Beta 010: Agriculture-based industry & environment

[Greater Hunnia]

Is there an ETA for the implementation of this? My economy will suffer greatly, but I still welcome this change. Is it going to be implemented at all?

[Athretvari]

I disagree with this particular Beta proposal. There are very few issues that provide the ability to build strong trout fishing industry. I purposefully began a campaign to “enhance food security” and began selecting environmentally friendlier issue-options to boost fishing, cheese, and agro. At the time, those issue-options had not only boosted those industries, but also negatively affected other industries, like mining. I figured that was already a suitable trade-off.

This beta is a retroactive penalty for any player that went my route of economic management or readjustment, which again, already penalized my other industries.

If the issue is that certain “issues” are outputing bad results, ie. increased environmental beauty when increasing use of fertizers, then why not just fix the output for those issues so that they boost agro, but also harm environmental beauty... going forward.

There are many, many environmentally friendly actions, like building an artificial reef, which not only increase environmental beauty, but do in fact support increased industry, as more fish in and around the reef means more can be sustainably harvested... cleaner rivers do mean more fish to catch... cleaner harbors can offer safe local catches... cleaner over-all runoff does increase the number of fish that can be sustainably caught in local waters and lakes, etc, etc.

The current “system” of clean agro-states balances well with the concept of dirty industrial-states.

[Flanderlion]

I disagree with this particular Beta proposal. There are very few issues that provide the ability to build strong trout fishing industry. I purposefully began a campaign to “enhance food security” and began selecting environmentally friendlier issue-options to boost fishing, cheese, and agro. At the time, those issue-options had not only boosted those industries, but also negatively affected other industries, like mining. I figured that was already a suitable trade-off.

This beta is a retroactive penalty for any player that went my route of economic management or readjustment, which again, already penalized my other industries.

If the issue is that certain “issues” are outputing bad results, ie. increased environmental beauty when increasing use of fertizers, then why not just fix the output for those issues so that they boost agro, but also harm environmental beauty... going forward.

There are many, many environmentally friendly actions, like building an artificial reef, which not only increase environmental beauty, but do in fact support increased industry, as more fish in and around the reef means more can be sustainably harvested... cleaner rivers do mean more fish to catch... cleaner harbors can offer safe local catches... cleaner over-all runoff does increase the number of fish that can be sustainably caught in local waters and lakes, etc, etc.

It's just rebalancing, although your nation does seem to be hit particularly hard (as you're top 2% for environment). Re the issues, I do agree that there aren't enough issues to increase those industries, but that's more an issue with issue content which is up to people to submit better issues, rather than an issue with the beta itself, and if any stats results seem off, put it in the Got Issues megathread, they're pretty good at either explaining why or fixing when stuff is off.

Currently, environment has too much of a role in determining the size of an industry (not the other way around). There are places with terrible environments that have great fishing/dairy/agricultural sectors and vice versa. It looks a big change, and you're dropping a few places, but you're still in the top 200, like you would be before the beta - just realised it looks like the betas show your current rank, not what ranking you'd change to.

[Stormcalling]

To reduce the dislocation, please consider adding small boosts from environmental quality to Information Technology, Basket-Weaving, and Furniture Restoration. Information Technology is a famous potential source of 'clean' productivity which is sought after in nations which are trying to manage their environments, and additionally there are productivity gains for workers who have clean jobs when they also have beauty in their environments. Essentially similar arguments seem like they would apply to Basket-Weaving, inasmuch as the endeavor of basket-weaving and similar trinket manufacture relies upon patience in a regular environment, and such endeavors are often sociable in nature, being reliant upon common (frequently outdoor) spaces for much of the fabrication and sale (see reference to world census experts visiting festivals to estimate the size of the basket-weaving industry in nations). As for Furniture Restoration, people only restore the furniture they get attached to, which due to much greater durability of durable goods, is more likely to have time to occur in a region with a known and controlled environment that is not ever soaking acid through the roof tiles and smog through every gaseous permeation.

Nowadays, it's possible to have productive agriculture and a terrible environment, as one can always use chemical fertilizers to enrich their fields. However, in the past, your agricultural productivity was based on the natural fertility of your soils. Having a strong relationship between agriculture and the environment allows primitive economies with good environments to have a few strong industries, and gives the sense that the nation's wealth comes from the wealth of its land, not advanced technology.

