Economic Development Model - Opinions Please?

[Richard Bruns]

The "god" mode is a good idea, especially for scenario making. Don't forget that a theocratic government with high popularity might have some of thise powers anyway.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Twinge:

I agree with Richard that the "God Mode" could be interesting. It would also be useful for stress-testing the system during playtesting!
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited December 19, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Just a quick note for how something works in the Econ model...

How secondary production sectors are handled in the Econ model

First of all, a secondary sector is a sector that requires inputs from another sector to produce anything.

So the manufacturing sector (called Production) requires inputs of resources to make things, so it's a
secondary sector. I will use production, and its input resources as an example here.
These are the steps that a secondary sector uses to produce its stuff...

1. In the beginning of the turn during the production phase, the production sector uses
resources that it purchased the previous turn. That resource is used up, although it's possible
some could be stockpiled for the next turn.

2. When the trading phase is done the production sector buys as much of the newly made resource as it wants.
For now I just have it buying all that is available, since resources have no other value in the economy.

3. When income for the production sector is calculated the cost of the inputs just bought is taken into account.

I think this will work fine, although there are some possible glitches if the amount of resources changes radically from turn to turn.

[Richard Bruns]

Why don't we calculate it all in the same turn? Stuff doesn't just sit around for five years waiting to be used; the "primary" and "secondary" production really happen simultaneously. It seems that this kind of lag might hurt the mechanics and confuse or annoy the players. Lags like that in mathematical models tend to generate sinusoidal oscillations in output.

For example, assume that we are running a market economy and that an excess of coal is produced in turn 200. The price of coal would then drop a lot, so in turn 201 there is very little coal produced. This means that there will be a serious coal shortage in the trading phse of turn 201, so the secondary production phase in turn 202 will have very low output. So thanks to the lag, a coal glut has the potential to cause seroius shortages two turns down the line, and playerw might not know what the problem is. That could be quite frustrating.

Could we calculate the primary sector production first, then the trading phase, then the secondary producation? That way the amount of coal made will directly affect the amount that factories can be run that turn. I think players would be happier with that.

[axi]

I kinda agree with Rich on this. Resources should be produced, traded and used up in the same turn. However one should be able to keep stores of F,R, and P (but maybe not S) with a certain amount of decay applied each turn.

This has a meaning when one foresees the loss of a big source of F or R next turn (f.e. invasion) or a bigger than usual rise in industrial capacity or an external trade deal. Otherwise, given the type of the production function we use, there is no reason to with hold resources.

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[Mark_Everson]

Hi gents:

Thanks for the criticisms! I got more than I bargained for (Sorry LGJ I missed your comments in this post because I was writing while you posted...)

I understand the points, and agree with their validity. I admit I was a little woried about stability even when I wrote out my draft of the Secondary Production model. OTOH Real economies do show these types of behaviors at times, so I don't think my original model is completely screwed up .

But to do what you guys want to do, things would need to be Very sophisticated.

Produce Others - Trade - Produce Secondaries would need to have a Lot of intelligence behind it, and also an additional trade phase after Produce secondaries to work. You'd need the second trade phase to be able to trade for Manufactured Goods themselves. And how do you trade resources for mfg. goods in your scheme Richard? By the time the cars are made the steel is probably gonna be all used up! In each trade phase you would also need a very good prediction of the final amount of each good the economy will produce, or you might make trades that weren't in your (or the peoples' best interests). So IMO this would require very good AI to make it work.

The difficulties above are why I decided provisionally to do it the way I discussed. Although it may have stability problems, It allows for sensible trading using everything the economy produces at one time, making it relatively simple. Personally I think if needed it would be fairly easy to put a patch of some sort on the stability problems.

And for the case that you suggest Axi, as long as we can limit 'ringing' after an abrupt transition, the only problem resulting from a change in overall supply level as a step function would be a transient in production amounts that doesn't have the right shape. I guess I'm just not that concerned about very minor glitches like that.

