Developing Regional Economics

[Varrosha]

I'm a game designer by trade and I've begun work on a fun little project in my past-time. It's the idea for a sci-fi space region that includes various economic and labour mechanics to create a trade system. My hope is that this could expand into 2-3 regions over a great deal of time that compete against one another within the same setting and rules.

Anyway, I'm working my way through mechanics design now and I'd be really interested in showing it to any interested parties for their thoughts and advice on its improvement and refinement.

Please let me know if you're interested.

[Varrosha]

So far I've finished drafts of the following gameplay systems: healthcare, supply & demand for natural resources, labour markets & growth, population growth, industry investment and planetary properties.

I'm working on education investment, migration and taxes next. Then I've got to work on combat, defence investment and single market mechanics.

I've already got 1 new pair of eyes having a look at the mechanics as I produce them. If anyone else is interested in helping out just TG me.

[Varrosha]

I'm very happy tonight, having solved and written up education mechanics with the neat little function of expanding or shrinking the job market. Trying to decide whether to implement the concept of pensions now or just get on with taxes.

[Varrosha]

So after a bit of research I feel it'd be in error to ignore a pension mechanic due to the Third Age Economy. There's enough evidence out there to suggest that increasing pension plans has the eventual knock-on effect of slowly increasing sales/vat tax revenue, which through investment and interest pays out more than gets put in. At least, when distilled down to a basic economic model that ignores fluctuating age demographics, which I absolutely have to for the sake of my own sanity

[Varrosha]

It took a whole day of research but I figured out a fairly simple model of effect for how welfare investment affects sales tax, both positively and negatively.

If anyone's reading this thread you'll have noticed I'm doing a lot of posting without replies. I hope no one finds that too weird. I've decided to use this thread as a little mini-dev blog whilst I build the system up. Hopefully I'll attract some questions and interest along the way.

Once I have tax sorted out I've got a functional interstellar economic model: minus defence, science, stock market and war.

I know some people will really dislike the idea of having to fiddle with lots of little economic mechanisms like adjusting education investment etc. so I've begun figuring out a voluntary-membership agency which governments can sign up to. It costs a fixed % of each government's GDP and is a non-regressive taxation project. It'll handle a universal investment model for: healthcare, welfare and education. Helping developing governments catch up with more developed members, thereby increasing the funding for everyone. It'll standardise the benefits as a result. It'd exist to take some of the minutia out of handling economics if it's not your thing, and give people who do like it more opportunities to explore the system.

I'm nicknaming it the C-SIA (Congressional Social Insurance Agency). Anyway once I figure out a simple stock market model and a few other details, it should be fairly easy to set up specific industry focused corporations that operate across many world's that governments can compete to invest in etc. I know it all sounds grandiose, but by keeping my systems simple, alot can come out of them.

[Applebania]

Sounds interesting. I might end up joining.

[Varrosha]

Thank you, Applebania.


So an idea occurred to me whilst I was cooking tonight. When it comes to physical conflict you've usually got 2 extremes: leave it up to luck with something like a die roll, or you make it insanely detailed and much more like a tabletop war game, which really doesn't fit the play-by-post style. What I do know is that I want the products corporations produce and sell to have economic value, and value in war when it comes to defence/offence.

Then I had this thought of a 3-pronged system. Defence products (and troop types) have a value called Battle Asset Worth (BAW). Obviously you buy defence products in bulk, meaning you'd have a high BAW total in your military. The BAW would have to be agreed upon by the product designer and an oversight group before going on the market. In a battle, whoever has the most BAW wins, but there's a kicker. Characters have value. In the region you don't have players as governments you have them as politicians and military who run governments (similar to typical regions but the forum accounts are actually characters). When military players RP they are rewarded with a battle multiplier for great and/or proliferate roleplaying (these multipliers are rewarded as decimal points (stacking), so as not to get out of control). So lets say you have a collection of war assets (troops, installations, vehicles and equipment) deployed in the conflict totalling to 20k BAW, led by 1 Admiral with a 3.7 battle multiplier = 74k BAW. Now the 3rd prong to this vision are war points. All conflicts are assigned a total number of war points needed in order to win and end the complete conflict series. Different battles offer a different number of war points for each individual conflict adding towards the total tally.

