Inflation - inevitable or manageable?

[TsarAndreas]

As the title suggests, is there anything that the player can do to mitigate inflation or is it completely outside our influence?

I accept it is a mechanic necessary for balance, but I just wonder if there is anything that can be done to make it better, or at least not make it worse too soon.

Thanks in advance

TsarAndreas

 

[keli]

There is an event which can pop up and requires you to pay a large sum of gold for a decrease in inflation. Paying the cash always worth it as inflation gets enormous over time.
However, I don't think there is anything you can do directly. The event appearing is pure luck.

 

[waaambulance]

I think you need to run free market (or its equivalent) to get a chance of it firing.

 

[TsarAndreas]

Thanks for the responses.

It sounds like I just have to deal with it then. I wondered if slowing the rate of building new cities or certain buildings might help, but I guess not.

To be fair, we haven’t exactly conquered in real life, so that’s probably reasonable!

Cheers

 

[Zaddy]

Unfortunately right now the answer is "Play a civ with a good inflation modifier". Older civs have extremely high inflation costs that will basically tank your economy if you try to expand much. Each city really needs to pull it's weight.

It's a much different story for Europeans and post-Columbian American civs (especially American and Prussia IIRC), which can mostly scoop up tons of relatively bad cities with little impact on their economy.

You can see each civ's modifiers in the world builder BTW.

 

[Logoncal]

It's kinda of a bad mechanic, but needed so that we dont have a runaway Egypt or China.

 

[freethink]

It's kinda of a bad mechanic, but needed so that we dont have a runaway Egypt or China.

But I still don't completely agree with it
It seems deterministic on the player to me

Take China for example (and maybe Egypt more remotely)
Their course in history was in many ways determined by their choices rather than being an 'old civilization. I actually think that in some games China AI should be a modern superpower in the later eras. China was damaged in many ways by the Mongol Invasion and later by the extreme isolationistic policies implemented, but what if China had just slightly different rulers that were more open to innovation?

Historians now are starting to wonder if the Great Divergence was a fluke if Asia's ultimate fate was not preordained to fall behind the west. There should be some sort of way for at least the player of these civs to have an impact on inflation; right now it seems the only way to do so is to have as few expenses as possible (I think)

 

[1SDANi]

But I still don't completely agree with it
It seems deterministic on the player to me

Take China for example (and maybe Egypt more remotely)
Their course in history was in many ways determined by their choices rather than being an 'old civilization. I actually think that in some games China AI should be a modern superpower in the later eras. China was damaged in many ways by the Mongol Invasion and later by the extreme isolationistic policies implemented, but what if China had just slightly different rulers that were more open to innovation?

Historians now are starting to wonder if the Great Divergence was a fluke if Asia's ultimate fate was not preordained to fall behind the west. There should be some sort of way for at least the player of these civs to have an impact on inflation; right now it seems the only way to do so is to have as few expenses as possible (I think)

Also China kept collapsing. Heck, both Taoism and Confucianism developed following a collapse.

 

[Logoncal]

I said it was a bad but needed mechanic, not that we didnt need a replacement.

 

[ThreeBlackSevens]

Also China kept collapsing. Heck, both Taoism and Confucianism developed following a collapse.

Somewhat on a tangent but I always thought it would be cool to find some way to represent this even when the player is China. It collapses a lot as AI into independents which makes sense but if you do it as a player you lose the game. Could make for an interesting historical victory target in some way or another, but I imagine that could be a lot of complicated new mechanics just for one civ.

 

[Kewlipo]

Apologies for random bump.

I really wish there was a way to interact with this mechanic, or reduce it and possibly eliminate it. For example, I tried to do a 3000 BC turtling China space victory for fun and found it simply impossible due to inflation. Inflation is especially punishing on marathon speed, as it is much higher at 1700 AD on marathon than on normal speed.

I was really hoping that we could brainstorm some possible mechanics to replace the current inflation system if, of course, Leoreth is open to the possibility.

For example, I was thinking that the current inflation rate could be simply reduced. Additionally, switching from outdated civics to modern ones could also reduce inflation (some math would have to be applied here so that it could not be abused). This abstractly represents old empires reinvigorating themselves after a shakeup in civics.

Any other ideas?

 

[Dracosolon]

Somewhat on a tangent but I always thought it would be cool to find some way to represent this even when the player is China. It collapses a lot as AI into independents which makes sense but if you do it as a player you lose the game. Could make for an interesting historical victory target in some way or another, but I imagine that could be a lot of complicated new mechanics just for one civ.

I guess the most logical way of doing this would be a new UP that ensures that they don't ever fully collapse (collapse to core from the start, additional units... maybe some sort of limited version of the new Rise and Fall mechanics?), plus a UHV incentive to get the player to risk collapse. Problems:
-That would make the interactions with the Mongols more complicated (this could be helped if Leoreth ever implements the "human player as a vassal" mechanics, but that's a long shot),
-I'm not sure it would be all that fun for the player,
-Internal troubles typically aren't represented in Civ. No American Civil War, no Unification of Japan, etc. So making an exception for China is a bit strange.

Apologies for random bump.

I really wish there was a way to interact with this mechanic, or reduce it and possibly eliminate it. For example, I tried to do a 3000 BC turtling China space victory for fun and found it simply impossible due to inflation. Inflation is especially punishing on marathon speed, as it is much higher at 1700 AD on marathon than on normal speed.

