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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001 time: 05:13
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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.
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Simon Loverix
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Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001 time: 05:13
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Do resource sites (normal or associated with specials) deplete?
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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
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Simon Loverix
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Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001 time: 05:13
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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?
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999 time: 06:13
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Sounds good. Is there any advantage to traditional economy, or is it like Despotism in civ2?
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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.
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roquijad
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Santiago
Nov 1999 time: 05:13
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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.
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Gary Thomas
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New Zealand
Mar 2001 time: 17:13
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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
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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.
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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
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001 time: 05:13
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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.
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Gary Thomas
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New Zealand
Mar 2001 time: 17:13
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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
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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.
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Sounds Good Gary!
Cya,
Mark
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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.
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Gary Thomas
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New Zealand
Mar 2001 time: 17:13
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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
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970 time: 00:13
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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
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Simon Loverix
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Tongeren, Belgium
Apr 2001 time: 05:13
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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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