Calling all economists: How to create a fun/simple/realistic world market economy?

[scottland]

Yes, the emergence of greating trading hubs is definitely something an economic mod needs to add to CivIV. I'd tend to prefer cities buying and selling resources to each other for amounts based on the proximity, cultural/religious similarity and relationship between their nations, with modifiers for the number of merchant specialists in the cities. Great trading centres have been imporant for at least 2500 years, it is a surprise they're not in the game already.

 

[chef pablo]

Yes, the emergence of greating trading hubs is definitely something an economic mod needs to add to CivIV. I'd tend to prefer cities buying and selling resources to each other for amounts based on the proximity, cultural/religious similarity and relationship between their nations, with modifiers for the number of merchant specialists in the cities. Great trading centres have been imporant for at least 2500 years, it is a surprise they're not in the game already.

this is the purpouse of blockades and embargoes,but even still were talking about money,goverments tend to not care so much about how much they like somebody when its time to conduct buisness.

 

[scottland]

Does anyone actually bother with embargoes in CivIV? And as far as blockades go - you may be able to stop a city building a powerful unit, but how many units and turns would it take to starve a city into submission? These are aspects of history that an economic mod could cover, but it looks like there's not much interest in doing one, so I might just work on it myself for a bit and see what I can come up with.

 

[chef pablo]

Does anyone actually bother with embargoes in CivIV? And as far as blockades go - you may be able to stop a city building a powerful unit, but how many units and turns would it take to starve a city into submission? These are aspects of history that an economic mod could cover, but it looks like there's not much interest in doing one, so I might just work on it myself for a bit and see what I can come up with.

did you take a peak at the book that i wrote on the previose page?would like to see some if not all those ideas implamented.If you can code and you want to take this on then my hats off to you,ive no time that i can spare for it nor do i have any skills.

 

[scottland]

I've just re-read your posts and you do raise some good points. Perhaps I could throw some more general questions at you (or anyone else reading this thread).

Trade betwen cities - how should it be modelled? Through abstract trade routes between cities that have modifiers for distance, terrain, etc. or should the cities create merchant caravans that travel back and forth between neighbouring cities? I'm thinking that for each merchant specialist a city could have three caravans to transport a number of resources dependant on the technology.

Money generation - this should not occur before currency imo, but, apart from taxation and tariffs, what other means do governments have of raising funds? I think civs with state property should sell their own resources, but any other civics will have to collect tax on the profits of selling resources and impose tariffs on importing resources from other civs.

 

[chef pablo]

Trade within the civ should be a no fuss thing ,thats why i proposed a slush for all resorces let the infistructure( roads and ports) determin how much material a city can collect on a givin turn.A merchant speacialist would be a good idea perhaps speacialists ups the amount of resorces that a city can import along with gold bonuses for the speacialist.im all about keeping this simple as far as internal trade and to make it more understandable lets use import and export as the term.

How to do this in the early game is a good question ,This is why i think all tiles should have resorces.these of course would be the "low capacity"tiles so there is not a lot of growth potential from the getgo.

"there are 3 basic types of these resorce/shields.
1-growth.should include high capacity grain ex-wheat.low copacity grain. ex-corn .high cappacity meat, ex-cows ,wild meats-game,low capacity fish-exe-crab,medium capacity fish exe-shellfish,domesticated fish exe-fish
2production-should be broken down into 3 catagorys-building material,ie clay,stone,hard wood,steel and aluminium.building capacity,this should be population shields and beast of burden shields.ie horses and cow.supply shields,food ,iron,oil,coal and uranium."

For interntional export and import again lets let this be a more organic thing simply sell the resorces on the open market. I think the less the player has to dable with the cost of goods the better,now as far as comming up with the figure ,give all resorces a base cost,with the base cost ,calculate how mcuh of the resorce is available(this is the tricky one and where i need suggestions) this is the selling price , add one gold for every port and market that it passes through, this money goes to the civs that those ports belong to ( call this a useage cost), and that should be the purchase price paid buy the purchaser.

