Dev Diary 4 - The Economic System and why it may seem a little similar

[King]

When we began to design Victoria 2 we thought back to the Victoria’s release. One of the problems was the epic cycle of bankruptcy at the start as your economy slowly crashed. Now by 1.04 this problem was pretty much solved but we drew one very important lesson from this. You need a functioning economy for the game to be fun.

They say that money makes the world go round, and when it comes to Victoria nothing is truer. To be able to enjoy the game you are going to need money, in Victoria 2 you need your POPs to have money so you can tax them and this means that you need a working economy. This factor pushed us towards a bit of economic conservatism, insert in contemporary analogy here, because after all if the game ain’t fun you won’t be playing it.

For those of you who did not really play Victoria, let’s have a quick run down of the economic system and how it functioned. At its base you have Resource Gathering Operations (referred to as RGOs). These represent things like farms and mines and produce goods without any inputs. Then you have factories that take inputs from either RGOs and/or other factories and turn them into other things. Then you have a world market that acts as a central clearing house for buying and selling goods.

So this is basically what we were doing. However there was a tragic scene in the office last week. Sometimes you can’t find the words to describe it so you steal someone else’s:

“Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's Christmastime at all?”

Now if you ignore the fact that in 1836 most of Africa does not know it is Christmas time for religious reasons we had a global crisis. There wasn’t enough Fish produced to feed the world. Now we figured we could either hold a charity concert or rebalance the economic system a bit. When we decide what to do we’ll let you know but for the moment times are tough. Although on a more a serious note, this is the joy of improving interfaces, it makes it a whole lot easier to work out if things are actually working the way you intend them to. The sooner you can get the basics right the sooner you can move on to adding things.

Which comes to the second reason why we chose to keep the economic system at its base similar. If you think back to the first developer diary I mentioned that we initially starting talking about ideas for a second expansion to Victoria, well the idea was that this would focus very heavily on economics. We felt that there was still a lot mileage in improving the original Victoria’s economic system without having to reinvent the wheel. Now we have mentioned things like unemployment and artisans and these we will return to in future developer diaries but that is it for the time being.

Here is another random Screenshot that you may or may not like.

 

[King]

Well, I kind of enjoy economy in Vic1, however I didn't like the buying goods system (state pays for goods to feed industry). Plus I hoped for national-international market and services added.

Can you give us some more information how the system will work, please?

Not yet

 

[King]

Yeah, no offence King but this DD really tells us nothing...

DD have variable content. This DD was an introductory to the economic system as such it is a set up for future DDs.

 

[King]

+1.

It's understandable that you are not ready to talk about the economic system yet. But then, why make the DD about it?

Well first off, not all Diary readers are actually familiar with Victoria so giving them a Victoria economy basics would be quite nice. Also I am bit disapointed that none of you noticed that thanks to our improved interface we are already spotting balance issues that made it into Victoria 1.0.

 

[Johan]

- country flags are in the form of a wheel, HoI-like. I hate it with passion. Will it stay this way?

yes, it will look that way as it looks great.

- Units are large dolls rather then formations. Will it be matter of player choice? Or, at least, will it be editable?

no, we want to have good looking soldiers to feel more like victorian era game.

kinda like tin soldiers on a big map.

 

[King]

but we don't know anything at all about the interface?

On the plus side, I loved the economic model from V1 so I'm happy it's more-or-less being kept, and the coast of Ireland is, to all intents and purposes, perfect. I can almost spot my house on it.

Ok I'll give you this for free, the world market interface was the thing that told us there wasn't enough fish to feed the world.

 

[King]

Aahhhhhhh.... now that is a damn good improvement. So, if one had industrialised early on, it might be in one's interest to deliberatly under-produce, say, steel or machine parts in order to keep the advantage?

Yes you could try that, but I will explain (starting next week) why that is not as easy as it sounds.

 

[podcat]

Counters are not good looking. I tried them once in HoI2 and hated them. Movement shown as a green mark at the side of the counter was a reason enough to move back to sprites. I never noticed if they were moving or attacking something.

when you attack the arrow turns from green to red.

 

[King]

Nice short DD.
I like how you are approaching the development of this game. It's important that the game is working when you release it, I don't mind paying for expansions that add stuff later.

Can you say anything about how old these screen shots are?
I would suspect somewhat old since the menu interface seems very unfinished, (judging by the menu text not being aligned).

