DESIGN: Money Money Money

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krum
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#76 Post by krum »

skdiw wrote:
han_krum wrote:I don't know if we really need money; they could be just an unnessesary complication of the resource system. Trade would work fine without them, only with RP and PP. What money seem to be basically is a stockpile for stuff. The game could feel more dynamic without them; I think we should think twice before including them; in a way it can spoil the game if a player accumulates a large amount of money and mess up things... remember, KISS. Money is only needed if there is something really important that can't be done by something more simple, IMHO.
I thought we passed all the resources kind we need. I don't see why any of the four resources can serve as money also. What is so difficult to say pp is industry and pp is stockpile behave just like money because you can exchange for other resources.
Well, we just call this PP stockpile 'money'. I also got real excited about some simple trade system that would enable us to put embargoes and stuff like that, for some variety to diplomacy. So if is also about trade it makes sence to call it money.

About conversion of resources: have empires exchange them. About the above examples like:
Empire A has minerals, needs food
Empire B has food, needs production
Empire C has PP/money, needs minerals
They could work out the situation by not trasnferring all their surpluses at once, which is too risky because they can't trust each other; Instead, here's what they'd do:
Empire A agrees to tranfer a portion of its surplus minerals each turn to Empire C.
Empire B agrees to tranfer a portion of its surplus food each turn to Empire A.
Empire C agrees to tranfer a portion of its surplus PP/money each turn to Empire B.
That way if someone stops th ransfer at a given moment in order to get stuff for nothing, he doesn't get too much, and loses the trust of the other two empires, which would supposedly be a bigger loss.

EDIT: just occured to me that this could be a little complicated for the AI... I guess it would have to be one contract made by three empires rather than three seperate contracts. That means we would need to have diplomacy a lot more complicated to allow for multi-sided diplomatic agreements or whatever we'd call that. It still seems simpler than the alternatives to me, though. And as you all know. I'm an AI expert... :roll:

DemoMonkey
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#77 Post by DemoMonkey »

Even the most draconian government imaginable won't directly control ALL of the available resources.

I think the concept of using currency to buy various resources, even though no player or empire in the game has a surplus, is an abstraction of the empire bartering on the open or private markets. The minerals/food/whatever are out there, even if they don't show up in anyones production stats.

Make the exchange rate worse for exchanging large amounts in a turn than for small amounts. That's a simple matter, and it prevents blowing a huge cash stockpile suddenly for a game breaking effect.

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skdiw
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#78 Post by skdiw »

I see that "money" is just another parameter or resource that we reference our transaction to in our econ model. Much like how we reference off a valuable and useful metal called gold at one in history, I don't see why we can't just use pp as a reference. I think referencing off one of our four passed resource is simplar than introducing another parameter that all it really does is make a bigger mess. For example, why convert taxed pp into "money" when you can just taxed pp into "pp in stockpile." You can call pp in stockpile as money if you want, but the game effect is the same.

I fail to see what the purpose of having money if you can't use to buy stuff. Isn't coverting using one resource to another the same as buying one resourse with another?
:mrgreen:

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#79 Post by emrys »

For once skidw, I agree with you entirely. I just don't see the point of introducing yet another resource, who's only purpose seems to be to make it a little harder for us as designers to spot when we put in any mechanisms that don't make game sense, i.e. introduce nasty opportunities for exploits or 'gaming the system', or are excessively hard to balance.

I suggest that for the moment we should consider the phrases "money" and "PP stockpile" as interchangeable, with the view to planning the economy out talking about "money", but that anything we decide can be done with "money" will actually be done with "PP stockpile".

If (as I suspect) we find that that leads us to no problems at all, then we'll have managed to avoid complicating the game unnecessarily. If on the other hand when we finish fleshing out the economy/money design we discover that there are very good reasons why it is clearly impossible to replace all the occurances of "money" in our design with "PP stockpile", then we'll have discovered that we actually really need that extra complication.
Last edited by emrys on Wed Mar 10, 2004 9:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

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#80 Post by Daveybaby »

I dont get this obsession with PP. Its not the only resource in the game. Food, minerals and RP are all equally valuable. This focus on PP as the only meaningful economic output of planets is misguided, and potentially unbalancing.

In Moo1, if you gave a planet a grant, you werent necessarily rushing production, you were just giving that planet a boost to its economic activity, whatever that was. So if it was doing research, research output would be doubled.

