Proposal: National Domestic Market

orlanth

Storm God. Yarr!
Joined
Nov 17, 2001
Messages
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Here's an idea I've had for enhancing the Domestic Market feature to enable a more fun and realistic domestic economy, while still allowing trade route micromanagement as usual if players want that. I've been thinking about it a while, so I'll post it here and let me know what you think!

2/ I like the idea of the domestic market. I read somewhere that it's not as profitable as selling goods directly in Europe. But this is not true when the prices in Europe dropped and/or the taxes raised. It is thus a good alternative to what have been implemented, in other colonization version, where with the proper building (trading post ?) / founding father you could sell as many goods as you want, even if the goods are boycotted, and without paying taxes. The domestic market gives some income, proportional to your population, that you need to pay the formation of your new citizens. It thus allows to be completely independent from Europe at some point. I really like that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by raystuttgart View Post
You can use minimum thresholds (in import / export) and automated transports to regulate / ensure supplies for your domestic markets.
It is not very practical. It took half an hour to set the trade routes. The dialog for assigning orders to Trek took one minute to open. Then i had to wait several minute for the trek to choose his route. Besides, he choosed to take a lot of marchandise and to send them far, which is really not optimal.

I could do it by hand but it would be tedious with the current warehouse system. I guess i'll have to wait another version.

Others have also mentioned before that the Domestic Market is initially quite a fun feature, but can eventually cause so much micromanagement that it ends up becoming very frustrating. I agree with this; I think the Domestic Market is a very interesting and realistic feature allowing the local economy to become gradually more independent from Europe; but with many cities and many yield types to keep track of each turn, it really can get to the point where the resulting micromanagement can become very excessive and not fun at all to deal with (and also not very manageable for AI). I know some people will still enjoy having the possibility of making and managing very large amounts of automated trade routes; but for me the sheer number actually does become too frustrating a chore and will make me stop playing since it can just become much too tedious, even with automation. :sad:

From the viewpoint of realism, a lot of domestic trade happened naturally by small "laissez-faire" independent traders between local settlements, and was not centrally managed by needing very large amounts of planned trade routes and treks. From the viewpoint of the AI, optimal trade routes considering all demand and supply of all goods between all cities can just be too difficult for it to plan far ahead very well, making it do less well than humans.

So, what is a way that could allow Domestic Market to be a realistic model of internal trade that's fun and manageable for players (and more fair for AI players to use), while still allowing benefits from optimal micromanagement of domestic trade routes for players who enjoy that? I've been thinking about that a while, and I think the solution could be to allow for some possibility of natural trade between local domestic cities, while still giving a benefit if you can optimally manage trade routes and local supply/demand.

This could be done by a method similar to the following function:

Code:
* For each city (CityA), if it doesn't have enough Yield to satisfy local demand, then:
	* For each of that player's other cities (CityB) :
		* If the other city is set to sell that Yield, and the other city has excess supply ((other city's supply - other city's demand) > 0):
			* subtract this excess supply from CityB, and treat it as consumed in CityA's Domestic Market.
			* charge a slight gold penalty for transport, proportional to distance between the two cities.

In this way, there's a realistic ability for cities selling excess goods to satisfy demand from their neighbors, but there's still an advantage to efficiency if you're able to plan your economy well to satisfy domestic demand locally or from trade routes. I think it provides the best of both worlds! ;):king:

An alternate algorithm that could be even quicker:

* At the beginning of the Domestic Market phase, do a single calculation adding up a national total for Domestic Excess Supply: this is the sum of (local supply - local demand) for all cities which have excess supply and are set to sell that Yield.
* For each city, if it doesn't have enough Yield to satisfy local demand, it can consume some to be subtracted from the total Domestic Excess Supply, charging a slight penalty for transport.
* At the end of the phase, the total amount consumed from Excess Supply is subtracted proportionally from the cities that had excess supply and are set to sell.

I think this also might be computationally less expensive than large numbers of trade routes between lots of cities, so this might help the game run faster in the late game for games with large maps and large numbers of cities.

I know this idea could be controversial, but I'm putting it out there as something to start thinking about. For me, this could be a really ideal way to allow players to have an interesting and fun Domestic Market that realistically represents internal trade, and not have mandatory micromanagement become too tedious a chore. For players who enjoy lots of micromanagement, they could still get an advantage from their skill by carefully managing their domestic trade routes. For AI players, they would be able to make fair use of the feature without cheating and without complicated AI coding that's prone to errors. Well I hope you'll consider it, and let me know what you think! :king:
 
yes please, please, please.
the city-to-city trade route management is just not much fun after a while.
I'm the leader of the colonies, it's not my job to make sure every colony has 5 tonnes of coats each turn.
 
Well I hope you'll consider it, and let me know what you think! :king:

My personal opinion:

1. Domestic Markets is not the one and only game deciding feature.

It is just one featue out of many.
It is absolutely possible to play and win a game of Religion and Revolution without really taking care of it.
Nobody forces the player to use this feature. It is simply optional.

2. It is not meant to be a simple cache machine, where you don't really have to do any thinking.

It is actually a feature for players that like to do a lot of micromanament and want to take the challenge to optimize the last bit of their trade system.
I did not want to just make the game easier with that feature. That would be extremely boring for experienced Civ4Col players.

3. Beaming goods from one city to another is a no go for me.

All other features require as well, that you transports goods to the correspoding location.

4. In my opinion a good feature should balance risks / challenge / price to rewards.

The proposed National Domestic Market would only give rewards (meaning more gold).

5. Such an "uncontrolled" feature would become annoying or confusing to some player.

Some would say "I don't understand why goods dissapeared from X.".
Others would say "This stupid feature took goods away that I wanted to sell in Europe.".
Another would ask "Where can I see an overview how much gold will be generated or how much the national demand is ?".
...

At the end there are again players that are unhappy and complain.

6. This release has already entered the phase of finetuning and improvement.

We are busy with finding and fixing last small bugs, improving texts, improving graphics, improving balancing, ...

Summary:

If somebody wants to create a National Domestic Market in a modmod, that is absolutely ok of course. :thumbsup:
It is just not the way I personally want to play and thus I won't create such a feature.
 
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