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LDiCesare is offline LDiCesare
King
La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:13
  Old Post 22-11-2001 13:26
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Gary, I have an element (not unit) Engineer (basically useful for building field defenses) which would logically be able to build roads, so you could consider it if you need a real unit rather than just its category.

Simon Loverix is offline Simon Loverix
Warlord
Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001
time: 05:13
  Old Post 23-11-2001 16:01
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Do resource sites (normal or associated with specials) deplete?

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
Clash of Civilizations Project Lead
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Jan 1970
time: 00:13
  Old Post 23-11-2001 17:03 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi Simon:

Special and resource sites will deplete. New sites will also be discovered with new technology. But neither happens for now in the code. There was some discussion on the forums of this, but its scattered. One location I could find easily with search is this post .

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 23-11-2001 at 17:08

Simon Loverix is offline Simon Loverix
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Apr 2001
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  Old Post 25-11-2001 00:44
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I was thinking of using something like a floating point or double variable to store the amount of waste in a square, so when an appropriate level of recycling is reached, you can round it down and add it to the production sites.
Producing would add to waste (aside from generating pollution = environmental damage). This waste would decrease each turn (disappearing and being converted to pollution). It gives also a base for calculating historical damage that still makes peoples sick etc.
Wood supply simply must be included with the regular production sites. It's directly derived from BM, so it for the player it's a choice: food or resource sites. This restriction may be eased when he discovers biological fuels.
Does this sound good?

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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Jan 1970
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  Old Post 25-11-2001 17:18 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi Simon:

I think that using waste as production sites is probably not the best way to handle recycling. My guess is that if we want to explicitly treat recycling it could be an infrastructure class. That infra would turn waste harmless, but not give add'l production. The way you would model extra production through recycling is to build Production kapital and also infrastructure simultaneously. This seems much simpler to me, and works better within the econ system.

quote:
Wood supply simply must be included with the regular production sites. It's directly derived from BM, so it for the player it's a choice: food or resource sites. This restriction may be eased when he discovers biological fuels.


I agree.

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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Lightbulb  Old Post 17-12-2001 07:46 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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I've added a new econ feature for D6, which Should be out in a few days.

The player can now arbitrarily set the economy to either pure Traditional or Market.

In a pure Market economy new workers go where they will be paid most, and new capital investments are made where they give the most return. (Return is as in return-on-investment, ROI)

Traditional, as in traditional society, means that everyone does what their parents did. When new workers or capital investments are made in a Traditional economy they are made proportional to existing distribution among the sectors. This tends to result in slower growth and more imbalanced prices than a Market economy. Government orders and investments are much more important for growth in a Traditional economy.

For now the setting in the Econ Orders menu of the "Economy Type" is done at player whim. It Will Not be that way in the future. This is just a quickie demo for now. In the future the player will be able to influence the evolution of the economy type, and it will also have tie-ins with the rate of technology change, and possibly social stability. (The notion on social stability being that Traditional-oriented societies are more stable because of respect for position etc.)

Also in the future economies will not be Purely Market or Traditional but usually somewhere in the continuum between these extreme types.

Richard Bruns is offline Richard Bruns
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Nov 1999
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  Old Post 17-12-2001 19:15 Visit Richard Bruns's homepage!
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Sounds good. Is there any advantage to traditional economy, or is it like Despotism in civ2?

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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  Old Post 17-12-2001 22:14 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi Richard:

There are some posibilities for positive aspects of Traditional economies. But they are mostly marginal, and I don't have time to go into them now. However, I did pose the question of advantages for Traditional Societies just now in the Social Model thread, so you may want to check it out.

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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  Old Post 28-03-2002 23:12 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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In the thread From CIV3 to Clash Rodrigo made the following statements that I wanted to respond to here...

quote:
Trade
IMO trade is simply too important to be wrongly modeled. Complete empires IRL were built on trade. And in Civ3 and in other strategy games I've seen, trade is wrongly modeled. Either because its modeling is too simplistic or because it's too complex.

