New Economic Model for Civ

[dh_epic]

Am I the only one that likes the micromanagement of what tiles to work with your citizens? I like squezing that extra hammer out of the city while starving for 3 turns to complete the next build order in 3 turns instead of 4.

I think everyone basically likes it. But the thing is that Firaxis will only add so many "things to do" for the player before they cop out and say "the game is too complex to add anything else". Therein lies the problem: Civilization 4 has so much stuff in it, the only way you can expect Firaxis to add more is if they take something away.

As much as I may enjoy the mechanical and mindless calculations around my tiles (indeed, that's one of the few things that the builder gets to do), I would gladly give that up if it meant Firaxis could introduce more complexity somewhere else: resource stockpiles, more tactical combat, managing various social classes, or multi-party diplomacy...

 

[Yakk]

Please look at the results of a town in your math -- it has negative cost food. @_@

Or take a look at a size 1 financial city with a lighthouse and the colossis -- 2 food, 0 cost. That one citizen can produce the full food yield of the nearby water at zero GDP cost...

Ie, your math is screwed. That citizen shouldn't be able to fish the entire surrounding ocean all by himself.

Note that if you changed the GDP per citizen to 10, this singularity doesn't happen. But you still get other strange effects -- a town producing 7 coin 2 food 1 hammer only costs 3 coin per square.

So 3 coin produces (2 food 1 hammer).

So a 6 size city could work 20 towns, generating 40 food and 20 hammers.

12 of that gets eaten, leaving 28 surplus food. From a size 6 city.

A size 6 city under with lots of towns could produce 2 surplus food, 7 hammers, and 43 coin. This is a very different place than your model.

Note that your hammer system is also quite broken -- having an extra hammer source can quite easily reduce the productivity of a city, even if the city doesn't want to use the tile.

--

1: The basic unit of production in civ4 WORK not COIN. Coin is a mechanism of exchange, research and wealth.

As a real-world example, the Spanish empire fell apart from having too much Coin back home, and not enough work.

2: Working a tile produces it's output -- this takes effort on the part of the citizens, and imported coin from the Empire isn't enough.

Now, working tiles "fractionally" makes sense.

3: Commerce is not GDP. Commerce represents wealth, luxuries, trade and the ability to engage in research and culture.

--

Let's say a city can produce 10 units of work per citizen. We'll leave the base (2 food + 1 shield + 1 commerce) amount alone.

1 unit of work can thus provide:
1/10th of a specialist, if we have them.
1/10th of the yield of any square in the domain of the city.

Each of the specialist and squares provides a tradeoff of work for resources.

This generates a reasonably complex set of vectors in a 6 dimensional space representing workfood, production, coin, research, culture) tradeoffs. (Note that raw commerce can be easily converted into (coin, research, culture) given your empire and city settings)

A 4 food tile is 0.4 food per unit of work.
A 1 food 1 hammer 4 commerce tile is (0.1 food, 0.1 hammer, 0.4 commerce) per unit of work.

The delta tradeoff is (0.3 food) for (0.1 hammer 0.4 commerce).

Add in a mine at (4 hammers) gives us (0.4 food) for (0.4 hammers) -- or, locally, a 1 food for 1 hammer tradeoff.

Plug that back into the previous case, and we get (0.2 food) for (0.4 commerce) -- or 1 food for 2 commerce tradeoff.

Given even a handful of slightly different tiles, these cost tradeoffs fall out. Those with the best tradeoffs win.

More importantly, if you set "how much do I value food, research, culture, coin and hammers" at a given location, it is easy for the AI to greedily grab the best tiles or specialists for that location that maximize the result. A value-curve is harder to solve, but can be approximated by good old binary search/newton's method.

One would set a "global" value for each of those things, and allow local fudge-factors. Add in the ability for cities to import goods automatically (if one city is willing to pay enough food to pay for the transport costs, it automatically starts importing) and we would have an economy. You could even choose to "favour" a city with imperial taxes and let it send it's money to other cities in exchange.

Note that moving goods around has a cost: in an ancient era, moving food from one area to another would generate significant spoilage, and in the modern era it requires lots of infrastructure (coin and/or hammers).

Coin would be the easiest good to transport long distances by far -- so paying for things in coin would be the natural thing to do. Especially if you tweaked the economy of the game so that hitting 100% research was much harder (or allow negative coin rates).

...

In either case, this generates a rather cool AI improvement for the current game.

