27-01-2000 10:13									#61
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LGJ:

Gotta disagree. If the supply of gold (or silver) increases you can get inflation anyway. Or the ever-popular standard of debasing the coinage! There have been instances of inflation just about since the invention of money IMO...

	27-01-2000 12:01									#62
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I'd like to make some suggestions on current "merchant model".

It is a splendid idea that a merchant has an independent AI. I wanna see a merchant growing as time goes by and by industrial age, merchants will be upgraded to corporations

Corporations should be allowed to do many things that merchants could not.
1.Each corporation should have its own characteristics and management style just like other civs' characteristics(Expansionist~perfectionist)
2.They also should have their own factory(if they are manufacturing firms), service outlet(if they are service-oriented firms)or mine(resource-selling firms)
3.Coporations should compete each other like other civs do.
4.Corporations can conduct their own research
(Which is important for market economy civs to be tech-leading nations)
5.Corporations can brach out city by city as their business progress.
6.Corporations can be specialised in one area of business(Ford,IBM,etc)or many kind of business(Japanses keiretsu-Mitsubishi).
7.Number of corporations should be limited to reduce our CPU's burden(Some will be out of business.Some will prosper.Some will start)
8.Corporations will have thier own corporate HQ(usually in capital city of its civ which it belongs)
9.There should be a ranking of world corporations like Top 5 corporation,etc and its owning civs.
10.Two or more corporations can be combined(Merging & Annexation)
11.Corporations that have branches in many other civs will be upgraded to MNE(Multi National Enterprise)

I stongly believe that there are not only nations exist as a considerable entity today. Some corporations have bigger volume of trade than other smaller nations and they deserve to be appear in Civ game as they do in the history.

I believe that the game model will have government type and economy type separated like Alpha-Centauri. so there can be nations like China which has no Democracy but Capitalism.

But this kind of nations should be penalized by putting some human rights element otherwise everyone will play this type of government/economy(No senate interferance with thriving economy)

Planned economy civs should not have more than one corporation(state-runned) while market economy civs may have unlimited number of corporation.

Corporation element will add one more flavour in this game-ECONOMIC CONQUEST!

Traditional civ games had only military conquest or building something huge which particulary I don't like as an ultimate goal of the game but with corporation element,we will have economic conquest for the players who like prosperity rather then bloodlust.

Just imagine that your huge corporations ruthlessly smashing one of your rival civ's corporations!

Since they are all controlled by AI we can not controll them but watch them grow or perish. We may provide some fund as subsidiary or reduce tax level to protect our own corporation against enemy civ's corporations.(There is also "tariff" to help this action).

Manufacturing firms will buy resources from mineral firms and sell finished goods to public or service-oriented firms. Service-oriented firms will sell thier service to public,manufacturing firms,etc.
Mineral firms can sell to public directly,too(Dutch-Shell:Fuel selling)

If anyone has more ideas on this. please feel free to add or criticise. I'm sure there are so many ideas waiting to be discovered on this area. Sorry for so ill-structured way of expression.(I could not write neat and tidy as I typed as I thought roughly today).

Thanks
[This message has been edited by Youngsun (edited January 27, 2000).]

	28-01-2000 10:53									#63
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Youngsun:

I think your general point, that merchants should over time transform into corporations, is Very valid and that we should do it. Corporations should indeed have more capabilities than simple merchants.

That said, I think your ideas go too far versus what's practical to do in Clash. I think we can better address which if any of your enhancements we should try when we actually get the game into the modern era.

Econ and Govt. won't be as rigidly separate as in AC. A nominal market economy is IMO much more susceptible to damage by corruption in a totalitarian regieme than in a democracy (a real functioning one...).

I don't really agree with your point about economic conquest. IMO Only if the home country of the corporation is willing to back up that corp.'s rights with Armed Force is economic conquest really possible. Otherwise comanies are always only one coup away from having all their posessions in a given country nationalized.

	28-01-2000 12:00									#64
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Dear Mark

First of all, I wish my best hope for your project and all your hard working will be paid off someday.

I'm sure it is inevitable to have corruption when there is market economy under totalitarian regime or even in democratic one.