Perhaps the impact of the environment on agricultural industries should scale with primitivism rather than be a direct linkage. It would make sense that the more primitive a nation, the more their environment's quality should affect their agriculture for better or for worse, though this effect should limit; even with spectacular advances, it seems improbable that there is an amount of scientific perfection wherein nations with the kind of improbably hideous environments achievable in Nationstates should agriculturally outperform nations of basically competent farming practices where the sun shines through clear skies between rains that fall clean, gentle, and frequent upon fertile untainted soils.

Would it be possible to write an issue that involves an environmentally minded farmer proposing long term soil studies and rehabilitation projects (this could be two proposers, soil rehabilitation is rather on the "hiring shovels" side and costs more as it expands the science teams with unskilled labor), adding to science, agriculture, and environment? If there are sub-variables in environment this would obviously only improve the soil quality. I don't want to write the issue, the concept just occurred to me as I was contemplating this beta and specifically the comment by Old Garcy.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

This beta is a retroactive penalty for any player that went my route of economic management or readjustment, which again, already penalized my other industries.

So essentially what we're saying here is that it's better to perpetuate an inaccurate system that has been used for years rather than switch to an accurate one, because players have been making decisions based on the inaccurate system?

That is, the system has always been unbalanced, but players have invested time and energy into working that system to achieve the goal they want, and to rebalance it now is to retroactively undo all that work.

I totally see your point, and I guess it comes down to game management philosophy.

It's a bit like an FPS/RPG where a class has always had some overpowered and underpowered abilities, and then players have spent months developing characters that have builds that utilise those game-coded decisions. The developers then coming up with a patch that "improves" the game will then annoy those players who have done all that work for nothing.

That's a real dilemma. In an FPS/RPG we might give every player a free respec to change their character according to the new rules-set, but I don't think that's a feasible option for NS.

For me, I think the pain inflicted is an acceptable cost for a more rational simulation. The current rules-set feels like a "newbie trap", and generates a lot of unexpected effect complaints. The sim would certainly be more believable with the new rules-set. I mean, right now, if you let farmers use fertilisers, productivity would fall...

However, there is a real world effects to consider, on players who have played the game in its current form over the years, knowing its idiosyncrasies and working around those.

It's a tricky one which I don't know the right answer to.

[Aclion]

This beta is a retroactive penalty for any player that went my route of economic management or readjustment, which again, already penalized my other industries.

So essentially what we're saying here is that it's better to perpetuate an inaccurate system that has been used for years rather than switch to an accurate one, because players have been making decisions based on the inaccurate system?

That is, the system has always been unbalanced, but players have invested time and energy into working that system to achieve the goal they want, and to rebalance it now is to retroactively undo all that work.

I totally see your point, and I guess it comes down to game management philosophy.

It's a bit like an FPS/RPG where a class has always had some overpowered and underpowered abilities, and then players have spent months developing characters that have builds that utilise those game-coded decisions. The developers then coming up with a patch that "improves" the game will then annoy those players who have done all that work for nothing.

That's a real dilemma. In an FPS/RPG we might give every player a free respec to change their character according to the new rules-set, but I don't think that's a feasible option for NS.

For me, I think the pain inflicted is an acceptable cost for a more rational simulation. The current rules-set feels like a "newbie trap", and generates a lot of unexpected effect complaints. The sim would certainly be more believable with the new rules-set. I mean, right now, if you let farmers use fertilisers, productivity would fall...

However, there is a real world effects to consider, on players who have played the game in its current form over the years, knowing its idiosyncrasies and working around those.

It's a tricky one which I don't know the right answer to.

Well right now it become much harder to change your nation's stat as you answer more issues. I don't know if it's possible to cap how "fixed" a nations stats become, but if it were that would effectively allow people to respec.

[9003]

I feel as though trout exports should be closely like linked to the environment because there a very sensitive fish whereas agraculture would go up a fair bit (the primary productivity increases with more co2 in the air. On the cheese export portion I agree with the beta.

But on the extreme bad (my nation's goal) all industries should plumit to almost nothing as an extreme amount of co2 or other nasty things stresses the cows/goats and they can not produce and to much co2 can harm plants again to the point that they will not grow and trout the streams loses there oxagen and boom fish die. I would say that fish would be effected first than regular agraculture and than the cheese exports in the event of extremely bad environments

[Tunicyan]

Support, even if it destroys the major industries in nearly every single of my nations (which shows how monotonous it gets due to the exaggerated Environment effect).

Also, there seems to be a tiny mistake/oddity (probably a minor rounding error). In this nation, it shows that Agriculture changes from 0 to -0.00, with the Change area showing that it remains identical: https://www.nationstates.net/page=beta/nation=tunicyan

[Bears Armed]

I feel as though trout exports should be closely like linked to the environment because there a very sensitive fish

The industry listed as 'Trout Fishing' is actually often taken to cover all fishing, given the lack of alternatives in the list of industries.

