I was thinking about how to implement the economic model for my "upcoming" (in Geological time) 4x "Space Opera" game a-la Master of Orion. I'd like to implement a dynamic economic model like those found in games like Elite/Frontier and so on. There would be many raw resources to be fond on a planet, aside from the usual "food/minerals". Assuming that I have the usual handful of "population units", how could I choose which resource to extract? It would be micromanagement hell if each player would have to individually choose for each pop unit which resource to extract. To extract them all at once doesn't seem to be a bright idea too. So I had another idea. What about "concessions"? Individual agents ask you the "emperor" for a let's say "mining concession". The individual agent would decide on its own which resource to extract based on which one it thinks to be the most profitable to extract. The player would still be able to impose a limit on the overall industrial plan, but in a broader sense. Thinking back to Master of Orion 2, if 50% of pop units are allocated to mining, then it would mean that 50% of concessions would go for mining operations for example. Each "concession" would be linked to an AI agent. It would decide a sort of "minimum" pay based on some sort of Galactic Average Wage :D A population unit then would choose on its own for which company to work for. This would in turn trigger a migration phenomenon, as in reality. People who would be willing to migrate even to work for very low prices would fill those workplaces ignored by the local population. If no one wants to work there, the company might raise its salary. These "concessions" could not need to be capped (otherwise they would become similar to "production slots" of some sort): an individual agent might decide to ask for a concession only if there are enough unemployed people. If a company should somehow go broke, the mining operation could shut down causing unexpected unemployment. This could be useful for other game phenomenons.. The "happyness" level of the population could decrease and cause unrest for example. If a mining concessions goes unattended for a specific period of time it could be revoked if no one wants to work there. Also this concession idea could go hand in hand with another idea I had: make planets behave as RPG characters. A concession would be similar to a character's skill. For each day that 1 pop units works there, one "experience point" is gained in that area. If it is a mining operation, then it might gain levels in "mineral extraction" for example. When it "gains a level", and becomes level 2 for example, then it means that the improvement of the Technological Level 1 have been either built/introduced among the mining operation. This makes sense from a certain point of view: consider a planet that has two mining concession for the same resource. One goes to a local company, the other to a friendly but alien company that is way more technologically advanced. The alien company may start some TLs ahead of the local one, yielding an higher resource output if compared to the local one. If the "skill level" was tied to the whole planet instead of the mining operation, then both would have the same technological level because there would be no differentiation. This system seems to solve the multiple resource problem because the AI agents would choose the most profitable resource to extract and pop units would choose where to work for on their own. This could be modulated by the kind of society the workers live on. Democracy might allow for more freedom than a feudal system. The fact that some resources could be neglected would be mitigated by the fact that if no one is extracting the lowliest mineral resource, then it will mean that this resource will itself become rarer and rarer. Therefore it will eventually become profitable once again. So what do you think about all of this? I know that this is a complicated solution but hey, this is just "pour parler". And my expected release date is somewhere in the next 50 years :) "On paper" it looks like it may work...

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Original post by AvengerDr So what do you think about all of this?

In brief, a solution in search of a problem. Seems to me that you'd have to code an awfully complex simulator, simulating population, corporations (and their economic situation), employment, market prices and so on, in order to achieve.... what, exactly?
The same as Master of Orion 3, which had a very complex underlying economic model which 1) players didn't understand, and 2) wasn't really noticeable anyway, because the end result was much the same as it'd be without all the underlying complexity.

How would any of this enhance the game for the player? How would this contribute to the player's decision-making? How would it pose interesting challenges and choices for the player?

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"On paper" it looks like it may work...

Depends on how you define "work".
It'd work as a simulator that'd run without any player input, sure. It'd work if your goal is to make a process that the "player" can *look at*.
But I don't see how it'd tie into an actual *game*.

Let's say I'm playing your game. I have a planet where I can see 3 different kinds of ore can be mined, and there's a lot of farmland.
Now, my immediate reaction is to build a shitload of farms and some mines.

How would your system give me more interesting choices? What would it have me do instead? What should I do ideally, and how would I know to do it?

Try to run through it from the player's point of view. The player who doesn't know that Centauri Mining Corporation is three million credits away from bankruptcy, who doesn't every single turn check on galactic wage levels.
How would this player even *notice* all the stuff you're talking about? And how would it affect their planning?

Is it just complexity for the sake of complexity? Or does it add to the game that the player sees?

