Cities without city radius, self regulating economy, wealth

[Vultur]

#include "upper_thread"

Luxury Goods
Ok, once we have simplifed the model we can complicate it a bit more.
It's possible to produce non-essential goods that cost more than essential ones.
Example:
Synthesized Food:available since the beginning of the game this type is the result of the extraction of proteins needed for human survival from anything that is organic. Cost low.
Hydroponic Food:natural food, obtained with massive use of hydroponic greenhouses. Cost a lot of water.
Genetical Engeneered Food:Cost less than hydro-type, more then Synth. Risks: ecofriendly people don't want it, risk of massive loss of production, risk of genetic plagues
Refined Food:refining process that produce ultra-high quality food.
Cost: very high.

Player has no particulary reasons to produce Hydroponic or Refined Food, so he can decide to focus his attention on Syntesized and later on G.E. Food: low costs and high production, perfect combination to avoid famine.
But "Private" can decide to produce a these two luxory goods and can set the price that want, because people can choose between "Quality" and "Prize". If wealth stardard is high people will chose "Quality", if not, "Prize".

Wealth=Statal_Workers*Statal_Salary+Private_Worker s*Private_Salary

if (Luxory_Good_Price less than Statal_Salary)
all people will buy only the Luxory Good.

if (Luxory_Good_Price more than Statal_Salary), and if (Luxory_Good_Price less then Private_Salary)
only the rich will buy it

if (Luxory_Good_Price more than Private_Salary)
No one will buy it (for trade only)

NOTE:
If trade routes cost too much, other factions' people won't buy it.
end_of_luxory_good_production...

[DeathByTheSword]

whoah long will read it soon but looks pretty much ok for me what i read so far. wil give comments somewhere this week

[Blake]

Actually vultur a complicated model isn't nessecary diserable, it should be as simple as it can be and still have the required functionality.

And adding complication JUST to make it more realistic or to create more micromanagment for the player is not good

[Vultur]

...mmmh, maybe I've exagerated with details...
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa.

But I don't agree with you:
I don't want to introduce more micro-management: I want to have some MACRO-MANAGEMENT, so the player can decide how rule his economy.
It's useless and frustrating, having a trading model with different goods and trade routes possibility and cannot manage it directly. If you cancel all management, you have only a wargame masked as civ-one.

There is nothing that a AI can do better than an human player, but the calculus.

I'll post soon a completely new model, ispired on playability, control and few details

Stay tooned.

[Blake]

Vultur you'll have FULL control over your economy, but only on the macro-managment level. You wont be able to tell a single farm to increase output.

If you want to increase production:
Reduce taxes or give subsidies.

If you want to decrease production:
Increase taxes

If you want to encourage trade:
Lower tariffs and trade barriers.

If you want to discourage trade:
Increase tariffs and trade barriers.


Once again, the idea is to remove predictable tasks from the player, as population grows you would HAVE to upgrade food capacity. So we may as well have the game automatically upgrade the food capacity.

We give the players all the tools required to cope with EXCEPTIONAL events, and have the game do the optimal thing for MUNDANE events. An exceptional event is when your neighbour cuts of the energy he was trading you.

There is nothing that a AI can do better than an human player, but the calculus.

I cant deny that, but there are MANY things a computer can do thousands of times faster than a human and get a solution to within 98% of that of the best human solution. Making humans doing such tasks is cruel because time is a limited resource and it should be our goal to maximise the number of strategic actions a player can make for their time spent playing (unstrategic actions are simply boring managment, like every turn checking your cities for growth and upgrading food capacity on a per-tile basis in order to maximise growth...)

And may I please remind you we are making a strategy game, not a simulator here.

[Rasbelin]

Your model is very interesting, Blake. But there's one thing I would like to add to this economy model. Different government types should have a specific impact on the economy. The one you mentioned is good for democracies, while i.e. Socialist governments would have more control over the financies of the farms and resources. I haven't yet made up a list of suggestions as modifiers of the different governments, but I'll make one when I have time for it and I make it a part of the general suggestion for different government models.

BTW, Blake, according to your model, there wouldn't be much of any city improvements available for construction. Am I correct that this is your personal vision?

[Blake]

It would work differentely in some ways, altough this thread is not about facilities so I havn't mentioned them. It is likely that, on the whole, many facilities will be more specialised and not the sort of thing you would nessecarly build in every base. For example it probably wont make sense to build many facilities in small, specialised cities. (if it's a mining camp and most people immigrate away... wouldn't be much point of building research facilities....)

[Straybow]

Even before the industrial revolution the main economy was not based on extraction of raw materials (including food). The majority of the population were subsistance farming, contributed very little to the overall economy.

Unless you are basing this game on the Colony Ship Gets Sabotaged Or Otherwise Damaged So They Have To Start From Scratch idea, farming shouldn't be such a preoccupation. Already others have commented on the faulty food=growth paradigm.

