Culture, Sway, and Discord

The economics of FATES has already been addressed, but I wanted to address in more detail the non-combat mechanics for changing planetary ownership.  The three primary factors in determining civic planetary ownership are culture, sway, and discord.

Culture, in FATES, is an abstract representation for the racial properties of a given player's populace.  Racial properties such as individualistic, industriousness, taxonomy, and subterranean dictate what types of planets that player empires can colonise and how their populace grow and develop.  Since the culture is both a physical and abstract property, players will have the option of eventually ending up with mixed culture empires, or they can maintain the cultural purity of their own racial archetype.  Each option will present opportunities and challenges.  If the player pursues a multicultural strategy, they will suffer from increased discord on planets not in line with the dominant culture in the empire due to sheer cultural differences.  However, one also gains the benefits of additional culture's positive and negative attributes at those same planets.  Player's who retain cultural purity will have much less discord to deal with due to uniformity of thought and action, but they also lose access to any of the traits from foreign cultures.  As a physical property, players will also be able to trade planets or colony ships with your particular culture to other players in order to allow them to colonise non-optimal planet types in their region of space.

The discord factor, mentioned briefly before, is a key game mechanic that allows planets to change allegiance between various player empires in the game.  Discord is a measurement of a planetary population's unhappiness with the current regime.  The discord exists to enable non-military options for transferring planetary ownership in lieu of raw military invasion and takeover.  The discord is tracked as a whole number ranging from zero to one hundred.  The discord matters most significantly when it exceeds 80, since that is when a planet will officially begin a revolt to divorce itself from the present owner.  When the discord on a given planet reaches 90, the planet will swap allegiance to the next highest sway player empire and significantly reduce the discord to give that player a chance to stabilize the political situation on their newly acquired planet.  The factors that get fed into the discord number include things like taxation rate, food rations, proximity to allied and friendly planets, presence of allied or friendly troops or fleets, presence of allied or friendly counter-intelligence officers, presence of subversion agents, sway divergences, economic prosperity, unemployment, and military conflicts taking place near or at the planet.  All of these factors will play into a planet's discord and thus into the ability of enemies to flip planets' allegiances.  The discord will also play into tax compliance, with the tax compliance decreasing as the discord exceeds 40.

The prime determining factor when a planet changes allegiance due to revolt is sway.  The sway is a measure of the relative cultural and political influence of a given player empire on a given planet.  The sway exists to incentivise territoriality by increasing the difficulty of maintaining far flung colonies away from a player's main territory.  The sway is calculated at every point in space and radiates out from each planet that a player owns decreasing exponentially with distance.  The sway values for each planet will overlap creating increased sway within a player's territory and making lone colonisation efforts difficult for enemies.  This should encourage player's to keep their territory as contiguous as possible and prevent enemies from dropping hostile colonies into the middle of any given player or federation's territory.  The sway divergence, as a factor in the discord, will eventually cause such a lone planet to revolt and join the dominant empire of the area, unless it is supported by significant military forces to enforce law and order of the enemy empire.  One of the properties of a federation, with regard to sway, is collectivised sway values that operate at a multiplier for all federation members.  The amplified federation sway will help to maintain order within a federation and disincentivise players, especially key members, from leaving a federation.  If a player is deep within a federation's territory and leaves the federation, their planets on the borders will suffer from increased discord, potentially revolting from them and joining the nearest federation member.

All of these factors should allow the non-military player to wield leverage over militaristic players, and help them to compete on par with the military play style paradigm players.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out