[Edited by - Spoonbender on August 9, 2008 2:46:48 PM]

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Original post by Spoonbender In brief, a solution in search of a problem. Seems to me that you'd have to code an awfully complex simulator, simulating population, corporations (and their economic situation), employment, market prices and so on, in order to achieve.... what, exactly? The same as Master of Orion 3, which had a very complex underlying economic model which 1) players didn't understand, and 2) wasn't really noticeable anyway, because the end result was much the same as it'd be without all the underlying complexity. How would any of this enhance the game for the player? How would this contribute to the player's decision-making? How would it pose interesting challenges and choices for the player?

We all have played Master of Orion 2, 3 and many other games in the genre. They don't go much farther than the usual cliche of the genre. Build facilities/spaceships, click on the enemy star system and whoever has more ships wins the battle. Repeat.

The idea, or rather, the "hope" at the base of this is to provide non random basis for the occurrence of events. For example in those games, once you've passed a certain stage, you are able to erase everything from the map. There's little that can set you back for example. Now suppose that an alien empire decides to corner the market on a particular resource that your society depends on. It might be able to set their own prices if they gain a monopoly. Now if you replace alien empire with oil-producing countries and valuable resource with oil, then you should get the point for example :)

I know that all of this could be replaced by a much simpler calculation like "if (empire A doesn't like Empire B and random Roll <= WarChance) then Declare War", but some of the most successful games of all time made their fortune on the illusion that the game world was somehow alive.

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Depends on how you define "work". It'd work as a simulator that'd run without any player input, sure. It'd work if your goal is to make a process that the "player" can *look at*. But I don't see how it'd tie into an actual *game*.

In SimCity one of the only things that you do is to allocate urban zones. Then you stand back and see what happens. But that didn't block it from becoming a successul game. Buildings then popped up on their own. But the player had very limited power on which particular building would appear, just if it was residential, commercial or industrial. The exact way in which those buildings appeared is half the game for Sim City. The enjoyment comes from seeing your city full of skyscrapers.

If you are European, then you'll also surely have heard of the "Football Manager" game. If not, it's a soccer simulation game, from the point of view of the general manager. It is one of the most addictive games on Earth, and the pure enjoyment comes from watching small colored circles moving around a field that should resemble a soccer field, literally.

Therefore, watching how things unfold might not be that bad! Players will still have plenty of choices to make. For example, depending on the rarity of the resources you might want to protect that lone desert planet where a mining concession has been given to the House Atreides and the House Harkonnen. What if a self-proclaimed Messiah decides to stop the production of the spice melange? :D

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Let's say I'm playing your game. I have a planet where I can see 3 different kinds of ore can be mined, and there's a lot of farmland. Now, my immediate reaction is to build a shitload of farms and some mines. How would your system give me more interesting choices? What would it have me do instead? What should I do ideally, and how would I know to do it?

The problem with these kind of games is that there will "soon" be more than one single planet. If you play in a reasonably sized galaxy with 100 star system for example, when you'll colonize 30 planets it will become very difficult to manage the situation and to decide which facility to build on each planet every turn. In Civilization 4 things are easy for me when my cities are under the dozen for example. The above system would be a way to abstract the building of "common" facilities like mines and farmlands for example. The player would only be able to build "megastructures" like orbital starbases or shipyards and the like, which are a lot less and more easily manageable. And it makes a lot more sense to have one Star Base in a planet rather than having only one "automated factory" for example.

Instead of individually chosing which facility to build, you'd be able to shuffle your population units around like in Master of Orion 2. You'd have to divide them among general areas such as mining, farming, production and research (no more than 4/5, the bare essential). This would mean that if you allocated half your population in farming, your government is somehow incentivating the farming industry. This in turn would make so that the "concessions" granted to corporations reflected your choices in the "planetary screen". Like in Sim City. Then the "buildings" will pop up on their own, of the type you chose.

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Try to run through it from the player's point of view. The player who doesn't know that Centauri Mining Corporation is three million credit away from bankruptcy, who doesn't every single turn check on galactic wage levels. How would this player even *notice* all the stuff you're talking about? And how would it affect their planning?

The resources would come into play because each system would have some sort of system-wide market, where companies would sell the resources. More refined goods would also be sold there and produced by companies that buy the raw resources to assemble them. Players would not need to keep track of each and every resource unit in the galaxy. The only resource they would need to keep track of would be their money amount.

There would be an empire-wide screen where you could order new spaceships for example. The system would then compute the cheapest system where to build your new fleet or present you with a list of choices. Like if you choose system A it will cost more but it will be a lot faster and so on. Multiple resources would be needed so that there would be places of the galaxy that are way more strategically important than others. If you have the tech to build antimatter weapons but actually lack antimatter, then you will not be able to use those weapons on your ships. What if the nearest planet that you know that has that resource (let's assume for a moment that antimatter can be "mined") is in a friendly alien empire? Would you sacrify your alliance with them? Ultimately this serves the purpose of giving you "game reasons" to justify your actions. In Moo2/3 when you go to war there is no reason, other than arbitrarily having decided to do so. In Europa Univeralis, there's at least the "casus belli" system. The system described could be able to give you these reasons (not just for war obviously).