Anyway these were some initial thoughts I wanted to share. I'm very open to constructive criticism and feedback as I'm trying to make something exciting and enticing to battle-minded players.

[Varrosha]

My hope is that now I've outlined the base concept of war mechanics here:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=382836

I can more proactively pursue industrial production mechanics beyond natural resources and provide tools for product design for corporations. However, at the moment this only seems limited to defence products. I haven't seen a clear path to linking any other kind of secondary sector products to the rest of the system that provides economic benefits.

[Varrosha]

I finally figured out pensions and their relation to sales tax revenue. Whilst I'd already figured out the base formula, I was ill-at-ease with the static age demographics and ended up inserting a small addendum to healthcare, where increased investment in it, alters the demographics in labour forces and pensioners. For now I'm going to ignore the unemployed welfare angle, but it'll be readdressed later. Next up, I'm going to start playing with tax revenues.

[Varrosha]

I cracked income tax revenue today by dividing the employed labour force into 5 brackets, for there it was an easy step to calculating sales tax and social security tax.

On another note. I'm working with a developer to make the game function with javascript, so all the formula and math will be easily hidden away behind fun, pretty graphics. The whole experience is being designed to be sleek.

[Varrosha]

I sketched out several UI's for the economic info displays we'll be using in javascript and they are starting to shape up nicely.



You can see the 6 production categories: water, power, hydrogen, food, raw materials & secondary goods (anything made from the previous 5). You'll notice in each 1 there's a number of slots. How many slots appear in each category is dependant on the type of planet and its size classification. 1 of 3 possibilities is available for each slot. 1) It goes unused, 2) your government builds state-owned industry, or 3) you allow a corporation to build industry on the world in question.

Clicking on the planet's picture loads:



Hovering over a pie chart converts % to $. Clicking on a pie chart segment loads a graph detailing the history of the segment in question.

It's likely I'll be adding a lot more into this UI in the near future as I explore tourism, migration and cultural impact as well as begin to sketch out the process of government bonds.

Whilst these UI's display a planet by planet break down, a macro-UI will be available as well to make universal changes to all planets under your control. Planetary Governers will only be able to alter GDP investment on a single planet.

[Varrosha]

So I've been working on Sovereign Bonds, War Bonds and Treasury Bills the last few days, trying to develop a nice simple system for managing them as a planetary governor.

Here you can see some of the UI's I'm drawing up that will be implemented into javascript. War Bonds look almost the same as Sovereign Bonds, except they're only available during conflict campaigns.





I've also finished writing up covert operations mechanics, into a nice and simple play inside and out of conflicts. Covert Operations being the bread and butter of any piracy players and crime syndicates that might arise (Black Market mechanics coming soon).

[Kengran]

Dude, you are not getting even quarter of the feedback you deserve. (Actually that doesn't say a lot because barely anyone seems to have noticed this..)
This is really interesting and seems to have a ton of potential, and I find it intriguing how it hasn't received way more attention. I'm kind of busy right now, but when I'll have the time, I'll elaborate on what I like and maybe suggest changes or additions. So, -tag.-

Amazing work, keep it up.

[Varrosha]

That means a great deal to me Kengran. Thank you so much for your awesome words of support. I look forward to your thoughts with great anticipation.

[Varrosha]

For anyone wondering the difference between treasury bills and sovereign bonds, bills are purchased at a discount and redeemed at full value, its the kindergarten version of debt bonds if you will, and my intent for their inclusion is to serve as an easy way for new political and corporate entities to raise capital, when they have low credit ratings.

