Replacing Inflation

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I have never bothered to get my head around this economic aspect of Civ but BlueGenie in this thread and in particular this post is suggesting we may have been using the wrong part of the Civ system to fix some problems we have with city maintenance in particular. This has been happening since the old RoM days and is because we did not know what th tool was for so kept using a hammer when the screwdriver was needed.

Yes I know it is not about inflation but city maintenance but you brought up city maintenance as a replacement mechanism for inflation.

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If I am understanding BlueGenie correctly, he is advocating for Number of City Maintenance (the very modifier I was discussing earlier) to be increased significantly, instead of inflation. This analysis seems to validate my opinions completely.

@Afforess
Yeah, it is the spread which bothers me, not the total. The total can be calculated based on whichever formula that sounds reasonable. But without spreading it out across all cities, it would look strange for the newest city to start with an extreme high maintenance, while the other cities suffer no change. This way, the best building to build first will no doubt be a courthouse or similar which reduces maintenance, rather than some growth buildings like granary.

P.S.
The BTS formula takes into account vassal cities too, which yours have not.

@DH
Actually, the main issue with the current "Number of Cities Maintenance" is a max number is added. This means that above Xth City, new cities will no longer increase this value and only distance maintenance takes effect. This, I agree, does not make much sense, yet was set at a ridiculously low number, less than 10 I believe.

platyping said:

@Afforess
Yeah, it is the spread which bothers me, not the total. The total can be calculated based on whichever formula that sounds reasonable. But without spreading it out across all cities, it would look strange for the newest city to start with an extreme high maintenance, while the other cities suffer no change. This way, the best building to build first will no doubt be a courthouse or similar which reduces maintenance, rather than some growth buildings like granary.

P.S.
The BTS formula takes into account vassal cities too, which yours have not.

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Ok, and you're right about the vassal thing. I coded up my formula with some slight alterations, namely to spread it as you suggested, and to count 50% of vassal city maintenance (vassals get 50% off in maintenance).

platyping said:

@DH
Actually, the main issue with the current "Number of Cities Maintenance" is a max number is added. This means that above Xth City, new cities will no longer increase this value and only distance maintenance takes effect. This, I agree, does not make much sense, yet was set at a ridiculously low number, less than 10 I believe.

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I noticed that too! They were set absurdly low, and I am raising those much higher.

FYI, inflation is disabled as of Rev761.

Afforess said:

FYI, inflation is disabled as of Rev761.

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And which things discussed here have been implemented yet?

BTW, I agree with increasing city maintenance cost, but I don't agree with changing the formula so drastically like this, at least while it isn't fully understood and brought for comparison/study.

And another thing I disagree is my first city actually costing anything in maintenance. This way we will have to gather some gold at the start of the game to compensate for the fact we are already losing money (or go back to Civ III and give a starting gold to players). Even on Gigantic it would cost 1gpt (1.66).

I don't know on AND, but BtS (and LoR) had a balance in mind with City Maintenance. The value is low indeed, and is tied to your Handicap (it can be checked on CIV4HandicapInfo.xml). This was balanced with State Property. On the highest difficulty, the worst a City Number Maintenance could get was 8gpt. With a courthouse 4gpt. If you run State Property, all your cities are now costing 4 or 8 gpt. This was to balance the lack of corps and let players without corps to win the game even if someone is getting many corps.

AND has also a tech with no distance maintenance cost I believe, so that should be balanced together with an increase in the Number of Cities Maintenance Cost.

Spirictum said:

And which things discussed here have been implemented yet?

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I'm not sure what you are referring to, this is a fairly short thread, and everything discussed is now implemented.

Spirictum said:

BTW, I agree with increasing city maintenance cost, but I don't agree with changing the formula so drastically like this, at least while it isn't fully understood and brought for comparison/study.

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Please, do study. I will change it if it proves to be unbalanced or exploitable. I would rather move fast and break things than sit around and discuss theoretically in a committee. It's much easier to figure out what to fix after playing an actual game than discussing theory. So do play a few games and come back. I was honestly hoping you would. You've been enlightening so far.

The formula I replaced it with is an exponential formula, the version I finally settled on is:

number of city maintenance for one city = sum ( z ^ (i/y), i = 1 to NUM_CITIES) / NUM_CITIES

The z is the base number of city maintenance cost. The y is the target number of cities for the world map size (tiny map target cities is 3, gigantic is 10). NUM_CITIES = number of cities owned by the player.

While you are under the target number of cities, the summation will be very low (exponents to powers less than one produce small numbers). After you exceed the target number of cities, it slowly ramps up. The handicap infos still cap the max number of maintenance, but the caps are much higher (25gp/turn for noble).

Spirictum said:

And another thing I disagree is my first city actually costing anything in maintenance. This way we will have to gather some gold at the start of the game to compensate for the fact we are already losing money (or go back to Civ III and give a starting gold to players). Even on Gigantic it would cost 1gpt (1.66).

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It's less than 1 GP/turn on Prince & Large map. I'm not sure if there are any other scenarios where it would be > 1 GP/turn, but maintenance that is less than 1 is rounded down to zero. No harm there.

Spirictum said:

I don't know on AND, but BtS (and LoR) had a balance in mind with City Maintenance. The value is low indeed, and is tied to your Handicap (it can be checked on CIV4HandicapInfo.xml). This was balanced with State Property. On the highest difficulty, the worst a City Number Maintenance could get was 8gpt. With a courthouse 4gpt. If you run State Property, all your cities are now costing 4 or 8 gpt. This was to balance the lack of corps and let players without corps to win the game even if someone is getting many corps.

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RAND has a lot more sources of income, and now that inflation is gone, city maintenance can take the place as the gold sink - except you can actually do something to lower maintenance.

