AHD Economy Discussion

Thanks for the clarification.

Naselus said:

[...]National banks will lend upto their total money stockpile.
Countries may lend upto 3 times their tax base from every bank that has the money to lend.
[...]

Click to expand...

´tax base´ is what they´d have as tax-income, if all taxes are set to 100%? And they can lend upto 3 times that, total, right (not 3x that from each and every bank)?
If i take loans, will i always loan from my national bank first, if it still has money avaiable? Can i boost my capis by making debts (they´d get the interest i pay, right, assuming they are the dominant lenders to my bank?)? If my party is state capialtism, and an election-victory by the liberals seems pending, should i, maybe, invest like crazy, going into the reds as much as i can afford, let the liberals take over, and have my interest-boosted capis build away, stay in debts until the industry´s up, and only start to seriously payback then (assuming i could afford zero rich taxes and tariffs still)? If redistribution of wealth from bottom to top (aka capital accumulation) doesnt go fast enough for my taste, via taxation, is public debt a potent way to help it along?

Jazumir said:

´tax base´ is what they´d have as tax-income, if all taxes are set to 100%? And they can lend upto 3 times that, total, right (not 3x that from each and every bank)?

Click to expand...

Tax base is 100% taxes at 100% efficiency. And no, you can loan 3 times that from every bank.

Jazumir said:

If i take loans, will i always loan from my national bank first, if it still has money avaiable?

Click to expand...

Yes.

Jazumir said:

Can i boost my capis by making debts (they´d get the interest i pay, right, assuming they are the dominant lenders to my bank?)?

Click to expand...

Yes.

Jazumir said:

If my party is state capialtism, and an election-victory by the liberals seems pending, should i, maybe, invest like crazy, going into the reds as much as i can afford, let the liberals take over, and have my interest-boosted capis build away, stay in debts until the industry´s up, and only start to seriously payback then (assuming i could afford zero rich taxes and tariffs still)?

Click to expand...

Ye-es, but be careful with that. Interest payments can easily become too much for an L-F government's meagre tax income to afford, leading you into a debt spiral.

Jazumir said:

If redistribution of wealth from bottom to top (aka capital accumulation) doesnt go fast enough for my taste, via taxation, is public debt a potent way to help it along?

Click to expand...

Not that potent, since:

a) Capis need to have accumulated a lot of capital already for you to borrow it
b) The base rate of interest in V2 is a measily 2%.

Naselus said:

It wasn't an argument

But anyway, what should happen in your fruit case is:

Fruit is oversupplied.
Fruit farmers become unemployed, and either demote to craftsmen (increasing industry demand, and also their own demand) or migrate to other RGOs which do have high demand for their output.
Fruit is no longer oversupplied, and industry has increased.


There may be a slight issue with money supply not expanding quite as fast as output atm, which would cause mini-recessions and microdepressions as the market runs into the limit of cash supply, but that's quite hard to diagnose accurately - it means tracking down where all the money in the game is at a given moment.

Click to expand...

I must give definately give my games a try past 1875

Hopefully you are right
Anyways thanks for the detailed answer


p.s.

(Problem is that Sardinia only sells fruit fruit and fruit hmy: - so it seems to be important to have
italy united i guess)
And i have similar problems with serbia which only have grain rgo's (and one coal)

Raph said:

I really love that raw material supply matters again, it gives you an actual reason to fight to sphere nations and grab colonies. One of the things I've missed most from the earlier days of V1.

Click to expand...

In V1, world market bought everything. Now you unload crates of wine to sea because the game doesn't simulate stocking or production balancing based on demand. Old system could tolerate crudeness of factory production system, new game cannot.

You can still use stockpiles to mitigate that to an extent.

IMO however there should be a Reduce Factory option instead of only having the option to close/open.

Yes, mostly it regulates itself. I have more problems with mass unemployment during war times during blockades. BTW any ETA on the patch?