I think that we should approach to the matter in terms of productivity. I believe that even if there are a lot of waste caused by corruption, the total output of production (market economy)will excede that of planned economy(strict communism) when both economy has same level of tech,edu,infra,etc. We all know that the increase of productivity mainly comes from will to produce more not a party motto,etc.

That's why some countries like Mexico which is highly corrupted are still better off than most former eastern bloc countries in terms of economy. What about a country like Singapore which has no Democratic government(closed to dictatorship)while her economy is thriving? All these countries share one thing "Market economy".

I'm not saying market economy is good thing and planned economy is bad. Sure, market economy has lots of weakness and problems in terms of wealth distribution and increasing gap between the rich and poor. That's why a lot of Western countries add some planned economy element to their market economy to gain advantages from both of them.

The point is that a game can not effectively represent the whole reality out there(it's just too complicated) It will be good enough to have a game that is closed to the reality.
That's why everything had to be simplified to fit in previous civ-games such as Democracy eliminates corruption,etc.<-for some, it is so frustrating.

That's why so many people wanna see later version or new game of civ-style games improved in all aspects(more closed to reality but not necesarily respresenting it)
I hope that "Clash" can achieve this.

And about "Economic conquest".
I maybe used too strong word for it. Economic dominance will be much better. Of course, you're right about that we need strong military to back up our economy. However,with the might of military, declaring a war is one thing and it is used for just security for trade is another.

During the colonial era, we might use our military to get some colonies for economic purpose(true economic conquest!)

Most modern nations focus more on economy than the other affairs. Only few nations heavily invest on their military for whatever purposes(religion,ideology,greed,etc)while other nations just keep adequate forces for defense(effective deterrence).But this kind of eco-military structure can only be assured when there is super strong military nation which is not interested on military conquest but international security for its and her allies' economic dominance.(US and her allies?)

The bottom line is whenever I play Civ-style game, I never destroy a single civ(unless I forced to do) while keeping my overall superiory(just in lower play level).That makes me feel good but in this way I can't finish the game unless I wait or building spaceship,etc. and there is always diplomatic isolation follows as other civs begins to gang up against me unless I sacrifice my overall supeiority(giving all tech,money,etc)

How can this problem be solved?
Well, enhanced diplomacy and AI will do the job for the isolation problem.

I'd like to see that economic dominance(maybe 50~80% of World trade) will be reflected in the game.

Thanks

	29-01-2000 19:29									#65
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Youngsun:

I think we are basically seeing things the same way. I would also hope that we can implement most of the stuff you talk about. The planning is a good part of the way there, but we just need to see if it works out practically in the game and is fun...

	29-01-2000 19:57									#66
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Big Question for Everyone...

Actually, the big question is only for those who have some familiarity with the model so you'll know what I'm talking about. If you're not aware of the distinction between how regular economic production sites, and infrastructure sites work in the "current" model, then you need to look at the Econ model on the web site first before commenting.

In starting to actually work out the implementation for Demo 5 the previous way that I had been planning to do improvement of economic sites struck me as a little cumbersome. Also, handling economic production sites like farms and mines differently from infrastructure (schools and health-care...) will steepen the learning curve for the player with no obvious benefit. Also, it occurred to me that handling things on a square-by-square basis would result in an awful lot of information that had to be passed during Multiplayer that again didn't have much benefit. So, here is the new proposal that I would like people to think about.

Improvement of farms, resource gathering, production etc. would be handled just like the other infrastructure classes. The only big exception is that the production sites would have a mechanism to keep track of them on a per-square basis in some special circumstances. (here I'm using production generically to talk about farms and all the other sites that actually produce things) So in normal operation, there would be just one number indicating how developed the say, farm sites, in the province are. The basic assumption is that the development is spread evenly over the "occupied" sites. The exact details are TBD, since things like some squares in a province being irrigable, while others are not, provides a small problem which I think we can take care of. The cases where I think things need to be kept track of on a per-square basis for awhile, are when new provinces are formed, or provinces are rearranged, or particular squares are damaged through pillaging or strategic bombing etc.

