Today’s dev diary is going to be focused on Bureaucrats and bureaucracy: we’ll talk a little bit about what bureaucracy is in Gilded Destiny, why your Bureaucratic Efficiency is important, what it affects, and how you can ensure you have plenty of Bureaucrats throughout your provinces.
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Bureaucratic Efficiency
To explain how bureaucracy works in Gilded Destiny, we'll need to first take a look at Bureaucratic Efficiency.
Each province has its own Bureaucratic Efficiency percentage, which represents how effectively the province is being administered by the state. This is derived from two values: Bureaucratic Workload and Bureaucratic Power.
Bureaucratic Workload represents how much work there actually is for bureaucrats in a given province. We'll go into this in more detail shortly, but it's essentially a measure of how much effort it takes to provide your population with services, get them to follow your laws, and most importantly, pay their taxes.
Bureaucratic Power, on the other hand, is a measure of how much work your administration is currently able to take on in the province. Generally speaking, more bureaucrats equals more Bureaucratic Power. It then becomes a question of making sure that you have enough bureaucrats filing and stamping the forms to prevent the bureaucratic work in the province from piling up.
So, to get our Bureaucratic Efficiency percentage, we need to divide Power by Workload.
Bureaucrats also need somewhere to do their work, so they're employed in administrative buildings. These administrative buildings automatically scale up if Bureaucratic Efficiency is below 100%, and scale down if it's ever above 100%, so you don't need to micromanage every single province (which would be a real headache for large countries like Qing or the UK). However, what you do need to pay attention to is making sure that you're getting enough bureaucrats to actually fill those job posts, which we'll come back to in a bit.
Summary
Bureaucratic Workload represents how much work there is for bureaucrats in a given province
Bureaucratic Power is the measure of how much work your administration can take on in a province
Bureaucratic Efficiency is worked out by dividing power by workload
Administrative buildings automatically scale up or down depending on your Bureaucratic Efficiency.
Why Bureaucratic Efficiency Matters
Now, we'll take a look at why Bureaucratic Efficiency matters in Gilded Destiny, and as you'd expect, it boils down to two things: cash and control.
On the cash side of things, Bureaucratic Efficiency determines how much of your taxes you can actually collect from your population. The lower the Bureaucratic Efficiency, the easier it becomes for people to find ways to evade the taxman - less audits, less assessments, and more reliance on decentralized collection (which increases the potential for people to skim off the top). As a result, the tax rate you've set may not end up being one to one with the tax rate you get.
On the control side of things, you'll get a scaling penalty to Authority generation if your Bureaucratic Efficiency falls too low. We've talked a bit about Authority in other dev diaries; but to recap, Authority is what your government uses to exercise its will. It's used to enact laws, keep special provincial edicts in play, and keep your leaders in check (since it pays for their upkeep).
Therefore, low Bureaucratic Efficiency means that while you may have passed all these laws, there isn't enough oversight to make sure people actually obey them, and it might mean that whatever services your government promises, there isn't enough manpower to actually deliver them. As a result, the separation between what your government says and what's actually happening inevitably reduces your government's Authority.
So, to keep things running smoothly, you'll need to make sure your Bureaucratic Power stays level with your Bureaucratic Workload.
Summary
Bureaucratic Efficiency determines how much of your taxes you can actually collect from your population
If your Bureaucratic Efficiency falls too low, you’ll receive a scaling penalty to your Authority generation.
Bureaucratic Workload
The problem with Bureaucratic Workload is that it doesn't stay the same. Each person in the province contributes a base amount of Bureaucratic Workload, and as your population grows, that number will go up.
Different professions also produce different amounts of workload: wealthier professions, like Aristocrats and Capitalists, contribute more, whereas poorer professions, like Smallholders, contribute much less. The general idea is that wealthier POPs have more assets that need assessing, and are more economically active in a way that adds to the administrative burden in ways that we don't directly represent. It's worth adding that you'll still get more tax out of wealthier POPs - the difference in workload isn't so large that it ends up consuming its own margin. The main thing to bear in mind, though, is that promotion and demotion will also cause Bureaucratic Workload to change - and if everything's going well, that number will also go up.
Then there are the challenges that come with having a more diverse population. Each distinct culture and religion inside a province increases the Bureaucratic Workload by a fixed amount, as things like language barriers, cultural norms, and religious practices all need to be taken into account by the machinery of state. A uniform populace is easier to predict, and thus easier to administer. Migration will therefore also affect a province's Bureaucratic Workload, and more prosperous provinces will inevitably be more attractive.