Similarly, if you taxed planets more (i.e. by taking more per turn into your reserve) then economic output of planets was reduced in ALL areas. Research, Ecology, Shipbuilding, etc. If a planet overproduced in any area, not just PP, then this overproduction was placed into the reserve (although it was impossible to overproduce research or shipbuilding in Moo1).


In my eyes, this comes down to one of 4* options:

(a) Track each resource individually, possibly allow stockpiles of food, minerals or PP to be redistributed as required. Possibly allow trade agreements such as : 10 food per turn in exchange for 20 RP per turn.

(b) Abstract overproduction/taxation of any resource and call it money. Some things may be more intrinsically valuable than others, so you might want a conversion process (i.e. 1 PP = 5 Food = 3 Minerals = 1 Money).

(c) Only allow stockpiling, redistribution and trading of one resource (which i expect would be PP) and pretend to yourself that its not money

(d) Dont allow money in any form. So, no stockpiling, redistribution or trading of any resource.



My personal opinion is either (a) or (b) - it doesnt really matter which. (a) would potentially be very interesting and could add a whole new economic angle to the game... but on the flipside it could overcomplicate things. (b) is pretty much how every 4x game has done it so far, so it clearly works as far as it goes (dont think ive ever seen any complaints w.r.t. that aspect of a 4x game). I see no benefit in deciding that PP is the only thing that can be money (option c). I also think that option (d) really over-limits what the player can do with their colonies.

Thats just my personal take on things - and it may not be whats best for FO. Hopefully, however, those 4 options pretty much cover all of the bases of whats possible - you just have to pick one.


*You have no idea how much that turned out to be like the spanish inquisition as i was writing it. :P
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#81 Post by krum »

Look, people, let's get our terminology straight so that we can concentrate on actual issues. Much of the discussion so far has been focused more on semantics than on actual game mechanisms, and it simply unproductive and slows us down a lot.

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#82 Post by krum »

emrys wrote: I suggest that for the moment we should consider the phrases "money" and "PP stockpile" as interchangeable, with the view to planning the economy out talking about "money", but that anything we decide can be done with "money" will actually be done with "PP stockpile".

If (as I suspect) we find that that leads us to no problems at all, then we'll have managed to avoid complicating the game unnecessarily. If on the other hand when we finish fleshing out the economy/money design we discover that there are very good reasons why it is clearly impossible to replace all the occurances of "money" in our design with "PP stockpile", then we'll have discovered that we actually really need that extra complication.
I thought we already had that settled...

As I see what a huge problem it is what we call what, I porpose that we call a stockpile of a giver resourse a stockpile, and some abstract conversion medium, which I don't think we need exchange medium or for short EM, and forbid the use of the word money :)

EDIT: If you like, we could call EM transfer roubles or TR*

* For our younger members, the eastern equivalent of the ECU, like in the old СИВ (Съвет за икономическа взаимопомощ) -- CEC (Council of economic coopeartion) -- the Warsaw Trateaty's equvalent of the commmon market. :wink:

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#83 Post by noelte »

@Daveybaby

I think a) is the best for the job. This way you have to e.g. asure that you are producing enough food. With b) you can simply focus on production and don't care about the others, this should IMO not the way to go.

If we have a trade system we could trade/buy e.g. food from other empire (if they have a overproduction). But there would be no way of buying food from nowhere or converting something into food.


Ronald.

Edit removed: I also think resources should stockpile.
Last edited by noelte on Wed Mar 10, 2004 12:04 pm, edited 3 times in total.

krum
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#84 Post by krum »

Daveybaby wrote: (a) Track each resource individually, possibly allow stockpiles of food, minerals or PP to be redistributed as required. Possibly allow trade agreements such as : 10 food per turn in exchange for 20 RP per turn.
I think I actually took (a) for granted, dunno why... Currently nothing is stoickpiled, adn that's not final, we need to figure this out. But currently the thread is often obsessed with making up complicated conversion mechanisms... how can you turn food into minerals or minerals into manufactiruing power? It's counter-intuitive; you need to exchange with otehr empires.
Last edited by krum on Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:14 am, edited 4 times in total.

luckless666
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#85 Post by luckless666 »

Daveybaby wrote:I dont get this obsession with PP. Its not the only resource in the game. Food, minerals and RP are all equally valuable. This focus on PP as the only meaningful economic output of planets is misguided, and potentially unbalancing.

In Moo1, if you gave a planet a grant, you werent necessarily rushing production, you were just giving that planet a boost to its economic activity, whatever that was. So if it was doing research, research output would be doubled.