In the case where the economic sites are developed "unevenly", those that are below the others would get priority in the building of the new sites, until evenness is restored. This is basically what I do in the old economic system, and it works reasonably well. Now for those of you who like micromanagement, this system really doesn't eliminate it in the case of economic production sites. The reason is that the player can still arbitrarily emphasize or deemphasize building in a particular square through orders or financial inducements. All that this will consist of is rescaling what is considered "even" with respect to that particular square.

Obviously this proposal is very short on details at the moment. I wanted to run the general idea past people and see what others think. I think the uniformity of only having one basic way that infrastructure works in the game is the big plus toward doing it this way.

	30-01-2000 07:26									#67
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Mark:

-----
In the case where the economic sites are developed "unevenly", those that are below the others would get priority in the building of the new sites, until evenness is restored. This is basically what I do in the old economic system, and it works reasonably well. Now for those of you who like micromanagement, this system really doesn't eliminate it in the case of economic production sites. The reason is that the player can still arbitrarily emphasize or deemphasize building in a particular square through orders or financial inducements. All that this will consist of is rescaling what is considered "even" with respect to that particular square.
----
You got to carefull with that also though cuz there are just some places that are better/worse off that the rest. I doubt ever if the Siberian Penesula would be economically as important as the rest of Russia as far as infrastructure goes. In China the coastal area is the only real place where there will prob ever be great economic infrastructure because 2/3-3/4 of the Chinese population lives there.

I'm just saying that although in general your right that lesser developed places can get developed moreso to compete with the other well-to-do places, there are so many modifiers to this such as population, climate, geography, trade, etc. That it doesn't usually happen that way.

	01-02-2000 08:29									#68
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Mark,
These evenly developed sites are within the province are they not?

So you could have well developed sites in your core provinces and much less developed sites in your outer provinces. If this is the case that should satisfy LGJ.

	01-02-2000 19:36									#69
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LGJ:

Yep, I have to be careful as you say. I don't think these issues will be hard to get around. But I agree they have to be kept in mind, especially if we get Really Big provinces in the modern age.

Krenske:

You are right in general, but as I said above, when you get to the modern age provinces could be really huge, leading to the problems LGJ is talking about.

Both of you:

Thanks for looking over the model, and your comments

	07-02-2000 14:14									#70
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Mark

I would like to ask you if you have been working on the province model. I have read what is posted on the subject and I don´t have a clear idea of how the computer generates the provinces. Are you thinking of something similar to a "concentrations map pattern" to generate the provinces (ex. square A belongs to province of square B, where reference value Bx>than x values of other neighbouring squares of square A?).
I ask you this because as it as been said here somewhere, one of the major factors to be considered is accessibility (comunications capacity). If the province generation takes into carefull consideration this factor, you can use provinces themselves for all types of game mechanics calculations (for sound military AI :-), maximum empire size - no more thna x provinces allowed, population growth variations due to province internal migration - >accessibility=> more imigration...etc etc)

Anyway being familiar to geochemical anomaly maps analyses and other similar stuff, I have some reasonable ideas of how to do the number crunching of this issue. Still if you have already done it there is no use in pressing the issue.

	08-02-2000 06:30									#71
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Henrique:

I'm still working out the details for province formation. However, I don't think we can use provinces for the additional things that you mention. The reason is that I want to make it very flexible how many squares can be in a province, and not rigorously handle the correct communications and transportation infrastructure and capabilities details. The reason for this is simple. I think it would involve a lot of micromanagement for the player. If you make it too realistic, every time you put in a new road you might have to change your province size. That way lies madness IMO. Anyway, that's all I have to say at the moment...

	10-02-2000 17:21									#72
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Mark

IMO province limits should be computer generated - the only thing the player can do to change province size is developing infrastructures like roads and such, knowing that such development would allways be benefitial despite the organizational changes that such infrastructures produce.
This is way I don´t understand the micromanagement hell you speak about. Still this can be because I either am not grasping the full consequences of this approach or because I am not being able to explain my idea to you.

	10-02-2000 17:51									#73
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Henrique:

The main problem is that in many cases the same square could sensibly belong to two or more provinces. If we make small advantages like a newly constructed road matter, there is a dynamic promoting micromangement. If the change is automatically done by the computer then the player will endlessly suffer through provinces being rearranged 'under them'.

