An intellectual's review

[Wiglaf]

Hoping you get back on your meds before it's too late,
Adam Weishaupt

Why can't we ban this guy? He's not even the author of the blog post, not that it matters anyway. Ming, you've gotten slow on the draw

[Adam Weishaupt]

If there were an itchy trigger finger on the bans here, it is hard to imagine AAHZ or Wiglaf would continue to be a part of the community. My absence would be a very small price to pay for that sort of pruning. That said, it is perhaps again worth reminding Wiglaf that he is not in fact a moderator, and it is an extraordinary presumption to dictate action to them, never mind asserting some sort of alliance with that use of "we." Did any of you ever think that maybe you wouldn't be treated with such disrespect if you did not go through your online lives spewing unprovoked venom far more than you actually contribute worthwhile substance? Believe it or not, that truly is an easier and more rewarding path to take than living only for the feud.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

[Wiglaf]

[ZEE]

Originally posted by Adam Weishaupt
If there were an itchy trigger finger on the bans here, it is hard to imagine AAHZ or Wiglaf would continue to be a part of the community. My absence would be a very small price to pay for that sort of pruning. That said, it is perhaps again worth reminding Wiglaf that he is not in fact a moderator, and it is an extraordinary presumption to dictate action to them, never mind asserting some sort of alliance with that use of "we." Did any of you ever think that maybe you wouldn't be treated with such disrespect if you did not go through your online lives spewing unprovoked venom far more than you actually contribute worthwhile substance? Believe it or not, that truly is an easier and more rewarding path to take than living only for the feud.

i will not point out to you that i have contrubuted more to this community than perhaps any other member next to staff, speaking of which, i am probably a month's time away (or less) from that promotion myself.

oops i pointed it out didnt I...

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

pieceâ„¢

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
Kuci, i think you are right saying that the economic model of "sim-civ" oughta be labor-based. There should also be energy and material flows (for that both would need numbers - amounts - attached to them). I think you have the right ideas, on how reality works (IMHO) and i´d like to discuss a sim-civ with you.

Okay, shoot.

How would it look like ? Lets start with the beginning of a game. We still have a settler unit, right?

I'm not so sure.

We still have the tiles - but something must change with the way we put them to use - let´s start here: How to model land usage and what would working land generate ? I start with a suggestion: The tile would have productivity indeci (spelling?) for each attainable good. So it would be goods (or ressources) that you would draw from the tiles. Food would be just one - hammers would not, but maybe ores would.

Sounds about right. Also, the tile might have a number of "native" pop (indicating the people who actually live on and work that land).

(And it's spelled indices.)

Lets not discuss if there should be different kinds of food and ores for now. So you could draw anything from any tile, just with different producticvity.

Perhaps, though I don't think that you should necessarily be able to draw ore from flood plains, or beaches.

Lets have it, so that tiles might be used by multiple pops at once, with a penalty for productivity for each additional worker on the tile maybe. Each pop gives us "labor points" towards that tile, so we can distribute them among the tiles´ various ressources.

I'd add the caveat that you cannot arbitrarily redistribute pop points - or perhaps that pop points gradually improve the tiles they're on (a la worker improvements) to represent settling in. IRL you can't just take a bunch of people and relocate them like that.

The "labor points" per pop would grow with techs, but lets have it have 2 for the start (see why later). So we settle and look for the tile with the best food productivity ? Hold on ! No ! Why would we do that ? To grow the city ? Wrong ! Its growth would not depend on food (as its rate) - only if it becomes the limit (like the health cap now), or we can trade it profitably or ship it off to other cities (later on) we start to care about it. No - we just want enough food for the one pop we have. So we need to pick a tile to work on initially, that offers SOME food productivity. So its a secondary choice-element. We pick the tile with the best productivity for the most useful ressource at the time (would be wood, i´d see in the beginning) that also has at least some food prod. Of our two "labor points" (which have to be on one tile since we have just one pop) we assign one on getting us some wood and the other to getting us some food. The food will be consumed obviously - but what with the wood ? Well after having build houses for themselves for a while with it, people would cheifly use it as energy source. Anyways it is being used to raise the standard of living - which should become a number attached to each city. There would be some natural pop-growth (eg a number of turns after which a pop would become two pops - the number of turns depending on social and technical conditions) and there would be starvation in case we lack the food to feed all, but mainly the rates of growth and decline of the population of a city would depend on its comparative standard of living.

