[Dev Diary #32] Rebellion Systems in Gilded Destiny

Salutations, Industrialists!

I'm Marc, a Producer on Gilded Destiny. In today's dev diary, we'll discuss how rebellions have been modeled in Gilded Destiny, including how government support and POP happiness affect public unrest, how different kinds of government can deal with growing unrest, and what happens when the populace breaks out in open rebellion.

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Without further ado, let's dive in.

Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

By 1822, the 'Great Democratic Experiment' of the United States was well underway, busily setting about establishing the conditions that would lead to a rebellion of its own. In South America, the Iberian colonies followed suit, throwing off the yoke of their European monarchs. Meanwhile, in the Old World, memories of the French Revolution were still fresh in people's minds, spawning dreams of nation-states, egalitarian republics, and fair wages.

In short, the Nineteenth Century was a time of rapid change, and as such, it was an ideal breeding ground for revolutionary sentiment (both for and against the changing times).

We wanted our game to be able to reflect the complexity and variety of revolutions that occurred, and to do so in a way that allowed for dynamic rebellions that responded to how and why a country was changing. We aim to give the players different tools for dealing with revolutionary elements, depending on the kind of country they are trying to create.

So, without further ado, it's time to go over how we've modeled rebellions in Gilded Destiny.

Unrest

To start with, we have Unrest. Every province has an Unrest value of 0 to 100, and when Unrest reaches 100, that triggers a rebellion (which means that a rebel army will spawn in the province).

The Unrest system is designed to give the player multiple options when deciding how they want to deal with state control, as well as producing dynamic and realistic rebellions that stem from identifiable causes. At the same time, it is designed to limit the number of rebellions that will actually happen, while still making the maintenance of public order an important part of running the country. Steam post imageThe main causes of Unrest are low Government Support and POPs with low Happiness (although other factors can also contribute to it).

If a government makes a lot of unpopular decisions, such as losing wars, getting embroiled in scandals, and so on, it causes low Government Support. Low Government Support adds Unrest to all provinces in a top-down fashion.

When it comes to Unrest that's being generated by POPs, the size of the POP matters: a small POP may never be able to generate enough Unrest on its own to cause a rebellion. There must be a critical mass of unhappy people in the province to push Unrest to 100. This Unrest is applied to individual provinces in a bottom-up fashion.

There is also the Unrest Threshold, the exact value of which varies depending on the type of government you have. When the Unrest value is above the Unrest Threshold (but hasn't yet reached 100), Unrest Events may happen in your country. Unrest Events usually give you a chance to try to get things under control (at a cost) before a full-scale rebellion actually happens.

Summary

• Unrest: If a province's Unrest value reaches 100, it will trigger a rebellion.

• The main causes of Unrest are low Government Support and POPs with low Happiness.

• There must be a critical mass of unhappy people in the province to push Unrest to 100.

• When the Unrest value is above the Unrest Threshold (but hasn't yet reached 100), Unrest Events may happen in your country, giving you a chance to deal with the situation before a full-scale rebellion occurs.

Open Rebellion

Now that we've covered how a rebellion happens, it's time to take a look at what happens when your people finally do take up arms against the government.

All POPs that are contributing to Unrest within a province will have an ultimate rebellion 'goal', which indicates how they intend to change the status quo. Political Rebels want to overthrow the country's government and put a party in power that shares their political opinions. Nationalist and Separatist Rebels are more concerned with their specific province and want to break away from the country altogether.

When Unrest reaches 100, the various rebel goals that exist in the province are evaluated in terms of which goal has the most Unrest contributed towards it. Rebels who are in support of that goal will then spawn a rebel army within the province.

The goal of the rebels will then determine their behavior: Political Rebels will attempt to march on the capital, using any excess forces to occupy whatever additional provinces they can.

Nationalists and Separatists will attempt to take any hold and any provinces they consider part of the country they want to join or form, depending on the majority culture in the case of Nationalists, or the province cores in the case of Separatists.

If the rebels are able to hold onto their intended goal continuously for a sufficient period of time, the rebellion succeeds.

For Political Rebels, this results in the current government being replaced with one that aligns with their political opinions, and the enactment of whatever available policies are supported by the new government.

For Nationalists and Separatists, this results in transferring the occupied provinces to a different country (either one that already exists, or a new country that is founded by the rebels themselves). If the rebels have joined an existing country, the country from which they seceded gets a casus belli to retake those provinces. If the rebels have formed a new country, that country is automatically at war with their former overlords.

