Dev Diary 28 - [VLOG] Population Dynamics: People, Professions, Power, Needs

Greetings, Industrialists!

In this Dev Diary we're going to update you on Population system! We’ll discuss how population groups (or POPs) are structured in Gilded Destiny, including how they’re defined by culture, religion, and profession, and how they evolve over time.

We’ll also explore how POPs interact with the economy, meet their needs, and shape your nation’s development through education, labor, and political influence. You may remember we shared a Dev Diary on Population a while back. However, much has changed since then—some things may be very familiar to you, while others will be entirely new.

You can find the full script for the Dev Diary below.

Also, check out our fourteenth Alpha Roadmap Update: See how far we've come compared to Dev Diary #1 on Population, Technology Dev Diary, and Culture and Religion Dev Diary.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback over on Discord. And be sure to wishlist us to stay up to date!

Join our Discord community today!

Finally, if you are interested in what we do and want to join us but do not see a relevant job, send us your resume at jobs@aquilainteractive.io!

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Script for Dev Diary 28:

Salutations industrialists! I'm Marc, a Producer working on Gilded Destiny.

In today's dev diary, we're going to update you on the Population system! We’ll discuss how population groups (or POPs) are structured in Gilded Destiny, including how they’re defined by culture, religion, and profession, and how they evolve over time. We’ll also explore how POPs interact with the economy, meet their needs, and shape your nation’s development through education, labor, and political influence. You may remember we shared a Dev Diary on Population a while back. However, much has changed since then—some things may be very familiar to you, while others will be entirely new.

However, before we begin, we have very gilded news! I am pleased to announce that Gilded Destiny will be published globally by Hooded Horse, a publisher renowned for their strong lineup of strategy games! Partnering with Hooded Horse will gild the path forward for Gilded Destiny, helping Aquila Interactive’s development team realize the game we set out to create. In addition, their support will elevate the overall quality of the game and ensure that our creative vision is conveyed clearly to a wider audience. This partnership will allow Aquila Interactive to remain focused on delivering the deep, immersive, and ambitious gameplay we have always envisioned, while reaching ever more players and industrialists across the globe.

We have another piece of gilded news! As I mentioned in the last Dev Diary, we are happy to announce that we are getting close to the release of the Closed Alpha! Our dev team is working relentlessly to get the Alpha to you as soon as possible. We have internal release deadlines that we are striving for, but we want to avoid setting a specific date at this time. With that in mind, we have already sent out non-disclosure agreements to our Kickstarter and Modian backers. If you backed us on either of these platforms, be sure to complete the NDA forms.

Without further ado, let's saddle up and gallop ahead.

Population Menu

First off, let's take a look at the Population Menu. Please keep in mind that this is a version of our internal pre-Alpha build, and the UI still requires a bit of cleaning up. We also anticipate a few minor changes as we add and integrate new systems into the Population menu.

The panel on the left allows you to select what you're looking at: either your country as a whole (as an aggregate of all your provinces), or each province individually. What you've selected here will determine what's displayed in the panel on the right.

This graph here presents you with an overview of the composition of your Population, with different tabs for things like Culture, Religion, Workforce, and so on. You can therefore track how your Population has been developing in your country or in a certain province.

Down here, you have your POPs. The green bar here allows you filter your POPs based on Profession, Culture, and Religion, or sort them based on Population size, Happiness, Needs, Savings, Growth, or Literacy Rate.

You can also select an individual POP to get more details about it. However, to explain this window properly, we're going to need to explain a bit more about what we mean by POPs.

POP Composition

POPs are not units of Population. Instead, they are sectors of the Population, each with a specific configuration of Culture, Religion, and Profession that is unique to the province in which they're located. For example, here in {province} Brandenburg, you can see we have several POPs belonging to the {job} Smallholders Profession, but these POPs all differ on the basis of their Culture and/or Religion.

This obviously means that POPs have different sizes, since some groups are much larger than others. As you'd expect in {province} Brandenburg, the dominant POP is {culture} {religion} North German and Protestant, and you can see the total here. However, not all of the POP is actively working - whether women and children are part of the workforce is largely dependent on the country's laws, although Culture and Religion may also come into play. The Workforce Ratio is therefore used to calculate what percentage of the POP can actually fill the job positions created by Buildings and Military Regiments. Different Professions also have different Workforce Ratios to reflect the reality of the job during this time period: Soldiers and Officers, for instance, are typically all men over the age of 16, regardless of whether women and children are expected to work, so the Workforce Ratio for these Professions tends to be smaller than others.

Professions

As things stand, the game currently contains 11 Professions, which are divided into Lower, Middle, and Upper Classes. In the Lower Class, you have Smallholders, Laborers, Factory Workers, and Soldiers. In the Middle Class, you have Artisans, Clerks, Intellectuals, Bureaucrats, and Officers; and in the Upper Class, you have Aristocrats and Capitalists.

