How is GNP worked out ?

[Bushface]

I always understood that GNP meant "gross national product". This implies that as long as your nation is producing something your GNP is a positive number. But in Civ4 mine sometimes goes negative: how come ?
And I believe that it is economically better for a country to export more than it imports, since otherwise its national debt will rise.
But in my current game the demographics screen shows a picture which I simply cannot understand. I have over 1000 gold in my treasury, with gold-per-turn at +28 with research at 100%: none of my remaining rivals have more than 100 gold for trading, or 7 per turn: I am producing 4.9 times the goods of my nearest rival, and crops at 1.9 times: I have 2.8 times my best rival's land area, and 3.2 times the population: the screen shows me as top, therefore, in goods, crops, population and land. Yet I show last in GNP at only 0.59 of my best rival and 0.9 of the worst, and my import/export ratio is 0/133 which places me last, with 88/38 as the best.
Not that these statistics affect the game-play, of course, but it would be nice to know what weird variety of creative accounting the game uses. Can anybody help ?

 

[kingkasai]

Yea... I'm also really confused on GNP, mine always sucks (sorry to be so blunt) and a loser civ has really good GNP...

 

[Zebra 9]

I would like to see how this works as well. I never realy thought about it until now.

 

[Bushface]

I'd also like to know about "power" and "number of soldiers", in which categories I am shown fourth. I can see via the religious line-of-sight that four of my rivals have galleys, triremes and longbowmen, but could they be considered better than my riflemen and galleons, even if there are more of them ? What will happen in a few turns, when I can produce cavalry ? Though I don't think I shall go that route but wait a bit longer to improve my techs and production capacity and churn out tanks !

 

[Severus]

Try this link

This should explain things a bit.

With regards to gnp, the numerical value given is the total raw commerce your civ is bringing in minus expenses. It doesn't take into account any gold modifying buildings like banks etc or shrine income which is why you can be at 100% research and still make a profit but have a negative gnp.

Imports is the total amount of commerce through trade routes you have with foreign nations while exports is the total commerce other nations are receiving for trade routes with you.

Number of soldiers is made up of many things, each unit equals a certain number of soldiers, population points (you get something like 1000 soldiers for each 2 pop points in a city, starting from size 2), certain buildings (barracks, walls etc) and certain technologies (eg iron working gives 10,000 soldiers i think).

The original poster explains it all in much more depth.

Hope this helps.

 

[Bushface]

Very many thanks for the link, which itself is brilliant.
The salient points are, as I see them :-
1). GNP is an inappropriate label, as it's purely commerce-based and takes no account of your production of goods and crops.
2). The GNP graph is based on data which differs from that used in the demographics screen.
3). "Number of soldiers" does reflect the strength and quantity of units but also includes a number of phantoms representative of the types of units which could be trained, not reflected in the actual number of units.
4). Imports are taken as the commerce generated in your cities by trade with foreign powers, exports as what other civs get from trading with you. This is the total inverse of real-world economics.
Regardless of whether the calculations are "reasonable" or not, at least they are now explained. As to why these methods were adopted, I suppose we shall never know.

 

[Severus]

I never use the demographics screen in my games apart from the late game when i'm pushing to be number one in every category since the information doesn't make me alter my play in any way. I find the graphs are much more useful and much quicker to use since they show you all known civs, not just the best and worst in each department.

I agree the term gnp is misleading, gnc would be more appropriate. It would be more useful as well if the power graph simply represented the total strength of all a civs units added together since it would tie in with the gnp (gold) graph, as both would then represent the actual in game situation.

 

[Bushface]

Like Severus, I don't alter my play at all as a result of the info on the demographics screen. What prompted me to start this thread was my incomprehension of how the various values were calculated, which is very fully explained in the linked thread, given what I had always understood to be the meanings of "GNP", "Imports", and "Exports". The game has other interpretations of these, which savours of what is euphemistically called "creative accounting".
Severus suggests "GNC" instead of "GNP". Even this is wrong, since the value on the demog. screen is obtained by deducting costs and so is really "NNP", for nett national profit. Also, rather than being a ratio, the international trade situation would be better expressed as "Trading Balance", that is (commerce you gain from foreign trade) minus (commerce all other civs get from trading with you)