Very good idea, dispite my criticisms!

 

[Mxzs]

Please look at the results of a town in your math -- it has negative cost food. @_@

Or take a look at a size 1 financial city with a lighthouse and the colossis -- 2 food, 0 cost. That one citizen can produce the full food yield of the nearby water at zero GDP cost...

Ie, your math is screwed. That citizen shouldn't be able to fish the entire surrounding ocean all by himself.

Yes, this is something I noted early on. I didn't regard it as a problem at the time (quoted explanation why it's not a problem in the spoiler box).

Spoiler :

Yes, that will happen, but it's a solution, not a problem.

Consider a plot of land that generates two food and one coin. If you build a cottage on it, and work it, it turns into a town, and then the square generates 2 food and 5 coin, right? (If I've got the results for "town" wrong, just pretend it's an improvement that results in 2 food and 5 coin being generated on a square.) So, in regular Civ your citizen works it and walks out with ... 2 food and 5 coin.

In the new system, the citizen would walk into the square with $4.00 and try to buy food. Now, plug the resource numbers into the formula U = (4 – C) / (F + H) in order to calculate what he would spend. The result would be (4 – 5) / (2 + 0), or –$0.50. In other words, instead of spending money to get food, he would get each unit of food free and plus $0.50. So, the citizen who fully "shopped" that square would walk out of it with 2 food, plus his original $4.00 (because he got the food for free), plus $1.00 (50 cents for each of the 2 food units he bought). In other words, he would walk out with ... 2 food and 5 coin.

The important thing, as far as I'm concerned in devising this system, is that each square yield the same results in the new system as it would in the old. (Because I don't want to worry about rebalancing a lot of other stuff.) And that's what it does.

Is this funky? Yeah, though you can easily explain it away. In the old system, the 5 coin that you get is generated by trade. In the same way, you can describe the odd result in the new system—free food plus more money—that comes from building and shopping in that town as deriving from the fact that the town generates extra GDP that completely offsets the cost of the food that is being bought. But instead of the extra coin being modeled as GDP, it is realized indirectly as "free food plus free coinage." The net result is the same.

But I decided later it was a problem. As it happens, I decided on another workaround, one that I think also handles your second objection:

But you still get other strange effects -- a town producing 7 coin 2 food 1 hammer only costs 3 coin per square.

So 3 coin produces (2 food 1 hammer).

So a 6 size city could work 20 towns, generating 40 food and 20 hammers.

12 of that gets eaten, leaving 28 surplus food. From a size 6 city.

A size 6 city under with lots of towns could produce 2 surplus food, 7 hammers, and 43 coin. This is a very different place than your model.

To handle both this and the "negative" costs problem, I wrote:

I'd change the coin-generating aspects of cottages-hamlets-villages-and-towns so that they'd add GDP directly to a city. So, for instance, adding a cottage to a square would raise a 2-citizen city's GDP from $8.00 to $9.00. This would solve two problems. First, it would get rid of the "negative expenses" problem—even though it's not actually a problem, it is counter-intuitive behavior. Second, it would be easier to describe the behavior of cottages, et al, in the game documentation. [EDIT: Cottages would "evolve" similar to the manner they do now, except that the number of cottages that evolve would be equal to number of citizens in the city. If there are more cottages than citizens, then the extra cottages would not evolve into hamlets.]

With this revision, a size 6 city would only be able to grow 6 such towns. This would, maximally, give it a GDP of $52.00 ($4.00 for the central square; $24.00 from the 6 citizens; $24.00 (6 x $4.00) from the towns). How much the city spends on food and hammers to maintain itself, of course, would depend upon the costs in the particular squares.

In regular Civ4, a city like this that worked its 6 town squares would generate 14 food, 7 hammers, and 31 coin (if I remember/calculate correctly). In the new system, assuming that the cheapest sources are squares with 2 food, 1 hammer, and 1 coin, then food would cost $0.75 per unit and hammers would cost $1.50. It would thus cost $10.50 to buy 14 food and $10.50 to buy 7 hammers, leaving $31.00 in surplus coin. The cities in the two systems would thus be equivalent.

Note that your hammer system is also quite broken -- having an extra hammer source can quite easily reduce the productivity of a city, even if the city doesn't want to use the tile.

I don't understand this. Could you expand on this objection?

The rest of your post sounds very intriguing, but I'll have to look at it more carefully and reply later. For right now, I'll only make a note that probably is not germane.