Tarrifs i think are a great idea,this should be componded on top of the usage cost depending on the goverment ,Obviosly some goverments would have high tarrifs some not
The othr means of making money, taxation has got to be big it would depend on the goverment where the taxes lay,democracy would tax heavily on industry ie,population with in the city,fuedalism would tax farms heavily and so on

revenue resorces such as gold,gems and silver, if were componding resorces then building a commerce city would use these resorces in its markets and banks to create huge revenue
industry would also have a play in commerce as an industreal nation could be purchasing raw goods and selling finished goods for a high markup.remember you should be able to compound your industry making more than one factory of a givin type.(something i forgot but any "resorce" improvement should have popultion cost attached to it,this would prevent a resorce rich but population poor civ from becoming a powerhouse)

 

[scottland]

As far as trade goes I'm happy to leave almost everything hidden from the player - just so long as the player knows that if he or she has excess stone it can be sold for x gold, and the current wheat that the cities need is costing y gold, so that player can make choices about making tile improvements. As far as having a popup each turn that says "Do you want to buy 2 units of wine @ 23g/unit", or having to manually instruct fish to be taken from your coastal cities inland, I consider far too boring. The CityAI should handle all trades as far as I'm concerned, importing and exporting resources as required.

I tend to think that domestic and international trade should have the same mechanism. Unless a civilization has an embargo, merchants throughout history have gone anywhere they like in search of a good deal. As far as a world market goes, I think it accurately reflects only a small part of the timeframe we're looking at,about 5% in fact. With the merchant trade routes system, the trade routes would get more and more efficient meaning that prices would tend to level out across the world anyway (except for freight costs and national trading tendencies, which I think is realistic - what's the price of petrol in your country at the moment?)

I know resources like gold and silver are often used in games to be converted directly into cash (I'm thinking Imperialism 2, and Europa Universalis), but I'm not sure this is the best mechanism. Shouldn't these resources just be bought and sold like any other? A state-owned gold mine will generate a resource that has a value just like a state-owned farm. It's just that merchants will 'buy' or 'sell' gold or silver in exchange for other resources.

I also plan to overhaul the population system, if anyone has an opinion about the game "Victoria" let me know.

 

[chef pablo]

I think were on the same page,Improvements within the city tell the city ai how much of a resorce to import.Using textiles as an example:building a textile factory in a city would tell the city AI to import 2 sheilds of silk and or cotton ,the cheapest way that it can.this could mean to ship it within the civ if its being accessed within the civ or it could mean to purchase it on the open market.Increasing the number of textile factories increases how many shields of raw product the city imports.The main purpouse of these factories is two fold ,one to increase the commerce associated with the resorce and two to decrease neccesary infistrucure to move the resorce.on the first point how much should the price increase,my thought is that if an improvement requires 2 shields of x material to build 1 shield of y material than the price should triple from the market price of x material.on the second point if factories take in 2 shields of x to produce one shield of y you decrease the amount of road and port infistructure neccesary to move the resorce around.

can you explaine the merchant system im having a hard time understanding it.

for the revenue resorces ie,gold silver and gems,ill give a comprimize what if they were neccesary for GP ,say 2 GPs for a gold shield and1GP for silver or gem of course still keep techs a limiting factor.The basis here is that the GPs are on the goverments payroll and the revenue resorces represent govermental revenue.or perhaps it should be a higher cost.at any rate this makes it neccesary to keep in mind that you will have to keep an infistrucure open to "pay "your GPs,techs later on such as banking could free up that movement .

I didnt really touch on population growth but I do have some ideas,If resorces are free flowing that it would be infistrucure that allows growth.building of housing zones would allow population growth,these could be compounded for more growth.this is not building of houses but the infistructure and bueracracy that goes into zoning disticts.perhaps this would be an instant increase,once you build a housing zone your population increases by one,provided you have enough food shields for the increase.excess food shields could create villidges outside of the city center again roads being the limiting factor here, any tile that has a road and that has no improvements on it could spawn a hamlet this would represent a population point(it would kinda be like storing population untill you could build the infistrucure in the city center).increase in road levels would increase the size of the settlement ie,level 1 road would spawn hamlets ,level 2 would spawn villadges and so on ,these could and should be taxed increasing the tax base.the only thing that bugs me is that I hate the sprawl of roads and this encourages that sprawl ,so something needs to be added prehaps requiring a luxerie resorce for a villadge to be created along with excess food shields.

Ive never seen the game so youll have to enlighten me.

 

[chef pablo]

just had a thought on the subject of factories .I had mentioned the necceasity of beasts of burden,this was an abstract idea of a power source to build and help in the prodution of improvements and finished product.
power source could be another class of resorce,this could be represented by beast of burden or building of wind mills and water mills could also produce "power" shields and as new techs come up new power sources come into play.
Perhaps factories would need x amount of population shields and x amount of power shields to operate

 

[NikG]

I know resources like gold and silver are often used in games to be converted directly into cash (I'm thinking Imperialism 2, and Europa Universalis), but I'm not sure this is the best mechanism. Shouldn't these resources just be bought and sold like any other? A state-owned gold mine will generate a resource that has a value just like a state-owned farm. It's just that merchants will 'buy' or 'sell' gold or silver in exchange for other resources.