Also how will ports look like and will all provinces have them?

The screenshot was yesterday

 

[King]

I'd just like to say this: Access to Markets As a Resource In Itself!

Please lets not have a World Market this time, but rather a series of Markets, the West Europe Market, the North America Market, the China Market, the East Africa Market and so on. Perhaps as well an ability to "merge markets" etc if you control rather EU3-esque Trade Centers...

Please, whatever you do, lets not again have just one big dumb infinite-capacity World Market....

No we have a world market.

 

[King]

Please, for the love of god, maintain the economic system all you want, just scrap the world market idea (as a single global market)!

The world market stays

 

[King]

For me today's dev. diary destroys a lot of hope I had for Victoria 2. If I got it right all the basic mechanisms even those most critisized by the community will stay more or less the same. However, keeping the old model means that things you might want to add as employment cannot be easily done in a plausible way either. The economic side of the game will always appear arbitrary without having a general equilibrium economic model as a backbone. I would really appreciate if King and Johan could explain why they don't even seem to consider this option. Maybe King could also describe how close the current enginge comes to a general equilibrium model and how these indeed qustionable world-market even works and what it does for the game. Basically, my question is why do we need a world-market if we don't have a general equilibrium model anyway. In a general equilibrium setup, which should be somewhat resource intensive (computer-power), a world-market could be a necessary simplification to keep things doable. Nevertheless, one could easily think of a general equilibrium economy with regional markets, maybe even one for each country. It couldn't even make many things easier in term of algorithm and necessary computations.

Another obvious thing that was critizised before is the RGO system. Personally, I think it was really childish how this worked in Vicy 1. In fact industrialization meant that people moved away from the countryside to work in factories but this didn't mean that they shut down farms and mines. Instead technological advantages in these areas freed up manpower for factory work. Having a general food supply score for every province would be a much better and also practical solution. Besides you should have an agricultural productivity number, which depends on your tech level. The province production could be determined like: Productivity x supply score (think of it as soil quality) x allocated pops. The latter factor should show decreasing rates of return that should depend on the productivity level. In the beginning the scarce ressource will be labour, hence production should rise almost linearly with allocated pops. Under industrialized circumstances the scarce resource will be land. Allocating additional pops wouldn't yield much extra then. This would give you a strong incentive to move them into factory jobs.

How we are going to improve the economic system is very much the subject for futre developer diaries, starting next week.

 

[King]

Regarding your crisis, I assume that the POPs used too much fish? Are POPs and RGOs using the same amount of fish? I would suggest that RGOs and especially farmers use a very low amount, because they sustain them self and do not need the world market. While food like fish needs to be consumed by aristocrats and cleric from the world market.

There was roughly 3 times the demand for fish as produced in our first crack of the world in 1836.

 

[King]

Without getting bogged down in details (or providing useful alternatives), I have to say that I am also disappointed with the retention of the WM from Vicky 1.

How are you going to model with any semblance of historicity the Opium Wars, for example? Or more generally speaking, the series of wars and near-wars that were fought (or almost fought) in China throughout the Vicky time-frame that centered on market access to the world's most populous nation?

While the WM may provide a rough approximation of the world economy viewed from a "macro" perspective, the "micro" of market access to particular nations is a factor which was a very significant factor in global power politics in the 19th century.

I hope future DD's will set my fears aside...

Well we do have some ideas here about why you may just want to do that.

 

[King]

Observation: Vicky 2 dev diary replies take much longer to read through than those for HTTT. I shall leave any implications of that statement to be reflected upon by you.

A brief dev diary with few details, but it does all that it needs to - introduces a few key topics, sets them up for later elaboration, and gets a few debates going. Personally I'll wait and see on this one, because until we see more we can't really make final conclusions.

You've made Doomdark sad, it's Christams and all.

 

[Johan]

Little offtopic maybe...

Is the new improved user interface going to be small? I mean for example in EU3 the province menu covered a huge part of the screen and when there were the menu on the top and map -buttons on right... There was not much map visible. Of course, I could just increase resolution but they were still covering a lot of the screen.

In Vicky1, even if it's user interface wasn't as good as it could have been, it was relatively small. Everything opened in the same menu on the left (IIRC).

think hoi3

 

[King]

@ RELee

I agree with the core of what you're saying. A fun game should be strived for, not a "correct" game.

