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Municipalities and Governing System


DecoyGoatBomb

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Hey All,

 

I think DU is a game that could do justice to a system based around municipalities and governing. This may sound like an overreach of the free play nature of the game but I think the extremely capable playerbase will be hamstrung without these type of options. I will break it down some suggestions tier by tier:

 

-Cities- (Mayorship)

Facilities: city core unit, power, lights and respawn hub

Commerce: unlinked market terminals and sales tax

Zoning: city blocks, streets and zone based taxes, mining rights

Policing: street level defensive structures for preventing violence in the city

 

-Territories- (Governorship)

Facilities: banks (terminals), warehouses (large vault style containers), trade hub (planetary terminals), planetary transportation

Commerce: Import tax, city trade deals, industrial incentives

Zoning: ability to claim adjacent territories with city progression instead of a physical territory units

Policing: Major ground defenses to prevent outside aggresion

 

-Planetary- (Lordship)

Facilities:  One specialized core unit chosen from a list

(Large Scale Shield, Trade Center, Senate, Industrial Center), Spaceport (interplanetary transport)

Commerce: Trade Center (interplanetary terminals), Org trade deals

Zoning: Sanctuary zones, Conflict zones (within your influence and population)

Policing: Planetary defense (Large Scale shields), Large anti-air defenses

 

I know this is not all necessarily easy especially when you get to the Planetary tier. I believe some of the things in the first two tiers are very beneficial to having a meaningful player city experience. I would like to clarify a few things that may seem vague or odd. I know the idea of transportation hubs is odd when you have vehicles and spaceships but the idea is it to be a very fast way to travel from point A to B (at a steep cost) rather than physically traveling all that way. With such a large map this would incentive players to at the least pass through cities and traveling via personal ship would still have a place as you would only be able to travel with your character with this system. This would also generate a need for spacport adjacent ship storage. In my experience as a mayor in SWG this created a more interactive player population. Another thing that may seem odd is giving seemingly military facilities and roles to a municipal power but I tried to keep it to policing and defense as that is something a city does in real life. Lastly, I know some may see this and think this would take away the ability to build custom facilities and everything would become to uniform but most things in this list would be implemented into the game world via a core unit that could be supported by terminals and other types of units that would be linked to the core unit. Two examples of this would be a "city core unit" would be where you manage all of the linked city facilities including power, lights taxes etc... another example would be a "Trade Center" would have a core unit that would be required but then you can also attach additional terminals. From this you can physically make a voxel based building to fit whatever form you would like.This is just some ideas so please feel free to add or take away anything. The main goal is to keep it simple as I know designing and implementing systems like this is very difficult. Happy to discuss in the comments.

 

 

 

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On 4/5/2019 at 3:28 PM, DecoyGoatBomb said:

Hey All,

 

I think DU is a game that could do justice to a system based around municipalities and governing. This may sound like an overreach of the free play nature of the game but I think the extremely capable playerbase will be hamstrung without these type of options. I will break it down some suggestions tier by tier:

 

-Cities- (Mayorship)

Facilities: city core unit, power, lights and respawn hub

Commerce: unlinked market terminals and sales tax

Zoning: city blocks, streets and zone based taxes, mining rights

Policing: street level defensive structures for preventing violence in the city

 

-Territories- (Governorship)

Facilities: banks (terminals), warehouses (large vault style containers), trade hub (planetary terminals), planetary transportation

Commerce: Import tax, city trade deals, industrial incentives

Zoning: ability to claim adjacent territories with city progression instead of a physical territory units

Policing: Major ground defenses to prevent outside aggresion

 

-Planetary- (Lordship)

Facilities:  One specialized core unit chosen from a list

(Large Scale Shield, Trade Center, Senate, Industrial Center), Spaceport (interplanetary transport)

Commerce: Trade Center (interplanetary terminals), Org trade deals

Zoning: Sanctuary zones, Conflict zones (within your influence and population)

