DESIGN: Economy Details for v.2

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Krikkitone
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#91 Post by Krikkitone »

Actually, the new colony bit Does bring up a possible problem. When I was setting up the scenario, the possiblity began to exist for Negative Wealth at a colony (overall).

This would happen if a colony is Very underdeveloped (or poorly developed, ie Industry that doesn't work or Minerals that people don't need). The people still have to be fed.

I'd say that in that case, any colony that has a net negative Wealth, has its wealth set to 0 and the difference is taken out of the Imperial Treasury (basically You pay for their food if they can't). The planet can then be overdriven (assuming that the population units produce some small amount of industry on their own) so that it will develop enough to pay for its own food.

I agree a new colony would have to have some starting economic infrastructure. (I'd make that proportional to the number and cost of colony pods on the Colony ship... although the scrap value of the ship could also be good... with Colony pods giving some extra)




As for money and my 'MOO4 dd', well it's ~100 pages long and only semi-organized, and Very incomplete but I can cut out the 'Econ' section and e-mail it.

Basically the idea is that each turn money comes from various 'Treasuries' either governmental or the local private treasury into various goals (like consumer goods, feeding people, building new buildings, etc.) The money then 'flows through' the local economies and comes out as taxes (to the govt.) and wages and profits (to the 'local private treasury') the complications come in the fact that price of Nothing is fixed*, and the problem of dealing with Trade (of Resources is not too bad, dealing with Trade Goods {or Quality Goods as I call them} gets more complicated)

*although I'm thinking of using production as a benchmark value to prevent runaway inflation/deflation.

another part of the idea is that the net amount of money in the game at any point is 0. (the amount a 'Treasury' can spend Depends on its income last turn, as well as its outstanding debt/surplus, and its trustworthiness)


As for the difference between my Omega and EA's with regards to Focus I think you may be thinking of Gov. Spending (which would Not be part of Focus)
Focus would be those 4 resources and the balance between them (or the buildings that help produce them)*

Government spending would be what you want to buy at this world (Defensive Structures, Mobile Military ie ships and troops, Terraforming and pollution cleanup, Or supporting the local economy.)*

*should be both macro and micromanagable

(Other Government spending done on the Imperial Level would be Diplomatic, Stockpile maintenance, Military unit maintenance, Spies, Special Building Maintenance could either be Imperial level or through one of those categories on that world...possibly depending on the building type.)**
**Done on an Imperial level so macro management is sort of built in.

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Krikkitone
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#92 Post by Krikkitone »

skdiw wrote:I prefer empire wealth not equal to factory production as it is easier. I prefer the having the resource itself reflect the contribution to empire. No need of extraneous money variable when they just cancels out. Nothing wrong with +20 food and +20 BC for exporter and just -20 food for importers. This way is simpler.
The idea is if I produce 1 food, that contributes to the empire by allowing 1 pop unit to work (and live)

1 mineral contributes to the empire by allowing 1 production to be made

1 Research contributes to the empire by allowing tech to move towards completion

1 Industry allows buildings and ships to be built and maintained, and provides people nice things

Money is just a way to redistribute that last resource. so that a world that has mostly farms, can build and maintain those farms, and have nice things and planetary defenses. So that production can be focused on one area from others giving a new world an ability to develop fast, or to pump out big ships through your one major shipyard system.

In that sense money is acting like it doesn in the real world, it does nothing itself just acts as a substitute for other things.

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#93 Post by EntropyAvatar »

Krikkitone wrote:I'd say that in that case, any colony that has a net negative Wealth, has its wealth set to 0 and the difference is taken out of the Imperial Treasury (basically You pay for their food if they can't). The planet can then be overdriven (assuming that the population units produce some small amount of industry on their own) so that it will develop enough to pay for its own food.
I agree that the government should step in at this point. I find it interesting that you can end up with situations where the infrastructure has been destroyed or lost through neglect, and you have a bunch of angry people with no means to even feed themselves.

Note that even if there's zero local industry there's a ceiling on diminishing returns. It would be expensive, but you could ship in everything they needed to get moving again.

