Importance of the different legitimacy sources
More details about how Legitimacy actually works:
There is several “sources” of legitimacy : legitimacy from religiosity, legitimacy from people’s approval, legitimacy from the Senate etc…
Many policies affect a certain type of legitimacy. For instance, enabling the Senate through the power policy “Senate” obviously increases the Legitimacy from Senate stat.
But a legitimacy source doesnt necessarily have any effect. It will depend on your active Legitimacy policies: these define your “claims” to power.
Each legitimacy policy modifies the ‘importance’ of each different source of legitimacy. It can also turn one source into having a negative effect on your final Legitimacy.

For instance: one source is called legitimacy from the leader’s superiority. It represents how superior your leader(s) are perceived in contrast to the commoners. The wealth of the Leaders class compared to the average population is what mostly defines the value of this source.
If you enable the “Divine leader” legitimacy policy ( claiming to be ruling as a god ), then this source will have a positive effect on your final Legitimacy, and it will be best to try to increase it by having your leader(s) as rich as possible.
On the other hand if you enable the “People’s representative” one ( claiming to be ruling in name of the people ), then this source will actually be inverted and have a negative effect on your final Legitimacy.
Nothing prevents you from enabling contradicting legitimacy policies like these 2 together, but it will tend to neutralize all sources, resulting in a very low final Legitimacy.
However having an illegitimate power will not be the end of the world as long as you’ll have enough military authority to repress any unrest.
The finality of State Legitimacy is to be a factor in the calculation of a region’s Loyalty, among other things. Low loyalty will lead to unrest and rebellion.

State Power
I’ve added and implemented State power. It is in a way what Administration is to local regions: the ability of the state to manage and do things.
State Power is mainly produced by the different active Power policies. For now it’s only consumed by one thing : all policies cost State power to be maintained.

All policies implemented
I have finished implementing the effects of all the planned policies so far.
I’ve also added 2 new Power ones : Ministry and Parliament.
While the Senate is good if you claim to rule for Common-good, Parliament is good to improve your legitimacy as a People’s representative. Both will eventually get their own special buildings.
A Ministry is a less costly and polyvalent institution providing a decent amount of State power.

 

 

 

The resource menu gives all the details regarding a specific resource in a region.

Price details
On the right, the menu gives  you details about the pricing of the resource and allows you to understand why it costs this amount of coins.
Several factors defines a resource final price.
– Market study is the base factor. It’s the ‘ideal price’ estimated by the merchants of this resource to make the highest income selling it, studying who wants this resource and what’s their purchasing power.
They also consider what industries consume the resource and what they do with it: If an industry produces a highly priced product out of their material, the merchants will also raise their market price.
– Supply/demand factors are how the prices are affected by competition. Either competition between merchants ( higher offer -> lowers prices ) or between clients ( higher demand -> increases prices ). Its separated between the Market one ( population ), and the industrial one ( industries using this resource as a material for production ).
– State supply/demand is the influence of the player on the resource price. Consuming a large amount of it at once, leaving the stocks empty, will increase prices.
– Production cost is the influence of … production cost on the resource price. The price of a resource will always increase to ensure a minimum +1 benefit to those trading it, so if a resource costs 8 to produce, its minimum price will always be 9. If that resource was supposed to cost 6 so far, the ‘production cost’ effect on price would then be 3, to ensure this minimum of 9.
Might have to rename that though, to avoid confusion with the actual production cost.
The actual production cost is the average cost of the different required materials to produce one unit of the resource, and is only for resources produced by industries.
If it takes 2 units of clay to produce 1 pottery and the price of clay is 2, then the production cost of Pottery is 4. Here because the resulting price is 15 anyways, production cost therefore as no effect on the final price.

Resource production and consumptions
As you can see this menu details all the different sources of incomes and outcomes of a selected resource. There you can check things like its production cost, or the amounts supplied and demanded by both population and industries .

Storage policies
I’ve implemented and added 3 storage policies. Each resource type can have its own storage policy.
A storage policy defines a general rule for stocking that resource:
The default one allows the resource to be stocked in any available storage building.
The “only in restricted” one means the resource will only be allowed in storage buildings specifically allowing this resource. They will not go in non-restricted ‘universal’ storage buildings. If there is no room, the resource is destroyed. This way you can now avoid having a single resource spamming all your ‘universal’ warehouses and make sure it only goes in the ones you created specifically for it.
And at last, the 3rd option simply forbids any stocking of the resource, if ever you need this for some reason. So any income left after distribution, exports and industries is simply discarded.

