Fwurg

[Caldoss]

Let me preface this post by saying that it is motivated by a desire to make this game even more fun. I would like the economics and the politics to be as closely related as possible, as well as providing a 'realistic', enjoying and relatively easy-to-maintain simulation of the economies of our star wars space nations.

In FWURG, the only relevant resource for players is money. Money is a resource that functions interchangeably as research capacity, construction material and as a medium of exchange, but NOT as a a store of value or a a standard of deferred payment. The actual resources, on the other hand, have many of the qualities of money, being indistinguishable in the properties they posses and their inherent value for the purpose of building tax sets.

This has several disadvantages:

• Player action is not constrained in any way by the availability of resources. A system or theoretically even the entire Union could be spending all its income on building projects without there actually being any construction materials zones. Same with food and population growth, or research and the availability of laboratories/research zones. This makes player action resource-independent, when it should IMO be resource-dependent to promote trade and political roleplay and more stark economic choices such as autarky vs interdependence.
• There is no system of supply and demand for populations. Tax generation / populations can be satisfied by any combination of resources, none of which is essential towards the purpose of generating money. As a result, the 'tax sets' gameplay is disjointed from any real-life process and is more akin to collecting brightly coloured Pokemon cards.
• Without actual upkeep of resources for population except for power, negative income is impossible. A faction will at worst become stagnant as a result of other players' actions. This gives every incentive for pareto-optimal trade.
• Money cannot be saved up for deferred payments, making any adverse change in trade flows immediately dangerous to national economies. There is no buffer.

I think it would be possible to improve the way that money and resources are used, using other games as an example. In my discussion with Brend and others I used Victoria II as an example, but because of the complexity it may be better to use old turn-based games like the first Civilization or Master of Magic as examples of simple, small-scale economies using a limited number of resources.

The changes I'd like to see include the following themes:

• Permit the saving of money as a store of value, while retaining products and raw materials as resources that must be produced and spent on the same turn.
• Population generates taxes, but exports and possibly other things such as bribes and subsidies can be used to supplement income.
• Give each population an "upkeep" of product-resources. This can be race-dependent: a standard humanoid race might have food and healthcare as basic needs and consumer goods and vehicles as more advanced needs which could give a bonus or malus to productivity and thus tax income. It is possible to make these needs race-dependent, i.e. the computer race needs ICT goods and power.
• Give each "product" resource a purpose in the game. You need access to construction materials to build new zones, say. And research to do, well, research.
• Rename the product zones with more fluffy names to reflect their purpose. A Research Zone could be called a laboratory, an upgraded one perhaps an advanced laboratory, or something more imaginative.

[Mercury]

We currently have projects which require certain materials. I am open to expanding on this, such as requiring Food, Construction Materials and Utilities instead of Population Growth Cost, Research, ICT and Exotic Matter Devices instead of tax for technologies (perhaps through a special good), and the likes. This would make these currently financial details into projects which I find a very interesting option that I am open to looking into. I also believe the system is more than stable enough to handle such changes.

The tax system however seems pretty solid to me as it is. Unfortunately, we cannot model an entire economy, with consumption, etc. So we abstracted this - we presume that all Union Factions can supply the basic necessities their population requires to continue to exist as otherwise players could be eliminated from the game, which goes directly against the purpose of the game. On top of this, population demands levels of luxury, and the more luxury you can give them (i.e. the larger tax sets), the more the economy booms and thus the more tax you can collect. Hence bigger sets generate more tax per product.

I understand the level of abstraction makes it a somewhat odd mix between Food and Exotic Matter Devices for example, but this is something I find acceptable, as earlier models with more restricted tax sets proved themselves to be unworkable on the games scale. We have to maintain abstraction at some level and in this game, its pretty high. I'll agree its closer to Catan (grain and ore make a town into a city o_O?) than it is to an accurate economic model.

Population is relatively static. I do not want system creation to be the only decision making point in the development of a player world. Your proposal regarding population generating base income directly and having a cost to maintain would make the decision of your population size absolutely critical in the game and whatever you chose you'll be stuck with. Though you cannot change planet sizes or orbits, you can very much customize your system right now through terraformation and zone refurbishment. Population does not allow this level of alteration however. Simply put, I do not believe that linking tax to population more that it already is would be advantageous, as it would effectively force players with small populations to remain small forever. That's not something I'm willing to do.

If you can come up with a concrete proposal however which addresses and solves the above issues, I am more than willing to look into them and work with you.