1: The basic unit of production in civ4 WORK not COIN. Coin is a mechanism of exchange, research and wealth.

Very true, and my proposal would shift the game from a producer-centric model to a consumer-centric one. That is, right now the player pushes citizens around and makes them work to produce a certain range of goods. My revision would work by letting the player adjust demand for various goods. This isn't much different from the way game currently works; it just "recontextualizes" current actions.

For instance, assume a city with one citizen, operating on ground that produces 2 food, 1 hammer, and 1 coin. Now, move that citizen to land that produces 1 food, 2 hammer, and no coin. The net result: -1 food, +1 hammer, -1 coin. In essence, the player's "demand" for food and coin has fallen, so naturally food and coin production have fallen as well; his "demand" for hammers has risen, so hammer production has risen. My basic idea was to create an interface that would let the player set his demand levels, and then let the game calculate the cheapest and most efficient way to meet that demand from sources within the city's production radius.

 

[Mxzs]

Long as I'm here, I might as well answer a few more comments and questions:

Something to consider mebey if infastructure like markets/banks and such could have there power adjustable based on city size so that a small city will get less use out of a bank system then one that is the size of new york.

I think that'd be an idea worth considering. Possibly cities above a certain size get an extra percentage GDP "bump" from banks, etc. That's one feature of this proposed redesign that is exciting and a little scary; it's so finetuned that there's almost no limit to the little permutations you could put into it.

Am I the only one that likes the micromanagement of what tiles to work with your citizens? I like squezing that extra hammer out of the city while starving for 3 turns to complete the next build order in 3 turns instead of 4.

I object not to close management, or even to micromanagement, but to inefficient management. My model would certainly allow you to starve a city for a few turns in order to hurry production: just order less food and channel the savings into buying hammers. But it would make it easier for you to set the orders that let you do that. Right now you have to do "production sudoku" to figure out where to put your workers to get that optimum output; a new interface would let you get there with just a few mouse clicks.

How will this deal with Tile blocking by enemies?

If that axemen is over the cheaptest 4 hammers, then you will have to take your hammers from other place meaning that you will get les hammers or less money.

Basically what qwert said. You wouldn't be able to buy hammers out of that square, meaning that the number of hammers you could buy would go down. Whether the number you did buy goes down depends upon how many you were buying previously. If, for instance, you can buy a max of 10 hammers and have only been ordering 3, then the loss of a 4-hammer production tile wouldn't make any difference. OTOH, this isn't so much different from the way the game currently works. If an axeman moves into a tile that you're working, you can still, quite often, get the same number of hammers out by moving your citizens to different squares (into those forests, say).

Would the cost change when the enemy comes calling? Hmmmm. Right now I've got it set so that the cost of hammers is actually an average of the cost in each square. That means that blocking a tile could make hammers more expensive (if they block a cheap source) or less (if they block an expensive one)! I don't like that last possibility, so I think the cost shouldn't change as long as no improvements are destroyed.

Mxzs: I had an idea. Why should this system mean that specialist are no longer usefull? I think this system could use specialist wery good, you would only have to change its function. Instead of producing resources, specialist could reduce the cost of the produced resources.

I haven't given a lot of thought to specialists. That's one of the places where a lot of possibilities open up, and I don't want to plug it up with my own suggestions. The suggestions of others (like yours) are bound to be better.

The main problem with specialists in the new model is that they are mostly redundant. They are very useful in the current game because they let you get close to the kind of finetuned management that my model is designed to allow. And because they are useful for doing that, they make the kinds of buildings (like Mosques and Synagogues) and Great People that generate them very useful. This kind of thing, in turn, makes things like Religion useful. So, pulling the rug out from under specialists comes close to pulling the rug out from under a lot of other features in the game.

Now, that's a price I'd be willing to pay: it's stupid to keep a kludge in the game solely to justify some of your other features. I'd rather see Religion and Mosques and all the rest filling new and better needs. But speculating on what those might be ... well, that kind of goes off topic.

Also i was wondering if it is possable to have it so that with some advanced technology or what have you that would allow a city to generate more resorces out of the land then is there except at higher prices so if a city wanted to get 4 5 or 6 food out of a 3 food square it might have to pay double or triple the base price? just wondering if that is possable without muffing up the math.

There are improvements already in the game that, at a cost, squeeze more resources out of the land: forges and factories and the like. The system I propose would treat these in much the same way. Whether more such improvements should be added is a game balance issue. To ask whether it makes sense to add such to the new system, you should ask if it would make sense to add them to the current game.

