Gem v1.13: Economy

Thalassicus

Bytes and Nibblers
Joined
Nov 9, 2005
Messages
11,057
Location
Texas
I'm solving several economic issues in Gem v1.13.

Purchase costs got too low in the lategame, and many buildings were not properly balanced. Military empires had balanced gold throughout the game, while peaceful players did not. The ratio of unit to building maintenance was askew in the lategame, when units and buildings should be approximately equal contributors. I also fixed a bug causing higher unit maintenance than intended. This bug was a far-reaching effect, so to ensure our total national profit remains unchanged, I spread out the impact with many small changes to reduce income and increase expenses.

I brought the ratio of unit to building maintenance closer together, so empires with a small military won't overflow with excess gold anymore. Early items also follow the same formula as later items now. This will help balance wide and tall empires, since early buildings are late buildings for expanding empires.
 
Sounds very interesting. Could you describe the direction of some of the changes?

I brought the ratio of unit to building maintenance closer together, so empires with a small military won't be overflowing with excess gold anymore.
What does this mean: building maintenance costs are up?

I removed the modifier for early unit and building maintenance, so early items follow the same formula as later items. This will avoid potential balance problems between wide and tall empires.
What does this mean? Early buildings are up or down?

I have typically found that tall empires struggled for gold while wide empires were swimming in it. So early buildings up could potentially reduce this.

I changed villages back to 2
Yay! We still need to fix the village vs mine problem though. It's not ok for villages to give double the yields that mines do for the whole early game.

moved them up the tech tree
This means earlier I assume?
 
"This was a far-reaching effect" -

A bit of an understatement for changes and problems from map size, late versus early game balance, AI army sizes crippling militaristic AIs, overall gold balance, and game speed effects. :)

Upkeep modifier that depends on cost should mean that many ships wouldn't need a reduction in upkeep? It also favors small boosts to UUs in strength (at least those that aren't more expensive like Legions or AFE), or reductions in cost like Mali or Foreign Legion.

I do like the change to villages to be just gold and provide changes to science buildings instead.

I'm not sure if it's necessary to make a lot of changes to the early game overall though. The bigger issue I see with gold income is that post-mints gold growth was (potentially) massive, and again with stock exchanges, not really villages and too little early on. I'm guessing this means that per pop modifiers are too powerful, either for wide or tall empires. Wide empires in my view end up with a lot of available gold from taking commerce policy effects and the three available trade route modifiers, but the 1.5 per pop later as cities grow gets insane in a larger empire.

And then into the industrial age with the higher unit upkeep of those units being affected by the game's inflation modifiers causing a huge gold sink (while buildings were very cheap both to buy and keep) was a problem. That's easy to adjust for by changing the balance of units and buildings cost, with both largely moving upward over time.
 
The bigger issue I see with gold income is that post-mints gold growth was (potentially) massive, and again with stock exchanges, not really villages and too little early on. I'm guessing this means that per pop modifiers are too powerful, either for wide or tall empires. Wide empires in my view end up with a lot of available gold from taking commerce policy effects and the three available trade route modifiers
I think this is probably right.
I wonder if the mint should have a gold maintenance cost, to reduce its value in small cities? A maintenance cost of 2-3 would mean that it still provide positive net gold in any but the smallest cities, and it would help tilt it in favor of tall over wide.
 
should have a gold maintenance cost

Ditto Stock Exchange if it's per pop then that's the problem of balance (at 4-5?). Last few games I definitely found that I had a ton of income after each of those came along.

You would get 1.5 :c5gold: per pop, +50% of that total, plus more trade routes and (potentially) a bigger gold-generating religion in a wide empire, that's a ton of money even before using any villages or fish/coast/rivers. And then the commerce tree on top of that...


I think the other problem with wide empires and gold was buildings were too cheap if you didn't need much of an army (other than free garrisons combined with the honor garrison bonus?). If however the upkeep of later game buildings scales better (I think science buildings costs were a decent model here as they got up to 8 I believe on labs and started at 1-2 with mentors and libraries), then the only thing that would remain is to potentially increase some of their yields/value to keep them worthwhile later on. Mostly an issue with production buildings. Happiness and culture and science are always worth it if you want those yields, even if the cost goes up, and faith stops early. Production might not always be, given the example of Hydro Plants. Probably a consideration if Military Academies are more expensive too, but they at least offer more XP than vanilla now.
 
