Class, population, and building units

[Grimly]

I'm coming to this discussion a little late, but I have suggestions that, if developed in a remake or pushed to the limit in a mod, could lead to really significant improvements in the feel of the game. I have tried to apply them to my own mod but the possibilities are limited. You'd need a dual system of AI units and human units, with the AI effectively unable to upgrade units, or else really lame AI Houses.

My main point is that the universe of EFS, at least on the House planets, consists of a feudal system and society and that the game could and should better express this. I'm proposing that the populations of cities be divided into classes to the extent possible (or treated as such), and that these classes be treated as resources controlled by technology, harvested and consumed for units. This system could allow Houses to express their true personalities by the tech they choose. By it, Decados could raise cheap units from peasants for cannon fodder AND a few really powerful units from a tiny elite; Li Halan and Hazat could use religion to mobilize their armies, and Hawkwood and Al-Malik could rely on education and a relatively open society to produce flexible, loyal units drawn from the middle class. Each House would best develop a particular society and economy, and would benefit from particular units, thus leading to Houses that look and feel different.

(I envision 3 types of economies---food-heavy, metal-heavy, and oil-heavy---that would operate in combination and that each would fit particular tech branches, unit types, and city types.)

ASSUMPTIONS
(1) Economies are neither centralized (planned) nor fully differentiated (developed). That means that companies as we know them do not exist, but also that dictatorships are impossible. Houses only control House properties and resources, including peasants. Political systems parallel economies, being neither centralized nor democratic. The social context determines everything. Notice that cities come in types according to what they produce: that's because the people who live in each type of city (or run them) are different, not because they have been issued different orders.

(2) Technology is neither completely centralized nor diffused among your cities. Much technology is available and out there, but it must be collected and directed to be useful to a House. (There is a valley in Pakistan where artisans will hand-make you a high-quality copy of any gun, provided it is made of metal and has no electronic parts, but they can't make you a lot of bullets for them. The Pakistani government can neither stop this trade nor steal the technology because it is traditional.) A mine city can't start making guns and tanks until you develop the means of transmitting the knowledge of their making and of the assembly-line approach---of getting Factory tech, or industrial skill, to the Mine. Meanwhile, your factory cities have that knowledge---they can take materials and construct an assembly line to make whatever you know how to make. This is a social technology. Logically, you can only research those techs that you can keep control over---if you were to research Printing, for example, and use it to publish, it would immediately be dispersed across the Known Worlds and lose its value unless suppressed. EFS assumes that many techs are held in common, and these techs do not show up in the tree. That explains the well-known gaps in the tree---apparently humans have never forgotten rockets!

(3) Wars are not won by material but by people. How many games have you played in which all you need is metal and oil, if that, and you can crank out tanks and planes by the hundreds? The men who crew the tanks are invisible---where do they come from? where do they go? Your society does not produce unlimited numbers of identical people ready to jump on a starship like in a Heinlein novel---EFS is not WW2 or a myth of democratic cohesion nor a society of machines or fascist robots or fanatics---unless you develop those technologies of social control. That's why the Psychosocial Engineering branch exists, not just to train psy-warriors and religious fanatics, but to give you more control over your society.

(4) Technology is not simply a matter of allowing more-expensive and more-powerful units. It also allows previously expensive units to be built more cheaply---that's what the assembly line did for rifles. It may allow a specialized tech to be made general.


WHAT THIS MEANS:
Units should be drawn from different segments of the population according to resources, cash, location (local skills), technology (applied and general, including means of social control) and acording to the established character of that segment of society. EFS society contains: peasants, laborers, townsmen/educated, priests/educated, and aristocrats/warriors/educated (including House nobles). Where do these things come from in a futuristic feudal/semifeudal society, and how are subjects converted to spacegoing units in a manner reflecting the above assumptions? (For "educated" you may read "indoctrinated." The original house traits give you some idea of how each House's society is indoctrinated and the path of development it might optimally follow.)

Resources
Extracted by peasants and laborers (or by serfs, slaves, and convicts) according to universal knowledge in cities specialized to that purpose.