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skdiw
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#94 Post by skdiw »

I understand what you guys are trying to do with money, but my point is that you added in unecessary complexities. I am saying the maintenence and whatever payments are all factored in already into the production of money--no background calculations--just simple +20 BC along with your + 20 food. The + 20 BC includes maintening those farms and provide other nice things; you don't need and (-) on the other side of the equation--no one cares except for the programmers who has to dubug extra code that does nothing! If you want realisim, just say that this new tech improvement decrease the cost of maintenece to provide a net change of + 30 BC. Whats the deal with adding then taking it off again? If you change focus, then the facilities deteriote depending on time. Plus they are useless anyway since the population is alloted to new focus so the old focus facilites are not in use.

This simplify way will help the new colony problem. Just say upon founding a new planet, you get 1 pop and 1 industry. The 1 industry is untaxed on default and you can use it for development only--no buying food or other silliness. You can overdrive it and import in food at no cost.



My simple free market (FM+0)

Each of the four resource is tradable on the FM. The amount you can trade for each resource is picked by the player ranging from zero to everything that that player can generate each turn. The default amount is everything surplus in the imperial stockpile. You can change the amount every 10 turns. You then list a price rate that you are willing to accept for that resource. Other players can buy the resource with a 10 turn agreement that on each turn, your customer have to pay your list price in exhange for the resource for next 10 turns. Both party gets a money bonus added within their agreement according to much they buy/sell for trading unless research is being trade, which then both parties gets a research bonus. <edit>If the agreement is broken before the 10 turns, then that player gets a black mark, which is used for relationship calculations.

Other items for trade are techs, planets, ships, spy information, and loan agreements. Besides of loan agreements, the player just list his price. Loan agreement operates operates just like in real life.
Last edited by skdiw on Thu Oct 02, 2003 2:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
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#95 Post by EntropyAvatar »

skdiw: With respect I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. You see this part of the model as a clear negative, while I see your proposed solution as demolishing one of the model's core benefits.

<edit> Also, could you please indicate your edits and additions once you've submitted a post? This is not the first time I've submitted only to find the post I've replied to has changed. It can make the conversation hard to follow.
Last edited by EntropyAvatar on Thu Oct 02, 2003 2:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

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skdiw
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#96 Post by skdiw »

My simplify version shouldn't demolish anything in regard to gameplay. What benefit does it kill? I think this is just a misunderstanding.

Most of my edit are spelling and clarity issue. Only a few have content changes.
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Krikkitone
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#97 Post by Krikkitone »

The benefit it kills is the necessity of having any industry in your empire. After all, why do you need industry if you can produce enough food to maintain your buildings, and rush build your ships with the accompanying money (which acts as production)

The point is moving the production around in the form of money does nothing to the Imperial Level balance, but it does Strongly affect Planetary Balances, so that there is

a) some reason to build Industry worlds (your empire doesn't get money from food)

b) some reason to build food/mining/research worlds (they will still have a decent portion of the Imperially produced money, so they can grow and flourish.. as long as there is not more food/minerals/research than is needed)

As for your Free Market, that sounds good and we should have something like it but I was talking about an internal Free Market.


Part of it is my innate resistance to having money be a 'good' that is produced. after all, what can money itself actually do in the real world..nothing. Food, Minerals, Production, and Research are all things with tangible benefits to the empire. Money as a produced good is something like 'Happiness'. It has no tangible result only what it makes others do.

I'd agree with EA that it may be a philosophical issue, so I'd like to see an alternative plan including one of your ideas for money or just one specific change in Omega plan (We'll call your plan Alternate Omega, or whatever other letter from whatever alphabet you want). That way we can see if there is any apparent gameplay difference.

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skdiw
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#98 Post by skdiw »

The money bonus is modicum compare to industry worlds so you would still want industry world as your workhorse for your shipyards. I assume the accompany money is small or just balances out. In the case that it balance, then I see no reason having money being accompany to food and minerals in the first place.

