Supply and Demand for Luxuries

I think this is possible now, actually I thought it was possible before SDK and all that, but that's beside the point.

I should tell people I have no idea how to translate this into actual code, I'm just brainstorming.

Hokay.

This is the Earth portrayed now:
Luxuries give flat 1 happiness bonus. Personally, I think this is ridiculous as it completely discounts the most basic economic theory of supply and demand and assumes that things are still as wanted even when everyone has them, which isn't true in my experience.

The Solution?

Variable happiness bonuses for resources.

More definitively. (NOTE: This is as a whole, not per source)
# of a type of luxury: Happiness Provided:
1 : 1
2 : 2
3 : 3
4 : 3
5 : 2
6 : 2
7 : 1
8 : 1
9 : 0 (Yes, 0 zillch none nada)
(I doubt anyone is going to get more than 9, but after this it can’t go down anymore)
(Also, a toggle could probably be made to make 9 and above still give at least 1 happiness)

Rational:
When you only have one supply, everyone wants it, so it makes people really happy, but very few people can have it, just the aristocracy. Once you have two, more people can have it, but it’s still got its allure and there are still people who don't, so the rich still want it to prove they're better. Same thing with three resources and by four it’s just barely saturated the market so that almost everyone has one, but they're still rare enough that people still want them. However, once you have five sources, the product begins to 'super saturate' the market, and it begins to lose its value, slowly and steadily devaluing until you hit NINE sources, at which point the luxury is so common, its as if it really does grow on a tree, and it loses all of its appeal. People don't care about having a cool nifty beverage if everyone has one too. Its why Cell Phones are no longer considered a status symbol, same thing with cars, the sheer fact of owning one that is, I would also like to put more emphasis on 'imported' luxuries, explained later.

What this would do. It would encourage trade first of all, but it would also encourage consolidation. You would want to achieve that level of 3-4 sources as that is the 'optimum saturation point' If the AI could recognize this, which since it generally just looks at flat bonuses, or so I’ve heard, it might without any work at the AI itself. It also makes things more realistic in my opinion and adds a bit of depth to the resource system, as right now its just sort of ’oh, I have resource X, cool’ And after that no other thought is given to them. It seems to me that all people ever care about accumulating additional sources are for trade, as they seem to carry more weight.

Now, about imported resources. Since you can never import more than one source of a resource, or so It seems to me, I feel imported resources should automatically be given two happiness to represent the ‘ooh exotic’ thing that happens.

An Unintended Side effect is it would limit growth through conquest. My reasoning for this, is that as one’s empire grew, one would naturally amass more and more sources of a particular resource. However as one took lands from others they would naturally offend many many people, and eventually these people would not want to trade with you or even speak with you. Thus the only way to get rid of your excess resources would be to pillage your own source to prevent super saturation, but that would also harm the city near that source and effectively limit your growth, especially once you started wiping nations out, as even when people wont ‘trade’ with you they will still accept ‘gifts’

Well, those are my Ideas, what do others think? And more importantly does anyone have any idea how to implement this. I honestly think you could achieve it with XML and it might not even need any AI manipulating, But I don't know for sure as my only experience with XML coding in cIV is lowering the minimum city distance to 0 so I could put a city right next to another city.

Supply and Demand! Yes! I always thought it was ludicrous to just need 1 of item X to meet the demands of your entire population! It would make things much more interesting and realistic if a nation's populace demanded more oil/rubber/steel etc.

Good idea!

To prevent the whole "Having too much of one resource" syndrome. You could relate the ampunt of resources needed to popilation. Obviously, if you have a high population, you would need more resources since there would not be enough to run through the hands of everyone.

Plus resources, such as oil, steel, and the like, could be correlated with the army, construction, factories, etc. More Oil would obviously be needed to support Modern Navies, Tanks, etc. As for construction buildings could require a certain number of a vertiain resource. IE, Coloseum needs one resource of marble... something like that. For the rest you get the picture...
wow.. this could get kind of complicated.

I dont know if any of this is possible, since I have no idea how to edit.

just an idea.

Now that's a nice Idea. I would like to keep a point where super saturation comes into effect, but I hadn't thought about bigger populations requiring more resources in any way other than simply you would need more happy faces to keep a city of size 31 happy as opposed to a city of size 3.

The strategic resource application is gold, that would be cool, and it could also cause more competing for resources, especially oil and uranium since it is so scarce on world maps.

As to how we could do it, instead of making units require a certain number of resources to build, have them continue to require only 1 of a resource, but if they are beneath the optimum saturation point they get hit with 'promotions' that lower strength. For instance "Rationing gives -10% strength" whereas "Lack of supplies gives -20% strength and -1 move point". This could also be slightly modified to require supply lines during warfare, because otherwise your troops won't have any ammunition and will be vastly weakened, which is realistic.

