What does Culture do?

So as I have been writing up the socio-economic model, Ive ran into a problem. I cannot for the love of God think of any purpose for culture. I was thinking that we look at other successful games that included culture as a value and see what they did. I'll tell you what we can't do to start.

Here is a list of the values that could be affected for reference.

Administration (Your government's efficiency at ruling its peoples)
Corruption
Influence (Diplomatic ability)
Tax Efficiency (%, how much of your taxes actually make it into your coffers)
Tariffs Efficiency (%, how much of your tariffs actually make it into your coffers)
Production
Science
Gathering? (Mentioned a lot in the tech tree but I haven't thought of a practical purpose for it)
Happiness
Stability
Health
Revolt Risk (People's chance of revolting every x amount of time)
Manpower Rate (%, how much of a faction's population are able bodied individuals who can actually work)
Golden Age Chance (chance of getting a golden age per x amount of time)

We can't have culture just give small boosts to everything, happiness already does that, and it makes for a boring value anyways. We can't have it increase only happiness, then it might as well just increase happiness. We can't have it increase borders, like Civ 4, since culture doesn't magically shift political borders and we already have another system for borders anyways. We can't use it to adopt social policies like in Civ 5 since we don't have that sort of policy system.

The only thing I can think of that it does is increase the chance of getting a Golden Age per x amount of time. But that is not enough, we need more.

Suggestions?

A good subsection for manpower would military fitness, which you would the amount of troops your society can raise based on fitness,health, population and social strata.

PTFace wrote:

A good subsection for manpower would military fitness, which you would the amount of troops your society can raise based on fitness,health, population and social strata.

That is already covered.

You know what they say, great minds think alike!

NickTheNick wrote:

Administration (Your government's efficiency at ruling its peoples)
Corruption
Influence (Diplomatic ability)
Tax Efficiency (%, how much of your taxes actually make it into your coffers)
Tariffs Efficiency (%, how much of your tariffs actually make it into your coffers)
Production
Science
Gathering? (Mentioned a lot in the tech tree but I haven't thought of a practical purpose for it)
Happiness
Stability
Health
Revolt Risk (People's chance of revolting every x amount of time)
Manpower Rate (%, how much of a faction's population are able bodied individuals who can actually work)
Golden Age Chance (chance of getting a golden age per x amount of time)
Suggestions?

1. Administraion is created by the skill of the people you chose and there is a corruption panelty... You can train your admins at management.
2. Corruption depends on the people you chose, if they head criminal recored or something like that.
3. Infulence Depends on your actions and the skill of the people you chose as diplomats, You can also train them.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_efficiency (You are talking about something else... Tax efficiency is completly diffrent, + How can one lose his tax?)
5. ^^
6. That depends on tos of things... Happiness, Health, Stability, Revolt risk, Man power, Golden age.
7. Science depends on your academys, Tech bonus, The money you give the academys, Ect.
8. ?????
9. Happiness depends on your health, Taxes, Corruption and Administration.
10. Depends on your Administration, Corruption and happiness.
11. Depends on your hospital, The training doctors recive, the money you give hospitals, ect.
12. Depends on your Stability.
13. Depends on your health, and the avarge age in your state.
14. If everything in here goes great, your chance will be higher.

What does culture do in reality? The more 'cultured' a nation is, the more of it's people are able to earn a living producing culture (art, music, theatre, religious icons), and the more willing the populace is to support this production. Your artisan social group will grow, and earn more. In effect, your able to increase employment without actually having anything significant for your populace to do (you don't need more food grown, or items built). This first part could ofcourse be cause or effect, increasing the level of artisanal production increases culture, but increased culture also increases the demand for artisan products.

As for the benifits of those products, as you say that's not quite so straightforwards. Most of the benifits will be in increasing happiness, strong cultural values may also increase your populations loyalty, increasing their resistance to military attrition, and possibly reducing the likelihood of defection, though this would likely result in severe unhappiness during an occupation. Conversely, strong culture could make your cultural products more unique, and possibly make them desirable trade goods.

I don't know if we want to go into much more detail, but cultural diversity is also potentially valuable, increasing a nations ability to relate to other nations diplomatically, and increasing immigration, possibly at the cost of slightly higher civil unrest.

There are probably a fair few more effects like these, but none of them are really 'gamey', theres probably a reaons most games use culture for something fairly arbitrary, rather than use realistic effects like these.

