Better Economics???

[moondrift]

Any chance that you could include this as an advanced player option? The supply pipeline thingy? That way the people who want the complexity can have it and those who don't don't have to.

[Eric Larsen]

But the real question remains how many ppl try the game, find it to complex and never even come here to try and figure it out further?. We can't always take forum opinions as the "average public" since it is only the more savy/in depth players that take the time to find and read the forum. We have less than 2000 members on this forum and have sold much more than 2000 copies...

For now it remains "on the drawing board" as a potential idea, but I personnally can't put my vote in for it as I don't like the extra complexity it would create (despite the fact that I'm the type of player who would like that particular element).

Chris,
I thought the SR2010 game was a "thinking man's game" and was created for us "thinkers" by "thinkers". Now it appears that you've decided to dumb down the next installment so it isn't a game for us thinkers. Might as well do an arcade game if you're looking to excite the masses.

While there may be only 2,000 of us who care enough about the game to post on this forum you should be very careful to keep us happy or your forum will be silent.

There seems to be some interest in the idea of shipping pipelines because it adds meaning to the naval aspect of the game. Right now it's just a dumbed down blue-water navy affair and that's boring. BG touts how SR2010 is the most realisitic economic system going and it is yet there's this glaring unreality that underpins the whole economic system with instantaneous matter transmission of trade. Adding shipping pipelines atleast does away with adding lots of little cargo ships to junk up the map and add an unnecessary level of complication to the game. It adds the naval mission of guarding shipping pipelines, something that's very real today as we have aircraft carrier task groups doing convoy escort duty around the Gulf. If adding in a time delay for getting goods from seller to buyer is something that you think is too difficult for some to grasp then you have too little faith in the intelligence of your prospective customer base. Someone who wants to play this style of thinking man's game isn't going to be deterred by time-delayed trade the way it works in the real world. Yes it would be more difficult to program but it would add a necessary level of realism to the economic system.

I still haven't gotten a straight answer to my suggestion for adding in a production/resource build list that will give us help finding the best places to build resource/production facilities. You say you want to make things more player friendly and yet you've ignored this popular idea. Giving us a list of the best places to build doesn't seem overly tough to implement and it would set up the AI to know where the best places to build are.

If you really want a simpler game that will appeal to the masses then why not just dump the economic/political system altogether and make a straight wargame? Just abstract economics and politics and make battle scenarios that model some situation. Ofcourse that would probably lose a lot of us grognards wouldn't it?
Eric

[Balthagor]

To be honest I've only skimmed your post, lost of things keeping me busy. You claim we've decided to "dumb it down" but I know for a fact I said no such thing, you even quoted me and no such words are used in my post. What I said is that we may not make it even more complex than it already is. I also did not discourage any of the thinkers from participating in the discussions here and can't imagine anyone leaving just because we made certain decisions, although I suppose if it makes them loose interest they might move on. However it would be irresponsible for us as a company to make a game for an audience of 2000 ppl unless everyone is looking at paying 3000$+ per copy. If we want to be around to make more games we need to keep in mind the almight dollar. That doesn't mean the quality of the product has to suffer, it just means we'll have to make some tough decisions and the community will have to trust us to do our jobs. We count on being judged by our product and the demo will be available without having to pay a cent.

[Seydlitz]

I think the economic system in SR2010 was very close to hitting the point where complexity began to detract rather than add to the game. Once I got to know the in's and out's of the system it became easier to manage, but when I first started playing (and I've heard the same from friends I've had play the demo) I thought the economic system was extremely complex. Even when I knew what I was doing I would still occasionally fail to account for something, and when that failed it would cause a cascading system of failures that would cripple my economy and make that game more or less useless, which was quite frustrating if it was a long-running game. A number of reviews I read said similar things.

I think if the AI's economic abilities were improved (over 2010) it would enhance that aspect of the game a lot more than a more complex economic system.

[Pandora's Last Ray]

I agree with Eric Larsen regarding Central Banks in the economic model. In fact, I think that the Phelps curve model should be abandoned or, failing that, to allow a player option for other economic models; i.e. Chicago school, Marx, Austrian school, etc. Several reasons:

The phelps curve is essentially statistical-fitting to arrive at a preconceived conclusion; it cannot model effects such as a stagflation, hyperstagflation or even Weimar-style turbo-inflation. Do you really think that Germany's unemployment was at 0% in 1922-23, or Zimbabwe's unemployment at 0.01% now?

