Afforess
The White Wizard
One of the other big economy topics, besides Trade Routes, is inflation. In normal BTS (and RAND) is simply increases with game turns. It saps your gold income. The advanced economy option adds some modifiers that influence the inflation rate, but the effect is to overall decrease the size of your treasury.
Why do we need inflation? I suspect the game developers saw that over time, the income levels of players would just rise and rise. Lots of buildings improve commerce and gold. The game gets seriously unbalanced if you can just hurry units and buildings every turn. Inflation is a way to push the scales the other way, and tax the success of the player. It applies to everyone equally.
This is dumb. Inflation in a real world sense, occurs when a government or external entity expands the monetary supply. "Gold" in the civilization sense isn't really even money. It's more a supply of government willpower & supplies. Why do I think it's not money? You can't simply throw millions of dollars at a cathedral and get it built tomorrow, in real life. So "Gold" isn't money. Plus, gold isn't earned by taxation. One can argue that the sliders are a form of taxation, and I certainly play with that concept with civic anger, but is it really? Do increases taxes in real life come at the expense of culture or scientific innovation? That's a stretch.
So inflation doesn't really make sense from a real world perspective. That's okay, plenty of mechanics are a bit silly. But it's also a bad game mechanic too. The way it works, is there is an inflation "rate", and your costs (units, city maintenance, civic upkeep) are multiplied by this rate. It doesn't matter how big or small your civilization is, all civilizations share the same rate. Because costs are different, the total expenses due to inflation are different, but the rate is the same. (Ignoring civics & random events that affect this). Because city and civic costs increase with the size of your empire progressively (each new city is more expensive than the last one) inflation is a progressive tax, discouraging larger empires. So far, so good.
One problem though. It does not take into account technological and progressional disparity. Let's say I am 1000 turns into the game and reach the Modern Age. Most other civs are trailing behind at early Renaissance. All civilizations have the same inflation rate. But because I am technologically advanced, I have access to more buildings that can boost and . The more backward civilizations have the least ability to generate commerce, due to limited access to buildings and wonders. But if our civilizations are the same size, we pay equal rates of inflation! This increases the commerce gap and allows me to expand faster and faster.
I propose we dump inflation entirely. Lock it at zero the entire game. Instead, increase the base city maintenance costs, and base civic upkeep costs. And see how it goes.
Why do we need inflation? I suspect the game developers saw that over time, the income levels of players would just rise and rise. Lots of buildings improve commerce and gold. The game gets seriously unbalanced if you can just hurry units and buildings every turn. Inflation is a way to push the scales the other way, and tax the success of the player. It applies to everyone equally.
This is dumb. Inflation in a real world sense, occurs when a government or external entity expands the monetary supply. "Gold" in the civilization sense isn't really even money. It's more a supply of government willpower & supplies. Why do I think it's not money? You can't simply throw millions of dollars at a cathedral and get it built tomorrow, in real life. So "Gold" isn't money. Plus, gold isn't earned by taxation. One can argue that the sliders are a form of taxation, and I certainly play with that concept with civic anger, but is it really? Do increases taxes in real life come at the expense of culture or scientific innovation? That's a stretch.
So inflation doesn't really make sense from a real world perspective. That's okay, plenty of mechanics are a bit silly. But it's also a bad game mechanic too. The way it works, is there is an inflation "rate", and your costs (units, city maintenance, civic upkeep) are multiplied by this rate. It doesn't matter how big or small your civilization is, all civilizations share the same rate. Because costs are different, the total expenses due to inflation are different, but the rate is the same. (Ignoring civics & random events that affect this). Because city and civic costs increase with the size of your empire progressively (each new city is more expensive than the last one) inflation is a progressive tax, discouraging larger empires. So far, so good.
One problem though. It does not take into account technological and progressional disparity. Let's say I am 1000 turns into the game and reach the Modern Age. Most other civs are trailing behind at early Renaissance. All civilizations have the same inflation rate. But because I am technologically advanced, I have access to more buildings that can boost and . The more backward civilizations have the least ability to generate commerce, due to limited access to buildings and wonders. But if our civilizations are the same size, we pay equal rates of inflation! This increases the commerce gap and allows me to expand faster and faster.
I propose we dump inflation entirely. Lock it at zero the entire game. Instead, increase the base city maintenance costs, and base civic upkeep costs. And see how it goes.