Actually, I've got a simpler model (that would be more suitable for a game - unless this is supposed to be only a sim). Wood could let you build houses and improve standard of living, yes, but what would attract pop points to your city is trade. So each trade route through your city (more on attracting trade later) grants one pop point to that city (beyond the first). Each pop point in the city grants one pop point to work a tile near the city - this could be modified to be a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, but the number of actual people in a city-pop-point and a field-pop-point doesn't have to be the same. Pop points in cities are specialists - the number of different types, and the relative values of specialists would have to be altered. You can only assign as many of each type of specialist as you have buildings to support them (a la Civ4). A city could have any number of Laborers, though (up to its pop limit), who are a basic specialist that converts resources into other resources, or finished goods (e.g. iron into swords). Also, later in the game it would be possible to bring field pop points back into the city (just like during the Industrial Revolution), and you'll be able to ship food between cities.

Oh, and if you lose trade routes (or other things that count as such for pop purposes), the people don't disappear right away - they lose their jobs and foment unrest.

Ressources in general, even those considered "non-renewable" (reason: technological advance makes more of them extractable), would have a dynamic growth rate that can vary from tile to tile. Over the times where a tile had "forest" or "no forest". A tile now may have the following properties - pre pop-assigning:
food : 5.000 tons / + 0% p.a. (natural capacity reached)
wood: 10.000 tons / +0% p.a. (-"-)
iron ore: 2.000 tons / +0% p.a. (not used, thus not investigated into more deposits yet)

If this is going to stay as a game, I'm in favor of sticking to relatively small integers and keep a relatively constant output from each tile. You could just have certain resources (i.e. Oil) be depleted after you've used them long enough, or just a random chance of depletion and discovery.

Now we assign our pop to it. With its first labor point we want it to hunt/gather, and he does so with a productivity of 100t p.a.:
food : 5.000 tons / - 100 t p.a. (human activity) / + 2% p.a. [=100 tons] (natural re-growth)

The second labor point goes to wood-chopping - he does that with 100t p.a. as well (of course both harvest rates would be linked to the abundance of what to harvest on the tile - when there is not much left to gather, it is less productive):

wood: 10.000 t / -100t / +0.5% [=50t] natural regrowth

you can see that we would have a sustainable society in food, but not wood. We cannot go on like that indefineatly. There is reason to advance ! There is dynamics ! There is scarcity, there is an economic model with relation to the real world, there is realism....

Ah, I see. Nifty.

[Blake]

If I was doing an economic sim I'd abstract food production.

Basically how it would work, is that a certain %age of the population would have to be devoted to food.

Improving technology, improving society, building larger settlements, would reduce the %age of labor devoted to food, freeing up more for other purposes.

The food wouldn't have to be harvested on site. You could set up trade routes, like from bread basket to metropolis, this would cause bread basket to devote more population to food, and metropolis less. In doing so you could optimize food production, like 1000 tonnes of grain might require half the population in Bread Basket as metropolis.

But regardless, people will grow the food they need to survive.

You'd also want to have a price of food / difficulty of growing food concept. In a city which is running low of food, because it's difficult to grow food, making food expensive, the immigration would be reduced, due to plain difficulty of living there.

You could even just do supply/demand. Like a metropolis springs up and the demand for food keeps growing, this results in a high food price at the metropolis, this causes population in cities where it's CHEAP to grow food, to grow that food cheaply then export it to Metropolis, allowing metro's growth to be sustained. The transport companies and stuff would probably further improve the wealth of Metropolis.

