Meleager's Economic Model

[apatheist]

As I said above, now its just getting the AI to understand it!

Well, the AI and the players.

This means that you can support 40 cities from this coal resource without difficulty. However, you have recently built coal power stations in half of your 40 cities.

What are the other 20 cities doing that makes them consume coal? Simply existing?

This means that you are currently exceeding your resource limit by 20 ((8*5)-20). What does this mean? Well, it means that all of the production times of your cities are increased by (40-20)/100 or 0.2. Thus, that unit which once took 10 turns to build will now take (10*0.2)=2 extra turns. Doesn't sound like much, but it could make all the difference, especially if you have several resources in a similar state of 'depletion'. This way, there is no arbitrary disappearance of resources, but the effect of building a successful nation of a limited supply of resources is properly modelled. This, in turn, will have the desired impact on trade, conflict and diplomacy!

I guess I don't see much of a difference in the eventual outcome with more "RTS-like" (as you put it) resource measurement, but I do see a difference in the ability of the player to see and immediately grasp what is going on. In one case, there's "We don't have enough" according to an unintuitive formula while in the other case, it's "We need 15 more oil."

As an alternative, suppose your coal resources in aggregate provide 30 coal units per turn. Suppose you have 20 cities, each with a coal plant that uses 2 coal per turn. That means that every turn, five cities have to do without its coal plant*. Let's assume that the city that does without is randomly selected each turn (either by the game or by the player; if it didn't rotate, then you might as well sell off the idle coal plants). If a coal plant boosts production by 50%, then 15 turns out of 20, each city has 150% production, while 5 turns out of 20, it has 100% production. On average, then, it has 137.5% production over those 20 turns, or produces things 8.3% slower than if it had 150% production all the time. The numbers aren't quite the same as your example, but the basic effect is the same. However, instead of having a more abstract measurement of supply and demand, the player can have a single screen that says:

==================================================

Supply:
-------
17 coal/turn - near Newcastle
6 coal/turn - near Liverpool
7 coal/turn - bought from Americans

Demand:
--------
2 coal/turn - Coal Plant in Newcastle
2 coal/turn - Coal Plant in London
....

Domestic Minister: Sire, our Coal Plants in Nottingham, York, Manchester, Bristol, and Essex were idle due to a coal shortage! We need an additional 10 coal to keep them running.

==================================================

I fail to see what is so bad about that.

* An alternate mechanism would be to have 10 cities with half-capacity coal plants and 10 running at full capacity. Overall, the result is the same, but that gives more uniform results overall (for better or for worse).

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Actually Apatheist, my model is broadly intuitive , wheras yours amounts to accountancy gone mad. It doesn't really even have realism going for it.
The bulk of resources currently used by people have no specific quantity that we know for certain-but we do tend to know if a resource deposit is relatively large or small. My system builds in that lack of specificity, whilst still allowing players to realise that they are overstretching their resources and require more-just not exactly how much. My feeling is that once you let people know something like this for certain, then you are opening the doors to what DH_Epic calls the 'Micromanage to win' phenomenon. My system is based less around dealing with minutiae, and more about dealing with broader issues of trade, war and technology development.
I'm not going to argue the toss with you on this anymore Apatheist-as I am becoming increasingly convinced that you simply don't like ideas with MY name attached to them. However, you may like to know-in regards to your Coal question-that coal was very heavily traded in England from at least the late 17th century, long before the advent of coal power stations, or even the locomotive, so it must have been pretty important to the economy at that point. My feeling is, if you know it exists then you must be able to use it and-therefore-you may cause its depletion.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[apatheist]

Actually Apatheist, my model is broadly intuitive , wheras yours amounts to accountancy gone mad. It doesn't really even have realism going for it.
...
I'm not going to argue the toss with you on this anymore Apatheist-as I am becoming increasingly convinced that you simply don't like ideas with MY name attached to them.

Comments like that make me question your objectivity and your sincerity. There is no reason to take a disagreement about a computer game so personally. Accusing me of singling you out like that is both immature and incorrect.

You may think addition and subtraction are beyond the average Civilization player, but RTS games seem to manage just fine. I think those games are a worthy genre, but they are less cerebral than Civilization. If RTS players can handle it, I'm sure Civilization players will be just fine.

