Please explain the trade and missing resource production impact game design to me

[Bugnr01]

I understand how it works but don´t why it has to work the way it does. My game is complicated but fun as hell, I (Germany) opposed Hitler, the british became fascist and allied with Italy resulting in the Commonwelth became the new Allies. Long story short there are now 5 powerfull blocks fighting each other:

Commonwelth: USA, France, Commonwelth states like India and Canada and other democracies
Anglo Italian: The european fascist block with Great Britain, Italy and a bunch of eastern european states
Monarchist Germany
The Soviet Union
Japan

The war was more and more escalating as the Soviets started to came to war with the Commomwelth and the Anglo Italians. So the USA is now at war with all four blocks and i was going to cross the Atlantik then i noticed that the US assistance in Africa and south america was dwindling and i stopped encounter USA convoys with my subs. I was curios why this could happen and tag switched to the USA. O Boy was that a dire picture:




The USA stopped producing nearly everything because of two and a half game designs.
First: factories with a missing resource dont produce anything (there was a time with 50% while one missing and 25% for two or so)
Second: Trade policies dont allow the use of unexported goods. the USA is extracting 1000, exporting 450, and needs 500 for itself. Seems fine but the USA is lacking 250.
Third: A democratic AI is rather going to die than change the trade law. This seems partly because the devs dont wanted every nation to cut the trade if they are lacking one resource (aka USA cutting Oil for everyone because they need more steel) and you can not change trade law per resource.

So whats the reasoning behind the system as it is and why is it good this way even when allowing this flaws in the gameplay. It just took a complete faction of the board.
Reaching a point in the game where in mid 1942 every non dem. nation goes for cloesd economy and killing them self and their faction members (one now lacks oil and the other steel but they cant trade anymore) while the big dem. nations die to reserve enough buy able resources for their small faction members.

 

[Zeeth]

The AI cheats, it does not need to have trade to get resources. AI is never going to act like a human. The only way to balance AI is to have them cheat. That's why they can have basically zero guns yet still be able to reinforce and have attrition at times.
If you control enough of the world to cut them off as you have, then the game is basically over at that point.

 

[bitmode]

So whats the reasoning behind the system as it is and why is it good this way even when allowing this flaws in the gameplay. It just took a complete faction of the board.

Have you ever seen a game designer answer questions like this?

 

[Bugnr01]

Have you ever seen a game designer answer questions like this?

No, and they dont have to. If the design is basicly good, serves its purpose and my game is a rare chase to the circumstances the community will point it out. So will they if its indeed bad.... . Sometimes its enough to just here other opinions on the matter.

 

[Androbey]

Unfortunately, the trade system is the easiest? You can either have free trade and have your opponent countries buy your surplus resources for civilian factories which you can use to enable you to convert your civilian factories to military factories that you can not supply resources to in order to produce equipment. Big Problem. With this system the only way to reduce your opponents from buying your resources, is to enact more restrictive trade laws.

The active trade law determines how much of the produced resource is set aside for trade. It Cannot be used by the producer even if it is not sold. Only the remainder can be used for production.

I can see that this was a compromise to simplify trade mechanics, but I believe that there should be a mechanism to untraded resources to the producer if they are not "sold". Also, a country should have the ability to declare a resource a "Strategic Resource" and prohibit its "sale", usually this only occurs if you are at war.

 

[BeauNiddle]

So whats the reasoning behind the system as it is and why is it good this way even when allowing this flaws in the gameplay. It just took a complete faction of the board.

I'm not one of the developers but I am a coder so here's my view:

1) It's a big meaningful choice. In HOI4 they specifically moved away from lots of small 1% bonuses to having big impactful choices. This fits that criteria
2) It mostly works. The missing material penalty has been reduced since release so now the system only really shows issues when the whole world is against you (although it should be pointed out again the AI still has issues regardless)

And the really big one:

3) It's computationally cheap. It would be lovely if you had access to the resources that were 'spare' but every time you build a new factory or rearrange your lines it would alter what's available for trade, thus all your partners would have to look for new supplies which would knock on to the whole economy. Think about how much resource usage jumps when you switch to wep3 or start building a battleship. There are small tweaks you can do to help this but the trigger conditions would be constantly firing in the late game - every time a factory is completed, every time a factory is bombed (strategic or resistance), every time a factory switches production it will need to recalculate resources on the market AND THIS WILL TRIGGER FOR EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.

For comparison the current system only needs to recalculate when people switch trade laws - a MUCH rarer trigger. Excavation research, infrastructure improvements & decisions now allowing resources to grow are fine since they only ever add to the trade pool and never reduce the amount available.


As soon as people stop complaining the game is badly optimised they will have computation overhead spare to look into this but until then the issue is just a minor one on a long list.

Oh and there's also the extra UI that would need to be added & user tutorial / explanation that would need to be added to explain what is going on / allow the user control. But those are doable even if the game does keep running out of screen real estate.

 

[bitmode]

1) It's a big meaningful choice. In HOI4 they specifically moved away from lots of small 1% bonuses to having big impactful choices. This fits that criteria

I'd say the choice is big but not meaningful. It is a hard choice between options you respectively don't want because the obvious choices have been removed.
This game is not really about trade to begin with, so why add a "big choice" about trade that can at best be used for some min-maxing?

2) It mostly works. The missing material penalty has been reduced since release so now the system only really shows issues when the whole world is against you (although it should be pointed out again the AI still has issues regardless)

Isn't it the other way around? At release the penalty for lack of resources was capped at 80%. So even when the whole world was against you, you could keep producing at scale - at least to some extent. 1.3.3 changed it so the efficiency would quickly drop to 0%:

- Now factories receive penalty for each next lacking resource across multiple lines rather than max out at 80% by line

3) It's computationally cheap. It would be lovely if you had access to the resources that were 'spare' but every time you build a new factory or rearrange your lines it would alter what's available for trade, thus all your partners would have to look for new supplies which would knock on to the whole economy. Think about how much resource usage jumps when you switch to wep3 or start building a battleship. There are small tweaks you can do to help this but the trigger conditions would be constantly firing in the late game - every time a factory is completed, every time a factory is bombed (strategic or resistance), every time a factory switches production it will need to recalculate resources on the market AND THIS WILL TRIGGER FOR EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.

For comparison the current system only needs to recalculate when people switch trade laws - a MUCH rarer trigger. Excavation research, infrastructure improvements & decisions now allowing resources to grow are fine since they only ever add to the trade pool and never reduce the amount available.


As soon as people stop complaining the game is badly optimised they will have computation overhead spare to look into this but until then the issue is just a minor one on a long list.

You can lose parts of your exports for other reasons already (bombed infra, lost territory, fluctuating convoy availability) so the game needs to constantly recalculate exports anyway. It's not a big deal. Without profiling an actual implementation, it is hardly possible to judge the performance impact of changes like this.

Oh and there's also the extra UI that would need to be added & user tutorial / explanation that would need to be added to explain what is going on / allow the user control. But those are doable even if the game does keep running out of screen real estate.

By that logic almost none of the things added in recent years should have been.