Primitive agriculture supports about 1000/mi², while fertilizer and insecticide aggressive US dry land methods support 4000/mi² in the wheat belt. Infrastructure improves on that only at disproportional expense: irrigation provides consistent production through drought but only slight increase in normal rainfall. Greenhousing can double production at much higher per unit cost. Single story hydroponics can reach 20-25 times the areal productivity at prohibitive cost, unless sealed environments are required anyway so that hydroponics minimizes the glazed area.

Until a base reaches very large size (1M+) all food support will come from the base tile itself. The tiles are likely to be 50+ miles across, so unless the soils are useless there will be more than enough land arable at 1-4k/mi². (In the Near Middle East, walled cities often included enough arable land within their walls for wheat suffient to support the population indefinitely. The medieval city of Nicea, 250k, enclosed over 20 mi².)

So the cost of food will depend on environmental hostility but the percentage of population devoted to growing and processing and shipping food will be 10-15%. It should be generalized so that player sees only the cost and tweaking is rarely of any use.

For disaster survivor scenarios the food sector will be 25-33% of the pop until they achieve some basic infrastructure milestones. This can be handled by having a farmer specialist who produces food (and nothing else). It is assumed the specialists work the base tile.

[Blake]

I'm not entirely sure what your saying the ramifications on gameplay should be. I would actually advocate removing food entirely from player managment (ie no food resource) because growing and distributing food is so essential that people would always do it... and food supply has virtually zero impact on population growth (in the real world countries which produce a lot of food dont have the highest population growth... the population mostly just eat more)

With regards to growth, I think a "cost of expansion" variable would be useful, some sites simply arent suited to city expansion...

I would still like some sort of food supply and stuff.. (if only to avoid the cries of dismay from those who have a background of playing TBS games with food....) and thats why I reccomend the self regulating economy thing, it could very easily be extended so that food is also grown in a base tile or that you could build facilities like hydroponic farms....

[Vultur]

Removing food resource???
Not at all!!!
The mayority of wealthy nations live imprting food from other countries. The great exception are US,ex-URSS and China (not exactly wealthy, but not poor)
All the non-wealthy countries have many problems with famine.
I think that in little bases food will not be a big problem, but bases with 1Million of habitants food management need a certain consideration.
I suggest to remove Civ-like system that consist in: more food=more people. Feeding people like turkeys, won't increase their number...
If you have a growth rate that depend on base dimension, age of people, level of culture, not from food.
Food is needed to feed population, not to make it growth

To have an idea of food managment suppose that a tile will produce:

Type: Unworked Farmed
Desertic 0 food N/A
Arid 0.25 food N/A
Dry 0.5 food 0.75 food
Normal 1 food 1.5 food
Wet 1.5 food 2 food
Rainy 2 food 3 food
Monson Jungle 2 food 3 food, but risk of flood

Each unity of food can feed 10.000 people.

Monsonic region can be left to forest growth (+25% possibilities of forest popping) but are maybe too wet for intensive farming.

This system will permit at a base, in a wet region, to reach w/out problem a size double the maximum #tiles that can be worked w/out crawling, trading or orbital facilities.

I'm thinking to introduce drinkable water as resource. This will allow to have Arrakis-like planets for expert gamers.
Consider that the drinkable water needed to the farming are the 80% of total consumes...

[Straybow]

Hmmm, yes, potable water is far more constricting a resource than food. But the reason why so many countries import food is primarily one of choice. For example, fruit is highly regionalized. We prefer a variety of fruit and like to import from the opposite hemisphere when out of season in our own. But we could easily rely on indigenous fruit grown locally.

Most Europeans like wheat bread, but soils in many areas are unsuited to growing wheat. Barley is the major grain crop, which Europeans prefer turning into various forms of alcohol rather than bread.

[Blake]

Yes, water should factor into "difficulty of city expansion" and what I think is, that rather than having cities in bad terrain grow slower, they are less productive because it costs more to expand and production is more expensive.

For example building next to a river would give excellent production, because there are so many uses for water and things are a lot easier with abundant fresh water. Heavy industry uses A LOT of water and altough it can get by with less (recycling and other effeciency improvements) it's cheaper and easier to just suck water out of a river and dump it back in downstream.

Getting back to food personally I think my self regulating model does everything required, it models the fact that people require "enough" food and feeding them like turkeys doesn't improve growth. New sources can easily be added and balanced. There is no reason why food cant be grown in the city square, and depending on the price (or demand, they are equivilant) of food more or less population will be devoted to food production.