Also… Moving buildings
It’s finally possible to move buildings. For now its free and it just takes the time to rebuild the building elsewhere.

 

 

 

CUSTOM POLITICS

Finally i’ve started implementing new features to Ymir since the Alpha 1 prototype. I’ve designed and almost completed the implementation of ‘politics’, and also made this new government menu to manage it.
Politics are completely modular, and although that can create some confusions i’ll need to sort out with time.
You have a list of ‘policies’ organized in categories. Each policy has one or more effects.  The system is modular, so policies can be combined in any way you want.
On the left column you can see a summary of all the effects of all the currently active policies, and on the right you can manage each policy per category, add new ones or remove them.

You start only with default policies as active, and you’ll unlock new ones as you develop technologically.
You start as a “band society” with a “gift economy”. This matches the most primitive forms of societies : small famillial groups with informal leadership and where people exchange things without expecting immediate reward.
This isn’t translated ingame only with stats modifications, but also in gameplay itself: entire mechanics can be locked or unlocked by these policies. For instance in such a primitive society there is no “money”, meaning you have a state have no income but also no expenses, all resources are automatically available to everyone and there is no need for organized distribution through merchants and markets yet.
Then as you evolve you can enable new policies like the notion of “Fair exchange” , meaning that instead of giving everything for ‘free’ ( expecting later rewards ) , people now exchange things expecting immediate reward  ( exchanging things of ‘equivalent values’ to make it fair : barter economy ).
In some cases, the decision to enable some policies when they become available will be pretty much automatic like that one, because you can’t really expect to build a large society with a gift economy…  but well , actually nothing will prevent you to try if you want!
For now i’ve added about 20 policies in 4 categories : power, legitimacy, economy , social.

Power
Power is how you organize the exercise of power in your society. You’ll find policies allowing you to do things like appointing local chiefs in each region, governors in each city allowing you to form provinces, or having parliamentary structures like a Senate…

Legitimacy
Legitimacy is about why the leaders of your society claim they should rule.
You can rule because you claim beeing superior to others, because you’re a god, because you’re chosen by gods and rule in their name, because you rule for the common good in the name of the people or because you rule as a representative of the people.
You can combine these as you wish. These claims then define which variables are taken into account to compute the actual legitimacy of your government.
For instance if you claim to rule as a representative of the people but without having any parliament or anything actually representing the people, this will be an empty claim giving you no legitimacy. So you’ll need to decide why you rule but then also do what it takes to make it credible enough to actually get legitimacy.
Things linked to gods will depend highly of religion of course.
Things like claiming to be a living immortal god will also depend on how superior you look to your people. So having your leader living in a commoner’s house is probably not going to be a good idea… Instead, building massive monuments in his name like a Pharaoh is probably what you’ll want to do.

Economy
Then you can manage your economy : currency, taxes, coinnage, representative money etc.
These affect directly the economic simulation, like unlocking dynamic population wealth or dynamic prices, the fact you’ll have to pay for materials when building something or not, the ability to setup foreign trade routes, or how your stocks of gold ingots can provide wealth with the use of representative money…

Social
As for social policies, for now its just limited to deal with government members. There is 3 population classes for government members : leaders, nobles and officials. There’s usually only one leader in the capital. Nobles depend of your power policies: for exemple having “local authority” enabled means you assign one local chief to each region, and that will show up ingame as having one noble in the population or each region.
Officials are the lowest class of government employees, you’ll get these from state buildings having “officials” as workers.
As part of the government these classes don’t get any regular incomes but with social policies you can give them privileges (they’re directly awarded a portion of the region wealth) or a fixed salary… or both.

Highlight of the new building UI and resource production

 

Here is a screenshot of the new building UI, in this case for a production building.
I’m going to explain a bit what it tells us about this particular building.
The top part gives us general informations about the building while the bottom is specific to its role ( production ).