I thought money = pp and pp = money. It doesn't really matter what you call it as long as the gameplay is what we want. EA calls it money; the developers call it pp; you know half of the key to understanding philosophy is realizing that everybody is talking about the same thing except they are all using different terminologies.

My intent is not to modify any of your proposed gameplay and I don't think Alternate Omega is any different than Omega. I just think the mechanics can be a lot easier with Alternate Omega; I wasn't talking about taxation or imperial funds; I was talking about planetary money mechanics not philosophy.
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#99 Post by Ablaze »

The trade of food and minerals shouldn't enter into it. The more developed a society gets the more it's economic trade will be based on services rather then goods. Any well run government would concentrate its taxes on services to avoid going bankrupt. (Most of today's governments don't tax services enough, which is why many governments, especially the US government, are seeing less and less revenue per capita.) I don't believe that services will or should be modeled in this game so I think that revenue should just appear "magically" out of population units.

I'll call this the "Premium Tax Plan Alternative 2003 Gold Edition."
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skdiw
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#100 Post by skdiw »

Let me expain what I understand:

single planet example:

prime focus: food
second focus: none

the planet generates say 10 food and 10 pop. Accompany is 10 money (1 money for each food).

5 of that pop is working on food while the other 5 is distributed equally onto research, mineral, and industry.

Focusing the arguement on just food, 10 pop eats 10 food (1 food for each pop). Instead of 10 food - 10 eaten, you do 10 money consumed taken from the food catagory so 10 food money - 10 conusme food money = 0 food left.

If lets say you get 20 money (2:1) for that 10 food. And the consumption is still 1:1, what I am saying is instead of 20 - 10 = 10, you do just +10 to accompany your 10 food. Since you know the ratios, you just use algebra the simplify the math. That is all I am saying; nothing profound, but saves a lot of headaches.

@ Ablaze
Again, I rather avoid realism arguements. I rather see mineral food being a critical role throughout the game. If you have surplus then you aren't expanding fast enough. Get your ppl to have sex more so we get more productive citizens. Burn all those trees and use those natural resources faster so I can spend my vacation on Mars next year. FYI, the only real service country is US. There are tons of starving ppl out there.

I added in FM becuase ppl want to win via economy. How do one win one of your Premium Tax Plan Alternative 2003 Gold Edition?
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#101 Post by Ablaze »

I don't see how your proposal adds anything to an economic victory, just because your less endowed planets will be both a drain of resources and a poverty-stricken slum rather then just the former. Vegas produces no significant amount of food or minerals and still prospers somehow.

You don't like real world arguments, then how about this: It's simpler.

'nuff said.
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#102 Post by skdiw »

I don't what your speal is about. I thought you lived in Inferno and not in the U.S. FYI, there are other countries besides U.S. :wink:

Food and minerals are passed and are important resources for the game; service is not passed and the only thing they are good for, as ppl propose, is reduce unrest. Food and mineral should be in FM. Just dump service as part of industry category. It is simpler to remove food and mineral out of FM but that's dumb. 'nuff said.

You win through econ by buying out majority of the opponent. There is a exhange rate depending on the relative economic strength of the two parties in which players must accept. Say 1 food = 20 money for fair market value. If you pay 100 money for 1 food, the other player can't refuse it and must sell however many food you what as long as you pay 100 money for each food. You can totally buy them out so they starve to death and win. They can use the money to buy food from other players but, because his empire is small and backwards, he has to pay 200 money for 1 food as the guarantee exchange rate.
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#103 Post by EntropyAvatar »

skdiw wrote: Focusing the arguement on just food, 10 pop eats 10 food (1 food for each pop). Instead of 10 food - 10 eaten, you do 10 money consumed taken from the food catagory so 10 food money - 10 conusme food money = 0 food left.

