate provinces from each other. I have a planned Provincial Situations mechanic to tackle this later.
Special provinces like Italy or Egypt, and what made them unique.
The gradual increase of ownership of land in the provinces by Roman citizens, displacing locals.
You can expect these aspects to get more attention later on.
Final Words
And that's my high level concept, or pre-production document, or whatever you want to call it, for provincial administration. Which is an important step, an "ideal" that will allow me to judge the prototype and whether it's hitting the design goals set here. Next time, I'll bring you the actual prototype!
Thanks! Especially if you’ve read the whole thing — I really appreciate it. Here’s what else you can do:
And wishlist Historia Realis!
View game pageThanks!
— Lucas