User:Monet47/Guide To Empire-Building

Empires in the Sporewiki fiction universe serve as the launching-off point for fiction. They create societies to explore, powers to interact and conflict and the fictionverse would be a very different place if we discarded them. The wiki has also had a problem with empires, new ones especially, that are deemed 'too powerful' or unfun. Whatever the reason, the issues can be resolved though writing improvement, and a lot of these bad empires are down to naivete.

This is not a rulebook on how to build an empire. This is a diverse fictional universe where diversity is celebrated. It is more of a guide that looks at the things that make empires possible outside of differences in alien biology and mindset. For those interested in what might make a mighty empire or those interested in explaining power, this article might be useful to you.

=Some Background= To get an idea of what is needed, the starting point is perhaps the idea of needs. Contrary to the classic world conqueror bad guy, the motivation for most historical empires in in expanding is for the acquisition of resources, territory, security and labour. For example, for a while one of the incentives the Roman Empire gave to its legionaries was that for those who served long enough, they could retire to a parcel of land granted to them by Rome, although often cities grew from camps established to protect the borderlands and the soldiers became locals. Camps became towns as they became centres of industry, agriculture and interaction.

The ideas are grounded in a partial similarity to Howard Maslowe's Hierarchy of Needs. The ideas

Preface: Maslowe's Hierarchy
Howard Maslowe's Hierarchy of Needs is a 1943 proposal (later expanded) that supported this idea. Maslowe suggested that many human actions are driven by the desire to satisfy certain needs. The importance of these needs and the proportion of people that have fully satisfied each tier were constructed into a pyramid. Wen unsatisfied, people would dedicate themselves to fulfilling that need. The five needs Maslowe proposed (which he called 'deficiencies' as once satisfied people would pursue the next tier) were, in order from bottom to top:


 * 1) Physiological (food, sleep, warmth, air)
 * 2) Safety (security, shelter, order, freedom)
 * 3) Social (community, friendship, intimacy, affection)
 * 4) Esteem (mastery, self-worth, respect, status)
 * 5) Self-actualisation (realising potential, personal growth, experience)

While Mazlowe's hierarchy was something that could only be realised though community effort, nations have - to an extent - their own hierarchy of needs that are both similar and slightly different to personal needs. The hierarchy was not cast-iron though; someone having trouble fulfilling a need for belonging might still work to pursue something in the esteem tier, what generally happened was that they could not fulfill it with a mind as effectively as someone who had satisfied his deficiency for social contact. Its still possible but the general rule in Mazlowe's heirarchy is that fulfilling the lower needs is essential for fulfilling the higher needs optimally.

The Hierarchy of National Needs are proposed as follows:


 * 1) Foundational (food, fuel, energy, population, health)
 * 2) Safety (relief, defense, security, comfort, protection)
 * 3) Social (entertainment, social interaction, union)
 * 4) Prestige (creation of art, prosperity, invention, status, political dominance)
 * 5) Sophistication (high art, national projects, monumentation, spread of culture)

The needs for nations are less dead-set, but satisfying - or more importantly providing a surplus - the lower tiers makes it much easier to pursue the higher tiers. Both hierarchies incorporate something profound about the construction of empires: Be it personal development or national development, when there is an abundance of sources satisfying the lower deficiencies, the output of pursuing the higher deficiencies can be both easier and more profound. When empires have an abundance of food, they have plenty of surplus to supply an army or a wealthy class, who can spent more time on gathering food and raw supplies. One fundamental difference however, is that while being poorly satisfied in the lower deficiencies prevents people from fulfilling the highest needs, nations can pursue all needs at once. However as mentioned before, their effectiveness of satisfying these deficiencies will be profoundly impacted. A nation under invasion for instance might be unable to dedicate the resources to build monuments and will struggle to maintain a grip on its pre-war sphere of influence. Likewise, nations that are suffering widespread famine will fare poorly in providing for a wealthy population as the foundational social classes starve.

A nation that can satisfy all these needs however will likely be under a golden age where science, art and engineering projects will be in abundance. it is this end-state where monuments to a nation's glory are built, and nationwide projects to advance the populace begin to really take hold. This can be seen in the cathedrals of Paris, Westminster, Canterbury and the victory arches in London, Rome and Paris. These were projects that celebrated the time they were built, monuments that may take an entire nation's support to make possible.

=Economy=

With Abundance Comes Advancement
=Military=

Supply Chains
=Administration=