I don't know how our economic model is handling trade right now, but this is what I personally would like to see: defining specific resources like salt, silk, etc and make civs trade them is, for my taste, optional. If they make players take strategic decisions involving possible wars or things like that, then cool. But if they seem hard to model or add little excitement, then I won't be sad to let them out. What is key for me is modeling what we might call "bulk" or "general" trade. That is, the exchange of all sorts of goods, from oranges to TVs, internally in each civ or between civs.


Before we get to bulk trade, the trade in different goods will IMO be vibrant, and will create things like pressure for war to get provinces rich in critical commodities. You can read up on Specials aand Merchants on the Economy web page and links on that page.

quote:
In each province there's internal bulk trade, simply because some guys have orange plantations while others have apple ones, so they can (and IRL they do) exchange production and increase their "utility function" (increase economic welfare) due to differences in people's preferences. Bulk trade needs a very abstract modeling, where the only interesting variable is overall tech level. The more techs you have, the greater diversity of goods (people produce TVs if they have the appropriate techs, which adds diversity to what was already possible to produce) and the greater the number of possible exchanges.


I disagree in part. Bulk trade requires much more than just tech. Also needed is transportation infrastructure, and usually some sort of market/commercial infrastructure. Part of the takeoff in European economies before the industrial age was the existence of these contributors to enabling specialization of production and the benefits that come from trade in bulk goods. Tech Differences are another important enabler I might consider putting in there.

quote:
At an aggregate level, grouping provinces, you can simulate bulk trade between provinces and between civs. The A-B trade system, so typically used in games of this type, is IMO too restrictive and to model the simple, abstract bulk trade, simply grouping provinces could generate interesting results

Unless we're talking about an incredibly primitive society, in every province there'll be always merchants enhancing the distribution of goods from producers to consumers and earning some coins out of that. With this I'm saying that we don't need to model merchant agents as a "thing", but simply consider them part of the demographic composition of society. The more bulk and the more diversity of bulk, more merchants there'll be.

This isn't a detailed proposal for modeling trade. All I'm saying is IMO we must model the massive trades of general goods and don't restrict trade to strategic or specific goods. If we don't do this, I'm afraid we'll be missing a key source of economic welfare of civilizations.


Intra-provincial trade will be handled in some relatively simple fashion as a general evening of the most vital goods across the province. At least that is what I envision so far.

I had planned to model trade of bulk goods fairly abstractly. The way I had envisioned it is that cities (or maybe any square) would have a "market size" determined by tech level, and transportation and commercial infrastructure realities. (Also perhaps by level and distance of trade in specialty goods) As market size increases one would get arbitrary bonuses to production in Food, Manufactured Goods, and possibly Services to a lesser extent.

roquijad is offline roquijad
Prince
Santiago
Nov 1999
time: 05:13
  Old Post 28-03-2002 23:52
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quote:
Before we get to bulk trade, the trade in different goods will IMO be vibrant, and will create things like pressure for war to get provinces rich in critical commodities.

Great. As I said, if you can do it, cool.

quote:

I had planned to model trade of bulk goods fairly abstractly.

Great!!! That's all I was pushing for. What I didn't want was trade being:
1) modeled only for strategic/special resources.
2) modeled for a whole bunch of specific goods, where as a player you'd have to take care for each one of them (boring).

So I'm glad. Probably we disagree in some details on what's the best way to model bulk trade, but that's ok. I admit I'd like to participate in defining how bulk trade is modeled, but I'm afraid I can't commit myself to another "job". We'll just see.

Thanks for your answers, Mark.

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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Jan 1970
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  Old Post 31-03-2002 04:10 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Rodrigo, Glad to see you content

Hi Fosse, I thought I'd move this discussion here...

quote:
Originally posted by Fosse (Econ Gui thread)
I like the loan idea.... will the loans be coming from other civs or from some imaginary "bank?" Or from your own civ's private sector once the infrastructure is in place? A discussion for another time perhaps, but since you brought up the loans!!


The loan idea isn't well developed but loans should be able to come from other civs, merchants/corporations inside or outside your civ. I hadn't thought of it coming directly from your own civ's private sector, but that's probably even better than merchants. Yet one more way for the government to help the economy!

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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Mar 2001
time: 17:13
  Old Post 07-04-2002 04:14
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I am more or less waiting on including resources in the scenarios.