I don't think either of the two things above is good!

	10-02-2000 18:49									#74
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Mark

I think I am finaly grasping your point...it dawned on me that the way you are building the economic model isn´t very compatible with a permanently dinamic province, thus making the player "suffer" the constant changes in its provinces as he adds new infrastructure.
I will have to read again the econ. model, because, from what I remember, on a rational approach the way you are thinking to implement the model is, probably, the best and most reasonable one, yet one doubt reamains.

Provinces will suffer almost permanent changes specially in acient and medieval times, because of things like frontier warfare, diplomatic tradeoffs etc. This was why it never occurred to me that the player would "suffer" from constant pronvince change because of new infrastructures. In fact I saw it as a natural and rather faithfull and intrisic aspect of the simulation being built by the game.

	12-02-2000 00:39									#75
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Econ model citation:
"To capture the importance of cities as production centers during this period, concentrations of productive capacity will get a bonus. For a really big city around 1900 my guess is the production bonus should be of order 25%."

IMO the production concentration in cities is due to two major factors -
resource accessibility
Cities are normally the center of comunications networks making them ideally located to install production centers which required quick access to resources and routes to export goods.
workforce accessibility
Production centers require large large permanent (if possible underpayed) workforces, making urban centers the best locations to find cheap employment.

My suggestion is to give production bonus to cities according to their population density and comunications network quality. With proper number tweaking this should produce reasonable results in terms of progression of the importance of cities from pre-modern to modern times.

	12-02-2000 10:50									#76
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I must first admit to only reading the model and the last few posts, but regarding those last few posts, I feel I have something important to say.

Democracy, so far has proven to be very beneficial to all governments worldwide. At the same time the level of democracy, or freedom, is also very important. For example, Singapore, a highly democratic but more restrictive government regarding "freedom", as Americans know it, has a very low level of crime (as do all democratic nations, except America).

The way I view it (as an American), is that democracy always increases output of citizens but also democracy can be more harmful than dictatorship. The level of freedom is actually the "key" here. The U.K. is democratic but suffers from very few of the problems America suffers from.

The point is that too much freedom makes the populace too strong, and this weakens the government's ability to control and rule them, and without government there is anarchy, which in my opinion, is where America is headed. But this isn't only opinion. If you compare the level of riots, corruption, crime, etc. in America to other democratic nations, America is by far the worst, although (somehow) still the most economically prosperous nation in the world.

	15-02-2000 04:53									#77
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Toubabo

I have to disagree with you. IMO Freedom and criminality in democracies aren´t exactly related. "Social unrest / disatisfaction/ economic need" breeds crime. The degree of freedom allowed by the state law enforcement institutions does control how the lid is put over the steam - you either restrict a lot the liberties and you won´t see the social unrest or you preserve those same liberties and people will express their unhapiness having criminality as a side effect.
If you want my opinion on freedoms/criminality in the USA my opinion is that the country has little freedom (I know its a big country with several states and that the constitution does attempt to preserve several basic rights) and very big social problems (racial tensions/ghetos/ homeless / etc etc). The fact is that the USA is not a "social" democracy, (does not even have a decent free public health care service!)
Betting on development without taking any measures to to prevent/solve marginalization/social unrest means that the country must pay a "crime bill".
Note that this comment is game related. The player should be able to decide what government route he wants to take and still have to face all the disavantages of his options (but I suppose there has been much discussion on the subject)

	15-02-2000 05:25									#78
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

First of all I don't understand why your talking about the effect of goverment types on crime in a economy forum, but I agree that too much freedom can breed crime. Take the U.K., they have cameras all around places like London, something we'd never do, and crime has lowerd dramaticaly in those areas. I'm not going into all the baltic stuff but look at Yugoslavia with Tieto and look at it now! I agree, in some respects, with that idea.

	15-02-2000 05:34									#79
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LOGO

oops caught on a "answer the last post" urge and didn´t notice the subject was "out of thread"

	20-03-2000 06:08									#80
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I don't think i'm satisfied with the PCI system, as I understand it people's wages just "magicly" increase over time. This make no sense, the reason wages are larger now is because of the larger middle class, and other things like minimum wages and other laws. First of all the wages should have a direct effect over goverment and the happines of the people, also the type of goverment should have an influence over the people as well. Along with that there should be a number of extremely wide reforms you can pass (bunching up a bunch of reforms into an easy to swallow button to push) to increase the middle class or to pass laws creating things like workmen's comp and wellfare. These are boarderline Government and Enonomy and I think most things in the model are. Any thoughts?