The thing is, that Paradox's current philosophy is to simulate the reasons why stuff happened, not forcing stuff to happen because they did historically. The main protagonist in the Victorian age were scarcity. Scarcity of jobs, and subsequently scarcity of resources to refine, and markets to sell the refined goods. Improving upon politics, ideologies, colonization, warfare and diplomacy is all very fine, but the bottom-line is that the different ideologies presented different solutions to cope with the scarcity of jobs, whilst warfare, colonies and diplomacy was different means to cope with the same issues.

Victoria turned that upside down. You had a scarcity of people, not jobs. Because of that, you wanted to maximize the profit you could make from each person, securing jobs for them was the least of your issues. You had no real incentive to protect your industry, you colonized for prestige rather than resources, you fought wars because an event told you so or you were bored.

I don't see how the Opium war or the guano struggles could happen if you don't have stuff like TA and embargoes. I don't see why you should actually bother to colonize if there's no real advantage in controlling the resources your industry refines. If you remove the event's that made historic wars happen without adding the reasons to the engine, I'm afraid I have to agree with the opponents of generic events. You get an entertaining game, but the start positions might as well be random.

Fake edit: This came out as a real depressive rant, more so than I had intended. It's just that I sincerely hope that the world market doesn't end up like a true world market. E.G. a place where you sell resources to the world market and buy it from it, not the seller. That would remove the possibilities of embargoes and trade agreement, and a lot of the depth with it. That being said, I'm still looking forward to vIIcky.

This is a 19th centuary historical game not a World War II game, that's why even if there were to be region markets there wouldn't be embargos and trade agreements. It just didn't happen.

 

[King]

Why even bother releasing DD if they are as uninformative as this one? We didn't learn practically nothing about economy, except that economy model will be similar to the one in Vic1. And justifying this with an excuse that this is just an introduction for the readers that don't know much about Victoria and didn't play Vic1 is somehow silly. If they didn't play Vic1 and don't know much about Victoria in general, they certainly won't know nothing more about Vic2 if you say that economy model will be similar to the one used in vic1...

It's all "wait till next week", "more details in next installment" and so on. It's like listening to a virgin girlfriend.

Well we can just stop doing dev Diaries if you prefer?

 

[King]

Transport costs should be easy to calculate.

Just have a total number of units by type, their capacity, resources they use.

a train will have a certain capacity, require coal or oil and machinery, and x number of people.

Clipper would use lumber cloth and a little iron and a lot of people.

As it costs more to have people around the value of moving to steam ships becomes obvious and necessary.

Transport modes could be as follows:

Road:
Sherpa.
Wagon.
Auto.
Truck.

Rail:
Train.

Sea:
Clipper
Steamer
Liner
Panimax

Air:
Airplane.

Your technology cold determine the ratio of resource consumption for each mode.

Movement by troops should be confined to road, except if they move strategically. In this case they should move at rail speed and use up capacity. In this case then there is competition for transport resources between troop movement and goods.

Sea units could be assigned escorts as in HoI and then based upon the commitment to blockading they transport can be inhibited, sunk or captured.

Units should also suffer normal attrition. That is, in the normal course of business units should die off from wear and tear.

Any upgrades should be paid for.

There should also be ports that have a particular capacity. If you don't build up your ports then you get a bottleneck. Lots of transport sitting around sucking resources but not moving anything.

This doesn't require much more than expanding the existing transport system to cover the movement of all goods.

The other thing missing from Vicky is the transport of people. Obviously they can walk from one province to another but they may also want to use (and pay for) ships trains and autos.

This brings up an issues for PoPs, assets that consume. If you track by pop the houses and cars they own you get pretty good consumption factor for fuel and maintenance demand. Having an automobile isn't like having brick, it has it's own supply ecology.

As far as consumption goes, food should always be listed first. (and yes, slaves do eat food and have higher level needs, even slaves need incentives to work).

No they aren't

 

[King]

Or you could just have transport cost you a % of your efficiency, per province, depending on infrasctructure.

Just think about it this way, with a world market we need to keep track of what is being sold on the market, and from where so the right people can get paid, and who buys it so the right people spend the money. However have no need to keep track of both at the same time. If we start to factor in transport we are adding quite a major level of computational difficulty to the game.