Economy

Discussion on game mechanics, balancing etc.
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Trilarion
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Re: III. Economy

Post by Trilarion »

I'm also afraid that it might become too much micromanagement (aka advanced excel training course :D ).

Automatization might be a way to go. However in MoO you directly got money (no real resources afair).

Long term deals are an interesting idea but have their own problems. If you just trade what you have then the deal is a deal. However if you promise to trade something you can still break that promise and what then? Well it might work. We have to see.
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Andrettin
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Re: Economy

Post by Andrettin »

I think provincial demand is a good change to the original economic model. Since the project is a remake IMO not much should be changed from the original's base mechanics, but provincial demand solves a big issue with the original, and fits in with its mechanics quite elegantly.

The domestic market being tied to workers would probably be problematic in that it would be too easy to exploit.

IMO provinces should give priority to trading with their owner, and then to other nations based on their relationship with the province's owner.

Here is a possible formula for how much a province would demand of a commodity in a given turn:

PROVINCE_COMMODITY_DEMAND = COMMODITY_BASE_DEMAND * COMMODITY_DEFAULT_PRICE / COMMODITY_CURRENT_PRICE

The good thing about this formula is that it makes demand respond nicely to price fluctuations. If the commodity's current price is twice the commodity's default price, then demand will be halved. If the price is increasing steadily because more is demanded than is offered, then with this formula at some point demand will stabilize with the offer (and the same with decreasing prices).
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Andrettin
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Re: Economy

Post by Andrettin »

Another point on province demand: provinces should probably only buy commodities if their provincial town is connected to their nation's transport network (except for the provinces of minor nations?).
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Trilarion
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Re: Economy

Post by Trilarion »

Andrettin wrote:...
IMO provinces should give priority to trading with their owner, and then to other nations based on their relationship with the province's owner.

Here is a possible formula for how much a province would demand of a commodity in a given turn:

PROVINCE_COMMODITY_DEMAND = COMMODITY_BASE_DEMAND * COMMODITY_DEFAULT_PRICE / COMMODITY_CURRENT_PRICE
...
That's more or less what I thought too. A COMMODITY_DEFAULT_PRICE could turn out to be problematic because you would need to set it beforehand running into balancing problems. Better to use the average price of the last 20 turns or so. Also instead of the ratio you can also use the difference (ratios can fluctuate quite a lot). Finally, one would also need a give a formula for the price_updates, i.e. how to estimate the COMMODITY_CURRENT_PRICE (or should it be a local property or a global).

I wasn't sure if each province should sell/buy on their own or if one should aggregate the provincial demands and then do the buying/selling on a nation level.

The trading order kind of gives a binary decision. If you insert instead several trading rounds, where provinces (or nations) buy and sell each only part, you would get a more smooth behavior (something like market shares). These are things we can chose, but I can imagine that having increasing or decreasing market shares behaves a bit better than selling a lot in one turn and nothing in the next because the trading order changed. There was a lot of micromanagement in Imp1, one had to adjust discounts quite often.
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