Current state of merchant agents?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Yoav:

Yep, that's the way it works right now. It is one of the things F_Smith convinced me to try for good or ill. The basic logic is that infrastructure needs to be associated with a square since territory can change hands by square. And if you need the infrastructure there, might as well do the production that way too. Another advantage is that players can't play games with province size to make the economy work better just by moving lines on the map. They could do that if all goods were distributed throughout the province for free.

Playtesting will tell if there are problems with the current approach. But don't worry, the player really doesn't need to do anything active to make trade work. Just not tax it so heavily that it disappears. Since the square-level economy is already coded, I'm not changing it until problems are found with the way its done now. Too many other things to do!

[Yoav Sissman]

OK, if the CPU can handle it (and will continue to do so even in the final game) then I don't see any problems.

We should just keep in mind that local merchants, while having the same rules that long range merchants adhere to, have different characteristics.

Local trade requires a smaller investment and is generally a less risky business (so it doesn't need a big ROI to be worthwhile) even in the ancient world.

Normally we'll want to make sure that no grain is rotting in one map square while ppl starve in the next one, excluding wars or other special conditions.

[Mikael]

Normally we'll want to make sure that no grain is rotting in one map square while ppl starve in the next one, excluding wars or other special conditions.

But I think this should be a possible event, to a certain extent, if infrastructure is insufficient, or if the player has no real control over that particular province (example: local warlords warring against each other...). AFter all, a map square is 100kms long, and if you have absolutely no roads between two squares, how could you transport food from one province to another?

By the way, I have a somewhat basic question that didn't turn up anything satisfying with the search engine... How is province size variability determined? How can the player modify province boundaries? How do they change without any player intervention? None of the models I have read really seem to deal with this... But maybe I have missed something big? Thanks.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Yoav Sissman
OK, if the CPU can handle it (and will continue to do so even in the final game) then I don't see any problems.

Well, that of course is TBD, but I think it will work ok.

Normally we'll want to make sure that no grain is rotting in one map square while ppl starve in the next one, excluding wars or other special conditions.

I'm with Mikael... historically it Has happened quite frequently that famine persisted relatively near to other places with quite adequate food. Even 100km or less away, I believe. The issues are transportation infrastructure, and the market power of the starving or societal will to get them food.

Originally posted by Mikael
How is province size variability determined? How can the player modify province boundaries? How do they change without any player intervention?

This is mostly TBD. My thoughts right now are to let the player set provinces for land they control only limited by tranportation capability from the province capital to a province square, with a few squares allowed to exceed this limit by a limited amount so that a few odd squares off in a corner don't need to be their own province. This is one of the areas where we will rely on playtesting a lot to fix the balance between reality and fun.

(I have cross-posted this both in econ and govt threads. Please put any response in one of those.)

[Gary Thomas]

See my comments in the government thread.

Cheers

[Yoav Sissman]

I think that historically local famine could persist due to war, social isolation of the starving populace, lasting plagues, or government prevention of trade. Maybe there's other possible causes for this that I'm forgetting. In other conditions every local merchant could load a small caravan and garnish a handsome profit.

Of course that transportation infrastructure should have its impact on the cost of traveling, and as such influence the agent's profit margin and his willingness to embark in the voyage. Naturally transportation's importance will increase with distance, so if one part of a province consists mainly of mines and the other parts are more suitable for agriculture then there should be no hunger even with map square based supplyn' demand.

[Simon Loverix]

A question about road infra: when going from square A to square B, the infra of which square is used? (B I suppose)

black market and smuggling:
advantage: don't pay tariffs
disadvantage: trader may be 'deleted' with high law enforcement and military presence

pirates:
just TF's running loose, but with a high chance of having a character as leader.

Province trade:
This should depend on the amount of food available, transport infra and transport tech. And only for food. Other things will be the domain of large-scale merchants. So we could figure out the food distribution for a province based on the above three factors, to avoid having so much small merchants with predictable effects. Since province size and shape will be linked to transport facilities, one could easily assume food transport won't be a problem either. Trading food between provinces (regardless of civ, but with tariffs appropriate) or armies will still be a merchant task.

Exploration:
Traders normally keep their trade routes secret, except when they are paid for revealing them. When a city is the node of a trade network, the information of its existence will be passed down the trade network. ('This silk comes from Chengdu, an enormous Chinese city of marvelous wealth. - Wow. I'll buy it so I can boast against my rivals.') This could be shown by showing only the name, and later the mapsquare on the right place of the map. A government can then hire a character to explore a possible route to that city.

[Gary Thomas]

What is "road infra"?

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Simon:

Did you mean road infra (local roads) or just roads with your question? Anyway taking you to mean just roads, I assume Gary will work it so that when moving from A to adjacent square B each road segment (that in A, and that in B) will have the specified effect given the terrain and road travel distance.

Province trade:
This should depend on the amount of food available, transport infra and transport tech. And only for food.

.

If I understand what you're saying I don't agree with it. Food should not be handled uniquely IMO, and many provinces will be too large for easy food transport. Food is one of the hardest things to move around. If my merchant concept turns out to be impractical, we might fall back to something like you suggest, but I don't think it will be necessary.