Spirictum said:

AND has also a tech with no distance maintenance cost I believe, so that should be balanced together with an increase in the Number of Cities Maintenance Cost.

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I didn't touch distance maintenance.

Well, looking at the formula, he is right that it will be at least 1 for a starting city.
x^y will always be minimum 1, when x is at least 1, and y at least 0.

Which is true for your formula, since z is the base cost, it has to be positive.
And regardless of what value for x and y, the exponential factor is at least 0.

My point on the Distance Maintenance was that the civic which has "No City Distance to Palace Maintenance Cost" should be balanced with an increase in Number of Cities Maintenance Cost because it's whole purpose is to let you face a Corporation Empire without HQs. By increasing the cap on Number of Cities Maintenance, the disadvantages to Corporatists will be less then to the Communists, and maybe will render communism useless in harder difficulties.

Once again I did a mistake:

AND has also a civic with no distance maintenance cost I believe, so that should be balanced together with an increase in the Number of Cities Maintenance Cost.

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Will a simple Ctrl-Shift-T allow a rev760 game to proceed with the removal of inflation?

Arakhor said:

Will a simple Ctrl-Shift-T allow a rev760 game to proceed with the removal of inflation?

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Yes, works fine.

platyping said:

Well, looking at the formula, he is right that it will be at least 1 for a starting city.
x^y will always be minimum 1, when x is at least 1, and y at least 0.

Which is true for your formula, since z is the base cost, it has to be positive.
And regardless of what value for x and y, the exponential factor is at least 0.

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World map size has a number of cities modifier which is always less than 100 ( between 30-12 for most sizes) so the maintenance is not that large.

And another thing I disagree is my first city actually costing anything in maintenance. This way we will have to gather some gold at the start of the game to compensate for the fact we are already losing money (or go back to Civ III and give a starting gold to players). Even on Gigantic it would cost 1gpt (1.66).

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Afforess said:

number of city maintenance for one city = sum ( z ^ (i/y), i = 1 to NUM_CITIES) / NUM_CITIES

The z is the base number of city maintenance cost. The y is the target number of cities for the world map size (tiny map target cities is 3, gigantic is 10). NUM_CITIES = number of cities owned by the player.

It's less than 1 GP/turn on Prince & Large map. I'm not sure if there are any other scenarios where it would be > 1 GP/turn, but maintenance that is less than 1 is rounded down to zero. No harm there..

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It is the fact that the first city will definitely cost at least 1 GP/turn, regardless of whatever map size or difficulty, while you claim that it will be less than 1, which will round down to 0.

An exponential function z ^ (i/y) can never be less than 1, when z >= 1 and (i/y) >= 0

platyping said:

It is the fact that the first city will definitely cost at least 1 GP/turn, regardless of whatever map size or difficulty, while you claim that it will be less than 1, which will round down to 0.

An exponential function z ^ (i/y) can never be less than 1, when z >= 1 and (i/y) >= 0

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Wrong. As I mentioned earlier (albeit I was on my phone), open Civ4WorldInfos.XML.

Please read the values of iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent. The value never exceeds 50% (45 for duel, 12 for gigantic)

Consider the implications. The maintenance for number of cities is multiplied by iNumCitiesMaintenancePercent then divided by 100. So a number slightly greater than one, multiplied by 45 and divided by 100 is definitely smaller than one.

Therefore, Maintenance is never greater than (nor equal to) 1 gp/turn for the first city.

Edit: to put the nail in the coffin, I started a DUEL map game on DIETY for both BLITZ and ETERNITY game speeds, and my maintenance costs for the first city were .... (drumroll please) 0.93 !

Then this is ok. But are those values you calculated earlier taking into acount this decrease of 45% you have just said?

EDIT: BTW, what about the Federal Reserve Random Event?

It cuts inflation if you pay 100. You must be Laissez-Faire, have Corporation and 1000

Spirictum said:

Then this is ok. But are those values you calculated earlier taking into acount this decrease of 45% you have just said?

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No. I didn't add in all the modifiers because there are building, civic, etc other modifiers too.

Spirictum said:

EDIT: BTW, what about the Federal Reserve Random Event?

It cuts inflation if you pay 100. You must be Laissez-Faire, have Corporation and 1000

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Good point. It's probably simplest to just disable the event.

There are a couple other events that should modify inflation, but they never worked

Afforess said:

No. I didn't add in all the modifiers because there are building, civic, etc other modifiers too.



Good point. It's probably simplest to just disable the event.

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I agree, and Vokarya made the Federal Reserve, so it shouldn't be both a building and an event

Afforess and others, just for your information from some quick test it looks like teching is slower in the early eras and maybe a bit faster in the later eras with the new changes for TR and inflation. If necessary, I'll work on balancing things, but I'll do some more testing once we're sure everything is working properly.

45°38'N-13°47'E;13345776 said:

Afforess and others, just for your information from some quick test it looks like teching is slower in the early eras and maybe a bit faster in the later eras with the new changes for TR and inflation. If necessary, I'll work on balancing things, but I'll do some more testing once we're sure everything is working properly.

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I'm not altogether too unsurprised. The later eras are not really balanced at all. After about Renaissance things start to go really off the rails. Balancing the late-game really needs to be a separate project on it's own right.

Afforess said:

I'm not altogether too unsurprised.

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Neither am I

Afforess said:

The later eras are not really balanced at all. After about Renaissance things start to go really off the rails.

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Well, to tell the truth not really in my experience. Problem is that after renaissance there's already some civ which is starting to get ahead of every other civs, possibly both in terms of strength and techs. That's the real problem. I don't think eras are too imbalanced, but once you have twice the number of cities of any other civ, the game is over (unless you use revolution, then sometimes big empires get in troubles but not as much as it was in the past).