	21-03-2000 10:51									#81
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LOGO: I am currently revising the new version of the government model, compiled by Rodrigo. It is a very large document that totaly reshapes Hfrankell's model, covering every aspect that concerns government in Clash. My review tries to cover some gaps, to fix some bugs and to correct some inconsistencies with reality, before it gets to see the sun. The most important contribution of mine, as it seems now, will be to establish a firm and reasonable interconnection between the economic and the political variables of the game. Due to the complexity of the system, this is really very tough and that's what's keeping me behind schedule in my reply to Rodrigo (this is for Rodrigo, in case he gets worried) and away from posting in these forums.

If you are interested in it, when it's done, I can send it to you too, along with Mark and Rodrigo. My personal opinion of course is that this document should come to surface in the website as soon as possible, but I don't know if the others agree.

Hey look! I'm a warlord now!

------------------
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[This message has been edited by axi (edited March 20, 2000).]

	21-03-2000 06:47									#82
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Logo:

I guess I don't understand what you mean by "people's wages just magically" increasing over time. There is nothing magical about it in the system. Essentially increased wages come just as they do in the real world, from productivity increases. Productivity increases come from primarily investments in capital, and utilization of new technologies. Minimum wage laws and such, at least as far as I understand it, have relatively little to do with average wages, which is what the model handles. All minimum wage laws do is set a floor below which you can't go. But I think in general minimum wages are set at the low end of the wage distribution anyway, because if they are not they will tend to give a huge shock to the economy. Anyway, most of the points you raise are already being addressed, and just aren't written up yet as axi says.

Axi:

For presenting the model, I definitely favor getting it out in the open as soon as possible. Otherwise, there is the danger of investing a lot of work in something with a large fundamental flaw in it... Refinements can always be achieved during the "comment window".

	23-03-2000 01:11									#83
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LOGO:
Wages don't increase magically as Mark said it. If richness increase and the population stays the same, PCI=$/POP increases. Maybe you're aiming to wealth distribution. Mark is having a WD inside his model and Axi and I are trying to allow the govt to give directions to the econ model about how WD should tend to, like minimum wages and so on. That's for sure something you will be able to critizice in the near future when the govt model goes public.

Mark&Axi: About releasing the govt model, I'm waiting for the social to model be "ready" (in a general sense). That's because the govt model is extremely connected with the social model. The govt model I made assumed Manurein's social model with the "agents" approach, which is not going to exist any more in the new social model by TK. If we release the govt model now, a lot of it will need to be change according to the new social model and I guess that's only going to confuse people. If at least I have a general idea of how the new social model is going to be, I can make those changes before posting anything and therefore the govt model will be better understood. I'm currently working with TK via e-mail to create a crude first version of the social model. I think we'll be ready in couple of weeks.

Axi: Come on! send me your comments, man!

	22-05-2000 03:25									#84
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New proposed handling of production levels in the Clash economic model

I have been working for some time on a revision of the basic production model for the economic system. After some good advice from Adam Smith from the Apolyton forums I decided to go with a production function similar to what is commonly used in real economic analyses. It has a lot of flexibility coupled with reasonably realistic behavior, for a fairly cheap price in terms of computation. My main worry about it is that it may be a little difficult to explain to players. But I think after people get used to it they will really like it. For one thing, it makes setting the economy on autopilot much easier for those who don't much care about the economy.

This approach to production is what we will be doing with in demo 5. There are a fair amount of mathematical details in this writeup. That is because it is meant as a first pass to let Laurent, our Econ coder, can get an idea of the way the system is going. However, if you're not interested in the mathematical details here are the few things that you need to know about this change...