For a reallife example, see 1500-1600 Spain. After the conquest of the new world, the spanish marked flood with gold, and inflation just skyrocket. So a direct convert from "gold mine(d)" -> "gold (cash)", would make inflation rise, while a more natural way of keeping it away from the cashing, and instead just let it be sold as "gold ore" or just actually keeping entirely away by not producing any gold ore at all, without inflation raising. It could be an boolean option ie. "Keep away from marked?" ~yes/no, in the Finance Screen. This is important, becuase it actually crippled the spaniards in the end, making England the "superpower".

 

[scottland]

Higher prices for refined goods would be a necessity; lower transport costs I'm not sure about - most refined goods are larger than the (essential) raw products used to create them: automobiles, jewellery, even refined foods like bread. Basically one unit of a resource should be the same size and have the same transport cost as a unit of any other resource - what should change is the yield from mining, farming, refining, etc. 5 units of cloth could yield 3 units of textile for example.

Basically merchants send out caravans (or trucks or ships or aircraft) to neighbouring cities loaded with goods the city has surplus and sells them in exchange for some of the goods the city lacks. The inspiration from this comes from Patrician 2.

Perhaps there could be a civic option for currency standard - have your own national currency as gold, silver, marble or diamonds (until the discovery of economics or something like this (more research required)). The amount of inflation or deflation depends on the rate at which you gain your currency resource.

I want to (almost) completely remove excess food from the city growth equation. Cities will grow based on a) births vs deaths and b) immigration vs emigration, neither of which have much to do with the amount of excess food a city produces - note cities don't actually produce any food in reality, farms in the country do. If a city runs out of food, starvation will occur, greatly increasing the number of deaths and probably decreasing the cities population. Building houses is a good idea, empty housing could lead to immigration, city happiness (lower property prices), whereas a shortage of housing could lead to homeless people stinking up your city.

We already have horses as a strategic resource - the question is how should they be used? Should horses be consumed when a city is building? Probably working horses don't breed, do they?

Basically instead of having for citizens representing 10,000 citizens each, you have 40,000 people divided into groups based on their religion, culture and class - so perhaps 25,000 Chinese Muslim farmers, 10,000 Indian Christian labourers, 4,900 Egyptian Christian farmers, 50... scientists, 50... merchants.

 

[chef pablo]

on the first point does it translate like this
2 cotton or 2silk or 1cotton +1silk=1cloth,2cloth=1sail
2timber=1lumber,3lumber=1ship
2iron /ore=1steal,2steal=1weapon..etc?
my thinking on decreasing the shield size is to create cities centered on that industry with restricting roads it should naturaly happen this way ,particulary if the resorces are in clumps on the map

is this an automatic thing or do you have to send the caravans out ?I prefure it to be automatic depending on the cities needs

this could almost be a diplomtic agrrement between civs(our great nation would like to sugest that you use gold for currency when dealing with trade between our great nations)something like this

same thought here ,thats why i suggested villedges that spring up if the city cant use the food.When you have enough available housing the villadges would disapear and imgrate into the city.this should be linked with culture,if you have a large port city(ports and markets should build culture)with a lot of housing to spare then you should have imigrants comming from the civ next door that has a port city thats overcrowded.

horses ,oxen could be considered beast of burden and used as a power source in production.all factories should have some type of power source.this would be a shield that is used in every turn.

lets leave it at 10000 its a nice roand number and we can break it down easily 10 population shields for every population point.
the one thought that i have on this is that if you build housing to accomadate a textile industry that your building and your importing silk from a nation that is hindu ,guess what religion that population ids going to be.

 

[NikG]

I want to (almost) completely remove excess food from the city growth equation. Cities will grow based on a) births vs deaths and b) immigration vs emigration, neither of which have much to do with the amount of excess food a city produces - note cities don't actually produce any food in reality, farms in the country do. If a city runs out of food, starvation will occur, greatly increasing the number of deaths and probably decreasing the cities population. Building houses is a good idea, empty housing could lead to immigration, city happiness (lower property prices), whereas a shortage of housing could lead to homeless people stinking up your city.

No matter how you see the current world, that food doesnt dictate our population, but certainly much of the human history it did. Right up until the industrial revolution. Actually it is well established that new and better farming tools/knowledge/crops/etc. resulted in an increase in the population.