Beagá said:

Yes, mostly it regulates itself. I have more problems with mass unemployment during war times during blockades. BTW any ETA on the patch?

Click to expand...

podcat said:

I cant give a date, but early in the week looking pretty unlikely now. Tracing down this out of sync bug that has messed up a few late game MP sessions is proving tricky and its one of the things I'v promised for the patch. The way these bugs work it can take 10 minutes to fix, or 3 days.

Click to expand...

From DD15.

Naselus said:

Tax base is 100% taxes at 100% efficiency. And no, you can loan 3 times that from every bank.
[...]

Click to expand...

100% taxes at 100% efficiency is sort of like the GDP, right? 3 times that as upper credit limit seems a bit much onto itself (if i am not mistaken, the countries currently having issues in reality are somewhere at around 1.5 times that, right?). Making that amount avaiable in every bank around the world, which can provide the money, seems quite lenient, for a non-expert like me, even if i dont consider the fixed rate of 2% (which should rise, as your debt/GDP ratio rises).

Please dont get me wrong, Naselus: I think you and the team have probably devised the best economical model in a commercial computer game to date. Please understand, that this is what makes me (respectfully) question details of it and wish for clarifications and further refinement. I am thankful for every minute you spend(-t) on it. I love how questioning it makes you question the real thing, too - that just shows its educational qualities, beyond the entertaining ones. You know, like in: ´Soo... public debt is actually good for the capis, uh...? well, at least in the game... i wonder how it is in reality...´

No, I'm glad people ask questions about the mechanics - it allows us to have intelligent debate on the subject, where everyone understands the fundamentals. Part of the reason the devs were kind enough to listen to my input when they were remaking the economy is because I've taken the time to learn everything I can about it, and it pleases me no end to have people actually seeking to learn from that. I'm a teacher at heart.

I do get annoyed when people presume the economy is simple or easy, or when they complain it's 'broken' without understanding enough about it to even describe the problem they're having, or trace what's causing it - there's definitely problems with it (there's always problems ) such as liquidity issues etc, but a casual glance at the economy by someone who's played the game three times or so is almost certainly not going to figure out what the problem even is, let alone suggest a sensible solution to it. A great many problems players have with the economy (including recessions) can be overcome in the game through sensible policy and spending, and quite frankly I'd argue that having natural recessions AT ALL is a mark of how impressive the economy is, rather than a sign that it's broken.

V2 almost certainly is the most advanced closed socio-economic world-system model in a game ever written, which is why it's capable of modelling economic cycles naturally, so it's really not sensible to presume that you can play the game through twice and understand everything about it. Most people understand almost nothing about the details of how promotion, or migration, or the economy actually work, and readily admit that they don't. Relying on them to accurately diagnose the problem and suggest a solution to it is like asking a man in the pub to tell you why you have backache, and to cure it for you. He might identify the symptoms (just as everyone can see that migration is currently way out of whack), but he can't tell you precisely what's causing it. Hence, the vast majority of suggested answers to various issues (both in base V2 and in the various mods) can be dismissed within seconds by those with a deeper understanding, because we made the same errors over a year ago and learned that the suggested answer just causes more problems.

On the other hand, these forums have been (and still are) frequented by some fantastically dedicated and enquiring minds, who have created mathematical models of the economy, drawn up formulas to explain various phenomena within the subsystems, modded in various repeatable experiments and posted the methodology so that their findings can be independantly observed, and dug into the scripts to examine and understand the way the game works. I may disagree with some of their conclusions completely, but I respect them because even though I think they're wrong, they have one hell of an argument to support those conclusions. Just dig through the old pages of this, or look at some of the threads of the major mods, and you'll find simply unbelieveable stuff (this thread, for example, contains a discussion between myself and Phi on V2 economic phase spaces. No, really. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?503495-Fiscal-Policy-Megathread)


Anyway, /rant. The way debt is handled is, in all honesty, a bit of a joke atm. A more sensible system would be for bankruptcy to occur when interest payments are greater than tax base - which is what happens in real life. In an ideal world, we'd also have variable interest rates etc, but that is DEFINITELY asking too much for a patch, and possibly too much for the Clauswitz engine to handle in addition to all the other plates V2 has spinning. Tho I do have some mod plans stashed away somewhere for an event-based credit rating system

Valinn said:

Why do people make such arrogant comments?