I'm currently working on credit rating, but I have a big issue with it, I simply have no idea how common it will be to default, at present. And defaulting needs to be implicitly possible so that credit ratings can lower.

Credit ratings will control your interest rate minimum in the single market. Each tier giving you access to a lower interest rate you can offer your bonds at.

[Entrits]

I've been looking to something similar but have no idea how to program it or actual make this game works. In my region, we originally had a secretary of economics and finance until we were raided and we had to rebuild. Their task was to either figure out how to program or find someone who is doing something similar. Well it looks like I found it. Reading through this stuff I am truly impressed and glad someone is working on this. Like other above me you are not getting the credit you deserve or the exposure you should.

My only opinion so far, and I bite my tongue at it, is that people may be opposed to because it complicated to average user. While you get it, I get it, and a few people will; most people don't know the difference between a treasury or sovereign bond nor do they care. A damn shame to be honest. Saying this hurts me but it's true.I'm not sure how the mechanics works but do you have to use all the functions... I know that's like saying can you take a way the strings to a guitar but is there a way to simplify it if a region wants to?

[Varrosha]

Hello Entrits, thanks for your feedback. You're right, not everyone knows about nor do they care about the multiple facets of economics (in fact I knew nothing at all about economics before I started this project and began teaching myself, now I'm looking at studying economics at night school because it's been so much fun).

My intent is to make governorship/corporate ownership in the game as intricate or simplistic as you wish to play it. I've already begun plotting out several concepts such as the C-SIA (see earlier post) that will handle several aspects for you. I want to stress that I am building this for a specific setting and theme. It would take a huge amount of work to retrofit it for other settings/themes (I'm not ruling it out, but 1 step at a time).

But economics is only 1 angle in this game, whilst it's the most important given the users come from a political simulation forum, there are other 'careers', namely military, diplomacy, intelligence, mercenary and piracy.

I won't be building the system in a modular fashion ie. disabling certain mechanics to suit your play-style, as this would skewer the whole model for everyone (you are not an island unto yourself in this game, like the default state of NationStates), but I will do my very best to offer alternative choices for people who don't want to follow through on some things.

For example you might hire an investment bank to handle your governments debt bondage schemes instead (yes, you can establish your own bank in the game *cough*warmongering*cough*).

[Varrosha]

After thinking it over for a while now, I'm going to allow Food and Raw Materials to have sub groups like Secondary Goods. I'm also going to incorporate 'inferior, 'normal' and 'luxury' quality categories into these 3 categories as well. When planets demand them, they'll demand a certain number of a goods from each type of quality category.

I considered exploring a simple approach like something from Civ5 where luxury goods make a populace happy, but in actuality that's just bullshit. Conspicuous Consumption doesn't equate to a happier populace. Instead, like reality, different demographics want and expect the availability of different qualities. Whether I do this via a formula based of income brackets or purely random, I haven't decided.

This has the add on effect of changing production investments, resulting in what quality of product is produced. I'm still mulling over how science progression and implementation will work (letting some ideas gestate first), but it could be fun to constrict production capability based access to technology.

I've also begun to plan out system exploration, charting and prospecting.

[Varrosha]

It's been a quiet few days, I'm doing some slow and frankly tedious research on currency interest rates, the issue being i'm building an economy that is a single currency, which even though we have something like the EU, still bases its interest rate of trade with non-eu currency.

I've invited a few people who've spoken to me here to begin looking at the documentation. My most sincere hope is to build a small community to peer review the work as I move deeper into it. I work at my best when I'm showing it to others, hence this 'little' thread (well not so little any more). I'm really hoping we can start doing some gameplay tests soon, whilst its javascript presentation is being built.

I think I'm going to delay multiple alien species till later to give me more time to play with that angle, so I'm working on a backstory where a pre-FTL humanity achieved singularity. The birth of AI leads to its brutal oppression of the species in order to protect them, by seeding them amongst the stars. What follows is several thousand years of dark ages, as man tries to rebuild itself to go out into the stars again. Meanwhile the AI, known as Synths having long since disappeared thanks to a last ditch effort by the humans, leaving behind quantum gates, for humanity to explore the galaxy and build a galactic community with the rest of its inhabitants.