Basically instead of having for citizens representing 10,000 citizens each, you have 40,000 people divided into groups based on their religion, culture and class - so perhaps 25,000 Chinese Muslim farmers, 10,000 Indian Christian labourers, 4,900 Egyptian Christian farmers, 50... scientists, 50... merchants.

Which will create a mess for a UI, and have huge requirements, and takes to much time to process compared to what you get back from it. If we should make such one we would need a 3-dimensional array, consisting of (max) 18 players x 7 religions x (dont know have many, but to take into account all specialist) 7, which equals 882. Although I like the idea, it may simply be too much, both in terms of information and the computations.

 

[scottland]

OK, I'll try to respond in order as best I can:

I think it in the best interests of the city to process raw materials if they can - more commerce will be generated from refined goods than raw goods. However, if a city can make more from exporting raw goods than from (exporting processed resources subtract the cost of processing) then the city should do that.

I certainly wouldn't want to issue instructions to several dozen caravans each turn, I expect no one else would either.

I rather let merchants do the trading and have them use whichever currency is more practical.

Immigration is a really tough problem, especially with the existing citizen 'points' structure - if I manage to convince you about the merits of the Victoria system of population management, the solution will become clearer. Cities with excess food, though, should definitely export it. If every city has too much food, some farmers should change occupation.

What about sweatshops? But generally I agree - the output of farms should be increased when horses are used, blacksmiths with coal, wineries with anti-freeze, etc.

See below

Cities cannot grow without food - that's a given. But just because you have food doesn't mean growth will occur. An increase in food production, in my view, will lead to an increase in world population, but not necessarily in the area that the food is being grown. People will flock to Rome because of the standard of living, the culture and the security. The food that fed the people of Rome came from all over the Mediterranean.

Your numbers are very kind - I think each city would need an array of links to cvPOPs, perhaps 50 on average per city towards the end of the game, and there's maybe upto 150 cities on the map. Each cvPop, I think, would need seven bytes to its information and the array in the city would need four per cvPop link. So that's 82,000 bytes of memory. At the moment there is only one process on my computer using less than that amount of memory - System Idle Process. As far as the calculations go, they could be made as complex or simple as we wanted. Modelling immigration realistically could be quite difficult, but growth could be fairly simple, I believe.
Births = Population * Happiness * BIRTHS_CONSTANT
Deaths = Population * Health * DEATHS_CONSTANT
Growth = Births - Deaths
And the only information that need be displayed to the user is:
Population of New York:
60% English
23% Dutch
15% Irish
12% Other

800,000 labourers
20,000 farmers
15,000 unemployed
3,000 merchants
1,000 scientists
5,000 other
which is pretty much the same as it is now

 

[chef pablo]

OK, I'll try to respond in order as best I can:

I think it in the best interests of the city to process raw materials if they can - more commerce will be generated from refined goods than raw goods. However, if a city can make more from exporting raw goods than from (exporting processed resources subtract the cost of processing) then the city should do that.

agreed,there should be a heavy cost invovled ,with population and maintanance.If you only have access to a small amount of resorce it would be better to export that raw resorce,however if you can acquire a large amount cheaply than building an infistructure to process that good would be highly benifisual(this is the whole reason for my idea of growing resorces)

I certainly wouldn't want to issue instructions to several dozen caravans each turn, I expect no one else would either.

cool

I rather let merchants do the trading and have them use whichever currency is more practical.

this needs more thought, spacificly early in the game(how do we handle trade behind the scene ,even though goods for money is a trade option later on in the game should we give the AI this ability to equate trade between )goods

Immigration is a really tough problem, especially with the existing citizen 'points' structure - if I manage to convince you about the merits of the Victoria system of population management, the solution will become clearer. Cities with excess food, though, should definitely export it. If every city has too much food, some farmers should change occupation.

if I fallow you than growth is more of an organic thing,having to do with birth rate and motality rate..this would require some digging to get accurate numbers on what would affect the rate.would each population type have its own birth rate,ie farmers having much higher birth rates but higher mortality rates,merchants lower birth rates and lower mortality rates.do we handle this on a tile by tile basis?

