Economy

Discussion on game mechanics, balancing etc.
Forum rules
Posted relevant content can be used under GPL or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/) for the project. Thanks!
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Trade: In the old Imp1 it was done so that the minors were endless sources of income and endless sinks for goods. Therefore it was less important to have a steady flow of goods or to distribute trade. You could focus on a single nation if you wanted to. However now with a bit more realistic model this means that also trade will change.

Do we still want the player to sign off every transaction? It could become even more tedious and boring then in the original because to meet a realistic demand you must ship many different goods to many different places. Also accepting or rejecting trades would become much more complex because you cannot just sell your whole production of chairs to one small nation, you would have to worry that you might be left with a big pile of useless chairs and so on.

The model proposes by Xylander had two markets (home market and world market) if I understood it correctly but there weren't any rules how price and amount of traded good are determined.

I would very much prefer if the player focuses on defining a trade strategy and the rest is done automatically.

Requirements:
- Since the amount of produced goods are limited, destinations must have some kind of priority. For example by trade embargoes or by other priority rules.
- But also import priorities are needed. (My export is your import - so how to balance my export priorities with your import priorities.)
- Additionally subventions and diplomatic standing should alter the success you have on each market.
- We don't want to define these priorities for each good and each resource or it becomes super tedious.

Possible implementation:
- Priorities for only two categories: raw materials and finished products.
- Export priority means the order that you offer your products to another player. You go around and around (and all the other players too) and offer all the products you want to trade until you haven't anything to offer anymore or nobody wants to buy anymore. You can decide to exclude nations from your export.
- Import priority just means yes or no (import from them or do not import from them (in case they offer something)).
- If you additionally offer subventions or the diplomatic relations are high the trades might become bigger than usual.
- You always have the option to let the priority lists be automatically ordered by diplomatic relation or by highest price.
- Price is calculated from how much the demand was meet averaged over the last turns and stays constant during one turn.
- If there is no demand (raw materials have no demand per se): price is constant (??) or price should be determined by overall demand?

In summary: while you probably cannot influence each single trade anymore you still could control very much with whom you trade and how much you trade and how much money you make (or don't make).
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Another thing is that in case the player has not enough money, some trades cannot be done. Which ones? The ones that are demanded by the people or other ones? And what if you could pay for them if only you would have sold enough stuff before. The order of trades is important. Maybe we could first process the finished goods and then raw materials because this way industrialized nations first get their money and then can spent it. Or should it be the other way around?
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Just thinking about the trade capacity. In Imp1: was buying and selling stuff both reducing your free trade capacity or only one of them?

The thing is that in a MP (multi player) game, then trade capacity would be counted two times if two human players traded with each other.

Basically the question is how we should do it? Either we say, the seller has to deliver the goods to the buyer, or we say the buyer has to collect the traded goods, or both, buyer and seller always share the transportation, or should great nations always do the transport to and from minor nations (and great nations between themselves would share the transportation costs?)? Has anyone a good idea here?
Veneteaou
Posts: 280
Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Re: III. Economy

Post by Veneteaou »

Minor nations don't have capacity, so it really does need to count against both when we trade with them. It's rare on the other hand to be trading with major powers (it wasn't very often that I would be selling cannon or food to someone), but we could code it differently.

If you only want to do it one way, I suggest the former.
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

It just has to be solved for the cases when there is trade between major powers. Doing it only one way (like the seller always is responsible for delivery) simplifies the trade between major nations but then minor nations needs trade capacity too. However it could be seen as an additional way to improve relations (gifting trade capacity to minors). On the other hand, if minors do not have trade capacity, then we need a sound rule what happens with trades betweeen major powers.

Currently I prefer the one way solution.
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Coming back to trades in general:

From above:
..Do we still want the player to sign off every transaction? It could become even more tedious and boring then in the original because to meet a realistic demand you must ship many different goods to many different places. Also accepting or rejecting trades would become much more complex because you cannot just sell your whole production of chairs to one small nation, you would have to worry that you might be left with a big pile of useless chairs and so on...
I still think about a solution to this. In the old Imp1 when manually doing the trades you had to take into account many things: your trade capacity, your current account balance, the relations to other nations, the order in which other nations contacted you for trade and the risk that they run out of stuff. All in all this was a really difficult task, maybe overwhelming some players while at the same time repeated every turn probably destined to get boring fast.

Btw. how was the order of presentation of the trade offers in the original? I guess they were first good by internal list, then country by internal list?

With a more realistic trade/economy model there will be even more trades (because you cannot just sell all your chairs to a single nation...). So I see no other way than to automatize this in some way.