Policing: Planetary defense (Large Scale shields), Large anti-air defenses

 

I know this is not all necessarily easy especially when you get to the Planetary tier. I believe some of the things in the first two tiers are very beneficial to having a meaningful player city experience. I would like to clarify a few things that may seem vague or odd. I know the idea of transportation hubs is odd when you have vehicles and spaceships but the idea is it to be a very fast way to travel from point A to B (at a steep cost) rather than physically traveling all that way. With such a large map this would incentive players to at the least pass through cities and traveling via personal ship would still have a place as you would only be able to travel with your character with this system. This would also generate a need for spacport adjacent ship storage. In my experience as a mayor in SWG this created a more interactive player population. Another thing that may seem odd is giving seemingly military facilities and roles to a municipal power but I tried to keep it to policing and defense as that is something a city does in real life. Lastly, I know some may see this and think this would take away the ability to build custom facilities and everything would become to uniform but most things in this list would be implemented into the game world via a core unit that could be supported by terminals and other types of units that would be linked to the core unit. Two examples of this would be a "city core unit" would be where you manage all of the linked city facilities including power, lights taxes etc... another example would be a "Trade Center" would have a core unit that would be required but then you can also attach additional terminals. From this you can physically make a voxel based building to fit whatever form you would like.This is just some ideas so please feel free to add or take away anything. The main goal is to keep it simple as I know designing and implementing systems like this is very difficult. Happy to discuss in the comments.

 

-Skylark

 

 

 

This seems like a cool idea, and I get the benefits of zoning for certain areas. However, I also think that this is hard to implement, and realistically we are probably just going to be looking at a kind of universal system for claiming land, using it, etc. Hopefully though, some of your ideas can be implemented. I especially like the idea about trade centers, as the idea of trade and potentially free trade zones (if they are even necessary) could exist. 

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Thanks!

1 hour ago, Caesares said:

This seems like a cool idea, and I get the benefits of zoning for certain areas. However, I also think that this is hard to implement, and realistically we are probably just going to be looking at a kind of universal system for claiming land, using it, etc. Hopefully though, some of your ideas can be implemented. I especially like the idea about trade centers, as the idea of trade and potentially free trade zones (if they are even necessary) could exist. 

As far as the difficulty of implementing zones... I would suggest using something based off of the "Line Tool" to create geometric area within the influence of a TU, STU or a large City core unit. Having these zones would allow for so much meaningful interaction on a city/nation level. Honestly it could also be done with a core unit ex. a "Trade Zone core unit" (trade centers, sales tax) or a "Mining Zone core unit" (mining rights, industry taxation) Each would give actionable options for the one running the city and for the one who owns the plot. The biggest unknown is the skill system and how diverse it will be. If there is a branch for trading, city buliding, industry etc... this should be possible but if it is just one tree that has linear tech unlocks maybe not. Let me know what you think. 

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In don't find the Youtube video, but they where saying that they will create templates for organisation, such as guild, pirate or democracy. But they were just templates, and the system allow you full customisation of rights and obligations. Wich make most elements of your proposition possible, if you combine them with right management.

 

But I don't think they would implement "city core unit", for a specify kind of organisation : The players will have to adapt their rules to the game mechanisms such as rights management of territory units. But this system is not optimum for larges organisation, so maybe adding a way to manage a network of territory unit ?

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The TU is essentially a "city core unit" anyway, I am just suggesting a modified version of it or even just adding functionality to it to make city specific decisions. I think the only real implimentation I'm looking for is to give you sub-territory control via zoning and linking to choose how your city functions beyond territory wide rights and obligations. I would like there to be "good cities" and "bad cities" depending on the skill progression and strategy of the player/org.  

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Since we will have the basic frameworks given to use, we just need to add some more user-created definitions and poof, we have 99% of what you suggest. We just have to do some of the leg work ourselves and everyone's parameters will be slightly different.