Perhaps a good solution that resolves all problems here does exist, but I don't think we've found it yet... We certainly have a long time to think about it before it needs to be solved. In the interim I've put a very trivial moving-average type filter on resource prices to help limit oscillations due to price shocks. I'm frankly not sure if this will help once trade starts being done...


[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited January 29, 2001).]

[axi]

IMO only practice with the economic game itself can prove any of this right or wrong. So Mark, please, as your coding progresses, please keep making posts such as this, describing the way you do things.

I also feel that too much detail (like in LGJ's post) is unnecessary and not-in-the-plans, am I right? Let's not forget the scale of the game and the fact that economic decisions will be olny a small part of what the player will be facing during a game turn. Simulating a real economy in it's every little detail is not what we want.

To explain myself: We are talking about an economy run in F/R/P/S. Special production types (that is, infraclasses) are not accounted for in their production, which means that they do not need specialised productive capacity for their sake, so we don't have "car factories", but "factories" in general.

Furthermore, while writing the infrastructure model, troubled myself with the accounting problem that the amounts of FPS produced and demanded by a certain province/civ are different, although their total value is the same. I had then said that this is what merchant activity is based on and that merchants would profit fron the difference in prices between two economies. Of course that would mean a need for balancing the sums of these quantities on a global scale and, if this is impossible, readjust prices and recalculate demand (I am referring to my discussion of supply based and demand based economies, in the infrastructure model).

IIRC, Mark's response to that is that, in that case, we should disregard balance in FPS and only take care of the monetary balance. Is that still the way the econ model is dealing with stuff?

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

[Mark_Everson]

Yep Axi, thats what I'm going with at the moment! Gotta run, or I'd say more. But I basically agree with your statements, and stated impressions.

[edit]
I don't think I have much to add after all Axi. I will try to get this stuff out ASAP so people can actually mess with it themselves.

LGJ:
On the warhouses issue, or granary vs the food you put in it, I was just discussing it like last week in Axi's infra thread. I'll quote it here:

quote: One other issue while I'm thinking about it. Some kinds of infra, as we're handling it, should really be what I think of as 2-stage. FE in the case of food storage the two stages are 1. build storage and 2. fill it with food. Because surplus food itself does no good unless you have an appropriate place to store it. Before I just combined some storage building in with food in the hope that it would average out, and not be too annoying . Does this two-stage infra strike you as a reasonable thing to include, or too detailed? It is especially important for building say battleships where you need 1. shipyard facilities before you can 2. build the ship. While we could finess the distinction in food, for military builds I think the 2-stage is fairly important. In summary, 2-stage is more complicated for the player and AI, but more realistic. Whatcha think?

Please discuss that topic further there, since this thread is about to exceed the 150-post limit anyway.

On you issue about the quality of goods, I think that's just getting way beyond scope for this game... we Might do quality/efficiency with weapons, and that is where I personally think we should draw the line.

This thread is now near the 150 post limit, and I'm closing it down. Further discussion should go in the Economic Model II thread.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited February 02, 2001).]

[Lord God Jinnai]

If we're going to be able to stockpile, which i think we should, there also needs to be in addition to the decay cost a monitary cost for storing and maintaining the resources at the lowest pssible rate of decay. This is turn could use up some of those resources (building a wooden warehouse to store lumber) also. Building warehouses on the scale of a magnitude to overcome a massive shortage and/or long-term invasion would require enough money put into building those warehouses and other sites that it would also need to be tracked, perhaps taking away from a couple of agricultural sites in the agri. part of this model.

Also if we are storing resources we should also be able, or sometimes forced to, store excess products such as cars and the resouce needed to produce them, say steel.

Finally with reguard to the latter part, those older products shouldn't have as high value in future markets and the AI should generally tend to buy the newer products unless it needs to conserve money, thus making those older products worth even less next turn. Decay also should happen to these and the player/AI should have the option of spending money to convert the products back into resources for other uses, but at a cost and usually not with 100% of the original product.