I have had some difficulty in understanding the resource system. As I understand it, it works as follows:

There are a limited number (four or so?) basic goods. All resources are transformed into one of these basic goods and thereafter treated as basic goods. In effect, anything except these basic goods is pure eye-candy.

Thus it isn't possible to have a requirement, in the tech tree, for aluminium to be available before you can build a satellite.

The only factors that resources (called by the rather unpleasant name <goodsinfo> in the economics.xml file) can have are a name, a corresponding basic goods type and a conversion rate.

This system seems to me to be extremely limited in a number of ways, and nothing is lost from the game, under this system, by limiting all resources to the basic ones and not bothering about things like gold or tin.

I am uncertain whether the system is intended to allow the tech tree to check to see if a particular named resource is available. Certainly there is nothing like that in the code now.

I would suggest that a resource could have the following:


  • it can potentially contibute to more than one basic goods type.
  • its location is remembered in such a way that the tech tree can access it for tech requirements (with suitable extension of the tech specifications).
  • it may have a maximum amount present (or be renewable).
  • it may have a "difficulty of finding index".
  • it may have an associated special ability which a unit must have to be able to find the resource ("prospecting" for example).
  • and, most importantly, an image name - if there is no image name, there is no icon displayed, though the data will show in the detail frame.


Cheers

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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  Old Post 07-04-2002 06:32 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi Gary:

Thanks for bringing up some of the issues on the details of how specials function. It's an important set of issues to get right for long-term success of the game since it drives merchant activity and economic strength of civs.

quote:
Originally posted by Gary Thomas
I have had some difficulty in understanding the resource system. As I understand it, it works as follows:

There are a limited number (four or so?) basic goods. All resources are transformed into one of these basic goods and thereafter treated as basic goods. In effect, anything except these basic goods is pure eye-candy.
(snip)
This system seems to me to be extremely limited in a number of ways, and nothing is lost from the game, under this system, by limiting all resources to the basic ones and not bothering about things like gold or tin.


The specials are not eye candy, and have a clear game function that mimics what happens in the real world IMO. Depending upon the amount of a special available substantial economic bonuses are available (thru conversion into the basic goods). However, the bonuses decrease rapidly with increasing amounts of the special, so huge surpluses of any special only give bonuses up to a certain level, and not beyond. That's because the conversion rate for specials is a function of how much of the special there is given the size of the economy. (It is wrong on the econ page, I changed the constant conversion rate long ago, but never updated the page with the change ) An economy with an adequate amount of a variety of specials can perform 2x or more better than an economy with a large amount of a single special. This is I believe the essence of what the real-world equivalent of specials do!

quote:
Thus it isn't possible to have a requirement, in the tech tree, for aluminium to be available before you can build a satellite.

I am uncertain whether the system is intended to allow the tech tree to check to see if a particular named resource is available. Certainly there is nothing like that in the code now.


Its correct that these things aren't in there yet. I am not convinced yet that we need them, although there are certainly individual items where strong cases can be made for requiring particular specials. A particular compelling case is in weaponry, where bronze is a Lot better than stone/wood/copper, and iron a lot better than bronze. I guess my position is that for flexibility purposes the system should include limitations on building things if a special isn't available in the civ. Whether these restrictions should be used extensively in the base game, I'm not so sure of. I believe that if aluminum didn't exist we'd still have satellites. Other, admittedly inferior, materials would be used out of necessity where Al is now the material of choice. People are generally very good about working around lacking resources, although there is a certain cost to the workarounds. We can figure out exactly how this is done in the game as things move forward.

quote:
I would suggest that a resource could have the following:

  • it can potentially contibute to more than one basic goods type.
  • its location is remembered in such a way that the tech tree can access it for tech requirements (with suitable extension of the tech specifications).
  • it may have a maximum amount present (or be renewable).
  • it may have a "difficulty of finding index".
  • it may have an associated special ability which a unit must have to be able to find the resource ("prospecting" for example).
  • and, most importantly, an image name - if there is no image name, there is no icon displayed, though the data will show in the detail frame.