Smallholders and Laborers are largely rural Professions. Smallholders are essentially peasants and subsistence farmers, working small plots of land with little to no machinery. They can generally eke out a living growing and harvesting natural resources, and can produce pretty much any raw goods, albeit at a very poor rate of production. For the most part, they receive less government oversight than your urban POPs, and they're also less politically minded - most of them will start the game politically 'Unaligned'. Since there aren't any limitations on becoming a Smallholder, most POPs will eventually demote to Smallholders if the alternative is starving, although they'll try out other Professions first if they can.

Next up, we have Laborers, who work in any industry that requires manual labor: mining, woodcutting, transport, and so on. They also work on Plantations and Mechanized Farms.

Factory Workers, unsurprisingly, work in Factories, which is to say, urban production buildings. This means that unlike Laborers, they'll mostly be producing manufactured goods rather than raw goods.

Soldiers and Officers are required to form military units.

Artisans produce most manufactured goods by hand - think of them as the 'manufacturing' equivalent of Smallholders. Over the course of the game, many of them are likely to be made redundant by Factories, and they'll have to promote or demote to other Professions.

Most Buildings will require a complement of Clerks to do the filing and bookkeeping and other bureaucratic tasks. Essentially, as you construct more Buildings, you will need more Clerks.

Intellectuals are typically academic researchers, teachers, and members of the clergy. They produce more research points per person than other POPs, so they're quite useful to have around. They're also needed to staff Schools and Research Buildings. If you're interested in learning more about how research works in the game, check out our Dev Diary on Technology.

Bureaucrats are required to administer your country's bureaucracy, as you'd expect. We'll go into more detail on the subject of Bureaucrats and Bureaucratic Efficiency in a future Dev Diary - for now, let's just say that you'll need Bureaucrats if you want your country to run smoothly.

Aristocrats are the titled nobility, typically owning most of the land (at least in the Old World). They therefore take a cut of Smallholder earnings, and they can invest in developing rural industries in order to get the most out of the aforementioned land they own. Finally, Capitalists own the means of production, which is to say that they own Buildings and take a cut of the profits from those Buildings. They can then reinvest these earnings to construct more Buildings, get a larger cut, construct more Buildings, and so on.

(We'll cover how POPs change Professions in a future Dev Diary, but for now we'll just point out that you can see which Professions members of this POP are likely to switch to.)

So, those are the Professions - and since we've already covered Culture and Religion in an earlier Dev Diary, it's time to move on to how POPs actually behave.

POP Stats

Apart from their Population size, POPs have 4 main stats: Growth Rate, Literacy Rate, Happiness, and Political Power.

The Population Growth Rate obviously represents how quickly the POP grows, and POPs can grow or shrink in various ways. On the one hand, there's 'Natural Growth' - so, births and deaths - which is affected by things like advances in medical technology and whether or not the POP's Essential Needs are being met. On the other hand, there are the ways that people can leave the POPs of which they are members and go to join different POPs. Since POPs are defined by Culture, Religion, and Profession, people within the POP who change any one of these three categories - through assimilation, conversion, and promotion or demotion - will leave that POP and join a different POP. Likewise, since POPs are separated by province, emigration will cause a POP to lose members (which are then added to a POP in a different province).

Next up, we have Literacy Rate, which represents the extent to which the POP has received a modern, scientific education. Obviously, in the real world, 'Literacy' as a concept covers much more than that, but in terms of the function this attribute serves in the game this narrower definition is what matters when it comes to the modernization and industrialization of society.

Without going into too much detail - again, this is something we'll need to cover in a future Dev Diary - Literacy Rate is affected by a whole bunch of things, but Needs satisfaction also plays a part here (the idea being that POPs can devote more time and effort to education when they're comfortable).

Happiness represents the extent to which the POP is generally content with their current living situation. It's affected by things like whether they're accepting of the current government, whether they're helped or hindered by certain laws, and whether their Needs are currently being met (more on that shortly). Of course, all sorts of other modifiers can affect Happiness as well, such as those from Culture, Religion, Province Edicts, Events, and so on. Happiness itself mainly affects whether or not the POP is likely to increase Unrest in the Province, and too much Unrest can eventually lead to Rebellion - but we'll talk more about that in a future Dev Diary.

Finally, Political Power represents the extent to which the POP has a political 'voice', which will affect support for Policies and overall Government Support. For the most part, Political Power is affected by the country's electoral Policy and by the POP's Wealth, with wealthier POPs having more of an ability to affect political change. POPs will also have Political Opinions, and the same POP can be split between several different Political Opinions (for instance, 30% Liberal and 70% Conservative).

Wealth

Speaking of POPs' Wealth, we can see a breakdown of that here in the upper right. POPs will spend their Income in order to satisfy their Needs, and any excess goes into their Savings. They can draw upon those Savings to buy more Needs if there are goods that they can't afford with their base Income.

POP Needs

We've talked a bit about Needs already, largely because the Needs system affects so much of a POP's behavior.

In effect, Needs are just that

the goods that people need in order to survive, flourish, and enjoy themselves.