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On 4/15/2019 at 9:36 PM, Context said:

Since we will have the basic frameworks given to use, we just need to add some more user-created definitions and poof, we have 99% of what you suggest. We just have to do some of the leg work ourselves and everyone's parameters will be slightly different.

For sure. I think simple tools can go a long way with our input and colaberation. It would be interesting of some LUA be used to augment city management. 

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Even without LUA though we can simply manually enforce rules. Theoretically, some groups could already be manually enforcing rules to good effect. Having items and code just makes it easier to manage, though might be a near requirement for many once we begin to heavily industrialize and small metropolis' begin to show up.

 

I don't think we will ever have something which can do this for a whole planet, some of this speculation cannot be shared due to NDA though.

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On 4/18/2019 at 10:00 AM, Context said:

Even without LUA though we can simply manually enforce rules. Theoretically, some groups could already be manually enforcing rules to good effect. Having items and code just makes it easier to manage, though might be a near requirement for many once we begin to heavily industrialize and small metropolis' begin to show up.

 

I don't think we will ever have something which can do this for a whole planet, some of this speculation cannot be shared due to NDA though.

Honor system among gamers. Nothing could go wrong :D

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11 hours ago, DecoyGoatBomb said:

Honor system among gamers. Nothing could go wrong :D

We need to erase this before New Genesis find it !

 

function DeusVult()

   if planet.intruder.heretic() then

      planet.intruder.purge()

   end

end

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On 4/24/2019 at 11:40 PM, DecoyGoatBomb said:

Honor system among gamers. Nothing could go wrong :D

Who said anything about honor. Break the zoning rules or building code and get charged with a fine enforced by cold ruthless authoritarianism. Sure you can move to a different metropolis but moving all your stuff is going to be more expensive than following the local rules. Of course, if you are a mage corporation already located in every major player created city then you are just losing out on business. Long term greed and profits will keep peace and least for the smart players.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is cool on a broad scale... But I'm not too sure about the policing limitations. I think people shouldn't be restricted by what defences they can put up to defend themselves by some arbitrary mechanic. Really the cost of making, maintaining, and powering them should be the limitation.

 

Also the way I see a system like this is also includes a regulations type system for different organisations and governments:

Organisational Authority(Controls the organisation polices)

Local Authority controls Hex tiles or a space station(A city, Factory, whatever)

Regional Authority control Region Tiles(which are a collection of Hex tiles)

Global Authority controls the planet.

They are then able to create polices on other organisations who use their area. For example The Global Authority should be able to set policies which affect everyone on the planet. 

 

When Creating a New Policy

  1. Leaders Give it a name & Description
  2. Choose how the policy is applied(Forced, Citizens vote, Senate votes on it, city majors approve it etc)
  3. They then pick what Policy they want to change from a list and can insert the values.
  4. Its done.

 

What Kind of Policy changes should be available:

Trading: minimum/maximum price; generic tax on trading; specific tax on good or organisation; blacklist an organisation or product from trading(including galactic markets)

Production: ownership tax; tax production of a specific product; blacklist production of a specific product

Ownership: Tax on land ownership; capital gains tax; Income Tax; Death Tax

Governmental: Set regulations on voting etc.

 

How to avoid taxes:

  • Go to war with the taxer
  • Or leave

 

note:

Taxes should be applied as a markup so companies don't have to set prices based on them. They set a base price and then taxes are automatically added on top to the price.

 

Sorry for kind of high jacking the thread, but I think this falls under the thread tile "Municipalities and Governing System" as this is a "Governing System". If people feel like this should be its own thread I could do that.

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  • 1 year later...

Hi,

 

As i play SWG a long time ago, i really appreciate their town/politics mechanics, and it's something NQ could inspire of, and not only this part, they are a lot of "civilians/social" cool gameplay mechanics in this old game.( specially pre-NCU )

 

Anyway, i would propose some "simple" ( dev team will hate me until armageddon ) first mechanics related to market and urbanism we can inspire from swg :

 

in swg to open a shop , you have a personnal construct terminal attach to your home and you manage the right for all/guilds/individuals to enter and have trade and acess to a limited part of your home, actually you could partially manage it by rdms so we have the core entry, we only need an item ingame which is already planified i guess, and act as personnal ( and also maybe local ) market.

