On Economy

[The Beatles]

What can be done to make the game's economy (and hence, political structure) more realistic?
A few of the things I thought of while brainstorming were:
* Eliminate the private market entirely -- cash must be obtained and spent entirely via the market. This will make the public market (in a hopefully better form) an absolute necessity, perhaps activated by default. This immediately makes goods prices more fluid, as cash cannot be converted into goods, and goods into cash, except by bartering.
Clan markets are a great step here, allowing people to set up markets and economic communities independent of the main one. Make troops and mages commodities.
* Introduce more goods -- instead of just food and runes, grains, mead, iron ore, runes, types of metals, prefabricated goods, etc.
* Tie the stock market to the public market and introduce a futures market.
* Eliminate the private bank and clan treasury. Instead, introduce a per-empire and per-clan banking system, together with fiat currency. (Allow writing off debts as a form of aid.)
* Model the flexibility of economies by the building structure. (Not precisely sure by what criteria.)

ME is a perfect test-case for many of these, as it is relatively large. Of course, this is unfortunately a far-in-the-future objective.

This is just meant to be a brainstorm thread. I posted it in GD because several experienced people don't have staffer access.

I mention economy, rather than other aspects of politics and war, because it is the most powerful and least complex to set up. Of course, it is much more complex than any of the other factors, but much simpler to set up, and has a human catalyst.

[Turock]

I am all for doing away with the Bazaar/Black Market. I really never understood why there were 2 markets anyway. It is a good idea but we need to consider all aspects of the effects of removing a market. More discussion is needed.

Adding more resources such as metal and meed, etc is good but how do they fit into the game? I mean food is used to maintain troops, runes used for missions, what would the other resources be used for and how would they tie into the game?

I would like to see the stock market return in some usable form, not just for cash storing. Having commodities tied to the market is a good start, but again, how would the commodities fit into the game? or would they be just for trading purposes/cash generation?

I don't really follow where you are going with the bank/treasury removal.

Great ideas though, I really like them.

[windhound]

I donno beatles
add too much complexity, although fun for people who are used to the game, could drive new players away.. and we need the new people

maybe as a seprate server

edit:
* Eliminate the private market entirely -- cash must be obtained and spent entirely via the market. This will make the public market (in a hopefully better form) an absolute necessity
---sounds alright to me

* Introduce more goods -- instead of just food and runes, grains, mead, iron ore, runes, types of metals, prefabricated goods, etc.
---no, not really. Rag. added extra resources and it was fairly hard to maintain all three. maybe the extra degree of difficulty is good, I donno

* Tie the stock market to the public market and introduce a futures market.
---Sounds decent

* Eliminate the private bank and clan treasury. Instead, introduce a per-empire and per-clan banking system, together with fiat currency. (Allow writing off debts as a form of aid.)
---hum. that could be interesting. The private bank is small enough that its really only for emergency only anyways

* Model the flexibility of economies by the building structure. (Not precisely sure by what criteria.)
---?

[The Beatles]

Thanks for your input.

As to the last, I meant that more advanced economies are often better able to adapt between wartime and peacetime modes. And the measure of how advanced an economy is might be partly or entirely modelled by the distribution of buildings.

[Freenhult]

I completly disagree. If you look, games like that Imperia Online have tons and tons of players, and the gameplay is somewhat complex. Not saying Promi is easy, but there isn't much to it in terms of economy, resources, and land, other than just buildings, attacking, and farming/maging. I'd like to see ores that are needed to build buildings. People needed to work the farms. Scholars to write the scrolls. Something like that. Uping the complexity might be just what we need.

It might even add diversity in with the game. Although, I do have to wonder, if such a move will take us away from "Traditional" Promisance. I can't say for sure...But I can't say that I really wouldn't mind having the game just be more cool, somewhat more challenging, and with a larger playerbase.

* Eliminate the private market entirely -- cash must be obtained and spent entirely via the market. This will make the public market (in a hopefully better form) an absolute necessity, perhaps activated by default. This immediately makes goods prices more fluid, as cash cannot be converted into goods, and goods into cash, except by bartering.
Clan markets are a great step here, allowing people to set up markets and economic communities independent of the main one. Make troops and mages commodities.