It should be fun and allow to make decisions and should be comprehensible and easy to implement while at the same time balancing different things like trade capacity, account balance, international relations, ... It seems like a difficult task.

What players probably want to do:
  • choose the nations on which exports of processed material should be concentrated on
  • choose the quantity of raw material to import (depending on the need of your industry)
  • choose the nations from which import of raw material should be most likely
  • additionally subsidize exports or imports to increase market share
  • set a limit on account balance to avoid going bankrupt during excessive imports
  • prioritise trades in case the trade capacity is the deciding limit
I have some ideas how to combine all this in a not too complex way but I still need to think about it. The most difficult thing so far is what to do if trade capacity is limited. What would a reasonable player do under these circumstances? Export less or import less or both?
Veneteaou
Posts: 280
Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Re: III. Economy

Post by Veneteaou »

All in all this was a really difficult task, maybe overwhelming some players while at the same time repeated every turn probably destined to get boring fast.
You know I like the original so take this with a grain of salt, but I think we need to be careful when we consider simplifying on the Imp1 model. Imp1 was already one of the more simple 4X/TBS games, already far more streamlined than sorting through the mountains of micromanagement tasks of games like Civilization or Master of Orion 2. Imperialism is a few key mechanics away from being a Facebook/Flash TBS in terms of depth.

Btw. how was the order of presentation of the trade offers in the original? I guess they were first good by internal list, then country by internal list?
I'm not certain of what you are talking about, but I think what you mean is the order in which trades were displayed to the player? It was ordered by good, and then by who still had product to sell you. I don't think it was sorted any more than that.
With a more realistic trade/economy model there will be even more trades (because you cannot just sell all your chairs to a single nation...). So I see no other way than to automatize this in some way.
If you look at the way the original Imperialism worked, it's not about specifics. Not about managing an industry directly. It's about being a leader that manages trends within the nation overall. So the idea we see in Imperialism is that while most furniture goes to a few markets globally, the industry overall still manufacturers and sells to many different nations - just in a low enough quantity to fly under the government radar. IMO that was one of the strengths of Imp1: it never concerned the player with micromanagement of anything. It was all macro management.

>What would a reasonable player do under these circumstances? Export less or import less or both?

It ties into industry. Keeping resources incoming is far more important to winning in Imp1 than selling on any one turn. That's why exports were only calculated AFTER a player had the opportunity to make all of their import trades. Which works just fine, because then the player gets to manage how much merchant marine they want to reserve for sales.
User avatar
Trilarion
Founder
Posts: 845
Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2012 9:27 pm
Location: Central germany

Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Yes I meant the order in which the trades were displayed to the player. One problem with realistic economic models is that imports and exports cannot be calculated one after another, because they are two sides of the same coin, my export is your import and both must be resolved at the same time. Also keeping resources incoming is certainly important but if you face insolvency then exports might have higher priority temporarily.

I guess there is a danger that the initial version might be too simple for a 4X/TBS game but then even the players of the Civilization series complain that part V is simpler than IV. Let's see how it goes and making things more complicated later on is always a possibility.
alex347
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 24, 2014 3:11 am

Re: III. Economy

Post by alex347 »