 

[Grey Fox]

Well I like the production suduko. It's the restrictions that make it a fun challenge. And why you want different kinds of tiles, with different improvements, instead of the same on all.

 

[dh_epic]

Well I like the production suduko. It's the restrictions that make it a fun challenge. And why you want different kinds of tiles, with different improvements, instead of the same on all.

The problem with suduko is once you master the calculation, doing the same puzzle over and over becomes fruitless, unrewarding, and boring.

Suduko is necessarily a single-player activity. Real strategy comes from a conflict with an unpredictable opponent.

Okay, so why not both? Why not keep the puzzle-type gameplay at the tile level, but expand the interaction with other opponents in warfare, trade, and diplomacy?

Well, the game has to move at a certain pace for the average consumer, let alone for a multiplayer game. That means there can only be so many things for the player to do before the game becomes unmanageable for Firaxis's target audience. So you have to ask yourself: would you rather have more suduko by yourself, or more interaction with other players (even AI players)? I don't mean to sound snide: some people will prefer different things, depending on what they get out of Civilization.

 

[hs1611]

A long time ago, in a thread far, far away... (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171232 - now dead) I posted an idea about food trade. I don't know if it's original but it seems simpler, from the player's perspective, than the import/export mechanism, although I don't think it would work for hammers.
Here it goes:

I think that food should be automatically transfered from cities with a surplus to cities with a lack of it, in such quantities that the former would still grow and the latter would maintain their population or grow extremely slowly. Some food could be lost in the process.
In reality I don't think that any city produces enough food for itself, even from nearby farmland. Food is exported from producing areas to the cities.
I don't really like caravans (micromanagement), but maybe they could be used to help cities grow. Keeping the cities supplied should be automatic.

What I mean is that, in real life, cities are not self-sufficient regarding to food. Food is brought to the cities from agricultural regions, not necessarily next to the city (2 squares ), which, normally, are more sparsely populated than the cities. Therefore, the most food is in areas with the less population, in CIV4 the opposite applies, more food = more population.
In real life there is also the transformation/manufacture of food products to consider, but that would just complicate things in CIV4 and lead to more micromanagement.

This is how I think it should work:
Let's say that City A and City B produce 100 food units each, but only need 80 food units to maintain its population, getting a surplus of 20 food units each.
50% of the food surplus would be removed, maybe to a Central Wharehouse or Great Granary (could exist from the beggining, after achieving certain conditions like X number of cities or tech Y researched, or could be a National Wonder) leaving 10 food units for growth in each city.
The other 20 food units would then be distributed to cities that don't produce enough (Cities C & D) in such quantities that they would not lose population but they would not grow either. Let's say 12 food units was thus distributed, which leaves 8 food units.
This remaining food would then be distributed equally to all cities, 2 food units to each. This would ensure that all cities would still grow, but cities C & D would grow slowly. This would make a city with good production squares or Bonuses on their radius but few food squares viable, allowing the existence of cities focusing only on production (Wonders, military units, etc...). It would also enable the construction of cities in choke points, those cities could be used like military bases protecting your borders or stoping rivals from expanding in that area.
In alternative the 8 remaining food units could go back to the original surplus cities, A & B, or it could stay in the Wharehouse against a time of need, trading it for a Gold Bonus after a certain amount, or to be used for trade with other nations. In this case population growth of the Production Cities could then be enabled by the use of Caravans or something like that (food for the caravans could be taken from the Central Wharehouse). Caravans would not need to be specific units built in cities, you could have a certain amount of Caravans to use per turn.

I know 100 food units it's a ridiculously, not to say impossibly, high number, but it's simpler to work with round numbers (at least for me). You can even think in terms of %.
I still think some food should be lost in the process. Maybe X% of the surplus would simply never reach the "Great Granary".

Your new interface idea sounds good to me, and it would still work with this food trade model. Hammers now, that's another question.

This model won't work with hammer trade, because how do you figure how much hammers cities A and B should retain for their own use before removing the rest for distribution?

A "workable" system to deal with hammers (I hope) would be something like cities producing wealth, when they turn hammers into money.
Maybe you could use your treasury to buy hammers to assign to whatever cities you decide. This could be done on the city screen of the specific city you want to give a boost of hammers. Or maybe the cities producing wealth would instead be producing hammers for the central pool.
In this case you would still need a way to turn them into money, either simply converting them or selling the excess hammers in the international market.

