Victoria II carnet N°24
Posté : mar. mai 18, 2010 8:09 pm
C'est le dernier carnet de développement. 
Developer Diary 24 – The Lower House
Having diverged dangerously into economics in recent developer diaries, let’s get back to politics. We’ve talked about the upper house in the previous developer diaries. Now it is time to talk about the lower house. For those of you who played Victoria the lower house will be a very familiar concept. Victoria 1 had the concept of a ruling party which had policies that placed various restrictions on what you could and could not do. In Victoria 2, the restrictions on what you can do with reform have been moved to the upper house, leaving the lower house to worry about things like tax. Essentially, we have the upper house for long-term decisions and the lower house running the day-to-day stuff.
Time to look at some of the changes. Firstly, like in Victoria we have a government form, to which we have added restrictions on who can be the ruling party. If you are a Proletarian Dictatorship you can appoint any communist party you want. Similarly, absolute monarchies cannot appoint communists, who are determined to put them into the dustbin of history, as a ruling party. Although I am sure you can all argue till the cows come home about the relative historical merits of a pack of reactionaries or fascists running a proletarian dictatorship, we decided to draw line at this because it just felt too weird. We have also added two new government forms. We have the Bourgeois Dictatorship, which means we do not have to worry about a reactionary presidential dictatorship deciding it is time to go anarcho-liberal. Yes, your bespectacled, moustachioed middle class ruling committee now get a government type to call their own. We have also added a second form of Constitutional monarchy, which we have dubbed Prussian Constitutionalism. Unlike the standard constitutional monarchy, the only extreme party they allow are the Reactionaries. We see it is a slightly more authoritarian version of the constitutional monarchy where certain undesirables are disenfranchised. It should give more scope to allow countries to develop in a historical manner.
Next up, let's see how votes work out. I have given a brief run down in a previous developer diary about this, but now I feel it is time to go into more detail. Firstly, what the voting system does is look at each of your noncolonial provinces and calculate the number of voters. In Victoria 2, not all voters are equal, some voting systems disenfranchise certain income strata, leaving them with 0 votes, while others give more worth to votes from people of a better class. We also have a citizenship policy, that weights votes according to the culture of the POPs. Thus, a Germany with residency as a citizenship policy will see North German votes worth the most, South Germans worth less and for the rest nothing. This in turn creates a Germany that is dominated by North German and thus Prussian interests. Then good old rotten boroughs do their bit to increase the worth a province has in the voting system. This gives you the weight each province has in the eventual outcome. This would in real life translate into seats, but for our purposes it is just its percentage worth of the province for the final result.
Having calculated how many votes our POP will get we then need to decide whom our voters will vote for. Each POP splits up its vote between several parties depending on how these parties compare to his issues. If two or more parties have the same issue he then splits according to his ideology. If there is a case where two parties have the same ideology and issue, the POP will split it according to the number of votes these parties already have in the province (POPs love to back winners). If there is no match for a POP issue it splits that part of its vote by ideology, dividing its vote between parties of the same ideology using the formula above.
Next we take a look at what creative measures the government is taking to keep itself in power. This is then used as a multiplier for the number of votes the ruling party gets in the province. Gerrymandering and harassing opposition parties to make sure they find it difficult to campaign all contributes towards helping the government of the day. Finally, we check to see if machine politics is in play in this province. A political machine does it bit to ensure that more voters, living or dead, will get out and vote for whoever controls the machine.
Once we have whom our POPs have voted for we then need to decide how much each party actually gets in the lower house. We have three different ways of calculating this. First Past the Post, where one party wins the province. Then two forms of proportional representation, the difference between the two is how they treat minority parties. The first system, the Jefferson Method, likes to screw over minority parties while a pure proportional system does not. The results from each province are added up and the winner calculated, in Victoria 2 there is no requirement for a majority, just to come first.
Finally, let’s just mention what these kind of lower house policies actually do. For those of you who have played Victoria this section will be very familiar. Trade policy determines your theoretical minimum and maximum tariff, although this is then modified by administrative efficiency to give you a real value. Economic policy sets your tax limits, what the government can and cannot do economically and it also modifies how expensive it is for Capitalists to be in the business of being capitalists. The military policy sets how much you can spend paying soldiers and officers. Those are the big three. Then you have two minor policies; citizenship and religious. Citizenship policy affects the vote weight of POPs not of your primary culture while religious policy influences how effective the Clergy are at keeping the ignorant and superstitious, ignorant and superstitious.
So there we have it, how the lower house works.
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