Economic Model II

[Mark_Everson]

fishing

From the colonization thread...

How is sea fishing modelled in the game?
Opinions? Idea about sea exploitation?

I haven't gotten very far in modeling fishing. The basic idea is that fishing would be done using fish resources that are out at sea and can be gathered. There would be an infrastructure class in any coastal square that would represent a fishing fleet. The fishing fleet infra would allow harvesting of fish resources offshore. At a guess, a given amount of fleet would have so many harvesting points that would be used to move to the resource and harvest it. For far-off resources, less would be able to be harvested since more time would be spent moving to it.

How exactly to do this with the existing code is a TBD.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well for the colonist keeping traditional occupations or switching i think this should be based on the traditionalism EG parameter when it is implimented, athough maybe with some modifiers if the people are dying because of too rigid traditionalism.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LGJ, that sounds pretty good to me. I think I'd make the default something like this:

Civ colonizing has traditionalism T on a 0-100 scale with 100 being super-traditional. For purposes of colonizing the traditionalism is T, but if the people starve try settling as if traditionalism were 2T/3. If that still doesn't work then the people won't colonize there. Puts a little teeth in being traditional. We can change the fallback setting to be more flexible or stringent after playtesting if needed.

[Gary Thomas]

Now that the technology model is actually doing something, I think that the time has come to consider in somewhat more detail how it actually works.

At present the technologies have, as well as a level, a characteristic of active/inactive. Not only does this currently do nothing, but I cannot see it ever doing anything. The player has no direct access to technology. The only way it can be changed by the player is through putting research points into an activity. Hence it is the activity that should have the active/inactive status, not the technology.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Gary, good point! But I'd prefer to have this discussion in the tech thread since its an overall tech issue. See you there!

[Mark_Everson]

Economic Specials implementation

I am now putting economic specials (gold, cloth, salt) back into the game after they were removed for D7. This thread has a moderately detailed discussion on specials and their function that took place in the april 2002 timeframe. There is also a writeup on specials functions on the econ web page on the clash web site. Please check it out if you're interested.

We also need artwork for specials to put in. The discussion for that is in Map Graphics Thread part III.

[Richard Bruns]

Has the econ code been updated to the new knowledge based system? If it hasn´t, farming effectiveness could be messed up even more than it already is. Ideally all tech-related calculations in the econ model would be replaced by user-definable Applications.

By the way, I think I figured out why the food spiral starts. The A variable for farming effectiveness, as described in the econ log, seemed to be equal to the farming tech level plus 4. This means, I think, that at the start of the game, food production is multiplied by 4, but when the tech level hit ten it was multiplied by 14. This meant that a doubling of the civ´s knowledge caused more than a tripling of effeciveness, while most applications are designed so that a doubling of knowledge multiplies effectiveness by at most 1.5. This, combined with free population due to food, was enough to kick-start a near-infinite spiral of tech growth, since with more food production there were more people and a bigger service sector, and thus more taxes to invest in the Food activity.

What other hard-coded technology-related calculations are hiding in the econ model that I should be aware of as I redo the tech tree in the updoming testbed?

Responding to Gary´s post, it is technologies that need to be labeled as active/inactive, not activities, because Activities like Food should be the same and available for the entire history of the civ, which means that they have to know not to give RP´s to the Genetic Engineering tech at the beginning of the game.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Richard:

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
Has the econ code been updated to the new knowledge based system? If it hasn´t, farming effectiveness could be messed up even more than it already is. Ideally all tech-related calculations in the econ model would be replaced by user-definable Applications.

I'm aware of what needs to be done, just haven't had the chance to check out the tech-change code Laurent sent me several days ago.

By the way, I think I figured out why the food spiral starts. The A variable for farming effectiveness, as described in the econ log, seemed to be equal to the farming tech level plus 4. This means, I think, that at the start of the game, food production is multiplied by 4, but when the tech level hit ten it was multiplied by 14. This meant that a doubling of the civ´s knowledge caused more than a tripling of effeciveness, while most applications are designed so that a doubling of knowledge multiplies effectiveness by at most 1.5. This, combined with free population due to food, was enough to kick-start a near-infinite spiral of tech growth, since with more food production there were more people and a bigger service sector, and thus more taxes to invest in the Food activity.

Food actually uses (old system) 5.1 + level for productivity. Food production is a bit odd in that for the utility function to work right it needs to be greater than 3 per capita. I need to reconcile effectiveness with food production at some point. One way would be just to start all agricultural civs with a knowledge of 4+. Whatcha' think?