I was thinking about an employment model, different industries would be more or less profitable and there could be a labour market - the pool of all people. The major industries would be:
Agriculture. (growing food for the masses)
Mining. (production of raw materials)
Energy. (electricity and fuel)
Military. (well, troops and barracks and stuff)
Consumer. (production of consumer goods and services, could be considered luxury)
Tech. (production of cutting edge goods)
Public Services. (education, police etc, you pay this bunch)
Unemployed (these dudes have nowhere to work, you can pay them an unemployment benefit and they'll be happier, but also more plentiful)

The wage rates would be set according to relative production and demand and would therfore be automatic, except for public services and unemployment, and maybe military (altough military can self regulate.

It is important to keep as much of the system as self regulating as possible, this doesn't mean you dont have to do anything, you'll have to react to changes in your faction ie production levels can change without you doing anything. It would mean you dont have total control.

Altough one idea would be to allow wage setting under stricter goverments, which would allow you to have a sheltered economy which cant be disrupted by other players....

I'll have to think about it some more, particullary implementation...

[Mark123jansen]

how about colonies,
for example a city pop 1,000,000 will have a food problem very soon, but on the next continent there is an area highly suiteble for farming, so they establish a colony there to farm the area, it will never be a city, but will sell al its food to the home city, so it will keep the homecity fed and produce a lot of energy at the same time. (kind of like the civIII model, only with homecity)

[DeathByTheSword]

colonies are just like crawlers and i think i like the crawler idea more!

[Mark123jansen]

but crawlers are mobile, and can be evacuated and set up elsewere easily, colonies are solid and will thus need to be defended, making it that much harder to have a large selfsustaining city

[DeathByTheSword]

and that is just the reason i like crawlers more

[Vultur]

Supply Base Idea
Crawler:
Population limit: 10000 people. Need at least 1000 people.
It' a big convoy that can voyage to find a good harvesting site, then can settle here and begin to harvest & send to the nearest base. You can decide to turn your crawler in a Supply Base or to move in other places. Needs food Support.

Supply Base:
Population limit: 20000 people. Need at least 5000 people.
Cannot be moved, can harvest & produce Supplies (medicinals,spare parts), can supply all near units (1 or 2 tiles of radius). Can be turned in a Base. Does not need supplies (turn part of harvested nutrients in food.)

Base:
Populaton limits:none. Need at least 10000 people. Can harvest resources in its radius & produce anything. Can supply near units (from 1 to 10 tiles of radius)

Comments?

[Leland]

In SMAC, crawlers were made available by industrial automation (right?), which meant basically robots and such. So, if the technologies in Stella are even closely following that route, I am not so sure why they'd be a need for thousands of people operating them.

[Vultur]

Originally posted by Leland
In SMAC, crawlers were made available by industrial automation (right?), which meant basically robots and such. So, if the technologies in Stella are even closely following that route, I am not so sure why they'd be a need for thousands of people operating them.

Yes, but in SMAC crawlers are overpowering. With a the necessity of population, you cannot have 200+ crawlers after 30-40 turns of production. Consider that you must crawl an area of 40000 square Km (200 Km x 200 Km) and transport havested resources to a base and that if in SMAC you can crawl one resource type in this game you can crawl all resources. An other limit is that you cannot crawl everywhere you want, the crawler can transport must be at a limited distance from the nearest base (maximum 10 tiles)
I think that this system is more balanced.

[Leland]

It probably is more balanced, but I don't think it is very realistic... besides it depends very much on the resources that are extracted, how many people are needed... if you have a single bore hole, you'll probably do away with a lot less operators than, say, if the whole 40,000 sqkm area is filled with farm lands (but that's kind of besides the point).

To me, "crawlers" as outlined above are not really crawlers in SMAC sense (though they may fill similar gameplay role). They're small bases, colonies, or something like that. How about "outpost"?

EDIT: If I was in another planet, and wanted to establish a supply convoy from point A to point B, regardless of how many people are needed to operate the equipment, I would first send the construction crew to build the infrastructure needed, and only then move in the people... I would not send thousands of people wandering in the wilderness.

[Straybow]

If I was in another planet, and wanted to establish a supply convoy from point A to point B, regardless of how many people are needed to operate the equipment, I would first send the construction crew to build the infrastructure needed, and only then move in the people... I would not send thousands of people wandering in the wilderness.

I believe on Earth we use something called a pipe. It is described as a long hole with metal (or concrete, etc) wrapped around it. It's a very clever idea, wrapping a hole so that things can be poured through it.
Another forgotten technology is called a railroad. First they lay rails of base metal (instead of high-tech magnetic materials) down on the ground to wherever they want to go. Then they put big boxes on wheels (instead of high-tech EM field generators) and pull them along these rails. Amazing what one can do without fancy gizmos when one's mind is put to the challenge.

[Vultur]

Originally posted by Leland
It probably is more balanced, but I don't think it is very realistic...