The people of your civ will automatically do reasonably smart things with this approach. They will, without your guidance, take advantage of all the natural resources available to them.
This approach smoothly uses any new technologies available when you make investments to improve production facilities. You don't have to build "advanced farms", your farming sector just becomes better gradually as you build more farms or replace existing farms. You can simply alter the rate of existing farm investment to change the rate of adoption of the new technology.
There aren't arbitrary breakpoints on how many people can use existing facilities. If you put more people to work in your factories, output will always increase. However, output increases with diminishing returns.

Now, on to some more of the guts of the model...

The basic idea of a production function is that one uses the input of different types of resources (labor, natural resources like land or timber, and capital investments) to determine the final output for an economic sector like agriculture. Typically adding more of any one of these things, for instance labor, without changing the other inputs, gives diminishing returns. So, for instance, if you double the amount of laborers on your farms, the amount of food produced will generally increase, but not as large as a doubling. However, if you were to double All the inputs, any output would be simply double the previous output.

There is one other feature about the production function approach that I'm using that's very important for Clash. Included in it is a factor that represents the effects of production technology changes on production (A in the equation below). As the tech factor A increases, the same amount of investment can get you more production. The way I have it in the current model A increases as new investments of capital are made. For example, it's assumed that the people, when they replace their farm equipment, replace it with the highest technology equipment available. This results in, on average, an increase in the productivity of farms beyond what the simple investment in more equipment would give. I'll give more details later.

The equation below is what a production function looks like. The total amount produced (Y stands for yield) is given by multiplying together several factors. Each of labor, natural resources, and capital has its own exponent (a, b, and c) that describes how production increases when you change the amount of that particular input. Just to make things concrete on the resource part, if we were talking about agriculture R would represent land. Some things, like services, don't have an explicit natural resource input so sometimes the production function won't have R or b. For a particular sector A, a, b, and c will have specific values designed to give reasonable outputs for the level of technology and application of other inputs.

Produced Amount (Y) = A*L^a*R^b*K^c
A = tech factor (includes available hardware, infrastructure, and other details)
L = Labor
R = Resource
K = Kapital (its traditional to use the German spelling)
a, b, c < 1 a+b+c = 1

Now I'll use as a specific example the production function for agriculture that we're going to use in demo 5 along with particular selected values for L, R, and K. We will use the same equation as above with the following values...

Produced Amount (Y) = A*L^a*R^b*K^c
A = 5 (production technology near subsistence level)
L = 1 head (1000 people)
R = 1 farm site
K = 1 (representing farm tools)
a = 0.5, b = 0.3, c = 0.2, which satisfies a+b+c = 1

Now, because I used a bunch of really simple values you can probably see that the crop yield is 5. That isn't really very much food production, since our farmers will need to eat 4 units of food just to avoid starvation. So a yield of 5 gives them a little bit of potential excess to trade for services or produced goods, or pay to the Player in taxes!

If instead our labor were allowed to work 2 farm sites the output would be 6.16. This production level of above 6 gives these farmers significantly larger surplus production than before. It could be used in different ways to grow the civilization. The increase in output that results from being able to work more land can be thought of in several different ways... with more land to pick from the people can take better farming sites on average, and leave the poorest land in the sites unused, or they can leave land fallow longer making it more productive, and there are several other possible explanations. It isn't really important which explanation makes more sense in which particular circumstance. The nice part about it for the player is that the people do sensible things without you needing to tell them "by hand" what to do.

How the tech factor A changes

So how exactly did the tech factor A get to be 5 in the example above? And how can be made to get better so are production becomes more efficient? I have come up with what I think is a reasonable way to have A reflect the fundamental technological realities of the civ in question. The amount that A increases depends on the amount of new investment, and how far A is from the current best available technology level, represented by the "ideal" tech factor T. The ideal tech factor represents what the tech factor A would be if all the investments had been made using the current best technology, infrastructure level, etc..

Change in A is governed by the following formula:
Anew = Aold + (Kbought/Kold)*(T-Aold)*I
Anew = new value of A after capacity improvements have been made
Aold = value at beginning of turn
Kbought = new capital investment made this turn
Kold = total amount of previous investment in the sector at beginning of the turn
T = ideal tech factor
I = innovativeness present in the economy ranges from 0 to 1

Anew = Aold + (Kbought/Kold)*(T-Aold)*I

I'm not going to go over this in detail, but hopefully you can see that the new value of A approaches T more rapidly as: a higher percentage of new capital investment is made, or the innovativeness becomes larger, or as the ideal tech factor increases. The latter factor comes in strongest when the people are replacing very old equipment (A much less than T) causing the rate of improvement in A to be relatively rapid.