Similarly, if you taxed planets more (i.e. by taking more per turn into your reserve) then economic output of planets was reduced in ALL areas. Research, Ecology, Shipbuilding, etc. If a planet overproduced in any area, not just PP, then this overproduction was placed into the reserve (although it was impossible to overproduce research or shipbuilding in Moo1).


In my eyes, this comes down to one of 4* options:

(a) Track each resource individually, possibly allow stockpiles of food, minerals or PP to be redistributed as required. Possibly allow trade agreements such as : 10 food per turn in exchange for 20 RP per turn.

(b) Abstract overproduction/taxation of any resource and call it money. Some things may be more intrinsically valuable than others, so you might want a conversion process (i.e. 1 PP = 5 Food = 3 Minerals = 1 Money).

(c) Only allow stockpiling, redistribution and trading of one resource (which i expect would be PP) and pretend to yourself that its not money

(d) Dont allow money in any form. So, no stockpiling, redistribution or trading of any resource.



My personal opinion is either (a) or (b) - it doesnt really matter which. (a) would potentially be very interesting and could add a whole new economic angle to the game... but on the flipside it could overcomplicate things. (b) is pretty much how every 4x game has done it so far, so it clearly works as far as it goes (dont think ive ever seen any complaints w.r.t. that aspect of a 4x game). I see no benefit in deciding that PP is the only thing that can be money (option c). I also think that option (d) really over-limits what the player can do with their colonies.

Thats just my personal take on things - and it may not be whats best for FO. Hopefully, however, those 4 options pretty much cover all of the bases of whats possible - you just have to pick one.


*You have no idea how much that turned out to be like the spanish inquisition as i was writing it. :P
This is exactly what I'm getting at. People are assuming that we are just going to base money off PP, and therefore say "why not just have a PP stockpile". they haven't considered the fact that the other resources in the game would also contribute. (You can't turn RP into PP. That would be turning thought and research into an iron girder. Its not feasible. However, thought can be SOLD, and therefore can be turned into money). I would like everyone to stop thinking as money=taxed PP and consider it as money=taxed PP, taxed RP, taxed Food and taxed minerals. Although we havent decided it to be based on this, neither have we decided it will be based off just PP.

And i'm with Daveybaby: whats this fixation on PP?
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krum
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#86 Post by krum »

luckless666 wrote: And i'm with Daveybaby: whats this fixation on PP?
That's not a fixation, it's simply that it's easy to imagine stockpiling food and minerals, while manufacturing power, labour, needs a more complicated representation as it's not so material. But, again, let's stop using "money" as there's as many ideas about what it is as there are people here... We'll figure out what to call money in the end...

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#87 Post by luckless666 »

han_krum wrote:
luckless666 wrote: And i'm with Daveybaby: whats this fixation on PP?
That's not a fixation, it's simply that it's easy to imagine stockpiling food and minerals, while manufacturing power, labour, needs a more complicated representation as it's not so material. But, again, let's stop using "money" as there's as many ideas about what it is as there are people here... We'll figure out what to call money in the end...
Its called money because thats what it is in the end. The accumilation of excess RP, PP, Food, and Minerals put in one convient (sp?) measure instead of having four seperate stockpiles. Its the profit from having an efficient empire
Last edited by luckless666 on Wed Mar 10, 2004 11:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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emrys
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#88 Post by emrys »

Daveybaby wrote:I dont get this obsession with PP. Its not the only resource in the game. Food, minerals and RP are all equally valuable. This focus on PP as the only meaningful economic output of planets is misguided, and potentially unbalancing.
A justification for focusing on PP as the main economic indicator:

RP is not valuable in and of itself, completed tech are valuable, the steps along the way are not in game play terms, even in descriptive terms of little bits of knowledge they don't really seem to be valuable.

Food is only valuable in terms of subsistence, i.e. there is very little point in having ten times more food than you need, whereas there is a strong value in building ten times as many ships/buildings/defences etc. as you "need". (In Economics terms, the demand for food is very inelastic, the demand for PP is almost completely elastic.)

Minerals are only really valuable in terms of allowing the production of PP. Excess minerals are basically worthless, in a similar way to food. N.B. wortheless to you, trade is a separate issue.

Essentially in the game PP already has all the properties of money. It is divisible, having a bit more is always worthwhile (strictly positive marginal utility), it is substitutable for all the other resources (in the medium to long term, i.e. you can use it to build more mines/farms/labs rather than more factories.). So long as it is possible to choose between consumption of it now or later it is in fact the almost precise equivalent of money anyway. (i.e. If it is stockpileable and later useable in some way, i.e. the boosting output by "use of prefab parts" idea which is the straight equivalent of buying boosted ouput with money)
In Moo1, if you gave a planet a grant, you weren't necessarily rushing production, you were just giving that planet a boost to its economic activity, whatever that was. So if it was doing research, research output would be doubled.

