Should there be a "Quality of Life" property?

[cakedaemon]

That is not "funky stuff", that's historical and correctly modeled in Victoria II. In the 19th century money was usually based on a gold standard. Which means that the only valid way to increase the amount of money in circulation was to dig up more gold in a mine. Inflating the currency at will by printing more money is the prerogative of a fiat money system. While fiat money existed in some form in some areas, most official currencies had to be backed by actual gold. Only during the 20th century (near the end of the game, or past it) did countries abandon the gold standard.
And yes, economies of specific countries have suffered severely due to gold shortages during the 19th and early 20th century. So this is modeled correctly in Victoria II.

Victoria 2 has fluctuating prices based on supply and demand. So I don't know why you say that it "doesn't simulate inflation".

No, take this as something from someone who has hundreds of hours clocked in Vicky on Steam and thousands off of it. The game's economic model is flawed in that a financial crash is inevitable as too much money disappears out of the game - I don't mean "oh, the money has changed hands and is now in a slowly industrializing China," - which is a blackhole in its own right - I mean "oh, the money has been destroyed, so there are now 1 million less money, a hundredth of the global supply, in existence." It vanishes entirely. Gone. Poof. There are no sources of actual cash for the game economy other than the gold mines and positive economic events, and the former generate so little money even in the best situations where the province has millions of pops to be practically irrelevant until the late game where production efficiency tech comes into play, and the latter basically never fire and are only a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of negative events that remove money from the global economy.

This is why Vicky's economic model is flawed: there is a limited amount of cash in the global economic system, ticking down over time like the fuse on a bomb, till there isn't enough gold available for every pop's day to day transactions and purchases from the global market. This is actually talked about at length on the forum and the subreddit, where the prevailing view is that the game's economic model is broken. What you're saying about the gold standard is correct for the real world, but the game is odd in that large bankruptcies of countries like, say, the United States, can simply delete one quarter or more of the world's gold, which simply leaves the game's economy and ceases to exist, meaning that there is now no longer enough gold in the world's economy to carry out day to day transactions, plunging the world into an Eternal Depression from which there is no escape. I've seen it happen a dozen times, and even had it happen in a multiplayer game where we were all trying to keep it from happening with deficit spending and insta-debt collection DoWs on any who went bust, to keep cash in the global supply, but it just bled out through events until the market failed and the game became unplayable. Though I can't find the thread for it, someone did the math behind the system and concluded that the economic failure I've mentioned in this post and which is mentioned in all those links is inevitable; you can push it past the end of the game year and thus escape it, but if you were to somehow keep playing you would eventually slam into the problem and watch the entire world market simply...fall apart. Its one of the reasons why, as was mentioned in one of those links, Paradox have been trying to fix the problem by removing things that take cash out of the economy, like cash construction fees on fortresses and the like, but it hasn't really been effective and the game continues to have the same melt down even in HoD, its just less likely to go bang in 1880/90 where there are forty years left in the game.

But we're getting off topic here

 

[MacCoise]

An alternative approach would be to further develop the existing properties so that there is a balancing act to be done to keep it interesting.

For example, consistent negative crime should lead to boredom, inertia and ultimately a drop off in productivity or science as people get too comfortable.

Too much Education should result in arrogance, lack of workers to do the basics etc. In this case keeping a city in negative education might mean better, more aggressive soldiers.

Too much negative health property should lead to complacency which exposes the over sterile population to new super bugs

I know this has been mooted before and it has been pointed out that the problem is that the AI cannot be taught to seek an equilibrium.

The quality of life idea is too modern a concept in my book.

Water, flammability and air pollution are probably plain bad but the other properties should be double edged swords. (There is an element of this with Education already)

For what its worth if I were to suggest a new property it would be Piety. A Civ, or every city, would have to build piety to max the benefits of religious buildings while harems, gambling dens etc would reduce piety.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Luxury and hence Quality of Life is a moving target. What one generation thinks of as a luxury another thinks of as a necessity.

For what its worth if I were to suggest a new property it would be Piety. A Civ, or every city, would have to build piety to max the benefits of religious buildings while harems, gambling dens etc would reduce piety.

Piety, is something I am considering but different religions support and condemn different things which makes things difficult. It means that Piety level would be by religion or State Religion.

 

[Joij21]

Piety, is something I am considering but different religions support and condemn different things which makes things difficult. It means that Piety level would be by religion or State Religion.

I would also add that religion in general slowly begins to have less of an impact as society becomes progressively more atheistic, agnostic, and secular. Hence rendering piety moot.

I mean what benefits would a pious society have? Better relations with countries of the same religion? Because personally I don't think a more "pious people" are necessarily more better then those considered to be "un-pious" as piety is a very subjective concept.

 

[Raven Destroyer]

Luxury and hence Quality of Life is a moving target. What one generation thinks of as a luxury another thinks of as a necessity.

Good example of that in our Generation is the Internet, when I was young and growing up it was a Luxury, and now It's a necessity, hell some people would go as far as put it on the same list as Clothing and Housing