Food would not be done on a per-city level, instead it'd be done on a per-empire basis (you need to grow enough everywhere for demand everywhere), obviously imported food costs more, so it's cheaper for cities to grow their own food, until the city grows large and starts relying on food imports. You'd basically have this fluxing level of agricultural employment in various cities/settlements. You'd be able to influence things, like by subsidizing shipping, or by enabling or disabling food trade with other empires, and just stuff like where to place cities. If you found settlements with good crop or fishing potential, then you can support a larger population. Providing cheap food would allow larger cities to grow, due to lower costs of living. Without a source of cheap food, the difficulty of growing food for a large city would hamper it's prosperity.

[Unimatrix11]

Originally posted by Adam Weishaupt
Kuciwalker had a fit when I suggested someone might think as you apparently just have. I'll kindly refer you to post #206 for clarification on the point I believe you were trying to make.

As for the rest, I'd be pretty well off if I had a nickel for every time an "engineer" said something no educated adult could plausibly believe about climate change in an online discussion. I'm not saying that Unimatrix11 has never attended a class in simulations. However, I am saying that this gives us no reason to believe him to be correct. It is more of a "trust me" argument than a "here's why" argument. Arguments accompanied by underlying reasoning can help other people to reach new understandings. Arguments accompanied by "and I'm right because I know I'm right" add much more bad attitude than good information to any worthwhile exchange of ideas.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt

No, Adam, You are absolutely right about this. I was tired and i had over-exertated myself on the topic during the whole day, yesterday - i was a bit sick of it. So that lead me to do this rather flat and bad-style argument, that did nothing to help the topic - sorry for that - i hereby apologize. I may or may not get back on the topic later and explain my point of view.

[Unimatrix11]

Wow ! First of all: Thanks to Kuci and Blake for response on the brainstorm. Kuci, i already praised you, so dont feel set back, when i express me being flattered by Blake, for whom i have a lot of respect, to have adressed this. Now back on it:

Kuci: To most of Your points i agree, or at least dont disagree at a level of certainty that suffices to tackle them. Just one thing: If we´d make the integers to small, then i think we are risking to fall back to over-simplification yet again. The numbers i menrtioned are pretty much taken from thin air and could be expressed in different units to make the numbers smaller, but i firmly believe that some sort of material flow, as well as capacites and re-growth rates are essential for a sim of civ, because these are the geological properties that determine and limit human activities. Randomness in ressource-depletion is certainly something that i would sneer on. Thats exactly one of those things in civ, that makes a good point against it having properties of a macro-economic sim. If economics is the science of scarcity, then you need to have some idea how scarce something is, or at least the usage of a ressource should have an impact on its depletion. If i use no oil, then it cannot deplete and its a mocking of an econmic strategy of ressource preservation if it does. (Perman would agree i assume - tho i fluked the test on ressource-economics )

Blake: The model your suggest is appealing, too, i think. I also think that the lines of thought of you, kuci and me could be brought together and do not contradict each other in a substantial way. I especially like your idea of work-distribution percentages and efficiency-levels of each economic activity and the empire-wide food stock. Isnt that really what makes ONE civ (nation or whatever): Solidarity in food-distribution ? And isnt it the declining role of food-acquisation (as opposed to satisfying "higher" needs (Maslow)), that indicates a civ´s evolution ?

In general, i´d say, that there is probably more than just one way that makes a city grow - and "sim-civ" oughta have the mechanics in its model to make most of them, if not all, occurable.