If lets say you get 20 money (2:1) for that 10 food. And the consumption is still 1:1, what I am saying is instead of 20 - 10 = 10, you do just +10 to accompany your 10 food. Since you know the ratios, you just use algebra the simplify the math. That is all I am saying; nothing profound, but saves a lot of headaches.
In the Omega plan, if producers get twice as much for food, then consumers pay twice as much. This planet would never make or lose anything from food (no matter what the price) because its production balances its consumption (except in the case where there's an empire-wide surplus of food that's being wasted).

Now if I understand your proposal correctly, you want to remove consumption costs from the equation. So I think if that were the case, the planet would make +10 from food in the first example, and +20 from food in the second example.

If that is indeed your proposal, then it's true that the player would probably still want to build industry, because thats where the big money comes in. The problem I see with this is that it breaks the chain of dependence. In the Omega proposal, every sector needs every other sector, but if you drop payments for consumption, this is no longer true.

To illustrate, let me introduce yet another example. Say we have a two-planet empire. Planet A is dedicated to mining and industry. Planet B is dedicated to agriculture. Everything is fine and stable until one day evil spies break in and destroy every single factory and mine on planet A.

Let's assume your modification is in place. Clearly planet A is screwed. Now, what happens to planet B? Nothing. They keep buying their consumer goods, and maintaining their farms, exporting food and living life exactly as before, because they don't actually depend on industry. This means that planet A can also keep living on their excess food indefinitely.

Now let's consider what happens in the original Omega plan. Planet B can still export food to planet A, but planet A has no wealth with which to pay for it. Assuming the government has reserves they can pay for planet A's food for a while. But this can't go on. All of planet B's wealth is now payed for by the government and the government's only source of income is taxes on the money it pays to planet B.

If it taxes everything right back, then planet B has no consumer goods and its farms will fall apart for lack of maintenance. If not, the treasury is on a freight-train to empty. Unless the government's reserves are enough to get some significant industry built somewhere, the empire is doomed.

Anyway, I have to get going, so I don't have time to argue with Ablaze :D . As for the edit thing, maybe just a note for when significant chunks are added (like your free-market proposal).

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#104 Post by skdiw »

Okay, resources ledges to a net balance of zero. In that case why just do + 20 food produce and then - 20 food consumption <edit> and other ppl pay for surplus? We are back to my original question: why do you need money to accompany the production of food? How do you do food focus if you don't have a net money surplus to reinvest in? How do your planets grow in the first place if the net always = 0? That is really strange.

In my first example, the net = 0; in the second, the net = +10. In both example, the money consumption is already taken account. We just balance with a positive income and not worry about any background calculations.

Now in your example, planet B would have a surplus of wealth so B can now pay for A to get food over to A. Planet A isn't just a trading partner; A is part of your empire; kinda like if your friend is in trouble, you go help him.

<edit>I don't see why B will run into debt if each food produce is accompany a positive money. Now, I can see if producing food is just producing food and ppl have to pay for surplus, then I can see this interplanetary trade and dependence that you are talking about. But in that case, I would suggest forget about the (+) and just worry about the (-) of the eqaution.
Last edited by skdiw on Thu Oct 02, 2003 4:56 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Plan 9

#105 Post by Quintin »

I'd like to break up my comments.

M y com me nt s .

there. All done ;)

First topic: managing a big empire with lots of planets and lots of different buildings, etc. I talked about my idea for this here: http://www.artclusta.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=35&start=90
note: Entropy, you've already read this.

Problems with Omega
I think the farmer buying trade goods and the factory workers buying food works. Mostly. Here are the problems I see with it:

1) Difficult to write an AI to properly manage an empire, decide what planets should have which focus, etc. Say one of your food producing planets gets destroyed... what should the algorithm be for determining which planet gets a focus shift to food production?

2) Empires are too fragile with the super interdependency created with said buying/selling.

More General Doubting:
Why would ANY empire surplus be wasted? In the here and now, we don't dump raw iron into the ocean or shoot it into the sun if we can't us it immediately. We do waste a lot of food, but its because it extremely cheap here (in the US). The tech to store food for long periods of time is old news - we can do it now with freeze-drying and canning. Thus, stockpiles should have very, very high ceilings. Also... if you lived on a planet and you KNEW that every scrap of food that you ate had to bridge the void of space to get to you, wouldn't you have a pretty well-stocked larder? I know I would. (maybe a Granary type building to prevent starvation during a blockade?)