What about sweatshops? But generally I agree - the output of farms should be increased when horses are used, blacksmiths with coal, wineries with anti-freeze, etc.

there should be improvements that translate raw resorces into power shields,perhaps for beast of burden there could be a stable improvement that does this,watermills and windmills would be unique in that they wouldnt require a resorce to produce shields.there could be 3 classes of power ,manpower,beast of burden,and machine power the latter using raw resorces such as coal,oiland uranium.Im rethinking this one perhaps windmills ,watermills and workshops (workshops might require beast of burden) are power sources spacificly for resorce collection,probally should have population neccesary to operate these improvements,and are in tiles that are close to the resorce tile.when electricity comes into play all these improvements could be replaced with electric lines conected to a power factory(this would spur the industreal revalution)

See below

Cities cannot grow without food - that's a given. But just because you have food doesn't mean growth will occur. An increase in food production, in my view, will lead to an increase in world population, but not necessarily in the area that the food is being grown. People will flock to Rome because of the standard of living, the culture and the security. The food that fed the people of Rome came from all over the Mediterranean.

with the idea that were not allocating squat and that all resorces are free flowing greatly depending on the trade infistrucure,than where does the population grow,my thinking is that this should happen along the trade routes outside of city centers ,any point that is collecting resorces particulry near farms.building of housing zones and cultural improvements would incourage imigration into cities.

Your numbers are very kind - I think each city would need an array of links to cvPOPs, perhaps 50 on average per city towards the end of the game, and there's maybe upto 150 cities on the map. Each cvPop, I think, would need seven bytes to its information and the array in the city would need four per cvPop link. So that's 82,000 bytes of memory. At the moment there is only one process on my computer using less than that amount of memory - System Idle Process. As far as the calculations go, they could be made as complex or simple as we wanted. Modelling immigration realistically could be quite difficult, but growth could be fairly simple, I believe.
Births = Population * Happiness * BIRTHS_CONSTANT
Deaths = Population * Health * DEATHS_CONSTANT
Growth = Births - Deaths
And the only information that need be displayed to the user is:
Population of New York:
60% English
23% Dutch
15% Irish
12% Other

800,000 labourers
20,000 farmers
15,000 unemployed
3,000 merchants
1,000 scientists
5,000 other
which is pretty much the same as it is now

there has been some interest on this on other strings so we should get some more input

 

[scottland]

I hadn't really appreciated the idea of each tile have a population regardless of a city being present or not, but I realize now that it is a really good idea. This is probably going to make me totally rethink my approach. Instead of having farmers POPs in cities, they will be on the outskirts of cities (there may be farmers in early cities). Each tile should have a %farmable_land value, which determines the maximum food output (variable with techs, civics, etc.) with the population of farmers determining the actual output. Perhaps in the late game, people who actually work in the city could actually live on surrounding tiles if those tiles have the highway tile improvement (hope someone else will design this).
Perhaps cities built on rivers could build a watermill city improvement that increases the production of flour mills, lumber mills and blacksmiths.
Population growth through migration should occur where
a) food is available (but not necessarily abundant)
b) luxuries are available (not a factor for lower class POPs)
c) culture is strong
d) security is good (i.e. the city hasn't been attacked recently)
e) employment opportunities are plentiful
f) city health is good/pollution is low
g) civil liberties are good (for international migration)

could you post links to the other strings - I couldn't find any

 

[scottland]

Perhaps we could have random uncultured populations scattered on tiles, which can be absorbed into devleoping cities to add to the growth rate in the early game. These POPs would be subsistance farmers or hunter/gatherers that are not hostile like barbarians, but willing to join your civ.

 

[chef pablo]

Perhaps in the late game, people who actually work in the city could actually live on surrounding tiles if those tiles have the highway tile improvement (hope someone else will design this).

later in the modern age as power lines are attached to farms and mines and other resorce collection areas the windmills ,watermills and work houses could turn into suburbs

Perhaps cities built on rivers could build a watermill city improvement that increases the production of flour mills, lumber mills and blacksmiths.

exactly,I lived in minneapolis for a while(the commerce capitol for americas bread basket)All of the grain mills ran off of the mississippi river.

could you post links to the other strings - I couldn't find any

ive posted a link to this site for all of them...there are a lot,might be easier to look up my post history.

Perhaps we could have random uncultured populations scattered on tiles, which can be absorbed into devleoping cities to add to the growth rate in the early game. These POPs would be subsistance farmers or hunter/gatherers that are not hostile like barbarians, but willing to join your civ.

this would be cool early in the game.

 

[scottland]

Hey, there a whole other forum out there that I didn't realize existed! There's some good ideas going on over there, hopefully a few people will migrate to this thread once they read what has been suggested. I'm hoping that I can get some real progress done on this mod over the weekend, for most of this week I've been learning C++ the hard way - mainly involving shouting "compile, damn you!!!" at my computer.

 

[chef pablo]

heehee,Il leave you to your frustrations, mine involve 2 year culinary grads who think they are gods gift to the kitchen and have to set them straight again,and again and again...the good thought is that the next time an intern ask me "so how do i stir this?" im going to be thinking "compile damn you!"