As far as realism goes, do you think the value of a factory in a city can be quantified? Or the defensive effectiveness of a division of mechanized infantry? Or the cultural benefit of a university? The number of happy faces in a city? Civilization games quantify many things that cannot be accurately and reasonably quantified in the real world. I fail to see how hiding that type of information from the players improves the game. It resmbles the culture flip mechanism in Civ3, and that doesn't seem to have been a very popular feature. It serves no purpose to hide the workings from the player. You may misinterpret that statement to mean I think players should have Excel open while they play, but that is not my meaning. The mechanisms should be clear and visible, to reduce player frustration and confusion, and they should be simple, so that there is no advantage to devoting excess energy to calculations because it is simply unnecessary.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

The argument regarding RTS's and Stockpiling-as a justification for use in Civ4-has been had out a number of times in the Ideas and Suggestions forums months ago. The fact is that it works in RTS games because they deliberately keep the total number of resources small (i.e. around 3-6) so that people don't have to keep track of too many numbers. In a civilization game, we can see as few as 16 resources-and as many as 32 (officially), and even more once modders get their hands on the game . Now, even the 3-6 resources in RTS games are sufficient to make those games a truly boring and monotonous experience for me, so having to keep track of 4 times as many would be out of the question (it would probably be enough reason for me to leave the game on the shelf). I am guessing that there are quite a few players who feel the same way. Thats not to say resources should not be 'quantified' (or else I wouldn't be here now, would I?) but that they should not be so in such an absolute way. As I said previously, in my system it is broadly intuitive. A player doesn't need to know exactly how many cities a certain sized resource can sustain (in fact, it is probably better if the player doesn't know for certain). All they need know is that the smaller the quantity of a resource they possess, the fewer cities and units they can efficiently maintain. Instead of pushing the player towards anal MM of his various resources-checking them turn by turn to ensure he has enough for that next city, next improvement or next unit, my system is elastic enough to give the player some leeway in exceeding the resource caps-at a price-whilst driving the player to more strategic level decisions (like seeking trade with other nations, acquiring technologies which will reduce the 'resource maintainance costs' or conquering/settling lands where that resource resides). As long as you also have a good interface-one which makes it clear which resource(s) are being over-taxed, then the player can check in on his resource screen if he ever notices his maintainance costs-or production times going up, or his happiness and health levels going down, and see instantly what resources may be behind it.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[apatheist]

That's a fair point. It's not like any resources lose importance over time, either, with the exception of Saltpeter, which isn't in Civ4 anyway. 8 strategic resources, 8 luxuries, and 8 types of food (I assume) would be pretty tricky to keep track of.

I think there are a couple differences with an RTS, however. In an RTS, you have to (afaik) find somewhere to store the commodities. You also have to set up units to harvest them and move them from place to place. With Civilization, you would just build an improvement, connect it to your network, and be done.

Also, another way I envision it (described further up in the thread) would use free markets to handle the purchase and allocation of both food types and luxury resources. You, the player, would tap the sites and connect them to your network and then reap the benefits. Only with strategic resources would you control things more directly. Depletion makes sense only with strategic resources, as those are natural mineral resources (well, with the exception of horses, and my opinion on breeding is above). The luxury and food resources are things that are farmed, with the exception of silver and whales, which to some degree assumes replenishment. Even whales aren't really an exception because they are potentially infinite if you keep your "harvesting" low. I'd just scotch whales and silver as luxuries, though, to keep it simple. Regardless, depletion doesn't uniformly apply to luxuries and food resources the same way it does with Iron, Copper, Coal, Oil, etc., so I'd be fine treating those separately.

The end result would be a system where the citizens of the cities buy and sell food and luxuries on their own, with the player skimming some of that in taxes. Strategic resources would be part of the "military-industrial complex" and thus controlled directly by the player. There would be no stock-piling nor any central repository to manage. The player would manage the 8 strategic resources approximately like they're managed in Civ3, but with the added issue of having to make sure (s)he has enough.

 

[Meleager]

It certainly interesting to see what we were saying before we knew anything about the game. But now it has been out for a few months and it is time to re-examine this if it is ever going to get off the ground. Some of these ideas need to be simplified, or minimised to ensure that they don't monopolise game play. I have thought of a few revisions that I will be posting in the next few days, either in this thread, or in a new one.