Ideology

Yeah I think these are really interesting questons.

Along similar lines how does biology affect politics? Do you think we would have fundamentally different politics if we had wings? What if there were still Neanderthals living on earth as a distinct population?

Then, as you cleverly point out, there's the whole question of what would happen if an ant colony were transformed such that each ant had the intelligence a human currently has. What kind of political arrangements would they make?

I do think, on the question of money, it's really ownership that is more important. So for example imagine a farm, is there one overlord who owns the farm and gives the workers just enough to live on? This is pretty close to feudalism. Or do the workers get an equal share of what the farm produces? This is pretty close to communism. It's not so much money that's the important factor but the way that resources are distributed in a society.

Really interesting questions.

An issue with that would be figuring out some ideological options humans couldn't have.

I mean, unless we just make humans (or human-like creatures) have the most options for politics, we need to add options for other types of species, otherwise ants would have very limited politic options and that could be boring.

Something to consider is how ideologies would actually work in the game, and what sort of meta-game would come out of it. Having a hive mind would lead to a (relatively) bland playthrough as far as politics go, but cutting corners like this would be vital to a speedrunner. How do we have ideologies at all? Offer the player a few buttons and sliders?

There's also the problem of mentalities that might get in the way of reaching the later stages. As far as humans go, we have two things that have characterized our societies: the ability to unify into large communities, while at the same time being competitive, even within those communities.


An example of a species without the former trait would be octopuses. We've long known that an octopus, with its large brain and manipulative tentacles, has a good body plan for a sapient race (aside from the fact they're aquatic), but its tendency for isolation wouldn't spawn civilization as we know it. Sure, two octopuses will have a showdown when their area of seabed isn't big enough for the two of them, but other than that, they just keep to themselves. They have no reason to communicate much more than "Back off!" or "I yield!", and it seems like they'd rather not have to communicate (or cooperate, for that matter) at all.


As for species without the latter, consider the reason why monopolies are so bad; in addition to the multitude of ethical concerns they raise, the company has little reason to improve their product when they don't have competitors who would do the same with their own. Also consider how much progress humanity made during the Space Race (only two decades after WW2 ended), but then look at how we've slowed the pace to probe missions for the past 57 years. Probe missions provide a lot of insight, but shouldn't we have made dramatic strides in space exploration in that time, compared to the ever-increasing capacity of home computers thanks to their market demand?

Nothing in that last paragraph provides anything beyond conjecture on a species lacking a competitive mindset (I'd have brought up insect colonies if it weren't for their members not being sapient), but doesn't it seem like there's a trend?

Huh, some of these are too dichotomic to be honest. There is a lot more nuance and many more variables to these things rather than stereotypical, ecology vs industry, isolation vs expansion, and so on.

This is a tremendously interesting question. Here's a few possibilities.

1. In a species with fertility suppression there could be a "universal fertility" movement (much like universal suffrage). Basically the species reverts from having a single queen to having many fertile females.

2. Something similar could happen in a species which has functional immortality (like some Jellyfish do). There could be a logan's run style social structure in place where not everyone is allowed to live forever. Maybe no one is, maybe only an aristocracy is etc.

3. Aristocratic hibernation. Maybe hibernation could be a political issue.

Thinking about it almost any biological function could become politicised. Creatures with wings could have a cast system where lower cast members have their wings clipped. 

4. You could have a planet with multiple species which can breed (Neanderthaals and humans, for example) and there could be politics around whether breeding between them is allowed / tolerated / encouraged.

5. Caste extinction / suppression would be a really interesting one. So say a queen has the ability to lay workers and warriors it could be possible for the workers to rise up and demand no more warriors are fertilised. 

6. In fact in that mode there is an interesting one about the rights of the queen of the hive. This is very similar to how humans interact with their monarchs however the hive needs the queen to keep breeding. Therefore the hive can't really execute their queen (unless they have the biological option to create another).

7. A species could have 3 genders and gender activism could be different between them (what if there is an infertile worker gender, for example, would they have the same rights?)

This whole question is really very interesting.

This is my dream job now 

I was having a discussion with Nick a while ago about this (he's got a lot of really good ideas for this stage). One approach is to have memes. So have population units which have memes living in them. The memes can spread to nearby population units and fight with other memes.

The advantage of this is that you can introduce a lot of small ideas into the game easily. For example "Gladiatorial Games, +1 Happiness +1 Military -1 Health" or something like that. 

So long as all the memes only modify underlying stats (or conflict with other memes in a pre-defined way) then you can have as many of them as you like and adding new ones is easy.

For example for political systems you could have memes like "democratically subservient to person A" or "feudally subservient to person B". The rule would be that if a meme is a subservience then you can only have one at a time. This lets different political systems spread organically across your species.

Not sure if this system would work (it needs prototyping) but it would allow a lot of flexibility and an endless amount of interesting content.

Yes, but what happens when people start rioting?