If there's an underlying system that keeps track of things like supply and demand, transportation costs, then not every system will be able to produce ships for example. Planets will evolve to be natural "shipyards" if they are close to the necessary resources. Otherwise it would be too expensive if raw resources have to be shipped from the other side of the galaxy. This in turn, will make it so that there are fewer systems able to produce space fleets. If in your 30 planets empire there are only 3 places where you are able to assemble your fleets, then the protection of those areas assumes strategic importance. If, like in MOO2, every planet is able to build a spaceship (albeit at different speeds, the concept stands), then the difference between an highly developed world and a backwater colony shrinks heavily. And the only way to have a situation like the one I described is to introduce a resource system and all those complicated things :) Europa Universalis has something like that. Each province has a manpower output. If you lose a distant colony it might not affect you as much but if you lose a core province that provides a lot of manpower, should your army be defeated you'll find yourself in troubles.

Anyway to make things shorter, the original problem was the "multiple resources" problem. In MOO2 we had food and minerals IIRC. Let's say that 1 Pop Unit produces 1 Mineral. If there are more than one mineral type, how can we decide which mineral unit to produce?

One way would be that if there were two mineral types, then 1 Pop Unit would produce 0.5x and 0.5y and so on. But what if one resources is way more needed than the other? A simpler solution would be to have a single generic mineral resource and to make the other more complex resources be "refined" from the generic mineral one. For example E-155 would be 2 mineral Units while spice melange 5 units and so on....

I'm aware that the solution that I was talking about is "gargantuan" but the diverse gameplay situations that would arise as a consequence of that system seem to act as a counterweight. I hope so at least :) And that's why I'm posting here obviously.. to see if there could be a simpler way to do all that I had in mind... should I have the time to do it.

I'm with you in liking complexity, but I don't like your suggested implementation-- like Spoonbender, the concessions system leaves me asking Sid Meier's famous question about who's having the fun, the designer, the computer or the player?

I do believe you can have different resources and different costs for extraction. If you define a limit per planet (say six?) you can use your idea here:

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Original post by AvengerDr One way would be that if there were two mineral types, then 1 Pop Unit would produce 0.5x and 0.5y and so on.

But use slider bars. So if you don't manage it, extraction occurs at 1/6 the rate.

I see that you want to put in some of the dynamics of industrial growth. I'd abstract and implement this using your RPG idea along with bonuses that get modified based on the tech, species and type of government. So each planet could have an Industrial Sector corresponding to the minerals and other services you're interested in. Industries would have a Health and Skill stat, along with a label describing it (monopolized, diversified, ailing, etc.) that would affect the colony in other ways, possibly even limiting or accelerating growth.

So Planet X has a Crystal Mining Industry, Antimatter Production Industry, Transuranic Element Industry, etc. maybe along with Power, Aerospace or whatever you want to add. The Crystal Mining Industry is Ailing, meaning that you get crystal more expensively from them, while your Antimatter Production Industry is Booming, meaning it's cheap.

The health of the Industry could directly correspond to player actions. Build a naval base at Planet X might help the Antimatter Industry, while scrapping Research Facilities there drives a stake in the heart of the already hurting Crystal Mining Industry.

As an Industry grows or shrinks, so do the bonuses for what it's producing. Maybe the slider bars idea corresponds to grants and taxes, so that you're said to be giving breaks and help to an industry if you power it's bar full, or starving it it you empty the bar. As a planet grows and its Industry operates successfully, it gains experience.

Industries could act a bit like the agents you suggest, but I'd concentrate on giving the player more of a visible impact and think in terms of the user interface.

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I'm aware that the solution that I was talking about is "gargantuan" but the diverse gameplay situations that would arise as a consequence of that system seem to act as a counterweight. I hope so at least :) And that's why I'm posting here obviously.. to see if there could be a simpler way to do all that I had in mind... should I have the time to do it.

What about capturing the end results in an event system and using a simpler system to drive that? So if you know you want things like Industrial Collapse and General Strike, rather than waiting for a complex system to cause these to arise, maybe design all the event you want and figure out how to cause them to be triggered. I'm doing something similar with interpersonal events, and thinking of it similar to a card game. When certain values rise to a given level, it causes a card to be drawn from a particular deck (e.g., lots of hateful actions cause a card to be drawn from the Vengeance deck).

You might do something similar with prices and economics. Maybe you have a good economy and bad economy deck, giving rise to events that have the flavor of a living world but give you less of a chance of getting tangled up forever in complicated design.