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[Pilsu]

I really don't see why a friendless grunt in the military would attain such popularity

"Dwarves like stuff" isn't adequate for explaining an entirely social phenomenon. Legendary status in itself might count as a bunch of friends but ultimately you're gonna need to socialize to attain popularity

Children and young adults shouldn't count towards election at all, nor should those people make friends with the adults

[praguepride]

A friendless grunt probably wouldn't be in the running...probably.

Let's take two hypothetical candidates.

Candidate A (Mr. Social) has 10 friends, an AVG social score of 10 (arbitrary number), one legendary skill and no artifacts.

Candidate B (Mr. Military Grunt) has 0 friends, an AVG social score of 1 (he doesn't talk to anyone), an AVG Military score of 5 (remember, this will AVG even skills grunt has no point in) 2 legendary skills (legendary wrestler and swordsman), and no artifacts.

Candidate A has a "25" score while Mr. Military Grunt has "16". Friends and social scores count very highly towards the ratio. While Military scores DO count, it's naturally weighted against itself because it does ALL military skills. Not many dwarves get high ranks in EVERY military skill, usually they get wrestling, 1-2 other weapons, armor and shield (again maybe) which makes it inherently harder to gain a high AVG military score as opposed to social skills that get XP all the time the dwarf chats with his friend.

Military isn't the key to victory, social & friends are the big score earners. However, with the age/legendary skills/artifact/military skill bonus, it should weigh things more heavily towards older, established dwarves then just children who've made a bunch of friends. This way you don't have to set arbitrary limits (must be X years old to be elected) because there are many examples of incredibly young people being elected to positions of power because they just were that exceptional.

[Granite26]

dwarves aren't people...  It's entirely possible to envision a sect of dwarves picking their leader based purely on knowledge of their works of art.

It's not human, but it's possible.

Hence, list of things that might matter and weights based on personality (personality largely determined by culture and race, but also based on individuality)

[alpha]

Dwarven Meritocracy FTW.

[praguepride]

That might be an ideal "end game/development" idea, but that would require actually making personalities matter at this point. Do we want a short term placeholder that breaks ground for an eventual "realistic" system or do we want to just sit back with children being elected mayor for X months/years until the system is ready for a complex election system?

[Granite26]

fair enough, although IMHO, spending time coding a placeholder for a minor issue is silly

[praguepride]

It's called Iterative Development and is a popular coding strategy. Instead of trying to do everything at once (and never actually accomplishing anything) you do a little bit at a time.

So you start with a simple placeholder. You can see how it effects the game world, the players, and the overall Fun. When you (or players demand) that it gets more involved, you do a bit more. Test again to see if the system handles it.

Toady's style is this. He didn't set out and create everything at once. He's put in "placeholders" that work and provide test information that can slowly be expanded. So he started out with a static 2D world. Then he made it a bit more dynamic (temperatures, biomes). Then he made it 3-D with z-axis support.

"Little" incremental developments that are easy to finish in a couple of days/weeks but also help pave the way for more complicated systems at the same time. A placeholder evolves into a little more complicated placeholder and so on until voila, you've got your final product AND it's already been tested thoroughly because people have been using it for almost the entire development cycle, offering suggestions and feedback the entire time.

[Granite26]

I understand what your saying... It's just my opinion that what you're talking about either isn't incremental in the right direction, or is just a hardcoded case of what would be done in the full case.

I.E.  A * X + B * Y + C * Z isn't made more incrimental or easier to program if you hardcode ABC rather than put them in a script (raw) file.  (It also makes fine-tuning the values easier).

Unless I'm very much mistaken, VG development trends from general to specific, with the specifics added in as script definitions.

[praguepride]

I understand what your saying... It's just my opinion that what you're talking about either isn't incremental in the right direction, or is just a hardcoded case of what would be done in the full case.

I.E.  A * X + B * Y + C * Z isn't made more incrimental or easier to program if you hardcode ABC rather than put them in a script (raw) file.  (It also makes fine-tuning the values easier).

Unless I'm very much mistaken, VG development trends from general to specific, with the specifics added in as script definitions.

I never said not to make the customizable or to not put it in the RAW. I'm just talking about the formula in general. Also, while you can tweak the RAW's, you would need either have to make things complicated or you'd only be able to tweak the weights. Similar to advanced worldgen options now. You can tweak the weights and min/maxes of worldgen, but you can't input completely new variables.

[Granite26]

I'm not even sure what we're disagreeing about anymore

[praguepride]

I said to come up with a simple formula to balance out political elections in-game and you said that making it too simple is a waste of time. That was the last topical arguement from what I can tell.

[Granite26]

Oh, yeah, I stand by that... I don't see any reason to go to all the trouble to add in a bunch of variables into a formula and then force yourself to touch it again later because you hardcoded them or because you didn't put enough in in the first place...

My opinion though

[SirHoneyBadger]

I think it could be done in two basic parts (with a lot of additional bits): One for a "basic" political pundit process that'll be cross-species (as much as possible), and then separate variables--primarily for government type, secondarily for culture factors, and teritiarily for species factors (including factors for interculture/interspecies/interclass political processes.).

[LegoLord]

I really don't see why a friendless grunt in the military would attain such popularity

"Dwarves like stuff" isn't adequate for explaining an entirely social phenomenon. Legendary status in itself might count as a bunch of friends but ultimately you're gonna need to socialize to attain popularity

Children and young adults shouldn't count towards election at all, nor should those people make friends with the adults

Again, it is not as simple as you seem to think.

[Granite26]

I think it could be done in two basic parts (with a lot of additional bits): One for a "basic" political pundit process that'll be cross-species (as much as possible), and then separate variables--primarily for government type, secondarily for culture factors, and teritiarily for species factors (including factors for interculture/interspecies/interclass political processes.).

There's certainly no reason to think that race A wouldn't prefer someone of race B over another member of race A (or caste, or whatever)