We deliberately do not allow money to be saved up for gameplay reasons - if you cannot save your money, you can't stay away from Fwurg for a few months, quickly spend everything and then be away for a month again. I want to keep it that way - players who devote more time to Fwurg deserve to be better off. It also gives you a continuous stream of things that are happening - a zone is finished, a technology is developed, a decision needs to be made on what to produce, etc. I am open to an IC banking system being created (and in fact have already spoken with Brend about doing so) but this will be limited in scope and that's as far as I'm willing to take the saving of resources for the above reason.

Finally, renaming a research zone to laboratory seems like it does not cover the scale of things (though you are free to name your zones). A single research zone may employ a hundred million people, cover an area the size of a small continent and have a production to match. I think calling that a laboratory suggests a very different scale than we are operating on. In fact, large parts of those hundred million people won't be doing research at all! They'll be organizing traffic, selling coffee or constructing and maintaining bridges, all of which is crucial to allow the actual research output of the zone to be generated!

TLDR; Your proposal contains some very fundamental changes. As mentioned, I'm not against picking up some of your changes, especially around extending the concept of projects to include things currently done by tax. I think that moves towards your goal already. However before I can even begin to consider a tax / population link scheme as you propose, you'll have to come up with a concrete proposal which addresses the potential problems I raised here.

[Elmer]

First, I like the approach and I also encounter some of these missing links. I also like the idea of using products more often, because taxes are just to general for good intertwined gameplay I think.

I got mixes feelings about the needs of population for a very simple reason: My Cradle is meant that it can be fly of one day and operate as a stand alone ship. But well, this is fixable with more techs. ^_^ Also as Mercury said, this might lock in your economy way too much. But still I am open to at least try if we can made up something.

Therefore, lets check the population needs: I think that the racial characteristic is a good baseline of the needs of a population: For example: The Cyborg characteristic needs , the high fecundity needs , and analytical needs . <-- These examples are just examples, any other, more logical requirements are of course welcome. Maybe players can use to change their needs.

Advantage: By creating your race you automatically get your requirement, making balancing more constant.
Disadvantage: The requirements may be too restricting, forcing people to take product requirements for their population they don't see fitting.


I have serious doubts about needing materials for new zones, this forces all the starting economies to take the same products to grow, creating an enormous overflow of the 'starters products' while starting economies have no way of cooperating with other new economies as all their economies are the same. Also, if you start an economy with other products than the ones needed to create new zones, than how did your faction grew?

I think needing products for upgrading zones might actually be a great idea. This can strongly encourage growing players to work together to achieve a more efficient growth. To achieve this, a need based on the opposite product might be an excellent baseline. What I mean is: There are the following products in the game:
: It's a sequence, like with colours. So the opposite products are:
:Every product moved 6 places compared to the 'baseline'. <-- again this is just an example.

The example product need is based on how it would, logically for me, increase cooperation the most. It is not based on IC logic. (Requiring weapons to upgrade your healthcare is just weird :S)

I agree with mercury as well that the way how taxes are made nowadays is pretty good. This allows flexible partnerships, and allows you to choose your partners, instead of that the whole economy is already predetermined by what everybody produces, and what the possible tax-sets are. The current system also allows economies, especially the growing ones, to grow towards the needs of their allies, they start pretty flexible and have most of the time good opportunities to grow to other areas than they originally intended.

[Mercury]

Based on the economic gameplay discussion (which I think still needs some more discussion), and the desire for more population oriented technologies, I came up with a way of changing the way population growth cost works and I want to hear your opinions.

Instead of requiring 100 per zone, I would propose requiring 60 and 60 per zone in population growth cost. This results in a net increase in the demand for organics, which I believe is fitting given the use in special goods at this time. Naturally all cost reductions will remain intact.

It will also make for a greater need for factions to get products rather than merely taxes and hopefully may increase trade and create some demand.

What do people think of this idea?

[Brend]

I don't see a problem with it. Though in all honesty, I don't think that population growth costs are paid in such amounts that this will really increase demand. What I basically see is a reduction of the PGC, as 120 products times 0.75 per product (the optimal yield through a 12-set) comes out at 90 per zone. And since my population is growing the fastest, I really have no problem with that. (And of course, the fact that this is an incidental expense, and the addition of possible shipping costs, etc. seem to balance out with the missing 10 .)

However, I would like to point out that I think I'm the main driving force behind the population-oriented technologies (come to think of it, without me, the number of population-related technologies would be very low I think). It might be more interesting to look into changing the cost of the Improved Production zone upgrade if you really want to target the effect on something a lot of players care about.

