Dawn of Civilization General Discussion
- Thread starter Leoreth
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BigSchwartzzz
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2019
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- 99
I just got hit with -15 Economic Stability for a recession in 1345 after I conquered the Moors. How is that calculated? It collapsed me.
It was -9 Recession in 1280 and I built the St Peters Basilica a few turns later and it still only got worse from there. How do I improve?
I replayed and fixed it, but I have no idea what I did differently.
It was -9 Recession in 1280 and I built the St Peters Basilica a few turns later and it still only got worse from there. How do I improve?
I replayed and fixed it, but I have no idea what I did differently.
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I would not make that causal connection so easily. Your economic growth is tracked every three turns by comparing your overall commerce to three turns prior - a reduction means negative growth, more than 5% increase means positive growth, everything else is neutral. Then the difference of positive growth to negative growth of the last ten checks (i.e. 30 turns) is used to determine if you have positive or negative economic growth, and then multiplied by 3 to obtain your stability score. For example, 2 turns of positive growth and 8 turns of negative growth lead to a stability score of (2-8)*3 = -18. Neutral values always revert you towards zero, so if negatives outweigh the positives they get added to the result and vice versa, but get only half the weight. So for example 1 turn of positive growth, 5 turns of negative growth, and 4 turns of neutral growth result in a score of (1-5 + 4/2)*3 = -6.
These values are also modified by some civic choices, but most importantly they are based on a long term sliding window, so a sudden change is not caused by something that just happened recently. However you can see rapid changes if you have had negative growth for a while - if you had positive growth before for some turns and started accumulating negative growth, past positive growth can still balance it out for a while. But eventually it will be pushed out of the sliding window and cause a negative score.
Expansion usually helps with the economic score because it's the easiest way of noticeably increasing your commerce output. That is the case even if it is offset by increased maintenance costs - economic stability only considers commerce output, not expenses. So without knowing more about your situation, I would assume that something else is going on in your game that causes bad economic stability.
These values are also modified by some civic choices, but most importantly they are based on a long term sliding window, so a sudden change is not caused by something that just happened recently. However you can see rapid changes if you have had negative growth for a while - if you had positive growth before for some turns and started accumulating negative growth, past positive growth can still balance it out for a while. But eventually it will be pushed out of the sliding window and cause a negative score.
Expansion usually helps with the economic score because it's the easiest way of noticeably increasing your commerce output. That is the case even if it is offset by increased maintenance costs - economic stability only considers commerce output, not expenses. So without knowing more about your situation, I would assume that something else is going on in your game that causes bad economic stability.
BigSchwartzzz
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2019
- Messages
- 99
Thanks for the in depth answer. The downwards trend must've began after I conquered Catalonia and Rome and the conquest of the two Moorish cities must've not come in time. When I first spawn I spam workers to build up my economy and industry very quickly, so I don't know if that caused stagnation.
And your coding skills are so impressive. That seems like a ton of work to implement.
And your coding skills are so impressive. That seems like a ton of work to implement.
Vekkimaster
Warlord
Question. Is there a way through WB to see sum of AI stability points? Was wondering just how much punishment Russia needs to take that their stability goes to even shaky? As seen from the pic, Russians war weariness is 150 and their nation is still going strong. They have despotism, revolutionism, individualism, free trade, clergy and multilatelarism.
The main problem was figuring out that a long term window is needed - there was a time where economic stability was only a snapshot and that indeed was often very swingy and punishing.
I think the easiest way is to switch to Russia using Ctrl+C and checking the financial advisor.
urbestfriend
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2014
- Messages
- 99
Apologies if I am missing something because my brain is bad - but how would you have negative commerce growth? Would that just be if you made your cities stop working tiles with commerce?
Vekkimaster
Warlord
In this pic I swapped to Russians to check how things are. War weariness was 145 before the swap. Now, because the value for "military" is zero, is there something I don't understand how this value is calculated. After all I destroyed a good amount of their troops/conquered cities. And further more if I loose a couple of units during fighting it seems to give a fast negative value to my "military" section.
SultanRedSnake
Warlord
For Economic stability purposes, commerce refers to GNP as displayed on Demographics screen. The figure reported by the PreviousCommerce entry under Stored Data confirms this, assuming this figure is to be relied up (comment Leoreth?) I refer to the following scholarly work on what GNP is made of:
You can think of GNP as how your raw commerce is being put to work. The most immediate way to see this is to play with sliders while checking Demographics. Trying 100% of each will yield different GNP totals. This is for illustration purposes. In a real game, the most common situation is having to reduce sliders to avoid bankruptcy,
EDIT: Having read Leoreth's response more carefully, I suspect a reprimand is coming my way.
EDIT 2: Pasted quote was for wrong version! Fixed.
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SultanRedSnake
Warlord
I'll let the boss handle the under-hood details. If you haven't read the Stability sections of the Pedia please do. There's a lot. Meanwhile I'd just like to suggest that if the goal is to induce collapse, focusing on Military stability might be a misdirected effort, especially at so late a stage in the game (massive pop, WW-reducing buildings, civ combos). At that point your only viable option is probably to conquer most if not all of Russia's core cities.
