> On 2 May 2014, at 12:41, Carlos <carlos.web@gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anyone developed rules for generating gov-law-tech-pop codes for multiple states in balkanized worlds, given the world UWP? I seem to remember some discussions in the list and even somebody writing on this at some point, but after some quick searches I came away empty-handed.
>
> One could just generate several UWPs with fixed physical data, and also use the "Governments" article on Freelance Traveller for more detail. I was thinking of rules which do not treat each government independently, but rather determine whether there are dominant powers and how many, then flesh them out. There are global constraints to consider. For instance, total world population needs to be split up among countries, law level needs to be somewhat consistent with that of the countries (A pop-weighted average? That of the largest country? That of the country hosting the main starport?). Also, if there are exactly two dominant countries/blocks in a planet, it is unlikely that one is hi-tech, hi-pop and the other one low-tech, low-pop, so there ought to be modifiers.

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Timothy Collinson <timothy.collinson@port.ac.uk> wrote:
But I'm not sure I'd worry too much about them being very
interrelated.  You're right, it might be 'unlikely' to have the
situation you describe above, but of such is the nature of humans
(and/or aliens) living in close proximity and of such stuff are
adventures made as you explain the situation.

For the one above, how about a recently 'discovered' population of
primitives living underground that the main population leave to their
own devices bar some 'study'?  Or holovid entertainment?

Yes, I see the point of leaving room for completely random new countries and interpreting the data. But I was thinking along the lines of determining the "main powers" first, the ones which dominate the planet, and leaving the minor ones unspecified for a while. If you come up with two dominant powers, and then one turns out to have lower tech and lower pop than the other, it is hard to see how it can be a main power, it would be swallowed up. One Hi Tech, Low Pop and one Low Tech, Hi Pop, sure. In your example, I would say the primitives are a minor player.

Of course, one should leave room for unlikely events in state generation, but they should be... well, unlikely.

Hm. OTOH, if you take alien races into the mix... "The world of SharpContrast is dominated by two major states. The Federation of Liliput has a population of 100 million at TL A, while the Kingdom of Gigantia has a population of 5,000 sophonts at TL 7. Of course, the raw statistics obscure the fact that the average weight of a Liliputian is just 3 kg, while Gigantians are massive moving flesh mountains with an average weight of 1000 tons. In the last Liliput-Gigantia War, a Gigantian squad rolled over a quarter of the Liliputian population before the Liliputian Grav Force could strike them down. An armistice followed."



Carlos Alos-Ferrer
Professor of Economics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de