As to making the overall percentages, since they can display unit counts on the military advisor panel I'm sure there is a ".getUnitCountNational" function or something like that, which we could use to get their number of units, divide by a certain number (I would suggest 20) and then depending on the results start applying the penalties.

We could also provide bonuses if there are ‘Plentiful Supplies’ which might give a +20% strength and +1 movement point.

I would suggest something like this: (Bonuses Cumulative)
#/20=
X<1 : Plentiful Supplies: +20% strength, +5% heal rate, +1 movement point
1 : Well Supplied: Nothing, base point
1<X<1.5 : Rationing: -10% strength
1.5<X<2.5 : Limited Supplies: -10% strength, -5% healing rate
2.5<X : Lack of Supplies: -10% strength, - 1 movement point (perhaps even to 0?)
For a grand total at no supplies of -20% strength, - 5% heal rate, - 1 move point.
Now that is crippling.

This would also restrict the construction of certain units according to actual history. For instance, cavalry were not common in the medieval ages because horses were rare and only the rich could afford them. Since a leader would shoot for that optimal saturation point they would only build a limited number of cavalry units if they only have 1 horse resource. Same thing with later in the medieval age, with tanks and oil. This would give Infantry and all other units that don't require a resource, a bit of an advantage and encourage building them as opposed to tanks, which is historically accurate. After all, the armies of world war two were predominately infantry, and not tanks, which is what it seems like in cIV, or at least it’s what I always do.

This is something I was thinking also... I think it's a great idea.

It is somewhat of an offshoot of what I mentioned in another topic. I stated that I think it be cool if there was an actual supply on resources. So each source gives a particular amount per turn. Those resources would be used for certain units.

In the case of luxury resources and others that aren't used for units, it could be done in a similar fashion as Vishaing suggested.

This would certainly add more realism to the game and make it more strategic.

Im excited. I've thought of this before, but im stupid when it comes to editing with Civ IV.

I just gave my suggestion in another thread, hope I'm not breaking any rules but here were my ideas:

"Tell ya what bugs me though. If I have any one resource, it takes care of my entire civ's needs. WEAK.
My suggestion? Take oil for instance, you discover a deposit of it, and you are told (hypothetically) roughly how much of it there is. Now there are a few factors that come into play after that. How much time/effort/expense does it take to get a barrel of crude? Then assume that the time/effort/expense goes up as you tap that oil well, until it becomes prohibitively expensive. Perhaps cheaper to buy on the market.(Say my, Market) But I need more oil, so my civ knocks on your civ's door and we say "say, we have the technology to pump out more oil more cheaply, we'll set up the infrastructure and give you a cut." Now you have the oil you need and I can either use or sell the surplus, what does that make? Why a commodities market of course!! I can flood the market with cheap oil, ruining the economy of Venez... uh I mean another civ and suddenly the game gets a bit more a) interesting b) complex.
I dislike the simplicity of the current Civ Economic system. I think units should cost more than shields(which mostly represent effort and industrial capacity) and should include materials (maybe later in the game, think tons of steel, look up the manhattan project and look how much silver wiring they used, I forget but I think it was alot) The creation of resources and the scramble scramble to secure/control them was a great idea that began in Civ 3, it added tension, direction, strategy, and realism. It just has to be taken a step further.
Some other examples of resources and such? The Vikings in Iceland I believe only had at their disposal "bog Iron" (lemme check my notes here...) a type of sediment containing as little as 1% iron, modern industry uses ore in the 30% to 95% range. It took alot of effort and energy to extract. Why did they bother? High demand and lack of outside markets.
Also I recall hearing that certain parts(or one particular plain) in Africa was so rich in diamonds that slaves were sent to comb the earth, literally picking them off the ground. Later on, you had to dig for them. What does this have to do with markets? For the most part, diamonds are commodities, and there are plenty of them, but theres basically a monopoly on them, and they are kept out of the markets, out of circulation. High demand, low supply, = high prices.
How does that grab you? "

I forgot to add that my oil example would lead to.. 'peak oil' and a global resource war, yay!
Now if we can just model:
1 protectionist tarif
2 metal based currencies
3 fiat currencies
4 inflation
5 black market
well we'd be pretty proud of ourselves!

Well, Lord Olleus, in the real world this is usually what happens when two nation trade two different items. NationA might take, for example, one month to produce Item A, and Nation B might take 5 months to produce Item A. furthermore NationA takes 3 months to produce ItemB and NationB might take 4 Months to produce ItemB. It has to do with Comparative/Absolute Advantage. It might be more profitable for each nation to focus on what each does best and trade their products with eachother, rather than divide the workforce. It's Economics, it's confusing, yet profitable.