Yes...Do kill the BM. If the PM naturally got troops on its own, and then people could just sell around that, I'm sure that the market would actually work. BUT... I do fear that the price for soldier would inflate massively to the max, immedietly, as people will still, A) Market store ; Try to earn the largest profit possible. At somepoint...your going to have to buy those troops. Like it or not. I would think that this could be fixed by placing a cap, per time period. IE...First week, Mice have to be sold for less that 900. And then increase it 100 per week uptil the max limit is reached. Somewhat more complex... but by then, people should have money, and others will be looking to actually use the market without being screw'd.

* Tie the stock market to the public market and introduce a futures market.

That would be cool, but lets all think about how the "Great Depression" happened. I wouldn't think twice about trying to inflate the market to get money. We can't really pass insider trading rules, but hey. I'm sure we can think of something. As for the stocks in general. Put a fee on buying and selling. Such as 10% per transaction. If people want to store money, the can, but for a price.

* Eliminate the private bank and clan treasury. Instead, introduce a per-empire and per-clan banking system, together with fiat currency. (Allow writing off debts as a form of aid.)

Nah... I don't see any reason why to get rid of money storing. Everyone needs some place...otherwise if I sell stuff on teh market...Where's it going to go? Hopefully not out on the open where it can be looted. So...As long as there is a place for that...I'm cool.

I like where this is going. I think that this could be a major move in the right step.

My own idea: What about making actions.. Such as building, sending aid, even attacking to some extent, take x amout of time. Attacking in region would be just fine, but depending on how far N. S. you have to go.. (Europe to N. Africa) You give the order, and your troops march down there. Or even have it so that your main empire is on Europe, but you can build like "Cities" or "Outposts" For your troops to be in for instant attacking as well. Could be a cool idea.. Could fail massively.

[The Beatles]

1. Some kinds of complexity are possible without REQUIRING players to make use of it.

2. There already is a transaction fee -- good sense though.

3. Don't forget, without BM, there is no way to make cash except by the market. People would /need/ to be competitive just to make cash -- prices would stabilize naturally by supply & demand.

4. The Great Depression was historically interesting though. I wouldn't mind the possibility of a crash. (That needs a fiat currency though, right?)

[Freenhult]

1. Some kinds of complexity are possible without REQUIRING players to make use of it.

2. There already is a transaction fee -- good sense though.

3. Don't forget, without BM, there is no way to make cash except by the market. People would /need/ to be competitive just to make cash -- prices would stabilize naturally by supply & demand.

4. The Great Depression was historically interesting though. I wouldn't mind the possibility of a crash. (That needs a fiat currency though, right?)

1. Right. Although, I'd don't want to see a player who's being very simple, be just as competitive with someone who's using a complex strat.

2. Good man...

3. Not entirely. If enough people go around selling mice for 1500. And only 1 or 2 sell competitevly for 600ish, then they aren't going to be doing to well. 1. Because their resources are very limited. 2. People who are selling for 1500 get their troops bought, and then buy the cheap ones, selling for 1500. Hence. the cap per week idea. It forces people and price to stay low. If everyone market stores when the cap is 900... the lots of troops will be in the 900 range. People will sell in that range until they got bought out and moved up the currency later. If enough people worked at it...your right. It would stabilize and become useful. I really don't see that happening though. Not for a while at least.

4. Dunno. Ask Volkov or Neo.

[The Beatles]

Not sure I follow your Point 3 there. But the best way to tell is to implement it and see what happens.

[Devari]

Haven't read the whole thing, but might I suggest one can browse the lots at the public market, with an option to show only the lowest priced ones? I mean, it isn't that difficult to code, considering the system is already set up that way.

[The Beatles]

I had that thought but didn't elaborate on it -- notice I said in my first point a "hopefully improved" market.
It has to be adjusted though, so as not to be a simple goods transfer -- perhaps the 5% commission, but dropped within clans?

[Devari]

That certainly makes sense.

I'd like to see the Bazzar go, but I would certainly like to see the public market restock automatically to some extent. However, if we want to avoid creating material out of thin air (as in, by eliminating the Bazzar, we want to get rid of the false (non-trained) creation of troops), a 5% or 10% commission on all goods sold on the public market will be put towards a pool, from which the game will (ideally) automatically create troops and food equal to the worth of the commission (the actual percentages of each troop/food should have a basic rate, but perhaps minor fluctuation within that) at a random time of day (to be unbiased) and will place them on the market.