I agree with most of these. On the second one, is it the location of a good source what you want to know, or the presence of a good in the economy? I can see cases where you need one, and cases where you need another. The "difficulty of finding" index is more a property of the sites themselves rather than the specials IMO. This effect would also be a bit complicated since difficulty of finding would depend on technology. I'm not sure about having a special ability being needed to find a resource since that seems to me to be a potential source of vast amounts of micromanagement. If we can figure a graceful way to do it I've got no objections

We can work out the details on these things in the next few months.

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 07-04-2002 at 07:15

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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Mar 2001
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  Old Post 07-04-2002 09:59
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quote:
We can work out the details on these things in the next few months.
Actually we need the framework right now, so I can finish the Dawn 1 scenario. This seems to be the only thing missing. Since the resources need to be specified in the xml file, they need a class with their characteristics in them. This is why I made my little list of characteristics (to which I would also add a defense strength).

I will comment at greater length on your post after I fulfil my immanent date with the pub.

Cheers

LDiCesare is offline LDiCesare
King
La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
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  Old Post 07-04-2002 12:29
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Rather than a special ability to find a special, a required tech (like in civ 3) seems better. You cannot find iron if you are still in the stone age, and noone looked for petrol/oil until modern times (unless it was used for naphta?).
I second Mark's point about aluminium being replaceable. You can always make do with something different from what you expected initially. Even for weapons, I think Aztecs and Incas didn't use metal weapons but stone, and they had quite evolved tactics. The only thing I would consider mandatory as a resource is big animals (horses, cattle), which lacked in America. That prevented lots of progress in terms of agriculture and warfare.

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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  Old Post 08-04-2002 02:18
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quote:
Rather than a special ability to find a special, a required tech (like in civ 3) seems better. You cannot find iron if you are still in the stone age, and noone looked for petrol/oil until modern times (unless it was used for naphta?).
That is a very good idea - less micromanagement!

quote:
I second Mark's point about aluminium being replaceable. You can always make do with something different from what you expected initially. Even for weapons, I think Aztecs and Incas didn't use metal weapons but stone, and they had quite evolved tactics.
This is not a coding or model issue - it is a data issue. My perception of the whole thing is that scenario designers can add the resources that they feel necessary for the development of the scenario.

One can certainly same the same about gold - it is replaceable. Is this an argument for not having gold among the resources? For some purposes it would be - a scenario set in the 20th century probably would not have gold as a factor. On the other hand, a search for El Dorado probably would.

quote:
The only thing I would consider mandatory as a resource is big animals (horses, cattle), which lacked in America. That prevented lots of progress in terms of agriculture and warfare.
Oddly, I don't think that horses (or cattle, etc) are resources as such - once discovered, they are bred everywhere, and the original resource is irrelevant. So we are not talking about an economic resource here, but a precondition for a technology advance. However, they would appear on the map as resources, until the appropriate technology is discovered ("Horse breeding" or whatever) at which point the "rersource" would vanish from the map.

Cheers

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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  Old Post 08-04-2002 02:34
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Mark:
I guess I am getting a better grasp of how things work. Can you clarify something for me: what is the relationship between the "the five sectors of the economy" referred to in the model, and "basic goods" referred to in the economics.xml draft? Are they the same thing?

Is it true that the the "resources" sector of the economy is an undifferentiated variable representing some kind of abstraction for all the "normal" (as opposed to "special") kinds of materials? I am not very clear on what is normal and what is special, though I suppose that we do not need to be very specific in the game. I do not, however, want people to be confused.

I am trying to get a coding system that has everything at the square level in a uniform framework. I order To achieve this I want to make a clean easily understood class structure.

Thus far, I have:

1. Basic goods, or sectors (this meaning of sector is not the one I understood when I did economics).

2. Special resources, both as production accelerators and as technology prerequisites.

3. Sites, mapping a basic good to a number in a square.

4. A list of special resources per square.

Cheers

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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  Old Post 08-04-2002 03:36 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi. I need to rush off to do something so I'll respond to the questions Gary needs resolved. I'll double back later to annoy everyone in more detail

quote:
Originally posted by Gary Thomas
I guess I am getting a better grasp of how things work. Can you clarify something for me: what is the relationship between the "the five sectors of the economy" referred to in the model, and "basic goods" referred to in the economics.xml draft? Are they the same thing?