I would also like independent national currencies to be modelled, with options for metals standards and fixed/floating exchange rates, currency pegging, confidence ratings, or possibly even currency repudiation, circa Germany under Adenaur, or an option for "default" of dept circa Russia 1998.

I would like to be able to track the seperate inflation rates: price inflation, and inflations of the M1, M2 and M3 supplies (yes, M3 is still important; look at the unhistorical divergance of the US' M2 and M3 supplies before the DOS stopped publishing them).

The reasoning of this would be to add a new dimension of economic warfare to Supreme Ruler. Like it or not, economic warfare is a reality, take a look at China's pegging the Yuan to the USD, or Nixon taking the dollar off of the gold standard after Charles de Gaulle figured out we didn't have the gold to back it?

I would also like to be able to see nations being able to purchase other regions' debt; we see this everyday with China, Japan and the UK buying many billions of USD government bonds, and have real risk associated with those in terms of defaults, regions being destroyed, etc.

By far though, the AI's handling of a region, and minister's handling of the department affairs was thoroughly inadequate as they almost always crippled everything from research to taxes to military to economy.



On the other side of things, I'm reading from the Metal Storm company website that they will start selling robotic Metal Storm systems in 2007, particularly the Redback, which if you interpret what they are saying about it looks like it uses all sorts of ammo altogether; airburst, anti-armor, thermobaric, non-lethal, etc. So could we expect to see unmanned ground units in SR2020?

[Pandora's Last Ray]

PS

I've had an idea.

Since different people handle varying degrees of economic complexity, maybe you could add an option to SR2020 for varying levels of economic complexity in a game? Maybe levels for simple, normal, and most realistic?

[dust off]

Personally I though the economic aspect of 2010 was sublime. Far superior to anything I've seen in a game.

The best suggestion I saw on these boards was wish-list for being able to invest in other countries industries for a margin.

Top of my wish list was for invisibles to be included, especially an easy to use and functional loan system to profit from other countries debt.

[Legend]

Sublime Ruler 2030! Sweet.

As for economics - we will have economics in the game.

What we do need to consider is our need to balance our time and the features such as world-like systems that we want to include in SR2020. Every time we consider a new suggestion it must be weighed against the complexity in the game and the complexity to implement. Consider adding one new feature: multi-currency. What do you think we must do to include it in the game? I would encourage people to talk this through... what things do we need for multi-currency? (we are still not adding multi-currency - into SR2020).

For any feature we consider I think there are several stages to getting it into the game.
- brainstorm
- evaluate
- design
- evaluate
- implement
- test
- reimplement
- test
...
- evaluate

Things that need to be considered are the time that each stage will take. Will we need GUI work/redesign? How does it fit into the rest of the project? What graphics do we need? etc... perhaps to summarize, we don't want to dumb down SR2020, but we also don't want to add a thousand new features to the game. We want to release next year and then continue work on our next project.

To actually assist with the economics within SR2020, you could take a look at SR2010 and suggest areas that can be improved without requiring us to rewrite things from scratch. For example, if there is an issue with instant matter transportation, then perhaps we could discuss this in some detail. If you are not at war with anyone the current model is fine, but when you are at war, perhaps that is when you can start to identify some examples - using the regions/countries in SR2010. (an example could be - take the country of Austria. If every region around them is at war with them, they shouldn't be able to trade - they can't get their goods out, so they shouldn't be able to trade. Make sense???) Can you come up with some examples???

[dust off]

One of the things I liked about 2010 is that if I screwed my enconomy I could normally pull it back by giving more control to ministers and jigging with their prioities.

One thing that always leaves me curious is what other countries are trading.

Also I'd really like the regular trades to be tweaked. Whenever I make a trade other than a one off the other country defaults.

Maybe a but to get the AI to suggest a realist trade would be helpful. Let's say I want to trade consumer goods for oil then I line these up in each countries trade box and press an AI button so that the ai suggests a reasonable trade that the AI nation can fulfill over the course of the agreement.

I'd also like the AI to offer trades. Tricky to balance though. Sometimes in HOI and Superpower the AI offered too many.

Overall I like to play my economy based on inflation. It goes up and I put the brakes on. This gives me the feeling of realism with economic cycles.