Economic Model II

[Lord God Jinnai]

I think the basis of whether a civilization goes back to nomadic is whether or not they can afford to feed their population as it is with farming, or if it would be better to go back to herding. This should have some qualifiers such as a lag effect, perhaps the destruction of a major city/captical that devestates their economy.

[Gary Thomas]

Is there any recorded case, in history, of an agricultural civilization reverting to a nomadic lifestyle? I don't know of any.

Cheers

[Simon Loverix]

As I said, the central Asian steppes (from the Caspian Sea to ) were inhabited by farmers, until around 1000 BC. These farmers could of course barely make a living, and herding was more profitable in their case ( from the moment they had the technology for wagons and horseback riding ) than ordinary farming. The fact that they lacked a significant wood supply certainly does matter.

Those area's were considered to be wilderness. The Chinese Wall was built to separate them from the mainland. Alexander founded a city called 'Alexandria Eschata', meaning 'the most remote Alexandria', since the land beyond it was quite unable to support sizable cities. In later days, there were cities (Karakorum, Bokhara, etc.) but they subsisted on supplies provided from the Mongol empire.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Alright he're my other post relating to 'Atlantis found' on TLC (and again, for those who didn't read my other post, Atlantis wasn't found).

While watching this i realized a way we could implement the agricultural aspect of higher yeilds with higher tech vs. the fact that not all regions use the same technique, take the case of the standard Euro-NA farming practices used in SA rainforest.

My idea is to keep track of the boimass quality,. rain/water quality and temperature as well as the Agriculture tech level. The way that this would be done is farming in a plains would would give you results Z based on the biomass A1 rain/water B1 and temp. C1. These people the move for one reason or another to a harsher enviroment where it floods 1/2 year and is in a drought the other half. They still would have the same tech level for agriculture, but based on how different A1. B1, and C1 are from A2, B2 and C2 then they will get a much worse result. As time goes by this will erode (as well as improvemnts do to tech level increases) till it would be at the optimum level.

[Mark_Everson]

Well, this is something you'd need to convince Simon to include in his model because he is just going to give me a sites number. My initial thought is, sure, its more realistic, but that the player doesn't get much out of it. If you are a player in one of the bad areas you are basically screwed, and there's not much you can do about your competitive disadvantage in agriculture. Where's the fun in that?

[Lord God Jinnai]

Actually if your a player in one of the bad areas to start off at, your at somewhat of an advantage if you can get your agriculturturale tech up. Hmm i guess we'd haveto make it harder to adaprt to harsher climates so that if you start of in one, it will be much easier for you to adapt to a less harsher one.

The reason this is important is because of yeilds vs. technology vs. terrain. Certain terrains cannot cope with certain farming techniques that produce the same yeilds and methods as 'traditional' farming uses. Some can produce more, if done propperly. A one-size-fits-all is IMO too unrealistic for the sake of gameplay. You can have it so that like i said, the player doesn't do anything when he moves. Its based mostly on agri tech level and tradtionalism of socitey as to how long it would take you to change, unless you were it a tightly controlled governmental structure.

[Simon Loverix]

The farming tech could be split up into three or six subtechs (artic farming ( ), temperate farming, tropical farming). The player would then be stimulated to expand parallel to the equator to keep farming yields in the same size. This is not something intuitively, so a player who doesn't know this rule would be confused 'why are their tropical farms yielding less than mine?'. Other than that, it also depends on the type of government. Is it a direct or an indirect rule? The first would replace government and give orders how, when, etc. to farm, while the latter would simply request X quantity in tribute, and who cares about how they get it.

I have some reservations about giving a site number only (but I'm not assuming anything more). Take the case of a river, for example the Nile. The lands aside the Nile get nutrients each year from the nutrients in the sediments delivered by the flooding of the Nile. If this is translated into a site bonus, in later ages it would be possible to boost the farming output even further via K, which includes (for a significant part) synth. fertilizers. Thus the agriculture would benefit twice from the one simulating factor, namely nutrition.
Now the Egyptians are using fertilizers and they're not reaping extraordinary yields. Why? The Aswan dam blocks off the sediments from the Upper Nile, effectively reducing the nutrient bonus for agriculture. This has forced the them to use fertilizer to keep their harvest at the same level as before. The benefits that stay are of course the water and the many years of flooding and farming, which has formed a good soil.
To represent these effects in-game, we could consider the bonus from river flooding a bonus to K (which would allow the Egyptians to have a bigger harvest with the same investments) apart from a small PBM bonus from the river and increased moisture.

Aside from that, I would propose to limit the invested K to the tech level and limit the applied tech level to the invested K.
This prevents huge investments in agriculture while there isn't the technological knowledge to be applied. For the largest part of history the workforce was what matterd most for the agricultural yields. The applied tech level would be low when the invested K would be low, since you might know all you want about fertilizers, mechanized farming and genetic engineering, it won't help a bit if you don't have the money to afford these fancy things.
I think these adjustments would make sense. Whether they are needed is another case. If the game is balanced enough it might keep a player (even when focusing on economical development) from reaching ridiculous levels of production way too soon. But they might even be necessary and/or useful to impose (partly) on the rest of the economy.. though that would take something away from the economy. But I imagine (given the production function) that the AI and somewhat experienced players rarely would invest above the point of diminishing return.

[Gary Thomas]

The book "Guns, Germs and Steel" makes an interesting point relevant to this discussion. Farming was developed in the Fertile Crescent and in the Americas (as well as some other places). In Eurasia it spread rather quickly east and west, to Europe and to the far east. It took a very long time to spread to South Africa. Similarly agriculture took a long time to spread across the tropical area of the Americas.