You don't get to decide when to shut a conversation down. It's rude to everyone else who posted in the thread. To order it, in allcaps nonetheless? Get over yourself.

Especially since you're the only one who couldn't understand the outrage you detected was a typo. Just sad.

Click to expand...

Read the tittle then rethink and then come back. He claims the enitre economy system is a mess based on one game..

Secret Master said:

Yeah, it is a bit easy to have surprise bankruptcies when you are nowhere near being unable to pay your debt off if you are the world's leading economy.

Personally, though, I would prefer two changes to the bank system. Bigger interest rates with a slightly bigger impact from interest rate reducing techs. I would also love it if capis could borrow money themselves. This was a feature originally planned for Vic2, but it was pulled early in development. Even if half my capis are defaulting every 10 years, I wouldn't mind at all. Just increase the promotion rates of clerks and artisans to capi and let the capis either borrow money to create an economic boom, or let them crash and burn. We'd get some historically realistic panics, then. It would also strengthen LF against State capitalism in the early and middle game, since the government no longer monopolizes the ability to borrow money to create new industries.

Click to expand...

But LF seriously does not need to be any stronger at the moment. It is by far the most powerful economic policy.

L-F is great when prestige is high and inputs are available, but terrible when prestige is low and competition for inputs is fierce. The UK thrives on it in the opening 10 years or so, but most other countries will struggle to compete. Later on, as the RGO output bonuses unlock around the world, L-F becomes monsterously powerful.

Naselus said:

V2 almost certainly is the most advanced closed socio-economic world-system model in a game ever written, which is why it's capable of modelling economic cycles naturally, so it's really not sensible to presume that you can play the game through twice and understand everything about it. Most people understand almost nothing about the details of how promotion, or migration, or the economy actually work, and readily admit that they don't. Relying on them to accurately diagnose the problem and suggest a solution to it is like asking a man in the pub to tell you why you have backache, and to cure it for you. He might identify the symptoms (just as everyone can see that migration is currently way out of whack), but he can't tell you precisely what's causing it. Hence, the vast majority of suggested answers to various issues (both in base V2 and in the various mods) can be dismissed within seconds by those with a deeper understanding, because we made the same errors over a year ago and learned that the suggested answer just causes more problems.

On the other hand, these forums have been (and still are) frequented by some fantastically dedicated and enquiring minds, who have created mathematical models of the economy, drawn up formulas to explain various phenomena within the subsystems, modded in various repeatable experiments and posted the methodology so that their findings can be independantly observed, and dug into the scripts to examine and understand the way the game works. I may disagree with some of their conclusions completely, but I respect them because even though I think they're wrong, they have one hell of an argument to support those conclusions. Just dig through the old pages of this, or look at some of the threads of the major mods, and you'll find simply unbelieveable stuff (this thread, for example, contains a discussion between myself and Phi on V2 economic phase spaces. No, really. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?503495-Fiscal-Policy-Megathread)


Anyway, /rant. The way debt is handled is, in all honesty, a bit of a joke atm. A more sensible system would be for bankruptcy to occur when interest payments are greater than tax base - which is what happens in real life. In an ideal world, we'd also have variable interest rates etc, but that is DEFINITELY asking too much for a patch, and possibly too much for the Clauswitz engine to handle in addition to all the other plates V2 has spinning. Tho I do have some mod plans stashed away somewhere for an event-based credit rating system

Click to expand...

This is why I love these forums and this game.