See adam: The mechanics of a sim have to be linked to reality in order to allow for a wide variety of realistic phenomena to occur - it goes "bottom-up" - civ goes "top-down": Its geared towards the results (or rather a specific one) and then twists the mechanics in a way to produce that result. I also have stated already, that my definition of a real sim (and that is just my POV) does not allow for decicion-makers with irrealistic powers and knowledge. Take the common civ-strategy of the early Axe-rush as an example for how player-knowledge results in irrealism: The strategy consists basically in finding our closest neighbor, getting and building axes asap and then crush (but not desroy for further exploitation) him, before he set up any real defences. How the hell, would our civ know, that there are other civs out there ? How do we know about axes, before we saw one ? We have a plan of something completely laid out, before we know any of its ingredients. In real life no strategy can be crafted this way. It is a too active way of acting - it should be much more reactive. Like: "OH there´s others ! What now ?", and: "Axes ? Wow these a good weapons..." We actually persue courthouses before we have any reason to do so, because we, irrealistically, are able to anticipate the need for them in the future. In RL, most of the time advances were made, there was something wrong to be adressed in the first place. When Hammurabi said "So that the strong may not harm the weak" it implies, that before is code of laws, strong DID harm the weak - had they not, he wouldnt have made the code... In consequence, if we´d leave the courthouse´s effect the same, it should only become avaiable when we start to have a problem with upkeep - when we already have overexpanded or are at the brink of it... Ironically in this context, to change this age-old reactive pattern of problem-solving into a anticipating one, is often exactly the purpose of a simulation.

EDIT: Continuing this line of thought: So if were to set all the parameters of the real world of today into civ - and i wouldnt even know how to do that, since as i indicated for example, i wouldnt know how many coins to give each nation/civ, since i dont know what they are supposed to represent in civ in later ages, it oughta be able to produce some kind of realistic forecast on the future in RL if it was a sim. To the degree it does (not), it qualifies as being (not) a sim. If RL was like civ, then most cities in the US would be on starvation right now, because of war-weariness (the approval rate is way below 40%, right ? - apart of that they also defied the UN), to give one provocative, yet certainly attackable, example... Europe would have stopped all trade with the US (approval rate of bush in germany and france is about 8% - bush is considered the biggest threat to world peace in europe - not bin laden) - if it was an AI (hey Blake - no offense) that is...

[Unimatrix11]

I already gave an example of a good economic simulation (hey i dont really know the difference between macro and micro - but i guess that one is micro): M.U.L.E. is an excellent one in my eyes. It wisely chooses to operate in an irrealistic set to begin with, so it gets rid of many difficulties right from the start, and features realistic decision makers. It is very dynamic yet simple. It does not simulate what has already taken place, so it only has to be coherent with itself and true to basic economical mechanisms - which it is. As i said, its very old (1984 i think) so its free. (sidenote: it is one of the most illegally copied games ever - only 5.000 were sold but was nonetheless very popular). In case you dont know it, get a C64-emulator (also downloadable for free) and the game and check it out...

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
From attending classes about simulation.

Yet you mention earlier that banks decrease national income. I'm not sure whether you were just joking here - because a banking system is vital to a flourishing economy on which national income relies - but it does suggest to me that there are two reasons for disagreement with a simulation.

a) the model
b) the parameters.

In the case with banks, if you are going to view the world in the way that Marx did, then you will say the model is wrong because banks don't increase national wealth. Someone more informed will completely disagree. Either way, it is not the model that you are disagreeing on but the parameter.

Incidentally, the Bank of England, which was founded shortly after the arrival of the Dutch King William arrived in England, was one of the basic foundations that allowed for the rapid expansion of British industry and commerce. Compare the Britain of 1689 with that of 1789 and then decide whether or not the Bank of England was a positive or negative factor.

[couerdelion]

The only problem with using a "bottom-up" model rather than a "top-down" one is that you end up with a micro- model.

[Unimatrix11]

I gave in sum (at least) 5 criteria as to why i regard the value of civ a sim to be neglectable:

1. Defintion by intention - it is not supposed to be a sim

2. Defintion by actors in the model - the model features (at least) one actor with irrealistic properties

3. Defintion by ability to forecast - i doubt its ability to do so

4. Defintion to corelation to reality - if it does corelate reality, it does so on such an abstract level that it is open to all kinds of interpretation, as we have seen in this thread. I still dont believe it does it in a sufficient way, even on that level of abstraction.

5. Defintion by way of modeling - top-down instead of bottom-up. Result-orientated instead of cause-orientated. Cause and effect get reversed in many instances.