Government-owned production buildings also contribute to Bureaucratic Workload, since unlike privately-owned production buildings, they don't have capitalists to run them. If you overexpand your state industries without sufficient bureaucrats, you could end up cutting into your tax margins.
Yet the biggest change to Bureaucratic Workload will come from your policies. Certain policies will increase or decrease the base workload per person, depending on how difficult they are to implement in practice. Bureaucracies need data, and the more specific and personal the data required is, the greater the effort it will take to gather and process.
In some areas of government, more progressive policies are naturally more workload-heavy: things like expanding the voting franchise, providing welfare, mass education, and so on. In other areas, more authoritarian policies may require more effort, such as policing and border control. "Big government" is, in this sense, quite literal: the more you want to directly affect the lives of your population, the more manpower you'll need to deal with them, and the greater the cost to the state treasury.
On top of that, there are certain conditions that can cause the Bureaucratic Workload of POPs to increase or decrease. For instance, the administration of colonial territories tends to engage with pre-existing power structures, and thus often involves some degree of decentralization, especially in relation to the home government. Colonial Territories therefore provide less overall yield than fully incorporated provinces, but have a lower workload. Certain cultures and religions also can add modifiers that increase or decrease the Bureaucratic Workload of the POPs they are attached to, and certain Leaders can provide sweeping bonuses to administration.
Summary
Different professions produce different amounts of workload: wealthier professions contribute more, whereas poorer professions contribute much less
The biggest change to Bureaucratic Workload will come from your policies: more progressive policies are naturally more workload-heavy
Colonial Territories provide less overall yield than fully incorporated provinces, but have a lower workload.
Bureaucratic Power
In general, of course, Bureaucratic Workload is likely to increase over the course of the game (unless you're aiming for some sort of semi-anarchist state, which is certainly an option). At the same time, the output of Bureaucratic Power per bureaucrat is also likely to increase as you build up transport and infrastructure and as you progress through the tech tree. Indeed, the discovery of certain technologies may make previously impractical policies suddenly become feasible, or at the very least, ease the financial strain from existing ones. The invention of the Tabulating Machine, one of the early precursors to the modern computer, is one such example: before its adoption in 1890, the US census took up to 8 years to collect and process (at which point it was almost time for the next census).
Of course, increasing the output per bureaucrat is only helpful if you actually have bureaucrats to begin with. Getting more bureaucrats is therefore the other way you'll increase Bureaucratic Power, and that requires taking a quick look at POP promotion.
In Gilded Destiny, promotion and demotion refers to the social mobility of POPs: whether they go up or down the social ladder, or stay in their current profession. Since some professions fall into roughly the same social bracket of the hierarchy, there are also weightings that determine which profession the POP is more likely to transfer into.
There are multiple factors that contribute to promotion and demotion; however we don't have time to go into all of them. The main one for our purposes, though, is needs satisfaction. Generally speaking, if a POP can meet more of its needs, it's more likely to promote (or at least less likely to demote). If a POP has more cash, it's more able to meet its needs. Since tax involves taking cash away from POPs, overtaxing your POPs can stifle growth by preventing promotion, thus preventing POPs from becoming bureaucrats (who you need to collect the taxes).
Conversely, paying your bureaucrats more will make the profession more attractive, which means more POPs will choose to become bureaucrats when promoting.
Promotion will also be a key factor in maximizing the tax gain from your POPs. Ultimately, Bureaucratic Workload is a part of what you might consider as your expense per person (aside from expenses such as military, research, and education). Therefore, making your POPs more affluent by getting them to promote to better-paying professions - in effect, industrializing your economy - will increase the income per person you can get without just taxing your POPs harder. Of course, you could just tax your POPs harder, but as mentioned earlier, there's always a danger that will stifle long-term growth. What it will come down to is the kind of government you want to run, and the kind of laws you want your people to follow, and the kind of state you want to create.
Summary
Bureaucratic Workload is likely to increase over the course of the game.
The output of Bureaucratic Power per bureaucrat is likely to increase as you build up transport and infrastructure and as you progress through the tech tree
Getting more bureaucrats is the other way you'll increase Bureaucratic Power
If your POPs needs are satisfied, they’re more likely to be promoted into the social bracket of bureaucrats.
Postamble
We hope this dev diary has given you an in-depth look into why Bureaucracy matters in Gilded Destiny, from telling you why Bureaucratic Efficiency is something you need to pay attention to, to what might cause your Bureaucratic Workload to increase, and what factors you must consider to get your POPs to promote into bureaucrats.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, don't hold your horses, and trot down to the comment section below. You can find us on Discord, YouTube, X, Facebook and Reddit for discussions, updates, and feedback.
Until our paths converge once more, we bid thee farewell!
May your destiny be a gilded one.