Back Of The Box test: "The end of world hunger is at hand"

In any case, excellent discussion. Even if nothing ever comes out of it.

 

[chef pablo]

exporting food really is not that hard and can be handled with XML and creation of a couple new improvements.

We will take the modern age as example

on the coast you have a city that has fish in its fat cross..
create a building that requires fish in its fat cross to build much the same way that iron works rerquire coal or iron .we can call this improvement fish cannery .this improvement creates the resource of canned fish in the same way that broadway creates music.

This resource carries no benifit however it is required to build a cannery warehouse.This improvement is where you add the food as it increases the food output of the city .I'm not sure where the tag is for increasing the % of output but I know that Sevos mod has the statesman speacial building does just that.If you give these buildings high maitnance cost you balance out the benifit . You can create food pretty simply without fiddling to much with codding.

If you wanted to create quantitive resources than (and here is the part I have no idea how to accomplish)make resources cancel themselves out when they are used,for example ,axman ,when you build this unit it would use a copper resource for that turn that you start building it, if you only have acess to one copper than no other city durring that turn could utilize the copper resource,but if you had 2 copper than an additional axman in another city could build an axman or other copper nececarry unit or improvement.

This as well as an ability to trade for more than just one given resource.In other words if you already have copper within your civ you should be able to trade for more copper.

Then create improvements that take in raw resource and spit out a different resource in quantitive.


This can also be accomplished with livestock and food crops (heres another i have no idea how to do it)there is already a tag for allows irrigation so if there is a way to combine a resource with improvement than you could use this tag to grow resources like hourses, cow , wheat etc.

anyway I hope this gives somebody a new way to think about accomplishing these topcis that keep comming up.

 

[Yakk]

In theory, if you set a local price for each of:
Hammers
Stable Food
Growth Food
Culture
and a global price for science & cash, you could figure out how much food/hammers/commerce you should export, and how much you should keep.

Note that exporting some food should be more efficient than exporting all food, and the same for hammers/commerce.

One must be careful that you don't end up becoming the "spreadsheets in space" of MOO3.

 

[Yakk]

So I've been thinking about this a bit more.

Demand-based resource allocation makes sense. But demand-based resource production doesn't -- resources don't come into being because it is demanded, but rather because someone produces it.

So let the player set global default prices for goods, and override prices locally. Prices would always be in coin.

Generally, the value of Research in Coin would be set globally.

Then one would set default city settings for:
Starvation Food (usually a negative value)
Hammers (with sub-settings for unit/buildings)
Culture (with sub-settings for pressure/no fat cross/border)
GPP (with sub-settings for each kind of GPP)
Growth Food (with sub-settings for happy/healthy growth prices)

There would also be a fall-off value for each of the above commodities (the first 5 hammers are worth more than the next 5, etc).

Locally, the user could change any of those prices. They could also send extra treasury money at a given city -- but this doesn't magically let the city do more work, but rather gives it more money to import goods.

Each city would then take their surrounding tiles, their current improvements, and the current civic settings, and attempt to maximize the amount of surplus value (determined by your prices) the city produces.

Each city could then calculate export and import prices for hammers and food. It would then contact nearby cities, take into account the hammer/food loss form travel, and see if it could increase it's net value by selling hammers/food to the nearby city, possibly including the choice of buying food from one city and selling it to another based off of their import/export prices.

This would create trade routes over which food/hammers could travel, step by step.

Trade technologies would increase one's efficiency at moving goods around, reducing the loss.

 

[Wimsey]

Brilliant Idea, Mxzs, in fact so brilliant that in lack of an idea of my own I'll do my best to help you a bit with this. Feel free to ignore any advice of course, but I hope You'll find at least some useful input. These ideas are mostly thought out while walking my dog, so it might not be entirely thought through.

The best part of this economic system in my opinion is IMO the oppurtunity to create national and international markets. To do this we need a spesific cost for food and hammers in each city, and I feel your formulas are a little flawed for this purpose.. The food formula because the cost may change for each unit purchased, which might perhaps lead to unnecessary micromanaging (This may be a totally unjustified accusation, in which case I apologise). The hammer formula is a bit flawed because having some tiles in the BFC with bad production can really upset the cost (and is actually worse that having a square with no hammers at all).

