On much higher tech: What Paul Said ;-)
They may freak at the first meeting, but less technologically advanced cultures figure out pretty quickly what they can use from those higher on the tech ladder IMO.

Pirates: I'm all for 'em

Capital Destroyed: Not as big as the Silly effects in Civ IMO. After Napoleon burned Moscow the Russians seemed to function reasonably well... If the people are already about to throw in the towel, losing a capital might have a decisive morale effect. Once we refine what the capital actually Does, we can handle what having a secondary one does.

1) quote from the model: The number of units of a special that can be used in a province's economy is 5% of that sector's production.
why? why a % of current production? what are you trying to model with that?

2) Your model is essentialy a free-market econ. How are you planning to adjust it to reflect socialist/communist economies?

3) Developing a site (irrigation, FE) should be cost increasing, that is, to go from production 5 to 6 should be cheaper than going from 6 to 7.... don't you think?

4) Are you still looking for a way to introduce cities into the province scheme as you mention in the model text? You probably remeber a couple of emails I sent you regarding formation of cities and if it's still undefined I'd like to give it a thought.

5) quote from the model: Things like roads and railways will probably be mostly built by the people themselves.
Another quote in the same line: The people will also build some fortification-type items (City walls / forts / castles) themselves if the central authority is weak and they feel they need them.
I must disagree. You should remember (since you look like a guy who knows economics) that certain things are called public/common goods (I'm not aware of the correct translation from spanish) since they have some properties of their own not shared with a normal good. The fundamental difference between a normal good and a public one is "nobody is willing to produce it by its own, but if it's produced, a benefit is achieved". So this is a type of good that is convenient to produce, but nobody wants to do it. Why? Because another important property of it is that it's difficult for the owner to avoid others to benefit from it (he can't charge them for use) and his only use doesn't pay the cost of production. This may sound very tricky, but public goods are much more common that one may think. An example: a lighthouse. If you have a boat you may need a lighthouse, but it's too expensive to build for your use only. The rest boat owners also need it, and you may think of building it and then charging'em for use, but the problem is u can't force them to pay once the lighthouse is built and they'll get the benefit of it anyway, which led economists to name it the "free-rider problem". Since the LH is really needed, the best way to solve the problem is gathering the boat owners together and coordinating them in order to build the LH then becaming a property of society (the boat society in this case) (so "public" good). You can find a lot of public goods in real world: roads, parks, on-street artworks, citywalls and even the nation's army. It's true that in modern times (late 20th century) some ways of dealing with the public good dilemma were invented (particularly in road construction, where access to highways are more controllable), but in most of our history this was not present.
We also have to recognize that for some historians and sociologists, the process of forming a nation (a civ) had to do exactly with this issue. The principle behind it is that families alone could'nt accomplish things that are only attainable through organization (thus the formation of a govt). All "great projects" in history, from simple roads in real ancient times to the apollo program in 20th century and including military safety come from the govt and not from the people's direct investment.
So, in Clash, I think you should identify public goods such as roads and citywalls and avoid people investing in them. Not only because it's more realistic, but because we have in the same game the precise agent who has to deal with this... the ruler (player)!! Anyway, this conclusion goes in the same way as one of Diodorus Sicilus critics about how much people spend in infrastructure (June 30 post), but he took it as a problem of poverty (a peasant couldn't spend money on roads).

Most of the stuff you're talking about was in a previous model, then I yanked it out because it was getting too complicated. I'm just concerned about the trade-offs between relatively simple models that are easily understood by the player, and much more complex ones that become more like a black box as we add more things to them. I'm not certain that any of your suggestions Won't be in the final model, but I think we need to get further along in terms of actually having a model up in the game before we will know. The question is how many people are turned off by not being able to understand the small-scale functioning of the economy with relatively little effort. I Think there won't maybe many people who are worried about this stuff in the actual game since there will be so many other fun things to do. But we'll just have to see.