Vekkimaster
Warlord
Good points!
Total collapse was not my intension. Just to make them suffer
Nor it was to conquer too much of their land. My eye just caught that strange "weirdness" when war weariness is massive 150 and the result is...well...nothing. Actually this was the first time it did nothing (to enemy) during my many games so far. I may not know much about technical stuff, but I have lot of eye for details like this number value, but (Leoreth) if things are like they should be, then game on man, game on!
Just for context, commerce for the purpose of economic stability is the sum total of your gold, science, culture and espionage output, not just the raw commerce.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of many things that reduce your commerce output: losing cities, losing population, destroyed improvements. But maybe less obviously also rearranging population to produce less commerce, assigning/unassigning specialists, switching your commerce sliders to something you have worse modifiers for. Common causes are also a flip or the plague.
None of these are likely to happen or have a big impact if you are playing well (plague notwithstanding) but that is the point. Something has to go really wrong for bad economy stability to affect you.
I am not sure, but my first idea would be the duration of the war. War weariness stability is both relative to your opponent and scales down over time (to reflect that war weariness can only rise over the course of the war), so maybe the war has been going on for too long for it to matter?
Changing civics is a classic one. Switching to Free Enterprise in one game I recall gave me something like +25 economic growth stability points.
Vekkimaster
Warlord
I did some back tracking. You are right, the war lasted long...maybe some 150 turns (epic turns ~600-750). At first I only did war of attrition by just sitting next to their one city and destroying while enemy troops popped up. Eventually started to invade on turn ~50. At this point war weariness was 80 and Russia was stable (and ctrl + C "military" was 0).
On turn ~100 war weariness was at its highest - 188 (and ctrl + C "military" was 0). Both Rus cities and troops were being hammered by me.
At the end of war on turn ~150 war weariness was 182 (and ctrl + C "military" was 0). Rus had two core cities left.
To me that massive weariness and not even a small effect to "military" section during the entire war sounds a bit off...
SultanRedSnake
Warlord
To me that massive weariness and not even a small effect to "military" section during the entire war sounds a bit off...
You admitted to not understanding the system so you don't get to say things like this since you lack a frame of reference to compare to. Have you read the Pedia entries yet? Hint: Look for the part headed War Weariness where or says "Your war weariness is compared to your enemies".
Vekkimaster
Warlord
I say my opinions/thoughts despite you telling me or not.
Saying this I manipulated the war against Russia via WB. Added much more of my own troops across Siberia to destroy all their troops yet not conquering Russian cities. I managed to get Russians war weariness into 487. Played a couple more turns and changed to Russia to see how stability numbers were. Russia was still stable and "military" section 0.
Now...I don't need a frame of reference or what ever to notice that after all this war massacre getting a number zero is something to wonder. But if Leoreth says the system is working as it should then it is. It just report my observations/bugs what seems to be odd just like I have done during these past many years playing this awesome mod and helping this way.
I am not saying it's working as intended, but I don't think it's a bug. I am just explaining how it works and it seems consistent with your description of the game. I can only do more if you upload a save.
I remember the war stability aspect of the stability calculation being more aggressive, and eventually changed it to the current state because it was just too swingy. It was very easy to push someone into being unstable just from losing a war by some arbitrary metric, and it made wars easy to win and finish prematurely, and in general made the world more volatile with frequent collapses. It's very hard to capture a war stability calculation that captures "what is really going on" in the war, so I decided to err on the side of caution and let it only have a small impact on overall stability.
For your specific situation you could also argue that nothing much has happened in your war, with no meaningful territory changing hands and war weariness being more or less on the same order of magnitude, despite being accumulated over a long period of time.
Another thing to account for is that meaningful losses in a war already affect other stability categories, e.g. expansion from losing core cities, economy from losing any cities or shifting the economy to unit production, and domestic from switching to wartime civics and unhappiness caused by war weariness.
I remember the war stability aspect of the stability calculation being more aggressive, and eventually changed it to the current state because it was just too swingy. It was very easy to push someone into being unstable just from losing a war by some arbitrary metric, and it made wars easy to win and finish prematurely, and in general made the world more volatile with frequent collapses. It's very hard to capture a war stability calculation that captures "what is really going on" in the war, so I decided to err on the side of caution and let it only have a small impact on overall stability.
For your specific situation you could also argue that nothing much has happened in your war, with no meaningful territory changing hands and war weariness being more or less on the same order of magnitude, despite being accumulated over a long period of time.
Another thing to account for is that meaningful losses in a war already affect other stability categories, e.g. expansion from losing core cities, economy from losing any cities or shifting the economy to unit production, and domestic from switching to wartime civics and unhappiness caused by war weariness.
Tangentially related, but what do you think about a mechanic wherein switching to wartime civics while at (global) war doesn't give you anarchy? I've always found it hard to justify some of the later game wartime civics with how strong free enterprise and democracy are, and losing two-three turns around then can hurt. Might make them slightly sweeter.
