How is this possible

[Diadem]

I'm playing a continents game on monarch difficulty, with blake's improved AI. Monarch's a bit harder now then it used to be, but still beatable. I conquered my entire continent now, which is slightly bigger then the other continent. My civilization stretches the entire continent, and most of my cities are well developped, save a few I recently conquered. To my surprise however, the AI is still almost keeping up in tech.

The statistics are as shown on the screenshot.

How is this possible? How can my best rival's GNP be almost as big as mine, with only a quarter of the population? I just don't see how that can add up. I do have plenty of cottages, and all the religions (the other AIs that started on my continent snatched all the ones I missed), with 3 shrines built.

Anyone who understands this?

[Senethro]

Wow, you really like your hammers. In fact, its quite odd how large your production is and how small your GNP is. Screenshot of your budget screen?

[Diadem]

I've done nothing special to increase my production. Mine hills and lumbermills on forest. Perhaps it's because I don't cut away forests too often.

[Senethro]

High food, high production, low GNP.

Are you a Representation/Specialist fan? Have you failed in your duty to bring cottages to all grasslands of the world? Have you fallen to the farm heresy?

Also, maybe the CPU has a Bureaucracy/wall street/Triple holy city

[couerdelion]

Could be any number of factors

1) Lack of State Property
2) Too few cottages or mills
3) Too many farms/mines

Need really to know things like number of cities/tech levels/civics etc

And production looks too high compared to GNP.

OTOH, I'm not sure that GNP is that critical. It's a guide but perhaps like the food thing it's horribly misleading where an extra population working unimproved grassland produces +2 food and absolutely no benefit to the civ. My guess is that it is the finance screen you really want to worry about.

[Diadem]

I am a representation fan. Normally. But this game I haven't used representation at all. By the time this screenie was taken I had been running Universal Suffrage for a while. And Emancipation too.

I don't build as many cottages as the AI, true. But I built enough, and the cities I captured from the AI had plenty of 'em as well.

I don't have a screenie of my finance screen, and I'm played on in that game now, so taking one now wouldn't be realistic. But if I remember correctly I was running 80% science and making a nice profit (about 100 a turn) to boot. Total gold + science output was about 3000. I don't think I was researching to slow. I had future tech in 1860 or so.

My guess is that the AI just gets huge bonusses to their GNP so they get almost the same GNP with a lot less commerce. Or something like that.

But does anyone know how it is actually calculated?

[Blake]

Uh the GNP is a nonsensical figure.

Basically it's calculate as (Raw Commerce - Total Expenses)

If you have say 1500 raw commerce and 1000 expenses and +100% multipliers, you have a net total of 2000 beakers/gold.

An AI with 600 raw commerce and 100 expenses and 50% multipliers would have a total of 800 beakers/gold.

However both GNP's would show as 500.

AI's get discounted expenses so that's why they show as having high GNP's, compared with humans. Humans tend to have higher multipliers because they focus on infrastructure more.

So in short neither specialist income nor multipliers (except expense multipliers) count in GNP and that's why it's not a valid measure of economic performance.

[Reinepein]

Is there an add-on utility or a mod that shows a more realistic ranking for GNP, food, hammers?

So e.g:
your GNP: modified raw commerce minus expenses
AI GNP: (modified raw commerce minus expenses) * AI BONUS (level dependent)

Similar modifications for hammers, are needed I suppose.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Reinepein
Is there an add-on utility or a mod that shows a more realistic ranking for GNP, food, hammers?

So e.g:
your GNP: modified raw commerce minus expenses
AI GNP: (modified raw commerce minus expenses) * AI BONUS (level dependent)

Similar modifications for hammers, are needed I suppose.

The food and production ones are realistic since they add the total food/hammers within the civ and allow for multipliers.

Even so they can be misleading since the most important measure of food is not total food but total surplus food.

Equally, hammers can be supplemented by other means so a low hammer count - particularly in the early game - is not a good measure of total productive capacity. The only problem with generating a "helpful" measure is that it would be diffucult to allow for the effects of these other sources since they are one-off boosts to production and not a regular stream as measured by the MfG

[Reinepein]

Total surplus food is a measure of either population growth or number of specialist (or any combination of them).

Looking towards your civ as some sort of corporation, you ideally want the advisory screens to produce some of the basis corporate accounting statements

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_statements

E.g., now we only get an income statement, but a balance sheet would also be quite helpful. I could think of some additional indicators:

Science: total amount of beakers researched so far (whether through direct research or through GPs)

Capital: total amount of hammers (both buildings and units) produced so far (whether through direct production, pop-n-chop or GPs)

[trev]

I have played games on Monarch where my GDP was similar to best AI, but I was streets ahead in tech, because of my use of specialists etc, ie I learnt the last 30 plus techs of the game alone while the AI were trading amongst themselves and I stayed at least 6 in front of AI best, so GDP is a pretty useless guide as to how things are.

[Diadem]

Well I had a major economy crash earlier in the game, so I was far behind in the early mid-game. I was first 1 liberalism by only 1 or 2 turns, and only started getting a techlead around when I got physics.

Was a fun game though. I usually have a rather small empire and army, but with superior technology. Now I had a huge empire but inferior technology. Makes a fun change.

And learned a lot about economics. Next time when I expand fast I'll beeline for currency more!

[Cort Haus]

GDP is at its most absurd in OCC, where the Monarch AI can be comfortably beaten to a spaceship with the single city human apparantly having only ~10% of the AI's GDP.

That figure needs to include specialists and multipliers to be meaningful.

[Blake]

Originally posted by couerdelion


The food and production ones are realistic since they add the total food/hammers within the civ and allow for multipliers.

Even so they can be misleading since the most important measure of food is not total food but total surplus food.

Nono, total food is an *extremely* meaningful measure of strength. Food means either population (which is producing stuff) or whip (which produces stuff) so thus food total = stuff produced.

Food surplus by itself is quite meaningless.

[Quillan]

Maybe, but suppose you generate 100 food total in your empire. If you've got 10 cities, each with only a two surplus of food, you aren't growing very fast. On the other hand, if you have 5 cities and each of those has 10 surplus food, they're growing like kudzu and can whip out huge amounts of stuff. The total food will be shown the same in both cases.