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Infrastructure in the Clash Economic System
The infrastructure system in Clash will be one of the most important
ways that the player can guide their civilization. It will allow
the player to emphasize, above other priorities, religion, education, or
a number of other things. I think all this can be handled on a civilization-wide
basis, avoiding the need, as in civ2, of every city/province explicitly
having its own library, marketplace, temple, etc. The Player will,
if desired, also be able to "drill down" and fine-tune infrastructure
on a per-province basis. Making changes in the infrastructure priorities
of the civilization should in fact be so easy that our main problem may
be keeping the player actively engaged in this aspect of the game.Â
This will probably require some sort of feedback to the player about how
their particular infrastructure strategy is playing out fairly often.
Depending upon their culture, the people in the civ will desire a variety
of goods and services. Among them are housing, entertainment, healthcare,
religious institutions, education, and other things. So it will be
possible to have a culture that invests more in education that usual, at
the expense of, for instance, buying consumer goods. The player can also
influence the people's desires through either subsidizing or taxing some
of the people's spending on infrastructure. In addition, the government,
if it has enough power, can simply mandate the amount of spending in a
given area. The people will then receive the government-mandated
level of services regardless of what their desire for them is. However,
if done in more than a few selected areas, this is generally a lousy way
to run an economy.
Note: this writeup assumes that you have read the proposed economic
system.
In the same way that the people or the government can invest in production
capacity for the various economic sectors (food, resources, produced goods,
and services), they can also invest in infrastructure of different types.Â
The investments can be either in physical infrastructure, or institutional
infrastructure. Physical infrastructure consists of things like transportation
infrastructure, housing, healthcare facilities, and defense/military infrastructure.Â
Institutional infrastructure covers educational and religious institutions,
as well as banking systems etc. A list of the infrastructure categories
that I've got so far are in the table below.
Each infrastructure class is handled at the provincial level for bookkeeping
purposes. However, typically the player will only have to deal with
infrastructure on a civ-wide level. Each infrastructure class is
modeled crudely like a storage container. A resource is put into
the container, and the benefits therein can be drawn upon either immediately
or at a later date. The amount of resource in the container also suffers
shrinkage for a variety of reasons. In other words, some amount of
constant investment is needed to keep the infrastructure at the same level.Â
For instance, using education as an example, services (of teachers, and
time spent by students) are invested to give an education level.Â
This education level will provide a variety of economic and other benefits
to the civ. However, without future investment this education level will
slowly shrink as those educated previously grow older and die, or as what
they've learned becomes outdated. So, in the ancient world where
average life expectancy might be 40 years, giving a useful life of education
investment of about 30 years, the shrinkage rate for education would be
about 3%. I call education a persistent investment, because the use
of its benefits to society does not reduce the education level. The only
way the education level is reduced is by shrinkage.
Not all infrastructure classes are persistent. The opposite type
I call consumed. An example of a consumed type is the "social safety
net" class. This represents charity, like food for the hungry, services
for the destitute, etc. The food aspects would be similar to the function
of a granary. When the stored food is used, that much of the level
is used up. These social safety net functions can be fulfilled by
the people themselves, governments, or religious institutions, or some
mixture of these.
So, to sum up, each infrastructure class has an input, a shrinkage rate,
and an output that is either persistent or consumed. Changes in technology
can have effects on this system into different ways. Better technology
can leverage the value of the input, or change the shrinkage rate.Â
So, for instance, if a civ discovers the alphabet, the services put into
the education area would get a bonus, perhaps a 50% bonus. The "social
safety net" shrinkage rate might change due to the discovery of canning,
which would make stored food much less susceptible to spoilage. As
healthcare improves, and expected life span rises, the decay rate for education
would also, as a consequence, fall.
If we assume that the government isn't intervening in the investment
decisions of the people for now, how do the people know what kind of infrastructure
they should buy to make them happiest? The table below summarizes
the information I've given so far for the infrastructure classes that I
have at the moment (suggestions welcome). Things aren't completely
worked out here, but at least this can serve as a basis for discussion.Â
The second column shows roughly on average how the people spend money not
allocated for food. So, other things being equal, they would spend
10% of the non-food amount on durable goods. I've adapted these figures
from the research paper, "Fundamental Similarities in Consumer Behavior"
by K. Clements and D. Chen, Applied Economics 28(6) 1996 p747. The figures
here are obviously somewhat skewed toward representing modern economies.Â
If we go with this basic system we will also need to figure out the numbers
that might apply for an ancient or medieval economy. The input column
shows how much of which of the basic commodities is necessary to purchase
a single unit of the infrastructure class. So, for durable goods, each
unit costs one production point. For religious infrastructure the
unit cost is two-thirds services and one-third production point. When you
purchase a unit of the infrastructure class its level would increase by
one. When the prices in the province are known you can figure a purchase
price for each of the infrastructure types. The column that says "example
price" uses one illustrative example from a province that has low availability
of finished goods. The remainder of the columns just summarizes information
about typical shrinkage rates etc. as discussed above. Don't worry, the
player will never have to deal directly with these numbers.