Lord Olleus said:

so if i understand what your saying, destroying some of my gold mines would make my people happier? How very odd.

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It would certainly make gold more valuable anyway... it'd make the people who had it quite happy

I think those would fall under the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Anyway Supply and Demand relative to population/empire size would be a wonderfull concept to implement into the game.

[i can see it now, "Crighton your people have no spices, you must conquer them to satisfy their hunger"]

I was joking

Lord Olleus said:

"But less people would have it. Either 1 person is very happy, or 10 people are quite happy. If you could quantify happiness, the total amount of happiness would be the same."

The game mechanics could be made to reflect that thought, but that's not how things really work. If I produced 10 cars at a 1,000 dollars each, and that was the same as producing 1 car for 10,000 dollars, where's my incentive for producing 10 cars? It would take 10 times the effort to produce ten cars, for the same profit!

Also if you do not have a monopoly over a product, you cannot artificially reduce the supply for very long. Your competitors would merely increase output(if they can) taking advantage of your introduced supply shortage. You'd be shooting yourself in the foot!
It's Adam Smith's "invisible hand" at work; good ol' Laissez Faire economics.

gunshi said:

It would take 10 times the effort to produce ten cars, for the same profit!

Click to expand...

Except it's not ten times the effort. If it were ten times the effort, it would cost ten times more to produce. The expectation would be that you were producing considerably more and thus the profit would be less per car but given the quantities in which you'd sell them as opposed to the more expensive ones, you'd make as much if not more profit in the long run.

Besides, if you flood the market with one product, let's say Gold (since that was the resouce used), it would make it less valuable. Can anyone say, fall of the Spanish Empire?

That's true. The question though ultimately is: can the game represent this? I'd say no, and so I'd suggest not making it that complicated.

Dom Pedro II said:

Except it's not ten times the effort. If it were ten times the effort, it would cost ten times more to produce. The expectation would be that you were producing considerably more and thus the profit would be less per car but given the quantities in which you'd sell them as opposed to the more expensive ones, you'd make as much if not more profit in the long run.

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sigh.. it follows logically in my abstract and simplified example that if you produce 1 thing, it takes twice as much effort to produce two things, etc.

I was refuting/arguing (whichever's nicer) what Lord Olleus was saying; I basically thought it was too simple. After all what difference would it really make if you had 10 or 1 of a lux resource if it panned out the same? that was my point.

Also what you describe, namely increasing supply and achieving a lower per unit profit but greater total profit only holds if the demand is there to soak up what you're producing. If everyone has got plenty of toilet paper, and you merely produce more, you won't necessarilly sell more, you must either lower the price you're selling it at or sell that fancy, quilted, scented kind.(product differentiation) But I digress..

also alex9988 when you said "It might be more profitable for each nation to focus on what each does best and trade their products with eachother, rather than divide the workforce." that is true, but there is a danger when you over-specialize your economy (think one cash-crop producing colonies or cuba for that matter) you are dependant (this was done intentionally for colonies) and vulnerable to the fluctuations of demand on your specialized product. But thats's the kind if strategery, that makes civ great![sic]

What this all points to is a greater complication of the economic aspects of civ, which was a welcome and relevant addition to Civ III. Trade blocks and economic warfare are exactly the kinds of things that underly polotical and economic tensions. Does Civ acurately show what dominace of the sea and trade routes means for an empire? no. Think Greece the Phonecians, think ENGLAND for the love of god. Who here on a continents/world map, if they were one of the european countries would try to really build an impressive and dominating navy, at the expense of an army? WWI was practically started after a failure to curb the amounts of battleships, that nations were producing. Good luck trying to blockade England in Civ.

lastly Dom Pedro II: "The question though ultimately is: can the game represent this? I'd say no, and so I'd suggest not making it that complicated."

That's the only thing I wholeheartedly disagree on. Of course it can be made, but as it's not everyone's cup of tea, it would be best left a) a mod pack or b) included but some how simplified for those that would rather not deal with it's intricassies, perhaps like the city governor option, that takes some of the minutea out of city tweaking.

-Gunshi

Now, this is something which I have been crying out for for AGES!!! There is nothing more frustrating than having 3 lots of a particular resource, but not being able to trade it because everyone has at LEAST 1 of that resource. So I once proposed an easy method to rectify this-for all resources-not too disimilar from what is being proposed here.