The ideal tech factor T gets the most part of its value directly from the effectiveness as determined in the technology model. In addition T has buried in it "human capital" aspects such as education, infrastructure aspects such as roads, railroads, and power grids, and some "tweaking" factors to get the numbers to come out right when the desired amount of capital is invested. This is going to be a somewhat complicated subject all by itself, and I am just going to gloss over it here.

The level of innovativeness of the people (I) will be something like 0.2 for a completely traditional economy, 0.7 for a command economy, and 1 for a pure market economy. The character of an economy will be indicated by a certain percent of each of traditional, command, and market forces. The innovativeness will be figured by simply using a weighted average with the factors above.

That is the general idea of the new model. I am currently working up a spreadsheet with specifics that runs through a complete turn (from an economic perspective) for provinces at different stages of development. When the spreadsheet is reasonably complete I will release it for anyone who is interested in the details of how these things work.

Let me know what you think!

	22-05-2000 23:47									#85
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I like this new system; it should work well and it is intuitive to me. I never really understood the old econ model. Of course, it might help that I just finished a semester of economics and the new model is based on real economics.

I do have a couple minor concerns, however. They deal with minor details and should be easy to deal with; I am not critisizing the model as a whole. If I didn't mention something, I think it is good.

The main thing I want to stress is that we should not code the ideal tech factor T into the econ model. If we say that tech number 47 helps farm productivity a lot while tech number 82 helps mining output a little bit, then we will be creating a nightmare for mod makers. The impact that tech has on the T values for agriculture, mining, production, etc. should be coded into the technology model so any alteration of the tech tree can be easily turned into the proper alteration of the econ model.

Does this mean that the tech model just got a lot more complicated? No. If we do it right, a technology's impact on T values can be directly based on its interface tags. These tags, which are already a part of the tech model, can be one of the major links between tech system and other models.

To help the AI and serve as a way to navigate the tech tree, we had planned for each tech to be assigned one or more interface tags. Each tag would be the name of the civ activity that the tech helps, and a number representing how much that tech helps. For example, a tech might be tagged with Agriculture:7 and Mining:2, meaning that it helps agricultural production a lot and mining production a little. The AI and the players can sort technologies by their tags, investing research in what is needed most. For example, a player would click on the Agriculture button in the tech interface, and all techs with an agriculture tag would be listed in descending order of the tag number.

Rather than simply being a description, the interface tags can also have a direct impact on production using this new econ model. The ideal tech value T for some economic field can simply be a weighted average of the knowledge levels of all techs with that tag.

A lot of technologies will have interface tags with 1 or 2, meaning that they are not the things to research in an emergency, but thay do halp a little. Roads, for example, would have an Agriculture:2 tag, maning that better roads do help effective farm yields a little by making it easier to move the food to where it needs to go. As a general rule, every infrastructure or educational technology would have tags of 1 or 2 for almost every civ activity. This means that they should fit into the T calculation nicely.

Mark: Is the I value you mentioned the same one that will be used in the technology model to determine the rate of growth of technology? If so, I don't think it should be used here as well. If it has an impact in two different places, it will have a disproportionate effect on tech growth. It already changed the rate of knowledge acquisition, so why should it change the rate of application as well? I thought the tech model was supposed to include both aquisition and application.

In the farming effectiveness equation, I didn't see anything that changed farming effectiveness based on climate or terrain. In the ecology model, I have detailed a set of steps that would create a farming effectiveness factor for an ecological province. That factor should be included in any calculation of farming effectiveness. I would suggest that this factor be multiplied to the R^b term of the farm productivity equation. I could fix the ecology model so normal farming terrain has a factor of one.

	23-05-2000 06:23									#86
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Thanks for checking it out. I generally agree with the things you have to say about modifications, so unless I gripe about or modify something you said, consider that doing it your way is fine by me.

BTW you should probably cross-post your comments to the current tech thread, since many of them are pretty important with respect to the evolution and refinement of the tech model.

