Discussion about ‘meritocracy’ in the Celestial Adm Government.

[darthfanta]

The Tang Dynasty was in many ways the last native Chinese government where bloodline played a major role in the appointment of government positions. Not only were many government positions open directly to the descendants of senior officials without serious tests, but even the Imperial Examination itself was usually rigged in favour of aristocratic clans who often formed the examiners. These aristocratic clans were destroyed by the end of the Tang Dynasty by rebels like Huang Chao and parvenu warlords like Zhu Wen who, coming from the lower class, disdained the aristocracy for blocking their way of advancement in the past. The aristocracy was massacred and their prided family trees were destroyed.

By the time of the Song Dynasty, many innovations were implemented to eradicate rigging of exams. While the system of officials being allowed to directly enroll their close family members into the government persisted, these untested officials were limited to lower ranking roles. Due to change in societal attidues,Officials who entered the civil service this way are almost never permitted to take any more than middle ranking roles. Most officials who became prominent came from middle ranking gentry who could afford an education instead of being big landed aristocrats. Officials who become governors, minister and chancellors were exclusively individuals who passed the Imperial Examination, often the individuals with top ranking results. Given the high bar to pass the exams, very few officials have their children or grandchildren become middle to senior officials after them. This effectively eliminated any chance for an aristocracy to be developed.

From what’s being seen of the dev diary so far, I don’t think the devs are capable of implementing the post-Tang style of meritocratic government. It’s more or less just a continuation of the Tang system. I was hoping to discuss ways where this could be better reflected.

 

[istar00]

make advancement score to be based on overall stats

corrupt house can use influence & schemes to raise advancement score, but lose merit if they got caught

influence is gained by being a powerful house, so only powerful house have enough influence to use, only powerful house have accumulated merit in the past that they can afford to lose, otherwise AI is disincentivised from taking actions that loses merit (a threshold merit they will maintain, beyond which, they get more reckless)

emperor can implement laws to crackdown (make influence advancement score increment smaller), but law lead to massive MASSIVE opinion loss amongst powerful vassals with many house members

vassals should have schemes to make the emperor unpopular, merit loss for corruption can be redirected to scapegoats, sabotaging education of other vassals so they got less stats = less advancement score

867 Tang starts with powerful corrupt vassals, making it difficult to implement the anti-corruption laws, later Song start have less powerful vassal / vassal with small House

 

[CrazyRat]

I mean: after all it is CK3, a Dynastic game. If you would argue that it should not be possible to develop an aristocratic dynasty, then – probably – a Song China would be a bad place to play as anyone but the Emperor.

Now, more to the point. We already have Merit as a big consideration, and Imperial Examinations. If you want to make it harder to establish a permanent Dynasty, then – during the correct Era – spending Influence to influence the examinations, and to advance your own family members could just be more (prohibitively) expensive.

Moreover, we already have events that create people: influential eunuchs, historical figures, and the like. We could have just an event like ‘a wild top student approaches!’ where the top ranker in the metropolitan examination would be created, and given according merit. Well, and given that AI is rarely doing too well on educating their families, I think they would stand a big chance of having better credentials than most AI families.

More to the point: there probably aren’t that many top, Emperor-rank jobs – and so the influx of such new men (one in a few years?) could make sure that at least the top jobs will not be an easy prey for the ruling families.

 

[AHumpierRogue]

It's a bit basic but I noticed that the Merit meter had 9 divisions, so I assume it is based on the 9 ranks system, though I imagine unlike IRL where you have to be assigned a rank, your rank is just innate and there being 9 of them is just for flavor. Though this could actually be a fun court position and system actually where you could be in charge of assigning people's ranks and grading them, and vice versa would have to interact with someone to get graded/get your rank updated. Still anyway I could imagine it being a thing where there could be a law related to how much merit your family provides, where in 867 the law would be you/your dynasty members after you would get like a boosted starting merit score based on whether your dynasty had previously high ranked members. This could be changed by laws, with a Song law having it have no bonus to your merit based purely off family(though of course families would still be the ones with the resources to cultivate genuine talent in their children). And perhaps also an even more family-oriented law you could enact for roleplay purposes if you reform the state where you could hearken back to earlier eras.