I can defend the individual positions on any of the things you didn't like in detail, but I suspect we would just get into a long rambling discussion about each. If, after you read my response, there is anything that Really bothers you, let me know what it is. I'll try to respond in detail on that issue. On to the things I really do want to hear your opinions on...

The way I envisioned centrally planned and socialist economies working in the game is pretty simple at this point. There are two big principles involved.

1.when the government takes stuff away as taxes and then returns it to the people, the people only credit the amount returned at 80% or so of its face value from a consumer happiness perspective. The basic idea is that what the government wants them to have is not always exactly what They want to have. However, if the government distributes the benefits so as to reduce inequality or things like that there will clearly be a possibility of overall social benefits. The details of such a model could involve a lot of work, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this sort of thing.

2. When the economy is centrally planned, or is capitalistic, but being ruled by a dictator, increasing inefficiencies, due to corruption and shortsightedness inevitably creep into the economy. These are present in Any system in Clash, but are much worse in the above circumstances. I don't know exactly how we are going to model this, but the corruption and inefficiencies will take their toll on each step of economic activity. So, when taxes come in to the government, less money will be generated for amount of taxed income in a corrupt system. Also, when the government gives back to the people, another portion is lost to corruption. As a totalitarian system persists, the corruption and other penalties will just get worse and worse, eventually leveling out in a regime with much lower growth than would be present in a mixed system.

You also raised a criticism of the current model, about the "people" generally not building roads and bridges and other public goods. I agree completely, but what I obviously didn't state clearly enough is that the "people" also include local and regional governments. So the assumption is that the national government is the only thing that the player has more-or-less direct control of in the best of circumstances. So, in an extremely centralized state, the "people" will basically do nothing because all the resources are funnelled up to the top to be disbursed at the whim of the ruler/player. However, there can actually be progress in things like a feudal system. Because the player does not have much in the way of central control, the regional and local authorities have much more leeway to perform investments of their own like building castles, local roadways, etc. I hope after my explaining this critical fact that the system now makes a bit more sense to you. What specifically the people themselves, and also the local governments, invest in is determined partly by the orientation of the culture and other factors.

I am indeed very interested in hearing your thoughts on how cities might work in the Clash provincial system. There are to big issues that I would Really like the hear your thoughts about. The first is the interaction between the city and the province itself. This will be important for the local economy, intra-province migration, another factors. But remember, the IMO the provinces must be large or we will have a management nightmare. So I think agent and MIDI will economies will need to be "faked" within the system. Because, realistically, unless a mapsquare is on a coast, or navigable river, it would probably be largely economically independent for much of the game time span in reality.

Anyway, I agree we shouldn't stop at every single thing trying to introduce everything into the model. I also know trade offs are present and, more important, the econ model MUST be simple. Some questions I made in my last post were only to better understand things and what's in your mind, mark, and not necessarily critics to the model (like when asking about the % of production used to determine how many specials are being processed). So, following your suggestion about concentrating in those things that REALLY bother me, let me just mention them by now. I'll get to a proposal for how to treat'em in a later time (later post):

1. The "public goods issue" could be solved as you stated it when considering "people" as people+local_govt. However, if you have a civ with a very centralized govt (not to confuse with centr. economy), all public spending comes from the central govt and roads and other public goods can only be built in a province if this central govt wants to. The people at the province may still invest in housing and non public goods, but not in public goods. For an uncentralized govt. public goods can be built by the central or local govt, which is the case in current econ model. So, the model now is able to simulate uncentralized govts only. To state it in other words, it's important to distinguish the level of centralism of an administration (LCA) and the lvl of centralism of economy (LCE). The later takes us into the discussion about how to model a centrally planned economy, but the former takes us into a discussion about how useful is to consider people at provinces as people+localgovts. If one considers LCA to be an important factor, the people+localgovt interpretation must be changed in order to make the model able to simulate centrally controled public funds. So, is it important? I think the LCA is very important and have had a major role in history ("typical" monarchy vs feudal govts, FE. Notice in both systems people invest in non public goods, like housing, but in the feudal system public goods are produced by the local govt at the province and they are produced by the king (player) in monarchy). This may be a discussion thread for its own and I'd like to see your opinions on it.