Maintenance (some of this is a reiteration)
For purposes of this post, I'm going to group buildings into two broad categories:
1) Buildings that directly increase a specific resource
2) All other buildings.

An example of type (1) buildings might be "'Smart' Tractors", which can be researched and built to improve food production. When they are built, they are built in a factory. So they require industry points (and mineral points) to produce. However, once they are in use, the factory workers are not the ones that maintain them. A farmer would maintain them - or a mechanic that specialized in farm equipment. Either way, it would be someone from the farming community that maintained the "building". Thus, the cost of maintaining such farming buildings is the time of someone who would otherwise be farming. So instead of that guy being a farmer and producing 3 food, he maintains the Smart Tractors... so you pay 3 (or so) food units to maintain your farm equipment, but you get +1 food per farmer. (NO flat bonuses for resource buildings!). So its reasonably realistic - but most importantly its really SIMPLE. :) Also, this makes it really easy to program the AI: does a planet have more than 3 farmers? Then build 'Smart' Tractors. Easy. Incidentally, having no buildings provide a flat bonus (ala MoO2's Automated Factories - they built stuff without any workers!) this encourages genuine distinctions between colonies of disparate focii.

Money
While accurately modeling a free trade economy might lead to greater game detail... people are still trying to do that in Real Life(tm) with little success. I'm in favor of putting together some system that stands up in at least a vague, hand-waving kind of way that feels easy to use and is simple. As such, I don't want to care about anything but the bigger ideas...

Questions:
1) Are my people starving?
2) Am I producing any really obscene surpluses?
3) How much money do I get to play with?

Answers:
1) No? Good. Yes? Oh, then I better shift some planets focuses...
2) I am? Hmm... I need to either trade these to other empires, or shift some focii... or I could stockpile them because I know I'm going to be needing a lot of minerals later...
3) Think of it like a sales tax. Really productive people get taxed more, so its really income generated on resources.

How much money?
Proposed: 1 "AU" (?) per production point of Food, Mineral, and Industry. (this all depends on what the buying power of an AU is and how many points per population unit can be expected. But the idea here is a linear relationship with those three resources.) This may sound like a lot of money - and why not? We're dealing with a futuristic, semi-utopian society here. Basic maintenance shouldn't be that big of an obsticle.

If all type 1 buildings cost maintenance in the form of the resource they help produce, what costs money to maintain?
1) Active-duty ships and troops
2) Type 2 buildings (Capitol, Sports Arena, Planetary Gravity Generator)
3) Spies
4) Propoganda (think "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky)
5) Trade agreements
6) Researchers*

* - why charge maintenance for researchers? Because they aren't making food, digging up ore, or building toys or guns. The whole investment thing you know. They do buy products, so you do get sales tax off of them, but you give it right back in the form of research grants, scholarships, etc.

Stockpiling
It doesn't take a whole lot of resources to store food and/or mineral wealth for long periods of time - but it does require some. I suggest that for every 50 points of food or minerals in stockpile requires 1 AU of maintenance.

The New Colony Problem
I think the current ideas would force all new colonies to initially be industry focused, then the primary focii would be changed to with the 2nd or third pop unit. Or, if population units aren't quite as precious as in Civ or Moo, a new colony might start with 3 colonists or some such.

Changing Focii
Inevitably, some colonies will be changing their focus. Since this involves major shifting around of a planetary economy, there'd be some penalties, no doubt. I'm thinking something along the lines of only one pop unit can be shifted from one focii to another per turn, and any shifted pop unit has a 50% penalty to production for that turn. Colonies who's focii has been significantly changed may have some buildings that are unprofitable (i.e. there are more 'Smart Tractor' mechanics than there are farmers). Such colonies might be brought to the player's attention.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something I meant to mention. I guess I'll think of it later.

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