C2C - Housing

National Treasuries are not the same as the National Economy. I don't see gold as being the economy but the treasury and the portion of the economy that the state holds. Surely, Nations can save... they just tend not to. Part of the reason for this is because if they do they're sucking employment opportunity out of their own economy. By so doing, they're shooting themselves in the foot and causing their economy and thus income to shrink. Thus why I say that if you have all sliders at 0%, thus holding onto all income as much as possible or having the tax stream all go directly into your immediate obligations, you should be causing drastic inflation.

Science does represent employment, and the statement that gold doesn't is a bit dependant on the angle from which you're looking at it. If you're on 0% sliders, it means you're budgeting nothing towards scientific efforts, culture or morale boosting efforts for society, and nothing for espionage employment and are just taking as much as you can... that does mean less employment you're investing in all in all, except that you're still spending money on maintaining state owned buildings (upkeep), military and state functions (civic upkeep). If you spend gold to hurry a build, however, that'd be an immediate economic stimulus guided by a program to get something done in a very short time. Thus in this way gold does mean employment, but you may be meaning gold from the slider perspective in that comment.

 

In reality houses are exactly the same (place where people live).
For those who rule (in game for us players) the only diffrent is how many taxes you can collect from them.

Now taxation tech is weak and dont give any real benefits to empire. With that change it will be very desirable. How without taxation houses can produce gold?

 

homeless people are less productive. More happily housed people are less stressed, and more productive again.

 

Of course. You are right. but this is represented by that houses provide.
So i will still insist that houses should provide after taxation tech.

 

What are you actually taking?
Every unemployed person is wasted. 100.000 not working does not suddenly give you more potential later. You have not saved anything, you have wasted potential.

 

hmm... I think you're just agreeing with me on that statement.

Of course, not all employment is generated by the state. So if you are hoarding your taxation income, you're not completely cutting off all economic activity unless perhaps you're running on a completely socialist society.

I see the commerce income in a given turn as the base taxation (which oddly we can't adjust in civ so we're all expected to be taxing at the same rates). I don't see it as the sum total of economic growth, which I think is the model you're suggesting it to be.

Thus, if all sliders are at 0 it just means you're not pouring anything back into the economy aside from absolute critical essentials that are compulsory to cover (unless you want to start going around disbanding units and tearing down buildings and going in and changing all civics to zero upkeep selections.)

If Science is thus at 0% it doesn't mean all research activities in the nation have completely vanished (and we can easily see this as research will still come in from independant research where buildings have added a flat +:research: that doesn't go away when the slider's at 0%). It just means that the state is not currently budgeting to support any research projects in any way.

Everything you've been saying just supports the suggestions I've made here regarding how inflation should operate. The less the state spends on research, culture, and espionage, the less its employing, and thus the less effective the economy should be and that should be reflected in a worsening income (and more...)

You asked what are you (the state) actually taking? I presume you mean what IS gold - under a currency driven society it is just that, currency. It's currency owned by the state and out of populace circulation, relativistically valued against the overall value of your economy (sum total value of all your currency that exists, in or out of circulation) by the inflation rate.

Thus a higher inflation rate makes the gold you hold less valuable while a lower inflation or deflation will increase the value of the gold in the treasury.

Prior to the Central Banking structure, nations indeed maintained national treasuries, hoards of gold and other goods. Eventually, they started printing money that wasn't just worth its own weight in the material it was of but the whole of the currency in the economy was 'backed' by a central treasury holding, making all currency a 'representation' of gold (as by then gold itself had actually become pretty much a universal basis for defining all value) held by the nation's central treasury. We've gone beyond that now into something even more confuddling as we left the gold standard, a system that is now completely interrelated to labor, GDP values, comparisons between nations, interest rates and seriously complex formulas.

 

Currency in your treasury for a hundred years might as well not be there, because it has no real effect. Well, actually it is worse, as you mention it is money that has been drawn out of the circulation so you might have made the amount of currency in circulation too low for all the trades to happen in time (that statement is only true for economies with a limited good like gold as currency).

I was tempted to ask you what you think inflation is but we better don't go that far off topic.

Currency has always been about labor, production and streams of goods. And it still is. Austerity, which is about what reducing the other sliders in Civ is, has never helped anyone. Because it only wastes and does not fill any treasury that you could actually do something with.

 

So you're saying that currency is nothing on its own and is nothing more than a fractional representation of the GDP. I get that and I'm seeing this from a very similar point of view. Where I may be throwing you in my approach is my use of the term inflation, as you pointed out. In this context, I'm only using it in a game sense as I realize in RL it has a lot to do with having printed too much currency and a lot to do with adjusting interest rates from the Fed. This sort of detail in an economy gets really tough to replicate in a game model.

The suggestions I'm making here, albeit not really from an official "I suggest we do this" perspective so much as an "I suggest we 'see' this to mean this" perspective, are just made to help us define values on our game objects.

GAME inflation should be perceived by the player much as a civilian would perceive the impact of inflation on the strength of their Dollar's buying power (reduced). Thus it represents an injury to the health of the economy (reduced income).

I do disagree that currency that's been in the treasury and out of circulation isn't currency that has no effect. If our government pulled a stash of gold out of some hidden storage somewhere and started cashing it in to pay off the debt, they could certainly help stimulate the economy, purchase specific efforts out of our laborers, pour more budget into a specific project like NASA, temporarily support more military, etc. Once it had done so, however, we'd be suffering from a devaluation on gold for a time.