It's a simpler start and a sort of prelude to the game getting off for real, when humanity finally makes first contact.

[Kengran]

I'm very sorry I couldn't reply in the past few days, I've been occupied with personal issues. I'll get straight to the points that I wanted to make:
- Entrits is right, this is complicated to the average user, and unfortunately I would fall into that category. I do not have a proper understanding of the mechanics at work, but noticing your effort and dedication to this project doesn't take a master in economics. This is brilliant, even though I don't understand it completely. However, I will try to look more into the subject and learn a bit, and perhaps if you can be bothered, explain to me concepts where I get stuck on. Don't mistake me for absolutely clueless, but I'm far from being experienced enough to make competent suggestions regarding the mechanics.
- What I am good at, instead, is writing. I'm not necessarily a proper writer per se, I haven't published any books, but I still have fairly large works, especially around the science fiction genre, and have been worldbuilding and roleplaying for quite a while now. I have fairly extensive lore written on various alien species that I could potentially tweak or modify for usage in your project. I also believe the races are very fitting for this scenario, because they all have radically different economies, ranging from feudalism to communism to anarcho-primitivism, and since the main focus of this project appears to be economics, it could add a lot of variety to the game. If you wish to, I could telegram you a short presentation of some of the races.
- Again, I'm sorry for delaying my reply for so long, I have been faced with various problems in the past days, yet I believe I could have replied earlier and not kept you waiting, forgive me on that. Aside from what I've already said, keep up the good work, there is an astonishing amount of dedication you are willing to put into this project and I believe it would be a shame if it was canceled due to community disinterest or insufficient feedback.

[Varrosha]

Hello, I've been away from this project for a little over a year now, which was never my intention but when your whole world blows up it tends to take time to rebuild. Coming home and finding the table still set is a disturbing reminder of what you lost. I loved building Empyrean for the short time I was, and I intend to reignite the project and give the concept life because I still get excited by what I've built so far.

Meanwhile I'm going to have to relearn all my documentation and notes so that's going to take a little time but I will revisit this thread with updates given how it is my best hope of bringing a community onto the project and thereby helping me stay with it. I would love to initiate a dialog with anyone who still has an interest in it, so please don't hesitate to contact me directly via email wolf.beaumont at gmail.com

[Varrosha]

Day 1 back in the fray and I sat down to test-drive the systems only to realise I have no planet generation model. This spiralled the entire day into me researching stars and building part 1 of a two part system for planet generation. Star generation is mostly completed now and it determines how many points you have to play with when you design your solar systems. Basically dependant on the type of star you pick at random and it's age, you are given a framework for what celestial objects you can populate a solar system with and how many Matter Conversion Points you have to build said objects. More advanced features coming with part 2 are the types of celestial objects (but I have some of this done from a year ago), natural resource distribution and bio-diversity tiers.

It's been a good day, I've also built a lexicon for the various acronyms used in the economic models, for easy reference (I basically had to relearn everything haha). I've also introduced a new resource to the economy which will be fun to play out, plus given stellar nurseries, neutron stars and black holes resource and/or strategic values

[Westwickport]

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Uhmm... sounds like a cool beans idea! How about advertising (or showing) this idea to Future Technology storytellers/roleplayers? They might be more open to it than the average modern technology (MT) roleplayers aha

Edit: Try to telegram one of the Future Technology Roleplay Mentors. Who knows? They might be interested!

[Varrosha]

Thanks Westwickport, I just looked at the forum description and it clearly states in-character storefronts for this section, I'm really sorry about that. I have no idea why I kicked off in a thread in this section a year ago if it's always said that. I will start a new discussion in the general forum instead, thank you and apologies.

[Northwest Kalactin]

This is a great idea I am interested so let me in on this