The sectors of the economy each produce an Output that is the basic good in question. I think the five includes specials, so just consider it four for now. So the Farming sector produces the basic good Food. There is a one-to-one mapping between sectors and goods, but they are not the same thing.

quote:
Is it true that the the "resources" sector of the economy is an undifferentiated variable representing some kind of abstraction for all the "normal" (as opposed to "special") kinds of materials? I am not very clear on what is normal and what is special, though I suppose that we do not need to be very specific in the game. I do not, however, want people to be confused.


Yeah, you've got it. Normal is Everything that isn't deemed Special by the designer. My short hand way tto decide is that if the special would be available most everywhere then it is not worth treating as a special. In most cases its things like wood, stone, hides, etc. are the "normal" resources. But what is normal and what is special can definitely vary from scenario to scenario. FE if you're playing a scenario where access to ship mast timber is critical and isn't around everywhere, you could make that a special although we usually assume wood is either available or easily replaceable with other materials like straw-mud bricks.

quote:
I am trying to get a coding system that has everything at the square level in a uniform framework. I order To achieve this I want to make a clean easily understood class structure.

Thus far, I have:

1. Basic goods, or sectors (this meaning of sector is not the one I understood when I did economics).


Hopefully my expanation above cleared this up. The econ models' sectors are meant to be similar to those you learned in economics. But neither basic goods nor sectors will automatically exist in a map square. The Sites are what you need to keep track of. If the sites exist and the technology is available to use the special Then a sector will be created in the square economy to handle production of that good. This condition is satisfied for Dawn1 specials afaik. It would be good to have iron "appear" to the player as a result of tech advancement in Dawn2 IMO.

quote:
2. Special resources, both as production accelerators and as technology prerequisites.

3. Sites, mapping a basic good to a number in a square.

4. A list of special resources per square.


Sounds Good Gary!

Cya,

Mark

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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  Old Post 08-04-2002 18:26 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Hi Laurent:

I think your idea about just using tech level requirements to see if goods can be detected is a good one. Two further extensions occured to me that still have low micromanagement.

1. Instead of having a single tech threshold for when the sites are detected there would be a range. If we have different sites have different difficulties for detection (FE one oil site is easy, and another very difficult) then they would become visible to the player as the tech matching the difficulty became available. One example would be when oil is first starting to be widely used the shallowest sites would show up. As drilling/prospecting tech becomes better, others from deeper wells would become available.

2. We could have an Overall prospecting budget, and tie detection into this. This would be low-micromanagement but still give the idea of letting the player accelerate detection if they deem it useful.

Hey Gary:

quote:
Originally posted by Gary Thomas
This is why I made my little list of [specials] characteristics (to which I would also add a defense strength).


Defense strength? As in how resistant it is to bombardment or destruction by troops? What exactly did you mean here?

quote:
Laurent said:
The only thing I would consider mandatory as a resource is big animals (horses, cattle), which lacked in America. That prevented lots of progress in terms of agriculture and warfare.
Gary said:
Oddly, I don't think that horses (or cattle, etc) are resources as such - once discovered, they are bred everywhere, and the original resource is irrelevant. So we are not talking about an economic resource here, but a precondition for a technology advance. However, they would appear on the map as resources, until the appropriate technology is discovered ("Horse breeding" or whatever) at which point the "rersource" would vanish from the map.


I like Gary's approach here, although I'm not sure about the details. For the time being doing it as stated, and then modifying the approach as issues appear seems useable.

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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  Old Post 09-04-2002 02:40
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quote:
Defense strength? As in how resistant it is to bombardment or destruction by troops? What exactly did you mean here?
I mean resistance to sabotage or destruction for other purposes such as scorched earth.

I have got to the point where I hope I am closing in on the code requirements. Really the only remaining problem I have is that I do not know how the economic model tells the difference between basic goods and specials. Since they behave differently I am inclined to have them in different lists.

My personal preference for site building is to do it through the existing buildable interface, or at least design the code so that when things are refactored it becomes easy to incorporate the buildable system. Everything that is done through that kind of system (Buildable, Order, SpecialAbility, Command, Administration) becomes very much easier to control, maintain and extend.

