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Eco Peaks: Adding Constitutions to the Game

 While most of the team is hard at work on 8.1 and 8.2 (which are both solely polish and performance), we’re also beginning work on a huge extension to the player-run government in 9.0.

Previously, players could run a government. Enacting laws, electing leaders.

In Eco 9.0, players will first *create* a government. Forming a constitution, defining elections, elected positions etc.

A new governance arises!

What this means is that in the beginning of the game, there will be very few governmental capabilities. From there, you will have to construct buildings that will unlock various government features.

  • Build a capitol to define a new constitution
  • Build a congressional hall to unlock government positions
  • Build an election hall to allow elections
  • Build a court to unlock laws
  • Build a census bureau to unlock demographics
  • Build a treasury to unlock taxes

Government Expansion

By breaking the government into pieces like this, players can build towards it to create the system piece by piece, allowing the government to grow slowly overtime with consensus from many players, involving more of the populace, instead of dropping it on players from the beginning. All of these system work together, so as you add a new system like demographics with a census bureau, now you can use demographics in all your laws. As a result, we can make the government grow much more complex but still make it understandable, because it’s not added all at once, and each system functions simply in independence.

Creating your governmental facilities will be a big part of the equation, thus tying the whole tech tree and all specialties into the creation of the government. Different factors of the buildings will determine how powerful the components are. For example, the bigger your court, the more laws you can have.

What will this be like to play? It will feel similar to the server event when players switch from multiple currencies to a single one; that’s one of my favorite moments in the game and when the systems and collaboration required inside a shared economy really shines. With this government change, it will be extending that approach throughout most the game, as your government becomes more and more powerful and detailed, with a growing capitol structure to match.

New Interfaces

Along with addition of government-formation to the game, the law creation system is getting an overhaul. Now laws will be created inside the game, while voting and discussion happens in the

browser. This process will be much more straight-forward, something every player can take part in, and dare I say it, fun. Yes, we’re going to make configuring tax code fun as hell. You will be shocked.

It will also come with nice new support like the ability to edit new and existing laws (and elected officials, and constitutions, and everything), full admin abilities, extensive in-game documentation and tutorials, import/export of laws and settings in general, and much more. Tons of underlying structures have been created to make this the norm for everything going forward, and eventually you’ll see that power and flexibility and ease-of-use in other things like contracts, finance systems, and tons more to come. It makes it so much easier to create new content like laws so we can create tons of options that add power to the government system, and modders can add to it too.

 

Comments

Eco represents the next-generation of education, learning through self-driven, collaborative inspiration, where their learning directly impacts their goals. Video games have a tremendous power to capture the minds of students, and with Eco we want to channel that incredible potential into avenues that will set them up for success in the world to come.