Also sending 300.000+ people (30 or more factions) on a starship at 1/10 of the speed of light and fall on an unknow alien planet (but Earth-like) and don't try to terraform Mars (nearer and well known...) and lose all contact with the Earth is not very realistic...

They're small bases, colonies, or something like that. How about "outpost"?

Call them Outposts, Colonies or Supply Bases, the idea is almost the same... having a quasi-base that harvest resources in a certain tile.

[Straybow]

Well, for SMAC the factions are only 1,000 each (remnants of 10k original colonists). With that scale in mind things change drastically… See pop/unit scales in SMAC in another thread.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Blake
I'm not entirely sure what your saying the ramifications on gameplay should be. I would actually advocate removing food entirely from player managment (ie no food resource) because growing and distributing food is so essential that people would always do it...

With regards to growth, I think a "cost of expansion" variable would be useful, some sites simply arent suited to city expansion...

I would still like some sort of food supply and stuff.. (if only to avoid the cries of dismay from those who have a background of playing TBS games with food....) and thats why I reccomend the self regulating economy thing, it could very easily be extended so that food is also grown in a base tile or that you could build facilities like hydroponic farms...

I had said, "The tiles are likely to be 50+ miles across, so unless the soils are useless there will be more than enough land arable at 1-4k/mi²… So the cost of food will depend on environmental hostility but the percentage of population devoted to growing and processing and shipping food will be 10-15%. It should be generalized so that player sees only the cost and tweaking is rarely of any use."

Definitely have food as a resource, but it should be managed automatically as a percentage of overall productivity. The percentage would depend on tech, environmental restrictions (open land, greenhousing, climate-controlled, or sealed vs toxic/vacuum), and a policy on per capita consumption (and allowance for draught, pestilence or other disaster or wastage) set by the player (similar to CtP2) and/or SE.

I wouldn't want the player to have to dedicate construction queue time to farming structures or infrastructure any more than we want to have to build each housing development or apartment highrise. Both should be automated not by calculating some simulated economy but assumed in simple proportions.

Food produced outside the base tile would primarily be luxuries rather than staples; and then it is a strategic decision to invest resources for happiness. A start-up economy can't afford to waste resources setting up, keeping up, and taking up bulk staples from distant acreage, doubly so in inhospitable climates.

If the soil (across the entire 50 or 100 mile tile) is lousy for growing food, build somewhere else. If you have no choice and need a sealed environment it would be cheaper to truck good soil in to your base than to build a distant mini-base with all its maintenance costs and problems just to grow some crops.

I would rather have tile production be specific: quarrying, mineral mining, forestry, non-food crops (such as rubber, cotton, flax, etc). You go outside the base only for something you can't get or do inside (or immediately adjacent to) the base. Essentially everything produced outside the base tile is like sending out a SMAC crawler (or a pipe-/rail- linked station).

( All of this based on simple extrapolation of 20th cen tech, no tissue vats blah, blah, blah )

[Vultur]

Well, for SMAC the factions are only 1,000 each (remnants of 10k original colonists).

I think it would be seriously difficult to run a base with only 1000 people: try to think how many thing you must produce to live in a good way on the Earth... In addition consider that there is a minimum number of people to permit a continous population expansion without need of immigration.

Food produced outside the base tile would primarily be luxuries rather than staples; and then it is a strategic decision to invest resources for happiness. A start-up economy can't afford to waste resources setting up, keeping up, and taking up bulk staples from distant acreage, doubly so in inhospitable climates.

My idea is to allow colony pods/crawlers later then the very first years: when you must settle a territory the first goal is not expansion (building new settlements), but seek for resources and organization of the first settlement, like many RTS games (Starcraft, Warcraft, Empire Earth...)
The player start only with a small group of colonist (10k), some supplies and one scouting unit (100 people, non-combat, can move 2 tiles) to explore surrounding area. The second base can be founded after 10-15 turns (not after 3-6 turns), when the HQ is enough big to support a colonization mission.

NOTE: 10-15 turns is not totally realistic, 25-30 should be more correct, but a very slow expansion can frustrate every player.

[Straybow]

I think it would be seriously difficult to run a base with only 1000 people: try to think how many thing you must produce to live in a good way on the Earth... In addition consider that there is a minimum number of people to permit a continous population expansion without need of immigration.

Yes, that's the point. As long as you begin from the Help I've Fallen And I Can't Get Up angle you start with precious little resources, especially personnel. The ability to make equipment or vehicles is negligible (unless you can fashion machines from bamboo like Gilligan's Island).

If you haven't crashed or whatever you should have a complete database of technology, skilled people of all kinds, and basic machine tools to make manufacturing equipment for all your needs. Communications, prefab satellites of various types, shuttles, and a robotic asteroid/comet mining unit or two might be expected. The challenge is to survive while building your infrastructure.

Why would anyone waste the tremendous expense of shipping thousands of colonists by not equipping them for success?