Economic Model II

[Mark_Everson]

Simon:

I hope you agree with Gary's distinction between your two inital points: start-up nomadic behavior, and later migration/conquest due to population exceeding the carrying capacity of the homeland etc. We certainly plan to have migrating peoples be an important factor in Clash, just as it has been in the real world. There has already in the past been substantial discussion on how to handle migration that you can probably find using the search function.

Perhaps it was just nomenclature, but the distinction both Gary and I are making is between hunter-gatherer (which I don't think anyone would want to play as explained above) and pastoralists like the Mongols. A third type of 'nomad' is a more modern migrant group leaving because they have become refugees etc. For each of pastoralists and 'migrants' we need to come up with rules as to how they function.

Gary:

The point you make about the interrelation between pastoralists and 'settled' civs to trade with sounds reasonable to me. I think this effect (pastoralists needing to trade or take certain items) may come straight out of the econ model once I define exactly how the pastoralist economy differs from that of settled civs. Stay tuned!

[Simon Loverix]

I still think there have been migrations of a complete civilization. Nearly all Germanic tribes (they were settled) broke with their homeland and travelled across Europe during the next century, going as far as North Africa. Only the Franks were more cautious, and did their journey in two parts.
It was more than individual people who left their community. Instead, whole communities were on the move. Afterwards, new empires existed almost everywhere, be it with largely the same population as before. And the start of all this was the invasion of the Huns, whatever their motive might have been.

[Gary Thomas]

I agree that there is some evidence for whole peoples migrating, but they didn't do it because of overpopulation. It wouldn't make sense, when your population became too great to vacate lands.

In fact the "barbarian" incursions into Europe were either raiding armies, or peoples displaced by more warlike invaders.

Cheers

[Simon Loverix]

Whatever the reason, it certainly happened and it had a great impact, by replacing the leaders of the conquered areas. In Europe it gave a nice German/Gallo-Roman cultural mix. Only christianity had to be added and all major contributions would have been made.
And of course, they would have stayed home if the Roman Empire hadn't been in such a sorry state. If they did, we would now speak neo-Latin, or pidgin Arab .

We can generate from the start a number of larger tribes (hunter-g) and then pick a few (on the best spots). These tribes become civilizations and the game starts. After that, once every, say, 1000 years one of these becomes a civilization. Players who want a challenge can start later. You will have a broad range of fresh and maturing to ancient civilizations throughout the game.
Another use: now and then such a tribe 'goes nomadic', probably bringing major upheaval to the settled world.

Nomadic civs only at the fringes is very good. They also want luxury goods, but cannot produce them and therefore have to obtain them by trade or raids. Unfortunately, they usually haven't much to trade with either..

[Gary Thomas]

The book "The Emergence of Agriculture" (Bruce D. Smith, Scientific American Library) follows the emergence of agriculture, using recent detailed archeological data. It appears that agriculture emerged (around 10,000 year ago in the Middle East) on settled sites that had been previously established on the basis of harvesting wild plants or animals in the area. It is an extremely interesting book.

This fits in well with your suggestion of staggered emergence of civilizations (if we accept that "civilizations", in this sense, equates with "agricultural settlements").

Nomadic civs only at the fringes is very good. They also want luxury goods, but cannot produce them and therefore have to obtain them by trade or raids. Unfortunately, they usually haven't much to trade with either..

They actually did very well, right through into Roman times, by trading animal products, either livestock for meat, or hides. They also traded products that were sometimes available in their area - furs and ivory are a couple of examples. In some cases, particularly in the Mongol era, a symbiotic relationship existed between nomads (animal products), agricultural people (grain, mainly) forest people (wood) with a scattering of mining settlements.

Cheers

[Simon Loverix]

Yes, that's true, and they also acted as traders between settled areas on each side of the area they frequented (the Arabs).
In case of the Mongols, when they conquered the surrounding agricultural societies, they took strong measures in favor of trade (better and patrolled roads, less tolls, ..). Later, when the empire fell apart again, the mongol dynasties were culturally 'absorbed' by the peoples they ruled.

In terms of models, maybe nomadic civs have more merchant agents. The cultural influence can be handled by shifting the numbers of the cultural attitudes a bit.

I think the vital point for being a civilization, is the presence of a surplus in production that is controlled by the leading figure/class.

[Yoav_Sissman]

I agree with the several last above posts on nomadic civilizations.

I think that pasturing may have significant advantages in large maps and while the world is relatively unsettled; Perhaps we can introduce this concept into the game, by allowing increased gains from farm sites for a limited period after they are left barren for enough time.