On using the tags to get the ideal tech factor technology component, I agree completely. However, one thing I think you left out is that technologies should sometimes have a lineage where technology A is succeeded by technology B. Even though they both might have an agriculture tag, they could not be both used for the effectiveness. Just whichever one gives a better effectiveness should be used.

Another point is that you say that infrastructure or education technology should boost almost anything. I would prefer to use the economic infrastructure components in the econ model for this in most cases. That's because the greatest educational technology in the world does your civilization no good if there are no schools and no resources invested in education. Similarly, knowing how to build superhighways does your no good if all you have are dirt tracks. Doing it this way would also make the tags system much simpler since educational techniques would only need a tag pointing to educational infrastructure then. At any rate, we should probably continue this part of the discussion in the tech thread...

On the farming effectiveness question, in my mind your ecology model factor should just go into changing R directly. I think it's a bad idea to be hanging excess terms off the utility function since we could easily compromise its proportional returns to scale and other good properties. Also, the production function applies on a provincial basis. Provinces will generally have lots of different types of land of different quality. So your farming effectiveness modifier would have to be some sort of weighted average anyway. If you would like to change the ecology model to provide an appropriate agricultural sites number, that would help a lot. I really think that's the best way to go, but we can discuss it further if you'd like.

	24-05-2000 09:08									#87
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I can't think of any example of a technology going obsolete or being replaced by something else. Rather than A->B, I'm fairly sure that all techs go from low level A to high level A.

I agree that an Infrastructure tag would probably be a better way to go.

Mark: I don't understand all of your comments about the ecology. What did you mean by an agricultural site? I thought a site was one tile.

I'll put more tech-specific stuff in the tech thread.

	24-05-2000 01:48									#88
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Technology going obsolete:
The Telegraph is a very important communication tech for a bit. (I expect we'll have it as an application, but can't remember for sure.) It will boost effectiveness in building communication infra. But when telephony comes along and gets going it completely Replaces telegraphy after some time has passed. You should not get Both the effectiveness bonus for telegraph and telephone, just whichever is better... Another example would be my proposed flow from Farm Tools to Farm Machinery. Once machinery comes in, nobody uses the hand tools that were once so important anymore. So when the effectiveness from Machinery is greater than that for Tools you would use the Machinery one rather than adding them IMO. I *think* this issue will come up in several places, but won't be all that common...

Of course it may be that in most of these cases the effectiveness you get from the older technology is so small compared to the new one, that the Total effectiveness is basically still that for the new one. In that case its not a big deal if we just add them together. Although our players might be amused to see their telegraphy number still increasing with year-2000 technology!

Agricultural sites:
There are a variable number of agricultural sites per square in the model. The minimum number of sites in a square is 1. (We could keep track of fractional sites if it turns out to be important) I don't know what the max is, maybe it'll be of order 30 or so. Think of each site as equivalent to N acres of pretty good farmland. So if the square has 10N acres there would be 10 sites. If the land amt is the same but the quality is less we'd reduce the # of sites, to maybe 8. If you reduce the land quality thru overfarming we'd reduce the number of sites also. If we drain a swamp it increases the number of sites in the square. The number of sites is added for all squares in the province and that's the number of sites that's in the production function as R.

	24-05-2000 02:10									#89
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Technology: I hadn't planned on seperate applications for telegraph, telephone, etc. At first I thought that all things like that would be part of the same technology, in this example Electric Communication. But then I realised that, even though I could combine those two and a lot of others, there are a few techs that will go obsolete.

Obsolescence should be defined in the tech definition, and when something is gone it will be deleted from the tech tree calculations entirely. This would mean that there is no need to filter them out in the oither models.

Agricultural Sites: I understand now. I'll revise the ecology model so it generates the number of farming sites per tile.

	24-05-2000 06:29									#90
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One thing on obsoletion and replacement: That's pretty much a good idea you have for the most part. However, exceptions should be made for a powerful governmental/reglious/cultural (esp. the last) movements for traditionalism to not accept the better quality stuff. This can be limited to certain areas and the only differance is that it would take longer to be achieved (ie the better technology would be delayed for use for X turns).