The point is that crops suited to one lattitude cannot spread across other, unsuitable, lattitudes. So, crops (and livestock) spread east and west, not north and south.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Simon:

I only have time for brief responses now, but I thought these might be better than nothing...

Six farming sub-techs: IMO realistic (as Gary says, talked about at length in GGS) but not fun, or at least not fun enough to put more baggage into the system

Farming depending on govt: Yes, I plan on some effects like you say. You can maybe get some idea from the D5 econ model, coming soon to a web page near you!

Your two points about K (farm kapital): There is diminishing returns associated with investment in K, so both the problems you see in the system are indeed there, but should be relatively minor. Kapital has diminishing returns to the power of 0.3 or less for the econ model sectors. The way productivity grows depends more strongly on the tech level which is not susceptible to the problems you cite. I can send you the tech spreadsheet if you want to look at how things work in detail.

Hope this helps

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well i think there needs to be something. For the sake of gameplay it makes it far to unbalanced otherwise. I mean if this were the real world scenerio where you didn't have that problem, we wouldn't have much problem with farming, esp in the tropics, like we do today. The major factor for clearcutting the rainfoest at such a scale is because farming practices used there were brought from western prarie/plains-like settings where it does real well, but rainforest have very little soil nutrition since it is used up quickly. Without this, in the later part of the game, i can't see any way you can get that to happen on nearly as large of a scale as it happens today.

[Simon Loverix]

My main concern to limit the applied tech to the invested K in some way is to represent minimal investments needed to apply a certain technology. This is what is keeping the Third World in its Third World state: a lack of income. And it is a factor that forces them to cut down the rainforests, for hardwood and livestock to sell. A player might want to invest chiefly in scientific research rather than directly in agriculture since higher tech has a stronger and longer lasting effect on agriculture.

Let's see how it works in playtesting. There will be possibility to peek at some of the calculations in the demo, I hope.

And what's the opinion about treating nutrients from flooding as a K bonus?

[Mark_Everson]

LGJ:

What you are talking about is Not a gameplay problem, its a perfect-world-simulator problem. I still think having many different kinds of agriculture is going overboard. That said, I think the sites number that Simon passes me from the ecology model could well include the fact that tropical forests, if cut down, have poor agricultural productivity.

Simon, is this effect already included? I frankly can't remember.

And on to your points Simon...

On the first one, I think it will be covered, but as you say, we'll see. The demo does give detailed economic outputs, but if you want to understand the fundamentals of the model, you really need the spreadsheet.

"nutrients from flooding as a K bonus" really won't work well in the system because of the extreme diminshing returns on K. I believe the best way is to provide an artificial tech level (A) boost from such things. At any rate there will be plenty of time to make any modifications if the way I'm handling doesn't feel right after playtesting.

[Simon Loverix]

When deforestation occurs in vulnerable climates, not only BM but also PBM is reduced, and maybe the same can go for farming if that isn't enough already. It's also easy to include a greater damage/risk if precipitation and/or temperature is high (it is in fact better than taking climate).

I am working at a new version of the ecology, but my computer time is limited lately..

[Mark_Everson]

This was posted elsewhere by Simon, but since these are generic econ model questions I'm going to respond here.

Originally posted by Simon Loverix in the "Planning for D6" thread
I have a paragraph on specials in the ecology version I'm working on (and which is delayed longer than I like..sorry!). I link their distribution to a few prerequisites (temperature, climate, and such) and after that it's probably best to limit them to provinces or at least continents, to avoid giving everyone the same.
(This is limited to the living resources.)

I agree, we need 'lumpiness' in specials both on short and long scales. And as you say positioning of many specials should depend on prereqs.

A question about production, though: while requiring specific inputs for specific products could be annoying while playing, have you considered separating just energy and resource sites? Resources have been fairly easy to attain and conserve during history, but getting energy in sizable amounts, and processing it, was problematic until the IR. Until then population was most important, but after that industrial development. In game terms, FE if you have power infra you can use energy as labor.

I've considered it, and so far rejected it as not worth the extra slot in the basic goods (thereare only 4 now). I think the big energy effects can mostly be captured with specials like wood, coal and oil. But the system is flexible enough that we could go your way without too much additional work if it looks like the player gets enough of a fun bonus for the extra complexity.

[Mark_Everson]

Cross-posting some comments Richard made in the D5 thread. The answers get at some core issues of what I'm trying to do with the economy in Clash.

The ROI system seems to works well, and I like it. *snip* Also, for some reason, the farming sector insisted on shrinking despite the fact that I was pumping cash into it.

There is a simulation of a real working market economy under the hood! What is happening to you is the same thing that happens to real governments when they invest in things the people don't want. Specifically there is a bit more food in the economy at start than what the people really want (they would prefer Services or Production more). So food prices fall, and wages in the farm sector fall. Workers look to other sectors of the economy so they can make more money. Also the people's own money is Not invested in farm kapital, since they would rather invest it in other sectors for the stuff they want. Kapital (in this case farm tools) also decay in usefulness. Adding all this together, it is quite possible for the govt to invest in farm kapital, and still have farm output fall due to fewer workers in the sector. If you check the economy.txt file I'm sure you'll find this is what is happening. If you instead pump money into "prod kapital" or gold mining you will see a positive response to your efforts, at least for a bit. But once again eventually the people will be satisfied with the level of say gold, and want other things.

Also, does lowering the tax rate do anything good for the civilization? Is there any economic advantage to soaking your people less?

Yes, they have more money to invest in the things they want, building a stronger economy. But you aren't seeing the full effect yet, since they only invest 5% of non-food surplus in kapital for right now.