So the nomads will be able to enjoy better agricultural results due to pasturing/hunting/gathering.

This probably belongs in another thread, but since the nomads don't have steady jobs and their lifestyle and culture encourages military might, they should be able to recruit large armies of good quality in a relatively short time and small investment.

They will obtain knowledge on a relatively large part of the world, which will allow them to be the first to know of good terrain, special resources and weak civs that can be plundered.

Their mobility will allow them broad borders (relatively to their numbers) so they will be able to trade with other civs that are outside their boundaries (or tax foreign merchants).

I agree that a nomadic civ won't progress much so this can't be a victory strat; On the other hand, it will be against the spirit of the game to have it based on settled civs only (and perhaps some barbarians).

This is why we can decide that in games that begin in the times of the first civilizations (and not 1000 BC) all civs start as nomads; They than have to choose between settling down right away and continuing to wander for a while, until they find a satisfactory location. This somewhat resembles civ2, where the player start with his first settler rather than town.

Some computer players should perhaps stay nomadic indefinitely, even though they will never win the game.

I'm not sure we should allow a civ to become nomadic after it has settled down; There are few examples in history of an immigration of a complete nation, even when the situation became very troublesome in their homeland.


On to a completely different subject, I understood from the model that some special resources, such as salt, will add a bonus to the food supply. I thinks that such an implementation of them will miss the true meaning of spices and other food-related special resources; They have little or no nutritional value (salt is required by the human body but only in small quantities that are naturally found in agricultural products anyway).

This may have been discussed and decided upon already, but I think that those special resources should have their effect directly on the people happiness level.


A third issue I would like to comment about is the rate of return on investments. I understood from the model that private investments will be made while they are supposed to yield 10% interest per turn; Is this done regardless of the populace income level?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Yoav, an official welcome to the forums

My current plans for the nomadic economy is to treat it with the same utility function as farming. With very little capital invested, subsistence will be available for about the right population densities historically had by nomads. Although I might need to throw in some special rules for herding to make the tech results representative of what nomadic peoples make progress in, which is quite different from where settled peoples make the breakthroughs.

Salt is a bonus to food because of its value as a Preservative. Its the primitive version (along with smoking) of canning for meats. I was planning on having things like spices function as you say, directly going into services (usually at first for the wealthy) and indirectly making them happier.

The ROI of 10% was just part of an example. Nothing is final in regard to which investments the people will find attractive, and the value for a civ will depend on its culture and environment among other things TBD.

[Yoav_Sissman]

I appreciate the quick response.

Your plans concerning nomads sound fine to me. I guess that we can overcome the unique pasturing qualities since the farming utility function already places a significant weight on the number of farm sites used, so a thinly stretched population that resemble the wandering tribes will get its bonuses. Also, since every turn in the game represents a long period of real time there is no need to represent seasonal wandering.

Also I agree with the spices concept; it’s just that I thought that they are all like salt.


Since the rate of return subject isn't concluded yet I would like to raise several ideas for discussion.

Investments, much like consumption, can be either public or private. The advantage of the first kind is that the ruler has complete control over it and can guide it to rely on his information and match his goals. The advantage of the latter is that it is made more efficiently, because the guy that is responsible for the investment also expects to enjoy its returns.

The simplest way to implement the disadvantage of government investment is by deciding on an arbitrary adjustment to the cost of all government operations. We may choose to use the same factor that was proposed for the inefficiency of public consumptions - 80% (that was offered to represent the fact that not everybody gets exactly what he wants). This way all government purchases and investments will cost 25% (1/80%) more then they would have if they were to be done by the private sector. We may allow this percentage to vary depending on the social qualities of the people and their government, but I believe that a constant rate will also fill that purpose fairly realistically.

Now lets discuss the advantages of public spending, and start with a discussion of what motivates our civ citizens to invest.

Basically every household has a given amount of available income (after taxes) to spend on his private consumption and to invest in his business. Actually in the real world the people also own financial assets and debts, but I think we better disregard them on this for the sake of simplicity (for the same reason we ignore inflation).

I think we should assume, that the people consume as much as their income that is needed to keep them in subsistence level without any regard to their future. The rest of their combined free income is invested in real assets if they expect to achieve at least a certain rate of return for their investment. Otherwise it's also consumed.

That rate of return can depend on the amount of risk involved (increase with risk) and on social factors, perhaps most impotently the level of lifestyle (decrease when consumed income rises).