Cash
Taxes are raised from peasants, laborers, and townsmen. Tithes are raised by the religious and in my mod go to the Church (the owner of each cathedral). You need to learn to build Palaces and Cathedrals.

Medieval rulers were always looking for ways to raise cash for their campaigns. They taxed imports and exports, they declared and enforced monopolies; married up, down, in, and out; they demanded/extorted tribute from neighbors and the local Church; they stole and robbed from Jews. heretics, and merchants; they exterminated dissenters; they begged for donations; they made demands of their vassals; they traded favors for cash; they authorized people to steal colonies for them; they trolled for investors among the merchant class. (Loans from the League, since they don't really need to be repaid, can be treated as investments but anyone can get them. Unfortunate!)

In Subversion, Advisers bring in cash (not sure how, by advising i guess) and some transport units are used to raise cash on the side. I have come up with the Vassal, which is an Officer unit raised to a Noble in exchange for 500 FBs per year from the Officer's rich non-Noble or non-House uncle, or if you want, the Officer (whose family is rich) is married into the House. Whatever. The traits also cover some of this, both positive and negative. You could have a cathedral-built unit that draws pilgrims and donations from the religious. Holy Warrior tech could inspire donations to Preachers for your crusade; Dervishes could travel the worlds performing miracles. You could have a factory-built Efficency Expert who raises cash by saving you money. Any of these could allow you to raise an army or build and maintain a Dreadnought. Adding these units would allow either costs to increase or cash resources to be restricted, as AI Houses would be unlikely to build them. (I wish you could set the League to buy/sell at 50%/150%, not 90%/110%!!!)

Local skills
This means city type. Obviously certain cities concentrate certain skills. Harvesting cities don't build much but they can be made to with technology, and each city type can have a unit built only there. The game calls the population of all cities Peasants, but that is obviously wrong. City type should determine the population available: peasants in Farms, laborers in Mines and Wells and Chemplants; Factories and Fortresses would draw from the population in general, and cathedrals too. Palaces would draw from the elite.

Technology
Technology can change the relation between location, class, and unit. If peasants are inappropriate for raising a Star Legion because they are superstitious, untrainable louts, then raise them from workers and raise starship crews from townsmen. But if you research, say, Holy Warriors, then the problem disappears because you now know how to indoctrinate peasants into units ready to jump into space or crew starships. In the current EFS this would require 2 lines of star legion units with different sources and required technologies. One would need an infantry or conscript unit input and the other a peasant levy. The AI cannot be expected to build these units.

High tech is normally considered to be more expensive---and it is---but it has the ability to help you use your population more efficiently. You could build a regiment of infantry, or you could build a battalion of tanks, or you could build a company of Star Rangers---each one deadlier than the last, more mobile, and requiring ever fewer men.

Class
Took me long enough to get here, but here's the core idea. It would be great if each segment of your population increased slightly every year along with your taxes and resources according to how many cities you had of each type and their health, and if these populations could feed into units just like a resource such as metal. Then you could build a Star Legion in a fortress from your general Laborer population---drawn from your mines, wells, processing cities, and factories. Starship and tank crews could come from Chemplants and such---advanced production cities. Cities would lose a tiny percentage of residents each time you build a unit, and then heal at the normal rate. Cities could grow beyond 100%, allowing you to raise units without affecting your material economy. The basic system is already there in EFS. (I also wish Oil were consumed by mechanized units like Food---or instead of Food---but that's a different post.)

Without a remake, the only way to achieve this is to have nonmilitary, noncombat Peasant Levies bought with food from Farms and nonmilitary, noncombat Worker Levies bought with metal from Chemplants serving as input units for all non-noble and nontechnical units, each unit being upgradable according to social class and as your technology allows. The rest of the population would be assumed to be townsmen from resource processing cities, so that any unit lacking an input unit would be from that class (they would offer the best balance of being accessible, numerous, willing, and trainable.) Aristocrats would be assumed to build Officers, which ideally would then be inputs to most ships and aircraft. It could be done. But (a) the AI Houses can't handle upgrades and would need their own simple unit system if you want to see them build advanced units (b) there aren't enough slots for this and (c) only the first unit of each slot can be an input.