2. IMHO centrally planned economies should be treated differently to what you're thinking. However, the system I'm now considering may have just the same consequences as those instruments you plan to use, so we'll have to see...

3. I see the problem with the market size and its possible implications for specials trade. Give me some time to think it.

4. About cities-province interactions, this is something I really find interesting and I'm glad I have some space to develop an idea about it. If there's an old thread on the subject or some previous proposals for it, let me now.

My apologies that this is taken so long. I will try to address each of the concerns in the post above if I can. Let me know what still bothers you after I'm done. At some point I'll try to back track and give you a few-sentence description on the other points that bugged you later ;-)

I think we have the public versus private goods issue well in hand. That's not to say that the modeling of it so far is perfect, so I'll tell you what we've got and see what you think. Specifically I'm talking about governmental centralization of economic resources, as opposed to a centrally-planned economy. I don't know if you recall from my model for the government that I wrote up way back when, but there was an explicit number for how much power each of the central, provincial, and square-level governments have. Essentially, taxes levied are distributed to the levels of government depending on their power. It's that simple! I'll give a couple of examples. Suppose we have a highly centralized government with the political power divided something like 80:10:10 in the same order as above. So then 10% of the taxes would go to the square-level government. Between the cultural effects, and who has the power in the government, there will be a formula for how this 10% is invested, or even squandered. I have a few very simple starts at this in Excel spreadsheet if you'd like me to send them to you. So in our example above, the player will get 80% of the nominal tax revenues to play with on behalf of the central government. Let suppose the situation were reversed. If we were in, for instance, a very weak feudal monarchy the geographic power might be distributed 10:30: 60. In this case 60% of the taxes would go to the local governments, since they can't rely on the central government to protect them, they probably would invest a lot in building local fortifications, such as castles. Those inclined in the mercantile direction might sink more of this money into marketplaces and such. As you can see, and the de-centralized government, the player gets very little money to play with. But this is as it should be. Anyway, I think you get the idea. Let me know what you think of it.

As to how to handle a centrally planned economy, I like to hear what you have to say about it. I'm certainly not completely happy with the way I'm doing it now, but I think it's basically serviceable.

As to the interactions between a city and the surrounding province there hasn't been much discussion of late. The nearest thing to this topic that I can put my finger on, is on the old bulletin board. The relevant thread is [URL]http://www.sitepowerup.com/mb/view.asp?Action=Reply&BoardID=103694&Reply=5 [/URL]. I hope that's of some help to you. If not, please just post a brief summary of your ideas on the topic, and potential ways we might go, and we can take it from there.

I agnowledge of course that it is extremely hard to be fair towards systems that we are not familiar with and that we always tend to make arbitrary generalisations and classifications, according to our own historical and political conscience. By saying that the Japanese are by nature militaristic, or that the English are experts in naval techs, or that communist spies are more experienced, or that free market economies are less corrupt than planned ones, we only reflect the way things were in a specific time and place, or we THINK they were, or we WISH they were.

Mark Everson's economic model reflects just that, since it is specifically tailored to represent the inner workings of a decentralised free market economy, like that of the USA. It is a very good model indeed, but when it is called to simulate the function of any centralised or planned economy, there comes the need to take arbitrary decisions, such as the "80% payback of socialistic redistribution of wealth" or the "citizens+local govt infrastructure enterpreneurship" or the "totalitarian corruption penalty". But how the hell are we going to call this game CLASH of Civilisations, when all players will be compelled by necessity to shape their societies in the same manner, resulting in the clashing civs to have only superficial differences?

What we need is a model where diversity will not be penalised, where history is free to pick her way through altenative realities, where many widely differentiated sociioeconomic systems will be equally stable and will have an equal chance of success.