In the Unrest Interface, you can keep track of which rebels are currently contributing the most to Unrest in each province - invaluable information if you are deciding which provinces you need to placate when your resources are limited, and where you might want to station your available military.

Summary

• All POPs that are contributing to Unrest within a province will have an ultimate rebellion 'goal' that determines their behavior.

• When a rebellion happens, the rebellion 'goal' that is receiving the most Unrest will spawn an army made up of supporting POPs.

• Political Rebels want to overthrow, while Nationalists and Separatists want to break away.

• If the rebels are able to hold onto their intended goal continuously for a sufficient duration, the rebellion succeeds.

Historical Rebellions

Gilded Destiny's rebellion system is designed to create emergent narratives of revolution that are both engaging and realistic. However, there are several famous rebellions that will have additional scripted content to provide the kind of depth and complexity that these historical events should present.

These events will still work with the system, and of course, we wouldn't want to make them entirely unavoidable (because where would be the fun in that?).

As with anything, there's a balance to be maintained between ensuring that there is sufficient historical content that does justice to the particular events of the period, and ensuring that the game's systems give the player sufficient freedom to alter the course of history in a realistic way. Therefore, the overall intention behind Gilded Destiny's rebellion system is to capture the ways in which revolutionary sentiment tends to build up from multiple causes, while giving the player multiple different options when it comes to running their country.

Summary

• The Rebellion System is designed to produce rebellions that are the result of prevailing provincial and national conditions.

• In addition to this, scripted events will occur that interact with the Rebellion System to represent specific historical rebellions.

• Historical rebellions will still interact with the Rebellion System, so they will also respond dynamically to prevailing conditions (and may therefore sometimes be avoidable).

Final Thoughts

In Gilded Destiny, we aim to bring a fresh approach to many of the systems we know and love to the Grand Strategy genre. Given the importance of revolution in nineteenth-century history, our intention here was to make sure that the game treated rebellions as something engaging and dynamic that would lead to emergent, interesting, and believable stories.

Development Update

October

• Continued the work on balancing and refining the economy, with a focus on testing.

• Updated and refined the POP promotion and demotion system.

• Started implementing updates to technology, including balancing buffs and adding new techs.

• Refined and updated the distribution of cultures, religions, and professions across the world.

• Refined the POP starting attributes (political opinions, literacy, etc) to take into account their profession, with culture and religion to follow.

• Finished the design of overarching content goals for each major power.

• Added Municipal Administration buildings to each province according to its Bureaucratic Workload.

• Created illustration artwork for Provinces.

• New building icons have been created.

• Completed the infantry unit and Cavalry unit animations.

• Assigned terrain types to all provinces.

• Continued work on the design for the province production buff.

• Designed the mid-Qing Taiping Rebellion and Second Opium War events, and we are working on adding special debuffs for the Qing Empire.

November

• Missing flags for the German countries of 1822 have been added.

• Created an effect type used to grant technologies to specified countries.

• Implemented new generic leader head graphics for African and East Asian Leaders.

• Implemented new leader clothes graphics: military uniform variants.

• Improved leader generation code (readability + performance).

• Implemented cultural naming taboo for the leaders' names of selected cultures.

• Fixed the Leaders glitch, which appeared on their portrait frame in the recruitment UI.

• Imp l emented province status concept (territory / state / colonizable / uninhabitable).

  • POPs in non-state provinces don't have political power.

  • Status information is displayed in the overview tab of the province window.

• When rebels establish or overthrow a government type with an election, the election process starts from the beginning, instead of continuing from the country's previous election cycle.

• The pop-up message that you received when rebels secede from your country now includes a list of the provinces that they took.

• Fixed an issue that occurred with the method that determined whether rebels support the governing party.

• Fixed the issue where separatist and nationalist rebels didn't disband upon success.

• Fixed the issue where Rebels "occupied" uncolonized land.

• Fixed the inconsistent display of a province's most popular rebel type between the unrest UI in the politics window and the unrest bar tooltip in the province window.

• Added terrain illustrations to the province UI

• Added tooltips for the sort buttons in the release nations UI.

• Fixed the issue where text tooltips appeared for any texts that automatically add a line break

Postamble

We hope you've enjoyed this Dev Diary, and as always, if you have any questions or comments, let us know. You can find us on Discord, YouTube, X, Facebook, and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback.

Remember, this Revolution WILL be televised!

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

May your destiny be a gilded one.