General infos
The building is a farm, and it currently costs 1 coin of maintenance. It has points of structure ( the building’s hp ) and solidity ( the building’s “armor” ).
On top right we have the currently available general functions : abandon the building, put it to sleep or tear it down. We see the building is currently functional, and employs 3 porcos as farmers.
On the bottom right of these general infos, we see there is one upgrade available to another farm building (details about the upgrade would pop up when putting the mouse over that button).

Then there’s the role specific UI on the bottom. Here its the UI of a production type building.
Its divided in 2 parts : production of resources and distribution of these resources.

Annexes
It also shows the available annexes for this building. Annexes are sub-buildings that belong to a main building.
In the case of this farm, we see it can build “field” annexes giving additional resource production, and you can choose what type of crops you want these fields to grow.
It can also build a distribution annex , the “barter area”, allowing to distribute produced goods directly to the population.

Production and distribution
We see 2 of the farmers are busy producing while the 3rd one is busy distributing, selling some of the production directly to the population using one built distribution annex.
The building is producing 0.9 of beans and 0.6 of corn, and all the beans are distributed by that 3rd porco . The remaining production (here the corn ) will go into granaries or be sold by merchants. Production is always expressed “per cycle”. A cycle can last a variable amount of real time depending on the game settings. If you’re playing in a persistent 24/7 game its likely to be 2hours while in a ‘realtime’ game it would be something more like a minut.
The building has an efficiency of 2. That depends of the building itself but eventually will also depend of techs, connection to roads and placement.
This, combined with the actual number of porcos producing, defines the actual workforce of the building ( 3 ). This workforce is used to work all the production sources available : 8 fields of beans, 9 fields of corn, and 29 wild beans in range of the farm. The 2 farmers are 100% busy working these and while the fields are properly exploited, we can see they don’t have enough workforce to also fully exploit the wild beans. To do that we’d need more workforce, so if we wanted we could upgrade the farm to increase its efficiency or put back the 3rd porco in production (but the farmers would lose the income of direct distribution which is higher than selling to merchants ).

Wealth
This farm is adding 9 to the total region wealth. Wealth produced by buildings is directly proportional to the amount of busy workforce of the building.
Total region wealth is then splitted between all the inhabitants of the regions depending on their respective incomes. A porco’s wealth defines its purchasing power and therefore the price of goods in the region (as merchants will continuously adapt to the available market), so its pretty important to increase it. Think of Wealth as some sort of objective unit of GDP.

Building destruction and destruction tools
It is now possible to filter what you want to destroy when using the destruction tool : terrain ( will clear trees and other natural things ), infrastructures ( will clear things like roads, walls built by player ) and buildings ( will trigger destruction of all buildings in the selected area ) by right-clicking on the tool. You can enable or disable each filter individually.
Also building aren’t destroyed instantly anymore. You can trigger destruction by clicking on “tear down” in the building’s menu or when using the destruction tool. The building enters a ” tearing-down” state that takes time,losing structure points progressively, and only disappears when the process is complete. When complete you recover half of its initial materials. The process can be cancelled before its complete.
Why this ? Mainly for multiplayer to avoid instant sabotage of cities where a player would erase its whole region in a second before its invaded. This doesnt mean i want to forbid players practicing this Russian strategy, but i eventually want it as a separate feature where you can set your whole city on fire. While a building properly teared down actually disapears and gives back some materials, a building violently destroyed becomes a burnt down ruin and remains on the terrain. It will still need to be teared down if you want to clear its space. Or you’ll be able to repair it at a lower cost. With this, repairing damages will be less of a hassle because coordinates and building types are preserved in these ruins, so you dont have to place again everything trying to remember how it looked. Eventually it will also be possible to trigger an auto-repair mode so damages are automatically repaired even if you’re offline.

New building : Flint collector
Stone tools now require a resource to be crafted : flints. And therefore there’s a new stone age building to produce flints (out of any gravely tiles). This building is  free as its one of the most basic buildings of the game.

Re designed fisherpig
I re designed the stone age fishing building to have a more unique visual identity.
Infrastructures
The placement of infrastructures ( roads ect… ) has been refined and repaired. Its now designed to later support a broader range of infrastructures (ex irrigation canals, walls, gardens etc ).

I’m now redesigning the production building’s UI to make it clearer to read, and refining all their functionalities (like annex placement).