[Unimatrix11]

Originally posted by couerdelion


Yet you mention earlier that banks decrease national income. I'm not sure whether you were just joking here - because a banking system is vital to a flourishing economy on which national income relies - but it does suggest to me that there are two reasons for disagreement with a simulation.

a) the model
b) the parameters.

In the case with banks, if you are going to view the world in the way that Marx did, then you will say the model is wrong because banks don't increase national wealth. Someone more informed will completely disagree. Either way, it is not the model that you are disagreeing on but the parameter.

Incidentally, the Bank of England, which was founded shortly after the arrival of the Dutch King William arrived in England, was one of the basic foundations that allowed for the rapid expansion of British industry and commerce. Compare the Britain of 1689 with that of 1789 and then decide whether or not the Bank of England was a positive or negative factor.

It is of course true, that banks improved commerce, but not national (net) income. The commerce it "generates" is merely a distibution of wealth from many hands into few. The wealth of nations corelates to the poverty of their peoples. That holds true at least for the beginning stages of industrialization. Concentration of money was one pre-requisite of industrilization and the other, directly linked to the first, was the de-propertyiation of the common man. Feudal and church properties were turned into modern private properties, massively concentrated and now turned into devices for private profit, taking from the people the means to produce their own products and forcing them to sell their labor (as "free men") in order to survive instead. I doubt that anyone can be regarded as being more informed on the topic of the industrialization of england, its causes and consequences, than Marx was. Compare the Britain of 1500 or 1600 to that of 1840 - look at the common man - and Marx did just that - and tell me what it did to civilization and how it did it. Nationalism in this context is merely a device to allow the pauper to identify with the riches that he no longer takes part in, apart from producing them and it was introduced when it ceased to have any real meaning beyond that, because by that time national politics have already been subdued to private interests of investors by means of the debt-system of national banking. Likewise democracy was granted when people stopped to rule anyways, cause money had taken over and was firmly in the saddle. It is truely an insane world we are living in, full of illusions and deceptions, which for sakes of viability we rather accept than question.

Take the colonies in the americas for example. There was plenty of land, so it was cheap. Colonists would come and settle and produce their own products. But that cannot be ! No one works for the investors profit and no one buys his goods this way ! So the british government artificially raised the land-price, so that who got over there, had to work in the factories first (and that was not so much as to produce goods for england´s greatness, but to generate individual profits -just like today new cell phones are not produced to advance civilization) for the factory owners and to create a market for their goods. The same took place whereever the europeans got their feet - local economy of self-sustainance was destroyed by any means necceassary in order to push the people there down into dependancy - and not so much from england as a nation, but from their employers. So in fact the colonies were not british or french or german (that only indicates the respective government that served and backed the investors interest) but cecile-rhodian or rockefellian. That is what banking did accomplish - concentrating true power over the world into just a couple of hands, that did not hesitate to take full reckless advantage of that institution, deviced by themselves.

EDIT: Not only did the government raise the land-price, but it used the increased income from land-sales to do what ? To bring more people over ! They artificially generated the surplus of "free" (of any way to work independentely) men needed for the factories, lowering saleries as a nice side-effect. It is clear, absolutely clear, that the british government did not serve either the nation nor its people but only the capital´s interest by such a course of action - and that is the rule, not the exception. The same thing can be observed with bush´s policy today. The simple question of "qui boni" (to whose advantage) reveals that very quickly: Neither the iraqi people(s) nor the american gained anything substantial from the war. America itself has suffered enormously (financially, in terms of diplomatic relations...). So who did benefit ? And so - who caused it ? Who rules ? How, by what means, did that happen ?

[Petrus2]

A few thoughts on various claims made.

First, a couple people made claims that a simulation had to be a computer program. False. A simulation can take on many forms. Sure, in today's world (and certainly by those who actively use computers) many will make that assumption, but it isn't correct.

Second, (I guess in reply to Uni) the primary protagonists (Kuci & Wiglaf in the green speedos, Adam W and Snoopy in the gold speedos, cage match at 11:00!!) haven't shifted their opinions in any way that I've seen. I am pleased to see that Kuci started making reasoned arguments after his first unsupported claims.