I'm still working out the details, experimenting with numbers and looking at results. :)

I'm spreading out the impact through the game because of the scale of the numbers we're talking about. I want to limit disruption of balance between specific units or buildings.

If we restricted ourselves to stock exchanges, even removing them from the game would not fully compensate for the new gold income from solving this bug. Limiting it to all gold buildings isn't enough either, and limiting the impact to late units as a whole would disrupt balance between units vs buildings. If we reduce late building income and increase late building costs, that would disrupt balance between early vs late buildings, which is a problem since early buildings are late buildings for expanding empires.
 
I agree about the post-mint growth. Before then i need to make tough choices between which tiles I work and what I spend gold on etc as my GPT is usually under 10. After it shoots up to +70 or so and then I feel I have so much gold that its each small gold decision becomes meaningless, especially on which tiles to work as an extra gold here or there doesn't mean much.

It might be the combination or trade route income, Mint, and the commerce policy tree all coming around the same time....maybe find a way to spread these out more
 
When I adapted a tame version of the eventual inflation fix from the other thread, my income in an industrial age conquest game save went from -80 to +2.5k (and 4k shortly after as I was in the midst of putting up stock exchanges)

So I can understand it's a pretty big change to adapt for.
 
Another possibility would be toning down the size of the trade route boosts on Commerce and Wonders, and slightly tweaking up the purchase cost modifiers for units and buildings.

It would also help make gold-for-city-state-gifts relatively more appealing.

But I can see this is a potentially huge change, playtesting will be needed.
 
I would second increasing purchase cost modifiers on units and buildings. Say 20-25%, possibly more on gold producing buildings.

Scaling upkeep is a start. If it requires some building re-balancing, it would then be easier to just re-reduce upkeep on a weaker building than fiddle with its effects (percentage buildings like the lab/factory would be easier). But I'd say any of the tier 3-4 buildings (opera house/museum/tower for culture, stadium/theatre, factories+) were too cheap relative to what they could do per turn.
 
I would second increasing purchase cost modifiers on units and buildings. Say 20-25%
I think that's probably too large a change, I'd start smaller.

But I'd say any of the tier 3-4 buildings (opera house/museum/tower for culture, stadium/theatre, factories+) were too cheap relative to what they could do per turn.
I worry a little the other way though; higher tech buildings need to be efficient, otherwise technological advance is not sufficiently valuable.

[Factories in particular I think need to be incredibly cost-effective, because they consume a strategic resource.]

A modest increase in maintenance cost is ok though for most of these; this also helps to favor Tall.
 
I was not suggesting that Factories should cost 6 upkeep necessarily with no other change and that we shouldn't just crank up the upkeep to 5-6 (or more as unit upkeep in the late game is higher still, almost 20 for infantry and battleships) in all these cases blandly. 3-4 would work for most with no other change. Towers and Museums I think are 2 or 3? Stadiums are 2 (same as colosseum). That seems rather cheap. Most of the production buildings are 2-3 and a modest increase to 3-4 wouldn't be a huge detriment.

If they're not cost efficient per turn, we could reduce the cost to build or increase their effects slightly. Right now I think they're nearly always cost effective except for the culture buildings in smaller cities (obviously you don't need stadiums everywhere either).

It might be simpler to put some cost per turn on gold buildings than to balance all of these too. Markets at 1, mint at 2-3, bank at 2-3, stock at 4-5.

25 is the current modifier on walls and castles. I'm not sure if that increases it 25% or more than that (I haven't looked at the math yet), but even a more modest increase would be noticed as I would almost never buy a wall or castle versus just building one at the current increase, even after Ben and Commerce kick in at -35%. Perhaps +10% would suffice.
 
Towers and Museums I think are 2 or 3? Stadiums are 2 (same as colosseum). That seems rather cheap. Most of the production buildings are 2-3 and a modest increase to 3-4 wouldn't be a huge detriment.
Agreed, that would be fine. I clearly hadn't been paying enough attention, I'm surprised that opera houses, museums, stadiums are only 2-3 maintenance.
 
I don't know where you get that "swimming in gold" from. I never swim in gold. Might be we got a different concept of what swimming means...