Your other ideas sound reasonable. I'm not sure about the details for all these things. Since the issues are further off in terms of implementation, I've got to go focus on demo 5.1 .


Gary: Check out this post to see about my ideas for handling local roads with a road infra class. That may be overly ambitious, and all we need is an overall "Commercial Infrastructure" class that could include all of: local roads and canals, power grids, water and sewer systems etc. We just have to see what seems the best balance in playtesting.

[Yoav Sissman]

Transporting Services

This probably have been discussed in the past to some extent, but I wasn't able to trace the discussion.

I can see how food and production units can be just carried around, but can someone explain to me how the merchants transport services?

As I understood, Sp units represent work that is being done , not materials. Now since every square width is 100 km I don't see many people live in one square and work more then a few squares away (unless traveling is part of the job). In today's world people can sometime do that using advanced communications, but more often then not this is not the case.

I can see people migrate to get a better job (especially if they are slaves ), and the rules of supply and demand can and should be used to model that, but the considerations people have here are quite different then those merchants have, and belong in the migrations submodel.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Yoav:

Services are handled in a unique way in the Clash Economy. Here is an edited quote from the Economy web page.

To simplify the economic system I propose that the price of services should always be set at 1 currency unit. For now I will simply refer to the currency unit as the CC for Clash Cash or simply C to save typing. Among the four sectors in Clash's simple economy, services are the one that is least tied to the land. Also, some services, like artworks are much easier to transport per unit value than goods in the other sectors. I could raise several other arguments, but I would rather hear what people have to say about this. If I don't use services as the unit of exchange, I'm not sure how to set the unit of exchange for a simple model economy like exists in Clash. Opinions and suggestions welcome.

The equivalence between services and money allows the government to take its taxes out of the province in units of currency. All that it needs to do is to trade the food and production part of its take for services. This trading will have consequences in terms of structure of the economy. If "cash taxation" goes on for a while, eventually the people will make more services than they themselves would want in order to have enough excess to pass onto the government.

Essentially I picked services as the medium of exchange (and so implicitly easily transportable) because it seemed to give more realistic results compared to using one of the other sector goods (Food and Mfg. Goods). I freely admit it is not correct in simulating how the real world works, although for low amounts of services trade I don't think its too inaccurate. Its just one of those tradeoffs made to get the Clash economy to run in a reasonable, if not perfect way.

[Yoav Sissman]

Thanks for the explanation.

I knew that services were used as the global measure of wealth, but the understanding that transporting them was free escaped my mind.

I can't think of a better solution either.

[Simon Loverix]

So large roads and local roads are handled separately?

I suggested limiting food trade to reduce the number of merchants needed because the food wouldn't be transported far. Also to avoid several types of merchants: one could assume it is small-scale initiative to sell their excess to make a penny. Merchants and taxes would still come first. And if there's anything left then, and they can still sell it..

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Simon Loverix
So large roads and local roads are handled separately?

That's the current plan...

I suggested limiting food trade to reduce the number of merchants needed because the food wouldn't be transported far. Also to avoid several types of merchants: one could assume it is small-scale initiative to sell their excess to make a penny. Merchants and taxes would still come first. And if there's anything left then, and they can still sell it..

Ah, so I did misunderstand what you were saying before. My vision for the local merchants is that they would just use a simple algorithm to spread locally-available surplusses over the province. The local merchant would look at surplusses and needs across the province and then do as much as possible given transport capabilities and costs. Rather than figure out precise routes and commodities bought and carried I would just do this using a quick-and-dirty approximation.

[colorrr]

Having skimmed this thread, it seems the Merchant documentation on the site needs to be updated.

While reading I also played with some ideas. I get the impression that this model is already implemented, and some of this is already covered, but here goes:

* The merchant operates from his province to other provinces, which could be the same civ or another civ. Another civ would give more potential income. Another race/religion/cultre could also give boosts.

* The merchant starts with a certain amount (with a +/- 10(?) % randomizer) fo money which he invests in bying some stuff and selling it in another place, and as the specs say, he tries to find a valuable commodity to trade.

* When the merchant starts out he does not have much impact on the civ economy as his net worth is not that much. For every trade route, the total gain gets divided in percentage between various factors. That means some part of the gain goes to the merchant himself (raising his net worth and making him more powerful), some part go as taxes to augment the civ economy (variable by the player setting taxes), some part goes to hire guards, workers, some goes to corruption/black market (depending upon civ type/racial traits/social level etc), some to warehouse maintenance. When the merchant starts out he could only have one route, but as his net worth raises by the money generated per turn, he'll get a nice pool of savings. He can try to set up (controlled by AI) another route. Setting up a new route could also be a failure, making that merchant suffer a setback.

* The merchant could have reference to social class/race taking some of the traits of these into account in different calculus. F.instance a merchant from an aggresive race would be more prone to set up risky, long but profitable routes instead of shorter, safer but low value ones. Maybe some cultures/races trade better than others, some don't trade at all.

I think the merchants should be abstract, not moving on the map, neither should it be possible to see the path. Each merchant should just list his trade routes in a simple from (with x goods) to ( with x goods).