My present, updated, list of resources is:

1. Basic goods (four of them).

2. Special resources, both as production accelerators and as technology prerequisites.

3. Sites, mapping a basic good to a number in a square.

4. A list of special resources per square.

5. A Feature class, a generic class which indicates that a special feature is present. This has no direct impact on economics, but is used for the horses, cattle and so forth. At a later stage it will have the framework present for disasters, disease and so forth. Generally it will hold ephemeral phenomena.

Cheers

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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Hi Gary:

Everything you say sounds good to me, though I haven't had a chance to reflect upon it.

Here is how you tell a basic good from a special:

code:
public class GoodsInfo{ /** Holds the actual Goods of the economy, keys are the Good names */ private static HashMap theGoods = new HashMap(); private String goodName; // for a special good like gold, it is eventually converted into services private String basicGoodItBecomes; // when converting a special into good it becomes, how many? private float goodConversionRate; private boolean basicGood = false; // Eventually need technology required to make good... (SNIP) GoodsInfo( String _goodName, String _basicGoodItBecomes, float _goodConversionRate){ goodName = _goodName; basicGoodItBecomes = _basicGoodItBecomes; goodConversionRate = _goodConversionRate; if( goodName.equals(basicGoodItBecomes) ){ basicGood = true; } else basicGood = false;


The boolean basicGood tells whether its a basicGood or not. It for now is set in the constructor shown by comparing names as you can see. For now you can have a lock on the econ code to change this around if you want to add a more robust way to handle basic vs special goods. But I would prefer to leave basic and special goods together in the same GoodsInfo list for now since I am not sure about what changes would be needed to separate them. I will send you by email the draft econ xml ini stuff I worked up a while ago in case it is of use to you.

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
Clash of Civilizations Project Lead
Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:13
  Old Post 13-04-2002 04:36 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Well, now that we have choices of where to settle (coming in D7) we need to have a reasonable approach for what type of sites (farm, resources, and specials) are associated with each type of terrain. This ties in with what I want to do this weekend in rationalizing the economic framework to deal with different numbers of sites on different types of terrain.

The Specials can possibly be put in by hand per scenario, but I think its time to specify that the current "flat" terrain has so many of each type of site, and forest has a different set of values. For now the values could be constant, although eventually they'd probably be picked from some sort of distribution.

So Gary, how would you prefer I do this? Or do you want me to just give my best guesses on the correct number of sites of each type for each existing terrain, and you implement it? Your call

Once this is done we will have a sensible driver to make population diffusion work.

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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New Zealand
Mar 2001
time: 17:13
  Old Post 13-04-2002 06:04
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Tell me what you want and I will implement it. All the infrastructure is there.

Cheers

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
Clash of Civilizations Project Lead
Canton, MI
Jan 1970
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  Old Post 13-04-2002 07:24 Visit Mark_Everson's homepage!
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Sounds good Gary!

Here is my first shot at it, comments welcome. Note these are values for terrain that hasn't been modified. FE no drainage in swamp. We will get to terrain improvements some other time...

BTW, can we add two flavors of flat similar to the distinction between grassland and plains in civ? For now I'll give an intermediate value, but I expect we will soon want to make a distinction. There is no need for them to be integers, so if people think 1 for dunes is too high we can make it 0.3 or something. The quote below gives a description of the general scale of these numbers.

Terrain type, Farm sites, resource sites

flat____10, 2
rolling_5, 4
broken__2, 6
mountain_1, 8
ocean___0, 0
coastal_12, 4
swamp___2, 2
forest__3, 5
jungle__4, 2
dunes___1, 1
tundra__1, 2

River would also give a bonus, but we're not there yet. Services sites are needed by the code, but irrelevant in the model. I have been setting those sites to 1.

One issue: These values, and the lack of merchants moving food, will make square populations above 15k or so almost impossible with low technology. (Current code has farm sites = 90, res = 3 for all squares) This could cause big problems with the carthage scenario in that the populations of the cities would not be sustainable. We can temporarily fudge the numbers up for farm sites, or come up with a temporary square type that has especially good farmland as a fix. Ideas?

