Small Con Goods Deficits on Utopian Abundance Shouldn't Be Apocalyptic

[Star Foth]

So what with the market fluctuating and rough patches basically being a thing, I think the penalties/functions of con goods and living standards should be reworked.
Right now if you produce 300 con goods a month and consume 320 con goods with none in storage, all your people act like they can't even meet the needs to live in poverty. At this point, even the poor live better than they do in social welfare. You can even have worse penalties than barely meeting needs while everyone is in impoverished living standards. It's surreal.
While you can just set the default to decent standards or social welfare and go down the line setting everyone to default then when you get out of the rough patch or market spike go back up to utopian living standards. Also, it is really immersion breaking which is a big problem, at least in my opinion, in Stellaris.
Scarcity should work like it does in Victoria; the rich have more purchasing power than the poor. Also, living standards should be a cap so you can set certain species to be better off than others or even deal with scarcity itself. The upper class should have 4x the purchasing power than the poor and the middle class should have 2x the purchasing power than the poor. Shortages of con goods suffer penalties relative to lesser living standards. IE of your deficit is small enough so that the poor live better here than they do on social welfare standards they should get the same bonuses than they do on social welfare (mostly to standardize bonuses and not have it make complex calculations. Would that simplify it?)

Any criticism and discussion is very much welcome and I'd like to hear what other people think on the subject.

 

[Talanic]

Break up your paragraphs for easier reading flow.

A deficit of the things you need for your economy to run is absolutely devastating and should produce ripples through your empire. It should be easier to quickly set up for replacement, but it shouldn't be something you can just ignore by saying that at least those pops aren't slaves.

 

[AlanC9]

How would you ever get yourself into that situation in the first place? UA isn't something you run if you're actually worried about producing stuff, it's what you run when you've got more stuff than you need.

 

[Star Foth]

Break up your paragraphs for easier reading flow.

A deficit of the things you need for your economy to run is absolutely devastating and should produce ripples through your empire. It should be easier to quickly set up for replacement, but it shouldn't be something you can just ignore by saying that at least those pops aren't slaves.

Thanks for the grammar tip, I'll start doing that

Issue with that comparison is that there isn't that kind of deficit in the scenario I described. They have more con goods than pops that live in social welfare. I wouldn't describe that as a devastating shortage of things the economy needs to run.

How would you ever get yourself into that situation in the first place?

Setting everyone to utopian abundance. It's less of a situation and more about setting everyone to consume as many con goods as they want. I can work around it simply by setting them as social welfare and that's fine. I just think that people shouldn't be upset that they have more goods than people that live in social welfare but aren't consuming as much as they are *allowed to do so.

Edit: Replied before you added more, sorry. I agree with what you are saying about UA as it stands now. But I just don't think it is very immersive or optimal for it to work that way. I would like it if they didn't act like they are starving when they are consuming *near utopian living standards and max UA should be a "take all you want" ticket for that species con goods wise.

 

[Badesumofu]

The way I'd look at it is this - your people are used to a certain standard, then suddenly crucial goods just aren't there. Maybe that shortage means that some people are missing out on key goods like medication. Then suddenly everyone is worried about shortages and clearing out shops everywhere. It's chaos. On the other hand if you switched to a lower standard then people would have less, but they'd be able to rely on getting what they needed.

 

[Talanic]

The way I'd look at it is this - your people are used to a certain standard, then suddenly crucial goods just aren't there. Maybe that shortage means that some people are missing out on key goods like medication. Then suddenly everyone is worried about shortages and clearing out shops everywhere. It's chaos. On the other hand if you switched to a lower standard then people would have less, but they'd be able to rely on getting what they needed.

Honestly that's probably the right choice. Swap down to lower standards for a bit. It's the uncertainty that drives your people to distraction.

 

[Attitude Adjuster]

This also annoys me,

Think there should be a bit of a buffer and maybe a scaling time based debuff for running a deficit, it's like your entire population goes crazy because they couldn't buy new toys for a month.

Heh, kind of like the forums right now

**Budummm tssss**

 

[sortulv]

Basically what you have is a society where goods are free, but in limited supply - so you better stand in line to grab what is available. Which means that you have less time to do anything productive - since you need to always be standing in a queue.