 

It could be, in my mind, a good idea to have the possibility to define "zone" inside our actual build zone of core and give access related to the policy, inside the building mode, and with different color we could define precisely this zone and use the same mechanics than actual selection tool but with no voxel.

 

Zone defined with large core could lead this way for example in definition of "highway in a city", residential zone, trade market, entertainement and so on.

 

with policy to org/individual by rdms and could also be use to define tax or whateveer economics as owner of the core we could define and use freely.

 

in this idea no need to make something restrictive against open pvp vision, it defines only things we can build and city building, despite my optimism i dont believe city with activities will emerge only based on player/orgs good will and without some sort of urban ingame mechanics to sustain it, but time will give us the answer :)....

 

sorry for my english and if something is not clear please be comprehensive, after all i'm just a frog !

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/11/2019 at 4:12 AM, Caesares said:

In my experience as a mayor in SWG this created a more interactive player population.

Market Districts are acting in a similar way to that of spaceports, terminals & shuttle ports in SWG in so far as they create a hub / bottle neck for players to have a greater chance of interaction. The ability to grow player owned cities and get to build functional structures like shuttle-pads brought with them the same player interaction opportunities for player built cities in SWG.

In relation to DU, apart from it not having the ability to have an automated in game shuttle service, though with Lua it is arguably possible. I believe the game already provides an organisation the ability to build there own shuttle pads and shuttle craft etc. Perhaps however there could be, at some time in the future an additional element added to the game that could allow two or more groups of territories deemed large enough to be cities, the ability to create an automated transport service to each other. Not necessarily owned by the same player organisation.

I do like the idea of some sort of attainment system related to organisational territorial ownership which provides levels of progression and there own item / element unlocks or mini-game mechanics. Geographically one based on traditional village, town, city etc would seem good. Additionally in the future a similar politically linked attainment system within player owned organisations may add another aspect to the game.

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On 6/3/2020 at 2:43 PM, Cyber Odysseus said:

Market Districts are acting in a similar way to that of spaceports, terminals & shuttle ports in SWG in so far as they create a hub / bottle neck for players to have a greater chance of interaction. The ability to grow player owned cities and get to build functional structures like shuttle-pads brought with them the same player interaction opportunities for player built cities in SWG.

In relation to DU, apart from it not having the ability to have an automated in game shuttle service, though with Lua it is arguably possible. I believe the game already provides an organisation the ability to build there own shuttle pads and shuttle craft etc. Perhaps however there could be, at some time in the future an additional element added to the game that could allow two or more groups of territories deemed large enough to be cities, the ability to create an automated transport service to each other. Not necessarily owned by the same player organisation.

I do like the idea of some sort of attainment system related to organisational territorial ownership which provides levels of progression and there own item / element unlocks or mini-game mechanics. Geographically one based on traditional village, town, city etc would seem good. Additionally in the future a similar politically linked attainment system within player owned organisations may add another aspect to the game.

Knowing more about how the game mechanics are turning out I think this can all be done with an augmentation to TCUs.

 

Why not have a TCU be a player bound incorporeal object. This would be their one and only TCU. Once put down it can claim adjacent tiles overtime either through UI or with a smaller TCU extender item (that can only be placed adjacent to TCUs). Each additional tile would get exponentially harder to claim and maintain. This TCU's territory could be committed to an org or the player. The main TCU can be destroyed but after a cool down period it can be placed on an unclaimed territory. 

 

I think this encourages orgs to control zones rather than a patchwork of individual tiles. It allows for more territory (zone) based game mechanics. Also, this would allow individuals to have atleast one TCU that they will have throughout therir entire DU career. Just throwing it out there.

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