[Trotterdam]

The industry listed as 'Trout Fishing' is actually often taken to cover all fishing, given the lack of alternatives in the list of industries.

Actually, the industry was originally Trout Farming, and is still listed as such on the nation page, but got named as Trout Fishing in the World Census, and is used for issues that involve fishing. Which could cause problems for how to stat issues that discuss the merits of farming versus fishing... Though it seems we don't actually have any right now. The only current fish farm issue (#591) assumes you already have fish farms and discusses farming versus wild fish populations that nobody seems to be fishing, not farming versus fishing.

[Bears Armed]

The industry listed as 'Trout Fishing' is actually often taken to cover all fishing, given the lack of alternatives in the list of industries.

Actually, the industry was originally Trout Farming, and is still listed as such on the nation page, but got named as Trout Fishing in the World Census, and is used for issues that involve fishing. Which could cause problems for how to stat issues that discuss the merits of farming versus fishing... Though it seems we don't actually have any right now. The only current fish farm issue (#591) assumes you already have fish farms and discusses farming versus wild fish populations that nobody seems to be fishing, not farming versus fishing.

The fact that we currently don't have any Agriculture stat that isn't livestock-related is presumably a problem in coding for issues on vegetarianism, too...

[Old Hope]

Ideally, the environment would affect those industries in this way:
There should be less influence in high and medium environmental settings.
But the effect should be as is in not so good settings, and get progressively stronger as it approaches a catastrophic environment - in a manner that causes a very bad environment to become absolutely prohibitive for agriculture-based industries.
This would meet common sense - if your environment is acceptable then better environment will not matter that much, but a worse environment will tip the scales and cause more and more crop failures/fish deaths/lifestock deaths. And an environment of the scale named "inhospitable" in the nation's description should reflect exactly that.

[Osarkian Federation]

rip my nations current economic stability. My nation is strong in agriculture and cheese exports, this would gut both those industries.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

rip my nations current economic stability. My nation is strong in agriculture and cheese exports, this would gut both those industries.

You'd still be pretty strong on both of those, but they'd shrink considerably for sure. This is because the current simulation overboosts you for your excellent environment. It's an unfortunate change for you, but for every person losing out there'll be a person making a gain.

This is definitely a needed change - at present there are issues where you can choose to mildly sacrifice environment in order to boost farming (for example, by allowing use of pesticides) which decimate agricultural output. This change basically just puts things where they should have been all along.

[Osarkian Federation]

rip my nations current economic stability. My nation is strong in agriculture and cheese exports, this would gut both those industries.

You'd still be pretty strong on both of those, but they'd shrink considerably for sure. This is because the current simulation overboosts you for your excellent environment. It's an unfortunate change for you, but for every person losing out there'll be a person making a gain.

This is definitely a needed change - at present there are issues where you can choose to mildly sacrifice environment in order to boost farming (for example, by allowing use of pesticides) which decimate agricultural output. This change basically just puts things where they should have been all along.

What? i don't have an excellent environment, i have a decent one. It's proven that countries like India have drastically lower agricultural productivity than counties like the U.S.A, the UK, and Japan who have much higher environmental regulations and standards. Its like saying Brazil has a horrible agricultural industry because its covered in jungle.

[The Natufian Nation]

I do NOT support this change and urge the developers to reconsider or table the change for further review.

My nation strives to be a leader in Agriculture and has also acted on issues to maintain a high enviro/eco ranking. My thinking is that the combination reflects a commitment to sustainable agricultural practices which, in theory, should result in a relatively high multiplier effect long-term. Reducing this effect seems rather punitive to those nations that are making this effort for the benefit of nations that are probably more ambivalent. In beta testing, I lose almost 15% and would be at risk of falling from the 1% percentile. I will be quite upset about that.

Please reconsider or at least use different multipliers for Ag vs Manufacturing, keeping the Ag multiplier at current levels.

Thank you for your consideration

[Lillorainen]

This change seems to be a particularly controversial one to me ... I did the test for all six Mains I run, and it turns out, that in five of them, this change would actually boost the farming and fishing industries (with Lillorainen, the living nightmare of any environmentalist, winning the most points); only the one with the best environment would lose points in those regards. I do somehow get behind the reasons why this change is being criticized, especially by nations with a long history of boosting their food industries by choosing environment-friendly options. Then again, this change will also be a correction in favor of those nations whose stats have gotten messed up by counterintuitive outcomes, thus, towards more realistic correlations between these particular stats.
It is a dilemma, though ...