 

[Surimi]

Also consider that higher consumer goods consumption probably doesn't reflect just more consumer goods, but primarily a greater variety of consumer goods available to more people.

Like, let's say we have two worker stratum people. One is living at the utopian abundance level while the other only has decent living standards. They both need medication for a heart condition, but the utopian abundance person isn't taking four times as much heart medicine. They still need just as much as the person on lower living standards. No more, no less.

Running out of consumer goods is still going to be a case of "well, we've run out of your heart medicine, but we've still got tons of these multivitamins you can try so I'm sure you'll be fine", it's going to be a pretty big disaster for that person who needs heart medicine.

 

[Alastor]

First time I tried UA I miscalculated the expected needs thinking my surplus to be more than enough. It wasn't. Cue in shortages, which killed stability, which killed production, which killed the balance of the rest of my resources, which gave me even more massive penalties. I was thinking. Why are they all so unhappy? To the point where everything stops functioning. They still get more stuff than they would with the previous policy. Cherry on top, I had to wait 10 years to change policy again, 10 years with my state in complete disarray. And even when I reverted policies out of UA I still had massive shortages due to the pre-existing stab hit. Yay?

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

First time I tried UA I miscalculated the expected needs thinking my surplus to be more than enough. It wasn't. Cue in shortages, which killed stability, which killed production, which killed the balance of the rest of my resources, which gave me even more massive penalties. I was thinking. Why are they all so unhappy? To the point where everything stops functioning. They still get more stuff than they would with the previous policy. Cherry on top, I had to wait 10 years to change policy again, 10 years with my state in complete disarray. And even when I reverted policies out of UA I still had massive shortages due to the pre-existing stab hit. Yay?

That's not what they get that matters but what you've promised them. Just mirror the current rage on forum with "having our trust betrayed by the buggy release" to the consumer goods issue.

 

[Alastor]

That's not what they get that matters but what you've promised them. Just mirror the current rage on forum with "having our trust betrayed by the buggy release" to the consumer goods issue.

I don't think that's a fair analogy in the least. There is a difference between a company selling you a product that doesn't work as advertised and your state giving you only a portion of the free stuff it promised for now. There is a difference between complaining about loss of trust and causing your entire society to implode as a reaction also.

But please let's not let LeGuin's sorry launch spill on every thread, relevant or not.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

I don't think that's a fair analogy in the least. There is a difference between a company selling you a product that doesn't work as advertised and your state giving you only a portion of the free stuff it promised for now. There is a difference between complaining about loss of trust and causing your entire society to implode as a reaction also.

But please let's not let LeGuin's sorry launch spill on every thread, relevant or not.

Okay, that was a bit inappropriate joke from my side, however...

What if the fact that you industries can not produce enough luxuries resulted in them being created poorly working? Like you can produce N millions of fine notebooks per day. Or (N-K) millions of extra cool super notebooks. Of course all of your people would like to have the extra cool super notebooks. But not all of them can afford them. Normally your industries produce both the fine notebooks and the super cool ones in needed quantities. But when you declare the utopian abudance you literally tell your industries to produce only the best goods. And then they try to satisfy the current demand with them, but can't produce enough, so they increase the speed of production which leads to making the super cool notebooks a bit wonky and not working as intended. So instead of fine notebook everyone is having a so called super-cool but a bad one actually. Every one is dissatisfied and your country collapses...

 

[Alastor]

What if the fact that you industries can not produce enough luxuries resulted in them being created poorly working? Like you can produce N millions of fine notebooks per day. Or (N-K) millions of extra cool super notebooks. Of course all of your people would like to have the extra cool super notebooks. But not all of them can afford them. Normally your industries produce both the fine notebooks and the super cool ones in needed quantities. But when you declare the utopian abudance you literally tell your industries to produce only the best goods. And then they try to satisfy the current demand with them, but can't produce enough, so they increase the speed of production which leads to making the super cool notebooks a bit wonky and not working as intended. So instead of fine notebook everyone is having a so called super-cool but a bad one actually. Every one is dissatisfied and your country collapses...

Well that is an interesting way to abstract consumer good numbers. But regardless, it's this disproportionate effect that I find questionable. The country collapsing. I could understand some unhappiness, some unrest, but this? This is taking it too far.

Perhaps consumer good penalties would be better if they scaled somehow.