[Mercury]

I can see this working for Improved Production in addition. Maybe something like requiring half the cost in Construction Materials and half the cost in the material produced by the zone (exception for strange zones like power zones). Natural life could remove the Construction Material cost for similar pricing.

[Elmer]

The problem with only one product needing for upgrading a zone is that this can seriously limit your growth options when other players refuse to provide you with the one needed product. (Con mats in this case.) At the other hand, if only a small portion of the cost has to be paid in a product, it can still be viable for the player to buy them from the open market.

I think I like the idea of needing conmats for upgrading your zones. I am still strongly against needing them for new zones though.

[Brend]

I see the Open Market as a viable alternative to buying the goods from other players. I assume the prices on the open market have an upper bound, so though it might not be very affordable to grab what you need there, it does at least allow you to improve your zones.

Now for a bit of doomsaying:

If we start binding a lot of products to specific purposes, one of the problems I can envision is a loss of flexibility. is very flexible. You can transfer it without needing , and you can easily deal with others to get some of it fronted if you come up lacking. If you must have to improve your zone, the whole economy would lose a lot of flexibility as you need to lock in those materials. Of course, the requirement of paying a part of the sum in the material you're improving anyway isn't an issue, as those are available anyway. Another mitigating factor is the fact that refurbishing still remains available with -only.

By binding too much products too specific (required) purposes, we loose all the advantages that can be gained by having as the common denominator of our economy. This would reduce the possibility for trade, and could tip over our economy into a bartering system where a loan of money doesn't really help you, as you need products to grow and improve. (And others won't have use of your either, as they would also need products.) This could take away a lot of the more interesting financial constructions that are currently possible (but not really in use). On the other hand, it would pave the way to things like commodity futures as the demand for goods can better be predicted.

For the TL;DR peeps: too much Product X has Purpose Y makes this a bartering game and takes away a lot of the uses of . In my opinion this is not logical, as the scale of the economy makes this difficult (small amount of players + no trade with NPCs).

[Elmer]

Maybe we can add a little flexibility to offer the player a choice. They can either spend , or an amount of products equal to that . So to improve your zone, you can spend 1000 , 1334 or an equal share between these. This way we can add more value to the products without loosing the flexibility of the system.

[Brend]

@Elmer: But if you can pay in there is absolutely no reason to use the , unless you have them in excess... After all, by using your in sets you can create taxes from them, and you get rid of other products as well. (Let's say you produce and put them in 12-sets. You won't want to take them out to start production of an Improved Production upgrade, as that would degrade all your 12-sets into a multitude of 9-sets.)

For any conversion of -only prices into a product-based price, there are two options: have the upgrade price in be cheaper, or have the upgrade price in be higher.

Since the price of 1000 for an Improved Production upgrade is deemed balanced, we can't really lower the price without breaking the balance. So the -only price should go up. This is currently done by saying 'just go to the Open Market', which at the time of writing will cost your roughly 60% extra at the moment (2013-3-6: buying at 1.25461 / makes 1334 = 1674 ).

Then we have the problem of valuation. The thing is, this is all based on the optimal conversion of products into 12-sets. The conversion of -price into -price is tied in with the valuation '1 = 0.75 ' which is based on the optimal conversion... However, if we take the nine-set ratio '1 = 0.6666666666666 ' this would mean more to match the 1000 original price. This would push people to paying in (paying 1000 is better than paying 1500 that you could possible exchange at 0.75 per for 1125 from 12-sets).

Conclusion: we should not offer the option of paying directly if we want to give the good meaning. Unless the -only price is much higher... And the Open Market can handle that perfectly. (It even offers incentive for political ploys to raise/lower the Open Market prices -- which might lead to more roleplay!)


@Mercury: What ratio would you want to exchange the goods in? 12-set would be 666 and 666 product-to-be-improved. The same ratio you put the PGC would be 600 and 600 product-to-be-improved.

For the PGC it seems you put the products as more expensive than 0.75 per product. My guestimate is: (0.9 * <currentprice> ) / 0.75 (which boils down to about 0.833 per product) though I do not completely understand why you decided on this (I assume you the reasoning is this: 10% of the price is handling and shipping of the products, the other 90% is converted into products through the 12-set ratio).

[Mercury]

I'm pausing my efforts on this until I hear from Caldoss -> this was their proposal, so I'd like to hear their opinion before I put more effort into this.