Seregon wrote:

What does culture do in reality? The more 'cultured' a nation is, the more of it's people are able to earn a living producing culture (art, music, theatre, religious icons), and the more willing the populace is to support this production. In effect, your artisan social group will grow, and earn more. In effect, your able to increase employment without actually having anything significant for your populace to do (you don't need more food grown, or items built). This first part could ofcourse be cause or effect, increasing the level of artisanal production increases culture, but increased culture also increases the demand for artisan products.

As for the benifits of those products, as you say that's not quite so straightforwards. Most of the benifits will be in increasing happiness, strong cultural values may also increase your populations loyalty, increasing their resistance to military attrition, and possibly reducing the likelihood of defection, though this would likely result in severe unhappiness during an occupation. Conversely, strong culture could make your cultural products more unique, and possibly make them desirable trade goods.

I don't know if we want to go into much more detail, but cultural diversity is also potentially valuable, increasing a nations ability to relate to other nations diplomatically, and increasing immigration, possibly at the cost of slightly higher civil unrest.

There are probably a fair few more effects like these, but none of them are really 'gamey', theres probably a reaons most games use culture for something fairly arbitrary, rather than use realistic effects like these.

Maybe we should make a few classes like art and other stuff...
I mean, each class effects something else.
the Culture will not affect the values as one thing...
I think we should do the culture that way, not as one value or entity.

Seregon wrote:

What does culture do in reality? The more 'cultured' a nation is, the more of it's people are able to earn a living producing culture (art, music, theatre, religious icons), and the more willing the populace is to support this production. Your artisan social group will grow, and earn more. In effect, your able to increase employment without actually having anything significant for your populace to do (you don't need more food grown, or items built). This first part could ofcourse be cause or effect, increasing the level of artisanal production increases culture, but increased culture also increases the demand for artisan products.

As for the benifits of those products, as you say that's not quite so straightforwards. Most of the benifits will be in increasing happiness, strong cultural values may also increase your populations loyalty, increasing their resistance to military attrition, and possibly reducing the likelihood of defection, though this would likely result in severe unhappiness during an occupation. Conversely, strong culture could make your cultural products more unique, and possibly make them desirable trade goods.

I don't know if we want to go into much more detail, but cultural diversity is also potentially valuable, increasing a nations ability to relate to other nations diplomatically, and increasing immigration, possibly at the cost of slightly higher civil unrest.

There are probably a fair few more effects like these, but none of them are really 'gamey', theres probably a reaons most games use culture for something fairly arbitrary, rather than use realistic effects like these.

Thank you for the ideas Seregon.

The ideas I got from you are that culture increases happiness, influence, Golden Age chance, and increases the likelihood of your goods being purchased over foreign competitors. By extension of these direct effects, revolt risk, diplomatic strength, and population growth (from immigration and natural growth) are also increased. Several decisions will also require certain amounts of culture to enact.

Why have culture be just one modifier that can be bad or good. In reality, culture is linked to every single one of those modifiers, and is both an influence on and a product of them. Not only the strength of the culture, but the type of culture needs to be taken into effect if we want to include culture. The only thing I can think of for this is implementing archetypes. Archetypes would be sets of modifiers for the existing fields, and the strength at which the modifiers are applied depends on your culture value.

If we want to do archetypes, we need a list, sort of like the biome list. We've talked about them before, so it shouldn't be too hard to find new ideas. However, as I mentioned in the other huge awesome thread, we need a comprehensive list of modifiers and their ranges first.

Culture does pose a very unique situation. I'll upload the chart of values to the Socio-Economic model thread and hopefully that will suffice in explaining the relationships currently in place, which would make determining the effects of culture a whole lot easier.

~sciocont wrote:

Why have culture be just one modifier that can be bad or good. In reality, culture is linked to every single one of those modifiers, and is both an influence on and a product of them. Not only the strength of the culture, but the type of culture needs to be taken into effect if we want to include culture. The only thing I can think of for this is implementing archetypes. Archetypes would be sets of modifiers for the existing fields, and the strength at which the modifiers are applied depends on your culture value.

If we want to do archetypes, we need a list, sort of like the biome list. We've talked about them before, so it shouldn't be too hard to find new ideas. However, as I mentioned in the other huge awesome thread, we need a comprehensive list of modifiers and their ranges first.

As you said, there is no "Bad" Or "Good".
And yes, we do need a list, Maybe I will work on it.