 

[Little Green Mensch]

I'd agree that instead of a global hit to the economy, consumer goods shortages really ought to hit the people with least purchasing power first (unemployed, workers). If your rulers were happy enough, and your secret police were ruthless enough, it should be possible for states with decent-sized shortages of consumer goods to rattle along for a while, c.f. the Soviet Union.

I'd also say that the number of pops affected by a shortage should be proportional to the size of the shortage, so that the number of working class and unemployed pops whose living standards cannot be met with current consumer good production is the number hit by the penalty. That way, big shortages would quickly spiral out of control, but smaller ones could be managed. Even better, at lower standards of living, smaller shortages affect more pops, because those people are living closer to the margin.

 

[sortulv]

I'd agree that instead of a global hit to the economy, consumer goods shortages really ought to hit the people with least purchasing power first (unemployed, workers). If your rulers were happy enough, and your secret police were ruthless enough, it should be possible for states with decent-sized shortages of consumer goods to rattle along for a while, c.f. the Soviet Union.

I'd also say that the number of pops affected by a shortage should be proportional to the size of the shortage, so that the number of working class and unemployed pops whose living standards cannot be met with current consumer good production is the number hit by the penalty. That way, big shortages would quickly spiral out of control, but smaller ones could be managed. Even better, at lower standards of living, smaller shortages affect more pops, because those people are living closer to the margin.

Why? Utopian abundance means that the goods are effectively free - sponsored by the government. Anyone unemployed would be able to spend their entire day waiting for goods to be available - so they are going to be the first to get new goods.
Workers need to get it from the internal (black?) market.

 

[Little Green Mensch]

Why? Utopian abundance means that the goods are effectively free - sponsored by the government. Anyone unemployed would be able to spend their entire day waiting for goods to be available - so they are going to be the first to get new goods.
Workers need to get it from the internal (black?) market.

Utopian abundance is a post-scarcity society; consumer goods are so abundant that they are essentially free. It's not that those goods are doled out by the government in bread lines (if your utopian abundance is working, no one has to wait). The question is really who has more purchasing power, the working or the unemployed. As you point out, the workers have an option that the unemployed don't, namely, getting goods from the black market (which exacerbates the shortage for people who don't have that option). In many (most?) historical shortages of consumer goods, waiting in line all day was no guarantee that you would get access to the goods available.

 

[sortulv]

Utopian abundance is a post-scarcity society; consumer goods are so abundant that they are essentially free. It's not that those goods are doled out by the government in bread lines (if your utopian abundance is working, no one has to wait). The question is really who has more purchasing power, the working or the unemployed. As you point out, the workers have an option that the unemployed don't, namely, getting goods from the black market (which exacerbates the shortage for people who don't have that option). In many (most?) historical shortages of consumer goods, waiting in line all day was no guarantee that you would get access to the goods available.

By official channels, everyone should be able to afford goods. The unemployed would normally be able to function as street artists or youtubers (or whatever else they might want). Now the most profitable thing for them is to be suppliers for the black market. The goods produced by the official economy are being delivered to everyone (including the unemployed). They can easily barter away anything they have gotten too much of for more of something they need. If you need to be at work for 1/3 of the day, you cannot pick up goods as easily as someone who has no workplace to go to.

 

[AlanC9]

I dunno about this idea. It'd be nice to have some granularity in the way low-CG situations are handled, but in practice the meta's not going to change from "don't run out" anyway; is burning a couple of CPU cycles on handling fail states more subtly really something the devs should be looking into now?

 

[Mastikator]

If the game acts like they are getting zero consumer goods then they should actually get zero consumer goods. If you produce 300 CG and 320 pops consume 320 CG then either all pops get a 300/320th penalty (6% if you're wondering) as if they were at no consumer goods OR 20 (random) pops get 100% penalty and 300 pops work normally.

Having everyone go bananas is not a believable scenario and unrealistically punishing.

This is a little bad for the player but a LOT bad for the AI which sometimes has problems with this. If this issue were more realistically and believably handled then the state of the AI would improve as well as the rest of the game.

This should be the case for all missing resources. If you're producing 150 food and consuming 250 then either all pops act as if they're only eating 150/250 (0.6) food OR 100 of them are eating nothing and 150 are eating normally.
Same for rare resources being used in buildings, if you're missing one then only 1 building would shut down, not all.