Mostly for my own reference I'm going to copy here something I wrote in the Vegetation, Climate, Ecology, and Pollution thread.

quote:
Some numbers for sites...
I think I've already given numbers for this in the discussions above. For the record (and this may change with playtesting) a lousy square (desert, tundra...) might have one agricultural site, steppe might have a few, rainfall agriculture-type squares would probably range from 5 to 20, and vastly productive agricultural lands like ancient Egypt might have something like 50 sites per square along the Nile. Irrigated desert agriculture poses a bit of a problem, since unless the irrigation is there, the lands almost useless. So I think we might need a special case to handle such lands. But for demo 5 I think we can't ignore the distinction and see how the system works in general.

The rule of thumb is there should be as many sites as ancient agrictulture could support population over the area of the square. So if on average a square in China supported 30K people, then there should be 30 sites. The exception is lands where heavy investments in irrigation are required. There I would cut the pop number by 2/3 or so since the investments in irrigation will increase the yield above the usual amount just given the sites.

Hope this is what you need... For resources I would just wing it for now. Sites will usually be in the range from 1-10.

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 13-04-2002 at 07:38

Gary Thomas is offline Gary Thomas
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Mar 2001
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  Old Post 14-04-2002 02:55
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This is now implemented, except that I added a plains terrain and changed the parameters to:

flat 12, 2
plains 8, 3

Tell me what you want for these and I will fix them.

Cheers

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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Thanks Gary, those values look fine to me for now. When we see how they play out, we can think about modifying them.

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
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I posted this by accident in the Demo 7&8 thread, so I'm going to re-post here where it really belongs:

I'm now working on getting colonists to distribute themselves effectively into the different economic sectors (farming, etc.). For now there is no influence upon this distribution of whether the economy is market or traditional. My question (for the longer term) is should colonists that are primarily traditional keep their fixed patterns of distribution into the sectors when colonizing? I don't know if its realistic, but I'm sure it will piss off players to have settlements start out hobbled because there are an inappropriate number of say farmers compared to other sectors given the sites available. My notion of how to handle this for now is that settlers with a traditional economy will distribute themselves near-optimally but after that the traditions are set for that locality, and the proportions of workers in the sectors stay fixed (in a pure traditional economy, which will be rare). My hand-waving argument is that the colonists knew that traditional patterns could be shaken up when they moved.

In the other thread Laurent replied:
quote:
Mark, I think your proposal is OK. I think the traditions hold only when there is some amount of infrastructure. Those who migrate are usually ready to start from scratch and seize whatever opportunity is open to them.

Simon Loverix is offline Simon Loverix
Warlord
Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001
time: 05:13
  Old Post 08-05-2002 03:24
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Hello again

I think those traditional colonists will try to keep their traditional occupations, but after that they will react normally (= according to their culture) to changes. The effect will be that a part of them strengthens their traditionally strong sectors and another part adapts to the new situation. Think, for example, of the Indian immigrants in the UK where the caste system continues to play a certain role, though there is no longer an economic or juridical base for it.

Concerning the terrain values, is there anything I can do? I did something on the food and production sites related to the ecology, should I elaborate or revise it?

ciao

Mark_Everson is offline Mark_Everson
Clash of Civilizations Project Lead
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Hi Simon!

The problem with that is that if you take the proportions in labor in different sectors from a given traditional economy and plop them down in terrain different from that in which their economy evolved, they may starve or be largely worthless. Anyway, I went ahead and did it the "versatile settlers" way for now. We can always change/refine it later...

On the sites, we just ended up hard-coding site number by terrain type, based partly on the numbers you and I worked on a bit ago. I think we are set for the moment, but thanks for offering! If you've got the time, there has been a lot of discussion on various things since the last time you were actively here, those topics could all use some fresh eyes .

Cya,

Mark

Simon Loverix is offline Simon Loverix
Warlord
Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001
time: 05:13
  Old Post 12-05-2002 15:46
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I just thought they might try their traditional sectors first, and change quickly afterwards if they can't make a living. Migrating people are likely not very rejective to change, except when conservatism is their reason to migrate.

 
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