The mechanics of PREEMINENCE
This documentation explains what moves each figure in the game, such as growth, inflation, unemployment, debt or popularity, and what makes you lose the game. It describes version 0.2 of the model and says where each formula and each value comes from.
In plain words
Each page takes one mechanic of the game and explains it from scratch, so you do not need to know any economics to follow. You will find the basic ideas, a worked example with figures and the formula read symbol by symbol, then a lab whose sliders make the mechanic react.
How a game is played
The player runs the economy of a real country, day after day, while the 212 other countries run alongside it and follow the rules that economic studies have estimated for them.
The player holds the budget, with eight spending lines that they set by their share of the budget and fifteen taxes that they set by their rate, what decides who pays and who receives, and the policy rate. In a democracy, each change to the budget goes to a vote in parliament one month after it is tabled, and each party votes on it according to its ideas. A decision takes effect on the 1st of the month after its vote, or, when nothing is put to a vote, on the 1st of the following month. Every month, the dashboard publishes growth, inflation, unemployment, purchasing power, the policy rate, the budget, the debt and its rate, popularity, the credibility of the central bank, the risk of default and the date of the next election. The game warns the player when a recession begins, when inflation or unemployment get out of hand, when the risk of default rises and when the central bank loses its credibility.
Each country has its parties, placed on twelve sliders, and its institutions. The election says whether the incumbent camp loses, then the parties say who governs next. The player loses power when their party holds neither the presidency nor the leadership of the government any more, whether it was beaten at an election or brought down after a default, and the player can then carry on the game with the winning party. In France, the president is elected separately, which lets them go through a cohabitation, and they can dissolve the National Assembly. During the three months before an election that judges them, the player campaigns, debates and makes promises. A tax cut raises popularity for a year, whereas the debt it leaves behind still has to be paid afterwards.
Each country also has its population, divided into groups by age, work status, wealth and where people live. Each budget line affects some groups more than others, and each group judges the government both on the country's economy and on its own income. When the government makes a group poorer, that group can take to the streets, and the player then chooses to concede, to receive it or to use a firm hand.
The world also moves without the player. Every day, small shocks, part of which hits all countries at once, shake activity and prices, while big events such as a pandemic or an El Niño episode strike at random. When an event hits their country, the player can respond to it. When a game is created, the game settings can switch off the shocks, the events, the elections, the parties, the population groups, the protest movements, the defaults or the departures of non-player governments from their rules, or make the events more frequent or more severe. These settings switch a mechanism on or off or scale it, without ever changing a value of the economy.
The overview shows how the mechanics link together, and the glossary explains the words used.
The mechanics
Each mechanic has its own page, and the numbers E1 to E35 in the table refer to the equations of the model.
| Page | Equations | What you will find there |
|---|---|---|
| Growth and demand | E1, E2 | What the interest rate and the budget do to economic activity. |
| Inflation | E3, E4, E5 | Expectations, overheating and the published figure over twelve months. |
| Unemployment | E6 | How activity pushes unemployment up or down. |
| Central bank | E7, E17 | The rule that sets the policy rate, and the credibility that is won and lost. |
| Budget | E8, E9, E26 | Revenue, spending, automatic stabilisers, the rule of non-player countries and the fifteen budget lines. |
| Taxes | E35 | The fifteen taxes set by their rate, and why a higher rate raises less than in proportion. |
| Debt and default | E10, E11, E16 | The borrowing rate, the government's accounts and the confidence crisis. |
| Shocks and events | E13, E18, E34 | The small shocks of each day, the big world events such as a pandemic or El Niño, and how the player can respond to them. |
| Opinion and elections | E12, E14, E15 | Popularity, purchasing power and election day. |
| Parties and seats | E19, E20, E21 | The parties and their sliders, the votes that change sides, and the formulas that turn votes into seats. |
| Governments | E22, E23, E24 | Coalitions, cohabitation and dissolution, the elections of autocracies, and the departures of non-player governments from their rules. |
| Decisions and votes | E25 | Who decides on each lever, and how parliament votes on the player's measures and reforms. |
| Population and incomes | E27, E28, E29 | The population groups, what each receives and pays, what each thinks of the government, and who pays and who receives. |
| Campaign | E30, E31, E32 | The two rounds of the presidential election, the debates and the promises. |
| Protest movements | E33 | The groups that take to the streets, their anger, and how the government can respond to them. |
| Alerts | What the game points out to the player about their own economy, and when. |
Reading a page
The mechanic pages all follow the same order. Each equation ends with its lab, and the full formula, folded away just below, can stay closed without you missing the essentials.
| Section | What it contains |
|---|---|
| In plain words | What the mechanic does, in plain English and without symbols. |
| In the game | What the player sees of it, and what they can do about it. |
| The fact sheet | The variable at a glance, with its unit, its bounds, what moves it, what it acts on and the player's lever. |
| The basics | The ideas you need to follow, explained without formulas. |
| The example | A case with figures, followed by the list of the formula's symbols with their value in this example. |
| The lab | Sliders to change the inputs and see the response day after day. |
| The full formula and its sources | The exact calculation at a one-day step, each parameter with its source, the reasoning that justifies it and what the equation leaves out. This section is folded away, and one click opens it. |
Each parameter carries a tag that says where its value comes from. When the three country groups do not have the same value, the values are given in the order advanced / emerging / low-income.
The labs
Each mechanic page contains one or more labs. When you move a slider, the curve follows and a sentence describes what is happening.
A lab isolates one mechanic. What the mechanic does not compute stays fixed, at the value you choose, as the note under the lab points out, so its figures show the mechanism on its own. In a real game, by contrast, everything moves together, from the central bank to prices and the debt. What the game gives with all the mechanics at once is described in The model put to the test.
The labs run exactly the same calculations as the game, and we check that they return the same values as the game does.
Why everything is published
In games where you run a country, the figures often move without anyone knowing why, and nothing then lets you tell a debatable model from a bug. PREEMINENCE publishes its equations, that is, the mathematical form of each mechanism, with the value and source of each parameter and what each equation simplifies, because the studio wants people to be able to find errors in them.
To play, there is nothing to read, because each figure is explained where it is displayed. This documentation is for those who want to understand the model, and for those who want to check or challenge it.
Telling a bug from a choice
- If the game does something other than what the documentation states, it is always a bug.
- If the game follows the documentation, but the documentation contradicts the data or the studies it says it relies on, it is a calibration problem.
- If the game follows the documentation and the gap with reality is listed under “What it simplifies”, it is a choice, which you can debate but which is not a bug.
- A parameter marked choice does not come from the studies but from the interest of the game or from a modelling decision, and those are the grounds on which it should be debated.
Reporting a discrepancy
A useful report gives the country and the start date, what was done, the observed value and the expected one. It also explains why that value was expected, through a source, an order of magnitude or a line of reasoning.