Thanks for wading through at least a chunk of the model. Of course, many of the details are still up for debate, and were chosen sort of arbitrarily. However, the particular items that you chose to criticize are I think things that Enforce game balance, rather than tilt it. Here's my reasoning.

Suppose there is no penalty for being a totalitarian ruler as opposed to a democratic one. The government model puts all kinds of constraints on the activities of a democratic ruler. There are very few constraints on the actions of a totalitarian ruler. If there were no penalty for being a totalitarian ruler and then All Players Would Be Driven to Be Totalitarian. Why on Earth would I accept all those restraints if there is nothing to gain? Also, it may be brainwashing from my upbringing, but I do believe that humans whose powers are not limited almost inevitably become corrupted by the experience. Although democratic systems do experience significant amounts of corruption, I don't feel these come anywhere near what one experiences in a totalitarian system. So I think the corruption affect that you cite is both a valid game balance mechanism, and in some way reflects reality.

The same is true for the 80% penalty for benefits returned to the people by the government. A market economy also severely constrains the player in the ways that they can guide the economy. In a command economy many of these restrictions are no longer present. For if not for a penalty on benefits returned to the people by the government, or some other compensating factor, all players would want to have command economies also. The penalty attempts to compensate for that. I admit it may be too large, it also may be too small. We will have to wait for playtesting.

At least from your comments, it seems to me that you want me to lift all these restrictions. At least as the model is now, I think that will ultimately drive all players to wish to be totalitarian rulers of command economies. I don't know what your political philosophy says, but I think the track record over the last century is that countries run on such principles do fairly poorly.

Also the opposite is quite true that republics can be very corrupt. The US gov is UMO corrupt, although not everyone in it is, just in general. Mainly this is by legal means of intrest groups. I mean you look how much most of the politicans hate to institute any reforms that should tell you that.

I'm initating a new topic thread at the forum to help people discuss those "real reasons" that make govt/econ systems better or worse. Hopefuly that dicussion will help each model developer.

Actually I put my case poorly. It is not that government forms in the model now have inherent levels of corruption. They have, depending on power distribution, inherent rates of Change of corruption. The more totalitarian a regieme, the faster the corruption increases, up to some level.

Revolutions can possibly in some TBD way change the actual corruption level also.

I havenīt seen anyone discussing the animal breeding, usbandry (I really donīt know how to write this in english) paper in civs.
Know this might be a bit foolish at first, but the thing is domestication is a fundamental part of civilization advance, right along agriculture.
One of the biggest issues is availability of domesticable animals in your continental (or island) mass. This is big both economically and military.

you can think off the appearence of horses in America, kangaroos in Australia
Cortez in MesoAmerica etc, etc, etc

By the way...it would be a neat feature to add to the diplomatic/spy/raiding actions - getting domestication knowledge along with the animals...or just the animals.

It's called husbandry in English, so you got Really close...

Inflation
I don't think I'm very satified with your use of inflation in your model (forgive me I haven't read the entire thing yet) all you seem to say is how much the per capita income increases. Well are you talking about inflation or an increase in the middle class? Inflation is somewhat complicated so I don't know if we should have it in the model, yet it IS one of the most important parts of our present day economy, besides it's not that hard to set interest rates. Though if you were going to use it I'd think you'd want a charactor as a Alan Greenspan for your country. Anyway if your going to talk about the increase in per capita income you should talk about it without inflation, it's alot less confusing that way.

By the way, I like your province idea, I think you should totally through out the city system, the only time you'd have a city is when the population is high in that place, a capital would atomaticaly become a city, all the cities would rely on only it's own square for food at first then after a few tech increases they could have support from other surplus squares, then everywhere in the province and someday everywhere in the nation, and if you pass free trade everywhere in the world (super over simplified on the the free trade thing odviosly) I've long hated the city system in Civ. II as incredibly unrealistic to any time.

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).

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...).

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

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.

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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.
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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.