I was really hoping that we could brainstorm some possible mechanics to replace the current inflation system if, of course, Leoreth is open to the possibility.

For example, I was thinking that the current inflation rate could be simply reduced. Additionally, switching from outdated civics to modern ones could also reduce inflation (some math would have to be applied here so that it could not be abused). This abstractly represents old empires reinvigorating themselves after a shakeup in civics.

Any other ideas?

The first question is: What game design is inflation in its current state intended to do? My understanding is that it's to counteract the slowballing effect of old civs that give them an edge over new civs, and to generally represent stagnation and decline. So changing inflation mechanics shouldn't forget these primary goals. Maybe just changing the formula to blunt the increase in inflation for very old civs?

Or, if you want more interactivity, maybe Golden Ages could slow down this process? That would give them more long term strategic value while being something that's hard to repeat indefinitely.

 

[Leoreth]

No. Inflation exists in vanilla Civ4 as well, so it has nothing to do with old civs. The reason it exists is that unit and city upkeep does not scale with your economy. One unit is always one gold per turn, no matter how large your economy is. Due to various factors of scale, your economy in the late game is several times larger, which would allow you to sustain much larger armies and empires than intended. Inflation is meant to be a money sink that counteracts that. I agree that it's necessary and works reasonably well for that purpose.

The only change that RFC makes here is that inflation is modified by civ parameters, and it's true that old civs have worse inflation modifiers, because their modifiers are worse than modern civs in general.

 

[happysheep]

Apologies for random bump.

I really wish there was a way to interact with this mechanic, or reduce it and possibly eliminate it. For example, I tried to do a 3000 BC turtling China space victory for fun and found it simply impossible due to inflation. Inflation is especially punishing on marathon speed, as it is much higher at 1700 AD on marathon than on normal speed.

I was really hoping that we could brainstorm some possible mechanics to replace the current inflation system if, of course, Leoreth is open to the possibility.

For example, I was thinking that the current inflation rate could be simply reduced. Additionally, switching from outdated civics to modern ones could also reduce inflation (some math would have to be applied here so that it could not be abused). This abstractly represents old empires reinvigorating themselves after a shakeup in civics.

Any other ideas?

No. Inflation exists in vanilla Civ4 as well, so it has nothing to do with old civs. The reason it exists is that unit and city upkeep does not scale with your economy. One unit is always one gold per turn, no matter how large your economy is. Due to various factors of scale, your economy in the late game is several times larger, which would allow you to sustain much larger armies and empires than intended. Inflation is meant to be a money sink that counteracts that. I agree that it's necessary and works reasonably well for that purpose.

The only change that RFC makes here is that inflation is modified by civ parameters, and it's true that old civs have worse inflation modifiers, because their modifiers are worse than modern civs in general.

Can somebody please confirm if inflation is bigger on slower game speeds? That really does sound like a problem that should be fixed. It is also the only point unaddressed by Leoreth in his post

 

[Just an idea]

Looking at GameSpeedInfo XML file inflation rates are Normal 35, Epic 24 and Marathon 18. So on Marathon inflation increases around half the speed it does on Normal per turn. However Marathon speed has thrice as many turns as normal so inflation increases at about 1.5 times as much as it does on normal on same time span. I did start China game in 1700 scenario on Normal and on Marathon and inflation rates were 95% and 157%.

 

[need my speed]

You can add extra upkeep costs to more modern units, and perhaps see if you can tone down inflation in combination with that?

 

[Leoreth]

Unit upkeep is discrete while inflation is fractional.

 

[1SDANi]

Unit upkeep is discrete while inflation is fractional.

Yeah, the main issue is that in history, the number of soldiers in one war increased massively over the ages, whereas it doesn't really change much in Civ 4. Perhaps upkeep could be tied to the strength of the unit instead of being fixed, though that'd need a lot of balancing and there's better features that take precedence.

City upkeep is IMO the big issue. Upkeep already scales with population via Civics and I can't see adding maintenance values to buildings being all that viable an option where you can't destroy buildings, and I don't think adding a build option to destroy X building for every building in the game would be worth the insane amount of clutter it'd add to the city screen's build option menu.

Maybe inflation will be removed by 2030 or 2040, though I really don't mind its existence all things considered.

 

[Leoreth]

maybe Joe Manchin is right and inflation is only so bad because Joe Biden wanted the government to do things

 

[1SDANi]

maybe Joe Manchin is right and inflation is only so bad because Joe Biden wanted the government to do things

That too, many buildings which ingame don't increase commerce even indirectly like culture producing buildings, production increasing buildings, etc do increase commerce IRL due to the fact that ingame systems are far less interconnected than their unabstracted IRL counterparts. Without such complex interconnectivity, you'd get a highly distorted and unrealistic system that discourages investment in infrastructure that would IRL be highly valuable to local commerce, and beyond making certain local resource and yield production increase trade route yield, I'm not sure any such changes would be for the better.

The fact that it'd require overhauling the trade route system only further cements that removing inflation not only is of much lower importance than currently planned features, but is best implemented, if at all, after the currently planned features, if not even after currently unplanned features that will eventually be planned.