Third, in reply to Blake's comment about abstracting food production, I'd be real hesitant about that. I read something several years ago (sorry, don't remember the reference, but it was a scholarly document not Time magazine) that had this simple claim: The USA has had a stable government for over 200 years because we've always had a stable and abundant food supply. Now there CERTAINLY is more to it than that, but it is a pretty intriguing concept. And abstracting food supply, if this concept does have a noteworthy margin of truth, would be a mistake. IMHO

Fourth, Adam, if I may suggest... remove the barbs from your posts and people will focus more on the concepts. That was my initial issue with Kuci and Wiglaf. At first your posts were clean, but you've lost ground in that area. I'm not even getting into "who is right".

Fifth, and I believe this is true for MANY of the posters here, a little give-and-take in a discussion will lead to a more meaningful discussion than drawing your line in the sand. Who knows, you may even learn something!

[Adam Weishaupt]

So the problem is that Civ chooses to be realistic while it is also unrealistic? Is it thought the degree to which it is "unrealistic" is by the sloppy ineptitude of the Firaxis team, as opposed to that also being a choice? I still see this as the imposition of history on judgements about economics. Never mind that most of the time arguments about history stem from warped notions of what actually happened in the past. Even if all criticisms on this front sprung from people knowing as much about history as they claim, those complaints tend not to be criticisms of the economic model.

If it helps, Unimatrix11, think of Civ as taking place on "Civworld" instead of a historic Earth, then reassess. I'm glad to see M.U.L.E. brought into this, because that was a groundbreaker, and, like Civ, it happened to be tremendous fun while providing a model that made good use of supply and demand as well as capitalist competition. The auction procedure in it made it possible to gain advantages over rivals in a variety of ways, but the context of a fledgling colony also created thresholds beyond which excessive competition would leave everyone worse for prioritizing immediate gains over sustainable behaviors.

To hear some of these people speak, M.U.L.E. couldn't possibly contain elements of an economic simulator because it condenses everything down to four commodities and six ways to spend money (with four of those being variations on equipment.) M.U.L.E. was about as simple as the original Civilization board game, making it far more simple than the first computerized Civilization. Yet it contained a sound economic simulation in spite of being about 40K of code and data, with much of that used to define the graphics.

Civ does not do much with supply and demand, but it does all sorts of things with dozens of other significant economic concepts. Yet again and again people get lost in the smoke and mirrors of their own analysis. Take all this stuff about banking. What makes that technology significant has nothing to do with the central banks of governments. It has to do with the rise of civilization from a state where median earners still tended to barter often and save only through the accumulation of property, with retirement security being a matter of having many children, to a state where median earners relied much more heavily on currency, had access to credit, tended to accumulate savings at an institutional level, etc.

Those changes are clearly what Banking technology and Banks represent in the game, but to reach that conclusion it is important to go beyond looking at the pictures and to assess the meaning of those features in the game. Again and again it seems that people rail against Civ's economic model for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual workings of the model and everything to do with willful misinterpretations of how it works. In order to judge this thing sensibly, the focus must be on how it works rather than what it looks like when rendered by the graphics engine.

To revisit M.U.L.E. for a moment, a well-played turn always ended with a visit to the pub to earn gambling proceeds. If we get hyperliteral then the game could be attacked for teaching that gamblers always win money. If we look at how the model actually works, we can see that those pub visits served as an abstraction to compensate characters industrious enough to retain some spare time and dedicate it to the pursuit of supplemental income. One approach makes no sense and flies in the face of reality, while the other makes good sense and fits in nicely with the rest of the model. When it comes to Civ, I see a lot of people choosing bad interpretations for purposes of propping up criticism, which is an incredibly poor alternative to choosing fair interpretations -- based on how the economic model actually operates rather than how the game is decorated -- then passing judgement on that much more useful and relevant level.

Regards,
Adam Weishaupt