 

In modern times currency represents nothing. It is created from air by money masters (international banking cartel)

Real whealth of nation depends on
Avaiable technology
Avaiable resources
Avaiable workforce

In perfect country every citizen schould know how much money is in circulation. How much new money his goverment plan to add on the market and how to spend it.

In real world problem is that national goverments dont controls theirs nationals currencies. It is controled by international banks so almost every nation on earth has national debt.

 

In the case of the houses the density of the house is expressed in . Meaning that an Apartment has many more occupants than a small Shack. Thus more potential workers.

This is independent of the wealth of the building which is represented in . A Palace gives more than a Shack. Note that you can have Low Density wealth that give lots of and few . Likewise you can have low wealth high density that gives few but lots of .

 

Disclaimer: My arguments are not aiming at making any change to the Civ model as it is unlikely we will reach anything close to reality.

No, it isn't a representation of the GDP. I could take a billion dollars and bury them in a forest and it would not change anything. Money only has an effect when it is used, in flow to balance and resolve trades. In a balanced economy a single penny would be enough for everything, if it could be moved fast enough and go through everyone a thousand times a day. And yet there could be a billion dollars with little effect at the same time (that changes hands maybe once per year).

At the moment the Fed could probably print hundreds of trillions and it would have little effect. The effect of money depends on who has it and even more who uses it and at the moment the money is only given to banks and vanishes in the big black hole that is the global finance casino (not too long until the gambling debts will drive a rift through the real economy again).

Correct, so lets stay with the Civ model regardless of if it is any real or not.

The gold would do nothing that the Fed could not do on its own.

 

I hate agreeing with you but its true. The fed pretty much controls the illusion of currency value entirely and can at will adjust the value of currency. This makes nothing that happens in our economy 'real' at all and when 'we the people' realize that we've been made to suffer at the hands of their whim alone we'll probably be pretty pissed off. Problem is, they've made the whole system so complex as to veil this reality from any true understanding among the ultimate mass population who hasn't the knowledge you possess to see through it all. We all just go about our business with the presumption that our economic status has anything at all to do with the financial game the way it once was played (with actual rules in place due to the ability to truly quantify the net worth of a nation, which is now a matter of completely subjective speculation and little more.)

 

I totally agree with that gamplay wise. although in many western countries the high quality housig residents tend to to pay less taxes the nthe mdeium or low quality ones, despite owning way more ... but modeling such things woudl realyrequire to introduce a whole tax system to the game, which might overdo it a bit when there are more exiting thigs to add.

 

I have been talking (via PM) to Hydro about the idea of using demand from housing to help balance the problem of excess happiness. I was talking about introducing the idea of consumables but at the same level as resources but now I think that is not the way to go. Instead I think we can use it for some of the concepts we have been thinking of but have not yet implemented.

I think we can use it for ideas such as Education, Electric Power, Culture and Religious Piety based on the idea of consumables and a local and nation wide supply and local demand.

For example Education:

Instead of an Education property have an Education consumable. Educational buildings provide an amount of the consumable and housing consumes it. Insufficient local production will be drawn from the national store. Excess will be put into the national store. In the end if there is still insufficient in the city then unhappiness follows.

Building such as

Library both create some Education and allow a portion of the locally produced Education to be put in the national store if there is excess produced in the city.

Myths and Stories only provide Education.

Housing: Palaces require more per population than Villas.​

 

Interesting... What methods would you be using to implement this concept? Give me some breakdown of the tags used on an example.

 

I was actually just going to use some special bonuses al la Platyping's Manufactured Resources on the supply side eg Library provides 5 "Education(C)" bonus every turn and we already have the ability to change that with tech if I am not mistaken. On the demand side there would need to be a list of demand bonuses with a similar structure showing the bonus how much it consumes and the effect.

There would need to be two types of consumption a flat rate or a consumption per population, eg ConsumedFlat or ConsumedPerPop

As to affects I was just thinking unhappiness and maybe revolutionary sentiment for when Revolution is on. This effect happens each turn - I was not thinking about how to undo the problem but maybe if the bonus was a cause of problems then fixing it should reverse the problem until there is no problem eg if there were ten turns of problem giving a total of -10 happy and 50 rev sentiment then when the need is met you get +1 happy and -5 rev per turn until either it is not met again or the net effect is back to zero ie 10 turns in this example.

Code:

<DemandBonuses>
  <DemandBonus>
    <Bonus>BONUS_EDUCATION_C<Bonus>
    <ConsumedPerPop>10</ConsumedPerPop>
    <ConsumedFlat>0</ConsumedFlat>
    <HappinessChange>-1</HappinessChange>
    <LocalRevolutionAdjustment>5<LocalRevolutionAdjustment>
  </DemandBonus>
</DemandBonuses>

 

This should be possible with the Education property. The Education property and it's usages just need to be done in the right way and maybe we have to do some minor extensions to the property system.
I post more about this later.

 

This needs some work to improve game play, currently many players are not aware that if they just build a building or get a resource then they will get their houses upgraded and their financial problems will be addressed.

Current issues are:-

• There is no concept page for housing.
  
  
• Housing is done via auto builds so is invisible.
  
  
• There is nothing on the city screen showing you the over all affects of the current housing or what you need to improve it.

I would also like to change things a bit so that you need foreign food and luxury goods to get the better housing.

For displaying housing I was thinking of a new tab on buildings(?) with the box displaying icons of the housing you have and describing the current effects of the housing. Then under that a set of lines indicating what it is you need to upgrade the housing or add new levels of housing.

 

The tab would go next on the left center box where we show the buildings - regular, wonder, special etc...? That would be a good start. The last point is the kicker that would be really nice.