Similarly, if you taxed planets more (i.e. by taking more per turn into your reserve) then economic output of planets was reduced in ALL areas. Research, Ecology, Shipbuilding, etc. If a planet overproduced in any area, not just PP, then this overproduction was placed into the reserve (although it was impossible to overproduce research or shipbuilding in Moo1).
So the effect of this was that you were allowed to convert any form of output into any other indescriminately, with the only restriction being that the maximum rate of interconversion was limited to the doubling the normal output rate of the resource you were converting to. If this is what we wan't in FO, we could have it, we'd just explicitly state "assigning stockpiled PP to a planet allows it to increase it's output (of a resource/of all resources) by up to +100% of normal output. This allows you to interconvert PP and other resources." rather than hiding this fact by passing it via "money".


As for your options, I'd like to see the possibility of trade agreements to exchange e.g. 10 food for 20 minerals per turn whatever system we go for (not RP, I don't think it makes sense to trade or exchange RP for reasons I mentioned above) whatever system we choose, so let's leave that out of the options.

In practice we're going to do (a) to some degree anyway, (d) is clearly out because it's way too inflexible, so we have a choice between (b) or (c).
But perhaps it would be worth rephrasing (b) to

(b) Abstract overproduction/taxation of any resource and call it money. Some things may be more intrinsically valuable than others, so you might want a conversion process (i.e. 1 PP = 5 Food = 3 Minerals = 1 Money). And then pretend to yourself it's not PP.

By which I mean that really the argument that any stockpileable, redistributable and tradable resource is money, is an equally good argument for saying "money" is an unnecessary synonym for an exisiting resource.


p.s. although my argument might seem to be in favour of taxing only PP output, in fact I'm in favour of taxing all output, and having planets nominally sell "output in excess of local consumption", and buy "consumption in excess of local production", so that everything ends up being "bought" with PP. The idea being that you as a player end up being presented with the empire surplus or shortfall in each resource, which planets are net producers/importers of each resource, whether planets are net contributors or drags or the empire etc. I know it sounds complicated, but it's really easy and exactly what we would do anyway with money, honest.

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#89 Post by emrys »

The fixation with using PP rather than money on my part is simply the effect that the name we use has on the thought process we through.

If we have something called "money" then we think "you tax PP,RP, mineral and food output and get money" and we think "you have money, with which you buy stuff". The result of these two seemingly perfectly logical thoughts is that, amongst other problems, you get yourself into the situation where you can convert any resource into any other resource by going via money, irrespective of how much you produce of each of them. So if you're not careful you end up with the situation where you don't need to do anything but grow food, then sell it even though no one wants it, and buy starships, even though you have no manufacturing base, or equally you can concentrate only on an industrial base and simply buy the research and food from nowhere etc.

[quote = "han krum"] how can you turn food into minerals or minerals into manufactiruing power? It's counter-intuitive; you need to exchange with other empires.[/quote]

Or equally we end up creating "money generating colonies and buildings" which effectively create stuff out of thin air.

If we talk in terms of PP then it is always in your mind that in order to get research, minerals or food out of this, you're going to have to convert it in someway, that way needs to be justifiable, i.e. by supporting overproduction from existing facilties, or by building new facilities, or by allowing you to divert support and maintenance into new construction. The player is forced to plan, and/or the designer can clearly see the impact of design decisions which blur the boundaries between resources.

PP used as money becomes the benefit from running an efficient empire, "money" used as an illdefined proxy for the existing resources becomes the solution to not running an efficient empire.

Perhaps the best argument for why we should use PP rather than money is this - what is it that makes money worth something? why is a piece of green paper with some famous americans face on it worth more than a plain piece of paper? Simple answer, because people will swap it for stuff, but then why not just use stuff as money? Real answer because it allows us to tell people what to do, what things we feel are worth doing in exchange for us doing something. In other words because it represents a slice of Production capacity.

That said, who cares? It's basically just terminology. If we choose to have money we just clutter the UI a bit and make it a bit more likely we'll cock up the design somewhere, if we use 'PP as money', then we may possibly confuse players a bit. To be honest it probably doesn't really matter so I'll just get back into my box and stick to arguing about the substantive design issues when they result.

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#90 Post by krum »

I suggest that we focus on how distribution and stockpiling of surplus resuources works, since that seems to be the issue.

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