People's Investment Profile Table
Can someone who knows HTML tell me why there's this huge space here?
| Infrastructure class | average | non-food | Example | Shrinkage | Persistant/ | Game |
| % used | Input | Price * | (decay) % | Consumed | Effects | |
| social safety net (charity) | 5 | (f+p+s)/3 | 1.33 | 5 | c | RU |
| education | 5 | s | 1 | 5 | p | IP, AG, +… |
| religion | 5 | (2s+p)/3 | 1.33 | 2 | p | RU |
| clothing & miscellaneous | 20 | (2p+s)/3 | 1.66 | 0 | c | RU |
| housing | 15 | (p+s)/2 | 1.5 | 3 | p | RU, IP |
| durable goods | 10 | p | 2 | 10 | p | RU, IP |
| health care / water infra. | 5 | s | 1 | 15 | p | IL, RD, Lg. C |
| transportation | 15 | (2p+s)/3 | 1.66 | 5 | p | IP |
| recreation | 10 | s | 1 | 50 | p | RU |
| economic infrastructure | 0 | s | 1 | 7 | p | IP |
| military infrastructure | 0 | (p+s)/2 | 1.5 | 7 | p | |
| investment | 10 | Varies | Varies | N/A | N/A |
* Example for prices per unit. If f=1, p=2, s=1, prices are as shown
RU - reduces unhappiness, IP - increases productivity
AG - Makes advanced governments possible
IL - increase lifespan, RD - reduces disease
Lg. C - necessary for large cities >50k people
To figure out what infrastructure people buy, the computer will start
with their after-tax income. This explanation involves knowing a little
bit about the proposed economic system. If you haven't read it, or
don't care about the mathematical details just skim this part. Suppose
the people in this province have after-tax amounts of food = 100, produced
goods = 20, and services = 60. This kind of availability of the commodities
might result in the prices used in the example. After they've eaten
the food, the people have produced goods = 20, and services = 60 to spend
on the things they want. Note that because we're handling the desires of
all the people together this could simulate either a barter economy or
a market economy. At the prices given in the example of s=1C and p=2C the
total value after-food is 100C (=20x2C +60x1C)Â If the government
doesn't intervene in the pricing, the people will simply pay the percentage
of that 100C left that's shown in the second column for each type.Â
For instance they would spend 15% x 100C = 15C on housing.Â
At the price of 1.5 per unit this would buy 10 units of housing.Â
This extremely simple simulated economy takes into account the fact that
the people will change the number of units they want of each type depending
upon its price. In this area where housing is expensive to produce,
the people will spend more for instance on entertainment (recreation) and
less on housing than they might someplace else.
And because the people alter their buying habits depending on the price
of an item, there is an easy way for the government to influence the balance
between say, education and recreation spending. If the government
wants to put more of an emphasis on education, it can subsidize the peoples
purchases of education. This of course will cost the government money,
so it's not a "no-brainer". One thing the government could do is
to subsidize education while taxing (making more expensive) recreational
spending by the people. The tax revenues from recreation could then be
used to help pay for the subsidy on education. If the central authority
of the government is high enough, and the people are sufficiently happy
to be able to take the happiness penalty of reduced recreational availability
without serious rebellion, this might be a good move. This can all
be handled by the player with the few keystrokes. Compare this to
what you have to do in Civ to emphasize education (tech). There you
would have to change the plans in every single city to build a library
there for instance.
I haven't discussed roads at all so far. Some of the transportation
infrastructure money would be used to build things like roads, bridges,
canals, and railroad track. Things like roads and railways will probably
be mostly built by the people themselves. If they are not doing it
quickly enough the government could probably either subsidize these activities
to some extent, or pay for them directly itself. I think with the
AI in Clash that is dedicated to understanding geography, "the people"
can do a reasonable job on road and rail networks. For areas outside
the provinces proper, engineers of some type will be available to construct
roads that the player has drawn in and assigned a priority to.
There are some specifics of this model that I have chosen not to go
into right now. And clearly if we're going to use it, it needs a
lot of work yet. But I wanted to put it up and see what people's
general thoughts were about it. Remember that one bonus of this system,
is that the player who isn't all that interested in the economy will not
do too badly if it is just left on its own. At least if that player
can refrain from seriously over-taxing the people. For those of us who
are more inclined toward tweaking the economy and infrastructure types
within it, this system provides a very simple way to achieve that.Â
What you think?
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 23, 1999).]
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