The amount of risk likely depends on the following factors:

(1) The government and political stability. Is it possible that the government will confiscate all private property in the foreseen future? Is it possible that there will be a revolt or that the current government will be overthrown and replaced with a government that will do so?

(2) Geopolitical situation. Is it wartime or peaceful times? Is our civ winning or loosing? Is our province near the combat zone? Is it likely to fall into enemy hands? What kind of an enemy is it? This kind of uncertainty can be reduced if the government offers compensation to its civilians for war-damages and as far as we don't expect so much destruction that the government won't be able to do so.

(3) Type of investment. Infrastructure is generally safer than merchants, which are in turn safer than armies (if we will decide to implement private armies, and I don't think we will).

Having said all that it is obvious that often the government will want to intervene in those investing priorities, to encourage people to invest in the suburbs, etch. We can now discuss the ways in which it can do that.

(1) Taxes and subsidies. That was already explained.

(2) Government investing. That is probably the quickest way but it will result in the penalty discussed above. The player will be able to set his policy in the civ level, province level, or drill down to specific investments.

I think we better ignore the influence on the rate of return that can be made by changing the amounts of money available to the markets, as we ignore other monetary issues.

We should notice the fundamental difference between public investments and private ones; Public spending benefits the entire population while private ones are meant to benefit individuals. Despite that, it seems that we generally ignore the class differences in our economic model and I would like to keep it that way and leave that issue to the social model.

How do we consider effects that don't have a direct economical value to the investor for the purpose of calculating the expect rate of return? That issue was discussed earlier, and is indeed troublesome. We should keep in mind that when the investment is private, the non-financial benefits are irrelevant. The private investors don't care about the safety, education, happiness or health of the people, unless they are going to get paid to supply it.

Does anyone still follows?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Yoav:

I'm not sure how much time I'll have to respond, so first I'll tell you about a thread you should look over. (You may have found it already) It discusses some of the general issues that you're talking about. One thread is: Proposal for a Complete Infrastructure Model by Axi. I don't agree with his formulation completely, but you can learn a lot about where the design was at that point (it hasn't changed greatly since). Other threads that may be useful are: Demo 5 Econ Model and Government - Economic models interconnections .

This should give you the background to know where discussions have been on many of the things you are interested in.

I need to tell you right now that I'm no longer participating in long discussions of things we might do with the various models unless we are ready to implement... That's because its all too easy for me to get sucked into design discussions -- but my limited time is better spent in actually implementing things or discussion of things about to be implemented. (And my Clash time has unfortunately been Very limited of late.)

So with that, I'll try to respond briefly to some of your points!

Public vs Private investments are good, and we have them. As to whether they should cost different we will leave to playtesting.

I agree in principle with most of the other points you make, although who knows about specific implementation. Most of them are likely not to be implemented until D7 or later.

On your final point about investments without direct monetary value, I believe we should just Define a monetary value. The preferences machine that Axi talks about is another mechanism we will use for private spending allocation. Finally, for things like military units, we can define a function that gives a monetary equivalent depending on player orders, diplomatic and geopolitical concerns etc.

Hope this helps!

[axi]

Dropped in to say hi!

Hi Yoav! Do you feel worthy enough to continue the work from where I stopped? You can ask me anything, about my models, i'll try to reply.

Hi Mark! How is the project going? Is there any possibility that demo 5 will see the light?

[Yoav_Sissman]

Hello again all!

Marc,
Thanks again for the input. I'll try and hold my ideas until I get better aquainted with the existing design. Hopefully that will also allow me to locate the fields in which I can best assist the actuall development.

axi,
Let me get back to you on this...

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Axi! Well, all I know about D5 timing is its likeley to be a few weeks. But of course we know these predictions can fail to work out

[Simon Loverix]

nomads, again

The central Asian steppes were first inhabited by farmers, only later (when a decent horseback riding technology was developed) they became nomadic again, including the later Mongols. The Celtic tribes started migrating around 200 BC because they lost their profitable trade position to the region north of the Alps (and they were more inclined to do so because of their war-like culture).

[Gary Thomas]

The Urnfield Folk were a Celtic people who inhabited northern Europe, specifically eastern France, western Germany, spreading into eastern Germany and across the Alps into the Po valley, and other parts of Europe. They had a concentration in the Danube basin. They were a farming folk living in small communities who were also skilled in bronze working. They flourished in the period 1200-700BC. This information is from the book "The Celtic Empire" by Peter Ellis.

Cheers