[SherpDaWerp]

It's not just stat rebalancing - many issues have weird stat effects thanks to the balancing of environment. For instance (although not specifically relevant to this beta), issue #1275 is a direct environment vs tourism trade. Thanks to environment being weighted too high in tourism, the option that decreases tourism in favor of the environment often increases tourism thanks to the environmental increase.

I'm sure there would be similar issues like this for agriculture vs environment (and if there isn't, someone should probably write one!), and a beta like this would hopefully fix these issues and remove weird stat effects.

[VoVoDoCo]

Agriculture is one of my favorite 1% trophies. It's going to be dropping by nearly 19%. Are most Nations going to face a steep Drop Like That?

[Kamchakta]

Agriculture is one of my favorite 1% trophies. It's going to be dropping by nearly 19%. Are most Nations going to face a steep Drop Like That?

Same for my nation. Really concerning for me

[Candlewhisper Archive]

To be clear, environmental quality and environmental spending SHOULD affect agriculture, it's just a case of proportion and balancing points.

The current simulation gives you more agriculture for a quantum of environmental gain than it does for a quantum of farming industry game.

For example:

[*] Currently, if you were to legislate to prevent farmers from using fertilisers, your agriculture would currently increase. Conversely, if you allow them to use fertilisers, your agriculture would currently decrease.
[*] Currently, if you were to legislate to prevent farmers from clearing forest for crop growth, your agriculture would surge. Conversely, if you allowed forest clearance for farms, your agriculture would plummet.

Because historically the balance has been massively off, this change causes massive changes to a large number of nations. Because most nations have a positive environment, most people will find the net absolute effect is downwards. However, centile wise, there's always going to be just as many nations gaining centile position as losing it.

Be assured that this change wouldn't be proposed if it wasn't necessary. You need to see the backstage numbers for these things to be cleared, but as written, the balance of stats is NOT rational. Essentially you can boost your farming industry way more by spending 1 billion currency on environmental measures than you can by spending 1 billion currency on your farming industry. That doesn't make sense.

Right now, there's no way to simulate decisions where the farming industry benefits at cost of the environment, which IRL is something that can happen in a multitude of ways, whether that's use of chemicals, or wiping out pests, or breeding homogenous crops, or clearing land for farming. The simulation needs to be able to have those sorts of decisions possible.

To be clear again, having a great environment will still benefit your Agriculture and a bad environment will screw it. Arguing that farming is dependent on the environment is moot here -- the simulation will still recognise that. It's just the proportions that are shifting.

[The Stalker]

I see the logic in the change, but i'm not a fan. It's gonna ruin 2 of my top stats. 6th for fish and 11th for cheese gonna loose lots of my points. >_>

With the way I answered issues, I've always went with pro-environment, and pro-agriculture/farming. So if agriculture/farming is being weight more I don't see how i'm still loosing out. Just seems like we're loosing points on environment and not gaining any for agriculture/farming. Is anyone score going up for this? Or everyone's going down?

[Candlewhisper Archive]

I see the logic in the change, but i'm not a fan. It's gonna ruin 2 of my top stats. 6th for fish and 11th for cheese gonna loose lots of my points. >_>

With the way I answered issues, I've always went with pro-environment, and pro-agriculture/farming. So if agriculture/farming is being weight more I don't see how i'm still loosing out. Just seems like we're loosing points on environment and not gaining any for agriculture/farming. Is anyone score going up for this? Or everyone's going down?

People with bad environments are generally going upwards, as the negative effect of their environment diminishes.

[Kamchakta]

I see the logic in the change, but i'm not a fan. It's gonna ruin 2 of my top stats. 6th for fish and 11th for cheese gonna loose lots of my points. >_>

With the way I answered issues, I've always went with pro-environment, and pro-agriculture/farming. So if agriculture/farming is being weight more I don't see how i'm still loosing out. Just seems like we're loosing points on environment and not gaining any for agriculture/farming. Is anyone score going up for this? Or everyone's going down?

People with bad environments are generally going upwards, as the negative effect of their environment diminishes.

So this change is reducing the impact of a bad/good environment on agriculture. Does that mean that in the pesticide issue, using pesticides increases agriculture now?

[Christ Triumphant]

Phew. That change to Agriculture and Cheese was pretty intense. I had many nations in the top 1% for one or both, and probably half of them dropped far enough to be well outside of it.

Not only that, but I'm noticing that many issue choices are now resulting in huge losses to both of those stats. Going to take quite awhile to figure out exactly what's causing these results. Anyone pick up on any correlations?