What other hard-coded technology-related calculations are hiding in the econ model that I should be aware of as I redo the tech tree in the updoming testbed?

Um, none occur to me at the moment. All the economic sectors work the same as food for now.

[Richard Bruns]

If you wanted to duplicate the current spec, you would use this application:

<FarmProductivity>
  <category>variable</category>
  <value>1</value>
  <technology>
    <name>Farming</name>
    <baseknowledge>-4.1</baseknowledge>
    <knowledgeeffect>1.0</knowledgeeffect>  
  </technology>
</FarmProductivity>

whcih sets things so that the farm productivity variable is always the same as the civ´s knowledge plus 5.1, as per the standard application equation:

value * 1 + ( knowledge - baseknowledge ) * knowledgeeffect

1 * 1 + ( knowledge + 4.1 ) * 1

knowledge + 5.1

This assumes that threre is no code problem with a negative baseknowledge. If there is, then we set baseknowledge to zero and start the knowledge at 4.1 for everybody, as you suggest. To be safe, I would prefer to set the knowledgeeffect to something less than one, so that productivity does not rise as fast.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Its correct that these things aren't in there yet. I am not convinced yet that we need them, although there are certainly individual items where strong cases can be made for requiring particular specials. A particular compelling case is in weaponry, where bronze is a Lot better than stone/wood/copper, and iron a lot better than bronze. I guess my position is that for flexibility purposes the system should include limitations on building things if a special isn't available in the civ. Whether these restrictions should be used extensively in the base game, I'm not so sure of. I believe that if aluminum didn't exist we'd still have satellites. Other, admittedly inferior, materials would be used out of necessity where Al is now the material of choice. People are generally very good about working around lacking resources, although there is a certain cost to the workarounds. We can figure out exactly how this is done in the game as things move forward.

Horses or other pack animals also. In every civilization that didn't have them or ignored them, the wheel was never devloped for anything beyond a novelty.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
Horses or other pack animals also. In every civilization that didn't have them or ignored them, the wheel was never devloped for anything beyond a novelty.

Hi LGJ, that's a good point. Could you cross-post this in the tech thread and we'll see what Richard can make of if for the early tech tree he's working on now?

[Richard Bruns]

I have run across two issues with the economy model in my work on 7.7.1:

The first is that ports seem to be broken. I tried to add ports to provinces to see if that would allow me to make triremes, but I got an error message. I got the same error when I set the port to Rome and when I set it to Mare Nostrum, the sea square. I know the xml command was right, because it ordered the code to do something, but it can´t seem to make ports on either land or sea squares.

The second issue is more of a feature request. In my Delenda scenario I have special units that are made by events, but I don´t want the player to be able to build them. I can do this by forcing them to be made obsolete by the Mob unit, but this may cause problems later. A better solution would be to use the economics code to make a stub order to hide them from the GUI. But when I tried that, it said they were uninteresting tags.

Could you allow any economics xml code to be added to the scenario.xml file, the way scenarios can contain military and technology? That way I can have resources that are only in one scenario, as well as the aforementioned stub orders to hide scenario specific units.

[LDiCesare]

You currently have several ways to have not buildable units:
Give them a prerequired tech like "CannotBuild" (typical Civ II solution), or restrict an element to an unexisting nationality.

I don't know about ports, however.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
The second issue is more of a feature request. In my Delenda scenario I have special units that are made by events, but I don´t want the player to be able to build them. I can do this by forcing them to be made obsolete by the Mob unit, but this may cause problems later. A better solution would be to use the economics code to make a stub order to hide them from the GUI. But when I tried that, it said they were uninteresting tags.

Hmmm, sorry, no idea on that one. I don't have a functional java setup at the moment, so I can't check on it. When I'm back in the saddle (maybe a week) I'll check it out

Could you allow any economics xml code to be added to the scenario.xml file, the way scenarios can contain military and technology? That way I can have resources that are only in one scenario, as well as the aforementioned stub orders to hide scenario specific units.

That's the way it's supposed to work. I don't know why it doesn't.

I have no idea about the ports either. Maybe put in a request in the Bugs thread and see if someone who has some familiarity with the XML is willing to look into it. Otherwise I'll do it when I get a chance, but it may be a while.

[yellowdaddy]

different currencies?