Therefore I would like to provide with you with a new formula that can be used to decide the cost of local food, hammers and commerce in a city. It is now purely based on the size of the city and the output of the fat cross and should be roughly equivalent to
cost = demand/supply. I think it should be pretty good for trading.

Spoiler :

This is the formula for determining the amount of GDP each food unit in a city costs:

U(F) = 2T/P

Looks simple, eh?

U(F) = Cost of local food, P = population of city.

T - Requires a bit of explanation. This value is the number of tiles the city must work to feed its entier population. Or rather; the number of tiles it would have worked in original civ.

As an example, let's say a pop 1 city gets its food from a tile with 4F. To feed the citizen, it must work 1/2 of the tile (2 of 4 units), which leads to U(F) = 2*0,5/1 = 1.

It gets a bit more complicated though :

Now we need to assign each tile a value of "food points"(FP). This is simple: Each food is worth 1 FP, and each hammer or commerce is worth 0.5 FP. So a tile with 3F has a value of 3 FP, and a tile with 1F 2H 1C has a value of 2.5 FP (1+0.5+0.5+0.5). When the computer decides which tiles it should be working to get the lowest price of food, it will simply go for the ones with the highest value of FP first, it doesn't matter what the combination of F, H or C is (as long as the tile contains at least 1F).

When determining cost, the total FP of a tile is considered, not only the number of food units on the tile.
I have a problem explaining this exactly, but since you're an intelligent person I'll provide you with an example and hope that is enough:

Let's say a pop 1 city must work a tile with 4F 2C (5 FP) for food. It must take 2F to feed the citizen. This is 2/5 of the FPs of the tile. So it is considered to work 0.4 tiles, which gives us:
U(F) = 2*0.4/1 = 0.8

Just one more example for a sligthly larger city to make things clear unless they already are:
A pop 4 city has the following best tiles to work for food: 4F 2C, 3F 2C and 3F 1C. It needs 8 food, so it takes 4F from the first tile (it can't take the commerce obviously), 3F from the second tile, and 1F from the third tile. It now works 4/5 of the first tile, 3/4 of the second tile and 2/7 of the third tile. This gives us: T = 4/5 + 3/4 + 2/7 = 1,84 and U(F) = 2*1,84/4 = 0,92.

Note that hammers and commerce can be used to lower the cost of food (a "bug" someone rightfully mentioned earlier), but it is exactly half as efficient as actually using food. This seems IMHO pretty balanced, and I have not yet seen any obvious exploits (But I'm sure someone else will..)

An observant reader will by now have seen that U(F) = 4/[average FP for each tile].

Now, this isn't really very different from your hammer formula, except a bad tile isn't taken into consideration before the city actually grows to the point where it will need to work this bad tile in order to feed itself. i consider this an important point.

For hammers and commerce I recommend it works exactly similar, with T as the number of the tiles that must be worked in order to give a citizen 2H or 2C respectively. Each tile would have to be assigned a HP and CP value.

For commerce I have the idea that after the player (or governor) has assigned GDP to food and hammers, the computer will automatically "buy" commerce for the remaining GDP, even for a worse than 1:1 ratio.. This would mean that it wouldn't be wise to leave unused GDP in a city with few or none economic improvements, and that there would be no wasted GDP at the end of the turn, since we can deal in small fractions of commerce. I believe towns could work exactly like they do now, since they would give the player the oppurtunity to buy lots of insanely cheap commerce for the GDP.

A problem will occur when a city grows to a size where there are no tiles left with goods to calculate the cost of a commodity. My solution to this is to allow a city to work an infinite number of "phantom tiles" that each contains 1F, 1H or 1C depending on the goods in question. When a city has finished working all its food tiles the cost will rapidly increase as it starts working these hugely inferior tiles. Note that you can not extract food or hammers from these phantom tiles, they are just imaginary there to help calculate cost (you can, and indeed sometimes must extract commerce from them, though)
This means that the cost of goods will converge towards 4, so an infinitely large city will pay 4 GDP for each local food, hammer or commerce! So think hard before you let those cities grow too much..