Hi All,
Below are a few thoughts I've had on how the economy model might be improved from imp1.
Trade:
In imp1 it always bugged me that supply and demand weren't really related. You could desperately want coal but it would be impossible to offer extra money for it. I think the designers of the original did it this way because of the difficulties discussed on this thread.
To make the market part of the game, I would suggest the following:
Give people the option to use a imp1-style interface and let the computer work out the details (so that you don't have to micro-manage when you don''t have critical shortages), or to click on "Details" to get to the micro-management.
In Details, you could place individual trade orders, each with a maximum/minimum quantity and price. For example Buy (maxQ=4) coal at (MaxP=$200) (so you end up paying the next highest bid + $1, to a maximum of $200). You could have multiple orders for the same good, for example Buy (MaxQ=4) coal at (maxP=$200), buy (MaxQ=10) coal at (maxP=$100), sell (MaxQ=10) coal at (minP=$400). The program could then take the buy and sell orders and pair them off in order.
Shipping capacity is a tricky complication; maybe it could be dealt with through a priority-ordering system?
Related idea: what if you could pool your merchant ships with other nations? Then when you have spare capacity you could earn extra money by renting it out to the pool, and when you need extra shipping capacity you could rent it from others. This would help make diplomacy a richer part of the game.
Another idea on shipping: what if you could buy goods, and then choose to leave them at the seller's warehouse (maybe for a small storage fee)? You could then bring them back when you have some spare shipping capacity (or re-sell them to someone else).
Markets:
Adding a domestic market would add an interesting new dimension to gameplay. Clothes and furniture could be sold to the domestic market, or traded abroad. The domestic market could have a supply/demand curve for each turn. E.g. for clothes, the market will buy 30 at $500, 10 at $1000 or 5 at $1500. If these prices are lower than the expected international market prices (which you would estimate based on last turn's prices), then you would sell more internationally.
You could profit by buying goods overseas (e.g. furniture, from a nation with lots of forests) and selling for more at home.
The internal market would also create a way to make money without having to deal with any other nations, which may be useful e.g. if you are under blockade. It also makes sense, since there are things that you need money for besides foreign trade.
Cash
In some situations I think it would be good to have different payment options. E.g. an army unit costs 1 worker, 2 arms and $2000; what if you had the option of using 1 worker, 2 arms, 2 furniture, clothing? You could then either take the more efficient route, or if you are facing hardship (e.g. shortage of cash) you could take what looks like a less efficient option but which works better for your circumstances.
To make this less tedious in normal circumstances, the game could show the total cash cost of each combination of resources and by default select the cheapest one.
Industry
Imp1 had some degree of benefits from specialization, but what if this was made more of a feature of the game? E.g. the more you produce, the more efficient your factories become. Maybe when a factory produces 5 units per turn for 5 turns it automatically produces an extra unit for free (and maybe it does so with less workers/materials); then if it falls below that production level the benefits start to fade. Imp1 had a simple version of this, but you could exploit it by building a bigger factory and leaving it idle. This way, it would be based on actual continuous production, and the benefits would be predictable enough to make it part of your strategy.
Benefits to specialization would also make trade more important. Normally the game is very much zero-sum, but with specialization there are benefits to both parties from trade.
The specialization idea would be even more powerful if there were smaller subdivisions of goods to produce (but I know that would make implementation quite a bit more difficult). E.g suppose instead of arms, you produced (and traded) rifles, cannons and naval cannons. You could specialize in one and buy the others on the market. In imp1, it was generally a bad idea to ever sell steel or arms to another major power, but here it would make sense in some circumstances.
Shipping
I always thought it didn't make much sense that you could produce as many ships as you want instantly, with no labour. If ships took a while to build, e.g. 4 turns,, and required labour, it would be more realistic. Specialization would also work well here. E.g. Britain would naturally be the biggest ship producer, and it could sell ships to pretty much anyone without losing much strategic advantage. The idea of different cost options would also be useful, e.g. if you could build a ship twice as fast using 3 times the labour.
Borrowing
Imp1 was very harsh about bankruptcy - countries can't really be forced to sell everything (especially not for practically nothing, as in imp1). Not paying your debts should just damage your credit rating and cause interest to build up.
It would also be good if there were a free market for borrowing and lending. For example on the trade screen you could borrow or lend large chunks of money (or maybe borrow/lend from the domestic market). This would create an opportunity to build/use meaningful diplomatic relationships (borrowing a lot of money from an ally would be a good way to cement the alliance).
Macroeconomy
If workers earned wages, their income could then be the added to the population's cash balance. Demand in each turn would have some correlation to workers' income in the previous turn (maybe 50% dependent on the previous turn, 25% on two turns previous, 12.5% on three turns previous, etc.?). This would work well with the "domestic market" idea, especially if you incorporated the concept that people can buy from the international market themselves (with tariffs on imports from certain countries, if you choose). You would then make profit just by collecting tariffs. If tariffs are too high and you aren't selling enough goods to the domestic market, then high price levels push wages higher. So you end up in the same place.
Maybe "Free market" could be a setting - you could turn it on and leave it for the domestic market to look after itself.
User avatar
visitor
Posts: 11
Joined: Tue May 06, 2014 5:20 pm
Location: Finland

Re: III. Economy

Post by visitor »

If the new trade system gets too tedious for the player to do every turn, how about this:

You make lengthier deals instead of haggling every turn with everybody. Make a deal that you buy 8 timber for 10 turns from Sweden. After 10 turns, you negotiate again and maybe adjust the terms. Now you also have trade capacity of 8 with Sweden, so they can buy whatever goods they want that you are offering. These sales could be automatic, unless you have them on your "blocked list".

Another option could be more general trade agreements. In Master Of Orion you only agreed on the capacity of the trade agreement. Then your industries could make the trading automatically by themselves in those limits. With good relations you could eventually get open trade agreement where goods move efficiently like in your internal market.

But I have to say that one of the things that made Imperialism so great game, was the trade system that it had. Simple, yet more advanced than in other games and fun. There has been some games that try to go too close to being real life simulators like Supreme Ruler. It makes the game boring to play at least for me. You start to get that Excel / spreadsheet feeling instead of enjoying a game.
Post Reply