Especially unit upkeep was crippling, but that is the root of the problem her, no? ;)

The changes seem reasonable and I just want to remind that spending gold is fun. So ideally, we would have a constant increase of it being available to spend on all the various different things we can spend it on.

On another note, (doesn't deserve its own thread) does the mod change the file that alters the advanced start amounts? (civ5eras.xml in gameplay/XML/gameinfo I guess)? Previously giving more gold, culture and units in advanced starts, seemed to work, but no it doesn't (and you and all the AI's go bankrupt by turn 5 on a medieval start...)
 
I don't know where you get that "swimming in gold" from.
With a wide empire, particularly a coastal one, I could have ~+800 net gold per turn by the modern era. Lots of merchants, lots of trading posts, lots of coastal tiles, all Commerce policies, Panama Canal. Coastal empires don't even need road/railroad maintenance.

Tall empires had much less, and struggled to maintain even a modest army.

I just want to remind that spending gold is fun. So ideally, we would have a constant increase of it being available to spend on all the various different things we can spend it on.
Well, but building things is good too. I think gold should be flexible but less efficient, and that you should always feel that you don't have enough gold to spend on *all* the different things you could spend it on. There should be tradeoffs.
 
I'm surprised that opera houses, museums, stadiums are only 2-3 maintenance.
I only noticed because I've been cataloguing data for the wiki page. It was a little strange to discover. To be fair, it's vanilla's fault as that's what they all are there. All Thal did was make them worthy of construction in the first place by upping their yields (Museum was 5 :c5culture:, versus 1 per pop, opera house was 4 rather than 50%), with no change in upkeep.

Mitsho, put this way: You will now be swimming in gold if you've been running advanced starts with later game units of any reasonably sized military if nothing else changes in the game. Guaranteed.

I found I was swimming in it until that point most games, even with a reasonably sized military. It's after the rifles and artillery and destroyers showed up that I would start to worry about breaking even or going negative, now not so much. I worry about drowning CS's in all the extra gold.
 
I'll compare two players Alice and Bob. Both are in the late game with 3500:c5gold: gross income per turn (before expenses). The bug was an unknown hidden 1.14 exponent on national unit maintenance multiplied by the percentage of turns we've progressed through the game.

Alice is conquering the world with a big army. Let's say she has 1000 unit maintenance and 500 other costs. The bug raises her unit expenses to 2600 (1000^1.14). Her income and expenses balance with a net profit of 400:c5gold: per turn (3500-3100).

Bob has a tall empire going for a culture victory. He has 500 miscellaneous costs, and a 500 maintenance garrison army paid completely by the Oligarchy policy. Bob has a net profit of 3000:c5gold: per turn (3500-500).

This massive disparity was not intended, and I didn't even know it existed. This also explains confusion in our discussions. Bob-style peaceful players have huge gold profits in the late game that Alice-style warmongers do not see. This means we need to remove several thousand gold per turn. The difference is such a big amount, I'm spreading it out through multiple changes, to reduce the impact on balance.
 
That first example would be a net loss actually... ;)

It's a huge amount. I'm still not sure how to scratch it; reducing incomes, increasing rush buy costs, increasing upkeep for buildings and to some extent units, all matter here. I could see reducing the trade income modifiers to 20% from 25 as part of the mix too. Lots of small changes.
 
This means we need to reduce lategame gold profit by several thousand gold per turn
Just something to note: I think this is an overstatement. 6,500 gross gold, or 3,000 maintenance are way higher than I ever get on a standard map, especially with a Tall Empire.

Even at 20 gold per unit, that would be a 100 unit army. I never have that many units.

And a Tall empire will probably have maybe 6-8 cities by late-game. Even at 30 gold per unit, you're talking less than 300 gold saved by oligarchy.

So it's *not* "several thousand gold per turn".
 
I'm okay with adding maintenance to gold buildings.

@mystikx21
We'll try a few things, test it out, then try more things, eating elephant one bite at a time. I'm going to start with maintenance costs.

@Ahriman
Do you agree with the proposed changes of reducing unit maintenance, increasing building maintenance, and focusing villages on gold? This is what I'm working on. I based the example on mystikx21's post documenting an excess of 2500-4000:c5gold: profit per turn, but the exact numbers are not important. It's just an example to illustrate the problem I'm talking about. :)
 
Top Bottom