As an example: Say you have 5 cities, and 1 source of silk-well this is sufficient to grant 1 happy face to all 5 cities. If you have 4 cities, however, then it provides 2 happy faces to each city etc etc (with the upper limit as suggested by the OP).
Now, say that you build a 6th city. Well, guess what? That city doesn't benefit from the silk because there is simply not enough to go around. If you get a 2nd source of silk, though, then it will supply not only happiness to the 6th city, but also bonus happy faces to cities 1-5 (you have enough silk to supply 10 cities, but only have 6 at present). The point is though that 1 source of a luxury will rarely be sufficient to fulfill the needs of your entire nation, and so you will either pursue them through colonisation and/or trade. New sources of an existing luxury, or altogether new luxuries, would supply the needs of the most unhappy cities first, followed by those that don't have any current access to luxuries. (Hope that bit makes sense)
Now, from a demand side of things, I reckon that the value-and happiness benefits-of a luxury should be based on its 'Scarcity' (i.e. how much of the resource is currently available) and the relative culture of the Civ supplying it (so if your average culture is 3X greater than your trade partner, then your luxuries will probably be worth 3X more than if you supplied them to a nation of equal culture). The flip-side of this, however, is that said luxuries will bring a certain, fixed proportion of the other nation's culture with it-'infecting' those cities which benefit from the luxury. This fixed proportion can be adjusted-up or down-by changing the culture slider.
Anyway, this applies to luxuries, but could be equally be applied to food and strategic resources. Hope you like my idea and, more to the point, that it made sense . I can explain in more detail if you need me to.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

SDK or not then the biggest obstacle for making a new and more detailed resource system would be the task of making the AI understand - and make proper use of - the way this new resource system worked.

gunshi said:

That's the only thing I wholeheartedly disagree on. Of course it can be made, but as it's not everyone's cup of tea, it would be best left a) a mod pack or b) included but some how simplified for those that would rather not deal with it's intricassies, perhaps like the city governor option, that takes some of the minutea out of city tweaking.

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Well, naturally, it would only apply to some who'd want it, and it would, of course, be available only in a modpack for people to take it or leave it. What's got me concerned is not the minutea of the playing as it is the minutea of the designing... I mean, try to code into the game the nuances of economics... Assuming you don't slow the game to a crawl, you'd also have to completely revolutionize the populations for the empires as well. Right now, the citizens are just one great monolithic group of people without distinctions. That would have to go right out the window. You'd have to start breaking down the population into socio-economic classes, legal classes too depending on the civic... you'd have to separate by occupation too... I mean, Wal-Mart can do business just about anywhere, but I doubt Nordstrom or Lord and Taylor would do much business in downtown Paterson or some depressed village in Iowa. They have to go to where the money is like Fifth Avenue.

But in the example of the value of gold dropping, then you have to do factor inflation into the game, which is not going to be easy given the simplicity of the system upon which you would be building. I mean, you'd have to literally devalue the price of gold in the game. Unit upgrade costs and rush costs would all have to go up because the individual units of gold wouldn't be worth as much anymore.

Not to mention the fact that you, the player, have complete control over your economy in Civilization. You send workers out and they set up an improvement to extract the resource and settlers build a city nearby if you need your borders extended to get to it. No population is required to sit on the resource to produce it. Just the improvement and a road connecting it. Then the player can trade it with other civilizations as though it were his/her property to sell. Except in command economies, that isn't true in the real world... so you'd have to basically eliminate the ability for the player to trade a resource with another civilization's leader and create a system for the "citizens" to automatically trade between each other depending on what each of those civilizations need and demand... unless, of course, you are in one of those economies where it all belongs to the ruler.

And while we're on the subject, there's also the matter of the over-simplified tax system... I mean, if I trade Oil to Catherine the Great for 10 gold per turn, that's ten gold that's going straight into the treasury. It's not ten gold that's going into the economy and then the government takes its cut. In fact, all money made in the game is essentially going straight into the treasury. You have empires with a 100% tax rate. In fact, the player has no control over the tax rate... only the percentages of how the collected revenue is to be spent. So then you'd have to reform the system so that maybe instead of trading in direct gold going into the treasury, another civilization would give "trade" that would boost the economy of the civilization and then translate ultimately into more revenues for the government.

Unless, of course, if we consider the player as something of the guiding hand of a civilization beyond the role of leader (especially considering the fact that the player "lives" for 6000 years). In which case, if the player has so much control over things already, then inflation, demand, and the rest fall within his sphere of power as well.

So there's a lot to think about and a lot to change beyond just this one aspect. And even this one aspect has to be written out and broken down into its most fundamental elements, because what I see now is a lot of abstract ideas... and you can't code abstract ideas. You need something solid to build upon.