Needs are divided into three categories

Essential, Comfort, and Luxury. Succeeding or failing to meet certain satisfaction in each Needs category will affect the POP in various ways. For instance, failing to meet enough of a POP's Essential Needs will cause it to demote or die depending on its position in the social hierarchy. Conversely, meeting enough Luxury Needs will increase the POP's Happiness and Literacy Rate Growth.

Whether a POP can meet its Needs will be dependent on whether it can receive and afford the requisite goods. It's no use to the POP if the country's market contains abundant supplies of Grain if the price of Grain is currently more than that POP makes in a week. Likewise, it's no use to the POP to have piles of cash if the country's market doesn't actually contain any Grain, or if it's currently under a blockade and can't receive any imports from other provinces.

The Needs of POPs are determined by several factors, but the main one is the POP's Profession. Smallholders not only consume less goods of each type than other POPs, but they also have far less variety in the goods that they consume. Aristocrats, however, consume a great deal more of everything, and have additional goods that are required to satisfy their Essential, Comfort, and Luxury Needs.

Some Needs are also added by certain Technologies over the course of the game (the general idea being that people don't usually want things that they don't know exist). Desire for those goods will gradually spread to POPs in other countries even if they haven't researched those Technologies yet, so keeping your POPs in blissful ignorance of Cars and Telephones won't be something you can do indefinitely.

The quantity of Needs can also be increased or decreased by things like Culture and Religion. Famously, the English have quite the appetite for Tea - so much so that after declaring independence, the Americans decided that Tea was unpatriotic and tended to avoid it in favor of Coffee. Some Religions also have fairly strict prohibitions against consuming Meat and/or Alcohol, and naturally that also has an effect on supply and demand.

Finally, the quantity of Needs will also increase for all POPs as a country develops new Technologies and as people become more aware of the potential for increasing the abundance of goods. Likewise, the quantity of Needs will increase as POPs become more Literate and thus more cognizant of the standard of living for people outside of their immediate social circle.

Quantity and Quality - The Firearms Problem

Before we go any further, we should probably address how we're dealing with quantity and quality when it comes to the consumption of goods. As you'd expect, there are some goods that are rarer and fancier versions of more basic counterparts - Clothing and Luxury Clothing, for example - to represent the fact that some garments actually require different materials in their makeup.

However, there are also differences in how much of each good each individual member of the population consumes depending on their Profession. Aristocrats, for example, require significantly more Clothing and more Grain per person than Smallholders. Now, this isn't to suggest that the Aristocrats are actually eating 20 times the amount, or that they actually wear eight more layers of clothing, or what have you. It's more to represent the amount of work that goes into producing the kind of higher-quality goods that Aristocrats would be consuming, without creating dozens of 'Luxury' versions that are essentially of the same type.

Why quantity needs to represent quality in this way is quite neatly illustrated with the firearms problem. Over the course of the game, guns get more complex: there are far more components to a rifle with a self-loading action than a smoothbore musket. As you research better-quality firearms, therefore, your units will require more Small Arms when they are recruited, to represent the fact that their weapons require more work.

It could be argued that instead of just increasing the amount of Small Arms, you could decrease the output speed of Factories in the country. After all, that's what's 'actually happening': guns are taking longer to produce. However, the problem is that since the world's markets are connected, the result is that less technologically advanced countries start to outproduce their rivals and end up dominating the market, despite the fact that they are, in theory, still making older, simpler models.

Of course, if you decide that you do want to simulate the changing nature of firearms in all its complexity, with different models of firearms circulating the world markets, that is something you could quite easily mod into the game. Our editor tool makes it relatively straightforward to add a new goods type, along with production formuals for the Buildings that produces it, and consumption requirements for military units. The same goes for any other goods type that you might want to add to, or even remove from, the base game. (You could even get right down to including the different calibers of bullet if you wanted to simulate the logistical nightmare of the start of the American Civil War, but that's up to you.) At the end of the day, we chose to focus on broader categories of goods so as to represent a wider variety of important industries during the time period (and even so, the current count is close to about 50).

Postamble

That's probably a good place to end today's Dev Diary.

Although there's probably more we could say about POPs, since they're so central to the game as a whole, we'll no doubt touch upon them again in future Dev Diaries.

Once again, if you backed us on Kickstarter or Modian, be sure to complete the NDA forms sent to you on those websites. In addition to having early access to the game, our backers will be an integral part of the development of Gilded Destiny. One of the main purposes of the closed Alpha will be to gather focused, high-quality feedback from devoted and passionate players while key systems are still in development. Again, we are thrilled to be bringing the closed Alpha to our supporters who backed us on Kickstarter and Modian!

We hope you've enjoyed this Dev Diary, and as always, if you have any questions or comments, don't hold your horses, trot down to the comment section below.

Lastly, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and, if you have not done so already, add Gilded Destiny to your Steam wishlist.

Until our paths converge once more, we bid thee farewell!

May your destiny be a gilded one.

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Also:

Be sure to listen closely to the backing tracks in all our videos—they are the pieces you will come to hear in the game, composed by John Skoog. Also, the solo clarinet on this track was performed by yours truly, Marc.

Listen to some of John Skoog's other work on Spotify and visit their website, John Skoog Music.