Now, as a city grows local, food, hammers and commerce becomes gradually more expensive. Note that if a city grows each and every unit becomes more expensive, also those already purchased. So if a city grows, say, from pop 15 to 16 and increases U(F) from 1.00 to 1.10 by doing so, the total cost of food is now 32*1.10 = 35.2 compared to former 30*1.00 = 30. This means we effectively pay 5.2 GDP for a citizen that yields 4 GDP! Not smart..
This is where the trade kicks in. The size and terrain of a city does not affect the price of imported food. This could lead to some funny situations where it is most efficient for a large city to import all its food, even though it could grow some itself.
I think export/import should be as you outlined Mxzs, with the government as middle man, and a transport fee that is lost in the process, payed by the recieving city (should depend on distance and intervening terrain. I have some ideas concerning trade routes, but I'll not go into them here. I'll walk the dog a little bit more first). I imagine import could be handled automatically, by the computer picking the trade routes that give the overall lowest GDP loss. This would mean export is the only active part of trade (and diplomacy in the case of international trade of course), for a minimum of micromanaging.. which I consider a good thing (up to certain point that is).

Anyway, you've gotten me really interested, so keep up the good work on this subject!

 

[Lockesdonkey]

So I've been thinking about this a bit more.

Demand-based resource allocation makes sense. But demand-based resource production doesn't -- resources don't come into being because it is demanded, but rather because someone produces it.

Why does that someone produce it? Probably because somebody demands it.

Say's Law and Keynes' response:

Say: Supply creates its own demand.
Keynes: And demand creates its own supply.

And the wonderful thing about economics is that they're both true.

 

[Yakk]

Why does that someone produce it? Probably because somebody demands it.

Say's Law and Keynes' response:

Say: Supply creates its own demand.
Keynes: And demand creates its own supply.

And the wonderful thing about economics is that they're both true.

The creating of the supply depends on being able to produce it: ie, making a demand-based model is good, but a compete transformation of how goods are supplied isn't justified. Just take the current supply rules, allow fractional tile work, and have the computer maximize the value of the city as determined by the supply orders of the player.

Inter-city and inter-empire trade should fall out of this naturally. A city that can produce food easily and a city that can produce hammers easily next to each other should be able to work out, through simple marginal price information, that they can trade food for hammers, and even take into account transportation costs if we keep trade relatively local (note that local trade can lead to cascades, as each city can check "I have someone demanding food at 4$ and someone offering food at 3$").

Things might, however, get chaotic. But that is the beauty of markets.

Demand encourages supply, it doesn't create it -- to create supply, the encouraged someone has to actually produce the good. Managing the economy from the Demand side has advantages: but just because demand for all goods doubles does not double supply. And similarly, when supply doubles, demand doesn't double.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

A thread that is not mine returns for no reason because it's an awesome idea.

 

[rysmiel]

Why does that someone produce it? Probably because somebody demands it.

Say's Law and Keynes' response:

Say: Supply creates its own demand.
Keynes: And demand creates its own supply.

And the wonderful thing about economics is that they're both true.

Tell that to the millions who died in the Irish Potato Famine.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Tell that to the millions who died in the Irish Potato Famine.

Not what I meant.

In any case, THIS NEEDS TO BE DISCUSSED. Danke.

 

[rysmiel]

Not what I meant.

In any case, THIS NEEDS TO BE DISCUSSED. Danke.

Well, my point is, these notions of economics are provably wrong, by the example I just gave, and therefore not things I should like to see integrated into Civ.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Well, my point is, these notions of economics are provably wrong, by the example I just gave, and therefore not things I should like to see integrated into Civ.

You're missing the bloody point. I forget even why I made that argument and I'm not particularly interested in arguing it now.

What I AM trying to do is get Mxzs' proposal back into the conversation, because it's useful and well-thought-out.

 

[lovett]

Well, my point is, these notions of economics are provably wrong, by the example I just gave, and therefore not things I should like to see integrated into Civ.

Funny that. Who'd of though you'd of caught something the whole economist community failed to see?




But yeah, On topic I think its a great idea.

It allows proper specialisation of cities, general economic strategy and a massive cut in micro-management. Not to mention the implication of international trade, which would greatly increase the impact of diplomacy, in particular non war-based sanctions.

Notably, I think this system could help make inflation more palatable. Rather then being more or less arbitary, it could be linked to your national economy and coin production, closely.

 

[rysmiel]

Funny that. Who'd of though you'd of caught something the whole economist community failed to see?

Anybody familiar with post-Keynesian refinements to economics like true-costr economics, Jane Jacobs on cities and how they generate wealth (which would be fascinating but very hard to implement in Civ), Stafford Beer's work on variety management, etc.

It allows proper specialisation of cities, general economic strategy and a massive cut in micro-management.

Civ 4 has to my mind gone too far in forcing city specialisation already; and a cut in micro-management is not a plus to some players.