[Gen. Volkov]

I dunno. I don't like the idea of getting rid of the BM. With indy's you will get a major cash shortageas they make troops and then no one buys them for the first few runs. With magers, the first few runs will have the opposite problem, not troops to buy right off the bat. And agro people would be the worst off. No way to sell that food quickly and no way to get troops until the food was sold. The magers could get the money to buy the troops off the indy's, but there'd be a big delay between when the indy's sold there troops and the first magers started buying it. Once the economy was up and running I suppose you would have less trouble, but I am just think about getting that economy started in the first place. Maybe a temporary BM for the first few days, that everyone knew would disappear and adjust too, but make the first days a workable proposition. However, it seems to me that it would eliminate agro as a viable strat. People just don't buy alot of food, and only the ability to sell on the BM was what made it a viable strat.

Like the idea of introducing more goods. Spice it up a bit. If nothing else, we could test it out, but I think it would make the game more fun.

Definitely like the reopening of the stock market, and tying it to something else. Futures market is also a very good idea.

Like the economy based on buildings idea too, means that people will have to adopt more balanced building makeups and make the game that much more interesting.

Fiat currency is not required for a crash or a depression. The only thing that's required is a stock market, a credit system, and overconfident investors. It's true that the most famous one, the Great Depression, happened when people all over the world had switched to fiat currency, but that didn't have alot to do with the crash or the depression. And at the time, we were on a gold standard, the currency wasn't free floating, the value of the money never really changed.

[bjornredtail]

My pipe dream is to have a whole bunch of types of goods, and a whole bunch of types of buildings to produce the said goods. The idea is that we have Railroad Tycoon II (or for that matter, Stronghold) style production chains. IE, ore is sent to the smelter. Finished metal to the blacksmith. Finished swards, armor, etc. to the troops. Perhaps you could require two types of goods to produce one, ie the smelter and blacksmith would consume fuel as well as iron (ore). There should be many diffrent ways of produceing the same class of product. For example, to have infentery you could also use poleturners if wood is more abundant than Iron, the end result being spearmen instead of swardsmen. Perhaps also limit the avability of goods on the black market based on region. Ie silk would be more redaly avable in Persia than in Gaul. Perhaps also limit each building per "race" of player too.

I'd like to see the Bazzar go, but I would certainly like to see the public market restock automatically to some extent. However, if we want to avoid creating material out of thin air (as in, by eliminating the Bazzar, we want to get rid of the false (non-trained) creation of troops), a 5% or 10% commission on all goods sold on the public market will be put towards a pool, from which the game will (ideally) automatically create troops and food equal to the worth of the commission (the actual percentages of each troop/food should have a basic rate, but perhaps minor fluctuation within that) at a random time of day (to be unbiased) and will place them on the market.

The sale of the said troops would also take money out of the game... So that really isn't any more necessary than it is now. Intresting idea though...



I really think we nail down our goals on the sock market... Do we want people makeing trades often or not? Do we want people storeing money on the market for long periods of time or not? In real life a typical (and need I mention modern) broker will charge a flat comission reguardless of how much money is acctually traded. This may, or may not be the behavior we want to emulate.

* Model the flexibility of economies by the building structure. (Not precisely sure by what criteria.)
---?

Did I say that?

If I did, I would have been refering to how the troops are set up, not the buildings (I'm not even sure how the buildings are set up.. Good thing we have a source viewer). This from a data structure/database viewpoint. I was concidering how we could easily set it up so that sever operators could use an arbitary number of goods/troops/buildings/land/pretty much any ingame item. For this I was concidering simply makeing all goods work like the current "troops" in FAF as they are set up in the database, Then use another database to tell the game what the global stats are for the each item stored in each user's entery in the database. So, if we only have food, cash, markets, and say rats, a typical entery in the said field would be 30000000|21312442154|1234|1000000... etc. Then say what each of those are in another table...

code: Select all

######## Name | upkeep[] | basevalue... etc.
good1         | Food  |  {0}        | 30
etc...

[The Beatles]

No, that was one particular idea that was original to me. Several of the rest are things already proposed by you and others.

Yes, it wouldn't be too difficult to have various types of goods, it just hasn't really been implemented in the game yet. Some sensible production defaults (or building percentage directives, as I suggested) could manage this problem. For instance, newbies don't need to know anything about the percentage of troops produced by barracks, because it's sensibly set up to be equal percentage of each. In the same vein, structures could be set up automatically.

[Slasher]

well i dunno, eliminating bazzar might be a problem for new people who sign up when there's say only a week left of the set... then they can't afford the high cost of things on the other market...