The economic simulation is very good. It's a major part of the reason I play this game, I get bored with games that aren't complex because they are too predictable and it's usually too easy to master them. I enjoy the number of economic instruments you have at your disposal (not just the sliders, but also all the other options you can come up with to stimulate your economy), and love how lowering taxes instead of increasing them actually can save the balance over time. There is indeed some kind of emergent optimum of tax rates that floats around. I usually put 1-3% on the toll to make people choose local products instead of foreign, but of course it can make things less competetive too.

One thing that could be missing though is that large industries should gain some slight efficiency bonus from being large. Early economies would have companies accumulate capital to eventually grow into heavy industry (maybe to simulate a free market of light industries turning into a set of corporations and market oligopoly). With a planned economy, you would, as in real life, skip the decades of uncoordinated light industry capital acumulation and build heavy industry from the beginning, thus industrializing and catching up more rapidly. In Vic 1 the Free Market option was underdeveloped, the AI was very stupid, now it has caught up and it should be time for the planned economies to improve.

About fluctuating interest rates I imagine they could be set to float by making them a function of the available liquid capital in a country. If there is an excess of capital the interest rates could go down etc. In a planned economy you would have to set the interest rate yourself and set how much money there should be in the bank (apart from pop-money) for others to lend.

It's pretty easy to get cycles in an economic simulation. All you need to do is to create a lot of productive agents placing orders on a market, introduce goods and needs, then if they happen to produce something that's profitable they multiply while agents that don't get needs fulfilled starve and get removed.

Threads like this remind me that there are essentially two kinds of gamers.

First, there are the Code Warriors. These guys revel in the mechanics of the game; how A produces B produces C, etc.. To them, the game is mostly a computer program to be studied, mastered and (sometimes) exploited. Nothing gives them greater pleasure than creating the perfect list of the 100 things to always do in the first 45 seconds of a game. (A radical sect of this group are the guys who live to discover things like the fact that pressing R+B+c+@ seventeen times within a span of three seconds gives you an extra cow.)

Code Warriors are awesome because they know exactly how the game works, down to the tiniest detail. They sometimes get so lost in the minutiae, though, that they lose an objective perspective on whether the code they love so much actually resembles a game.

The second group is the Zen Masters. They recoil from the details of the game mechanics like a vampire from a cross. They don't want to know that Rock always beats Scissors which always beats Paper, etc. They use the combat resolution tables from the manual to light their pipes. And they never, ever read the rest of manual.

Zen Warriors are awesome because they are willing to accept a high degree of abstraction and love nuanced ways to "win" a game. They're happy so long as everything just "feels right." Their problem, of course, is that they usually can't articulate exactly what "feels right" means, especially in a way that can be converted into code.

Code Warriors tend to be game designers and beta testers. Zen Masters tend to be consumers and reviewers.

And they usually don't get along with each other.

One thing I find interesting about the new economic system is that it now actually makes some sense to implement a progressive taxation system in a highly industrialized country; overtaxing the poor often winds up hurting your own industry due to demand dropping, while capitalists wind up with so much money that they can easily afford to get a big chunk taxed away and still have enough left to build things.

Darkrenown said:

But that's not true. Pop growth, Lit and Con all increase the demand from pops, plus lux goods are bought multiple times when the pops can afford it, plus industry gets higher throughput so demands more inputs, this all increases demand for goods.

Also, Grain is a life need, you really don't want demand to be 4 times supply...

Click to expand...

@ Darkrenown


I discovered this today


I played one year as Sardinia Piedmont : (1836)
with the military slider at 0 % , the population raised from 941.22K to 941.29K
that means the population grew by 90 people

Then another year with the military slider at 100 %
The population raised then from 941.22K to 947.59k

Not a single person immigrated or emigrated externely - it's all natural growth
An example : With the military slider at 0 - the natural growth was +6 on the 2nd day -
with the military slider at 100 the growth was + 50


Could it be that i am right when i am sceptical about the game mechanics ?
Or did i oversee something ?!

I mean if i didn't oversee something...this is a joke or ?