Taxes and Economy need explanation

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YoMomma
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by YoMomma »

The OP asked for explanation, so far 0 explanation has been given. Enough said. Evildari is right, most just seem random numbers which does not make much sense, except we can all see it hurts the ai big time. Now they build consumer goods for example, but not rubber, so in the end they will have 0 production, since ai is getting teached not to sell at a loss. Great job requesting the ai to build, i could have said that way earlier. Same with research, now comlaining they research random units and no techs to really develop after asking AI to learn more units, well no surprise to me. Auto repair, nah ai cant afford that in 36 game so screw the other players, tons of useless options in game, but screw them why make one for players who play modern games.

1. What exactly does each of the taxes impact? (Especially what are the unemployment and pension taxes, i.e. who pays them and what impact do they have on the economy)
IDK
2. Inflation? For a developing country what is the ideal rate and how can it be affected?
2-5% but some regions you cant really go lower then 9% like US and Australia in modern campaign.
3. GDP/C rises and falls. What gives? Is this the boom, bust, depression, recession, etc. cycles being simulated?
There needs to be expenses for gdp/c to rise properly, what the balance is, is one of the things you have to figure out.
4. Is foreign investment, accelerator and multiplier affect modeled?
no
5. Is having a huge amount of starting money in the treasury bad for the economy?
It can be, if they have a huge ammount they are more likely to sell at a loss to improve DAR and stuff, which doesnt have to be good. Just like in rl it is good to have cheap countries producing cheap for the richer countries. If everyone wants to be rich (or is rich for a short period) it will most likely mean shortages sinse there's not enough (raw) production in the world.
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Anthropoid
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by Anthropoid »

YoMomma wrote:The OP asked for explanation, so far 0 explanation has been given. Enough said. Evildari is right, most just seem random numbers which does not make much sense, except we can all see it hurts the ai big time. Now they build consumer goods for example, but not rubber, so in the end they will have 0 production, since ai is getting teached not to sell at a loss. Great job requesting the ai to build, i could have said that way earlier. Same with research, now comlaining they research random units and no techs to really develop after asking AI to learn more units, well no surprise to me. Auto repair, nah ai cant afford that in 36 game so screw the other players, tons of useless options in game, but screw them why make one for players who play modern games.

1. What exactly does each of the taxes impact? (Especially what are the unemployment and pension taxes, i.e. who pays them and what impact do they have on the economy)
IDK
2. Inflation? For a developing country what is the ideal rate and how can it be affected?
2-5% but some regions you cant really go lower then 9% like US and Australia in modern campaign.
3. GDP/C rises and falls. What gives? Is this the boom, bust, depression, recession, etc. cycles being simulated?
There needs to be expenses for gdp/c to rise properly, what the balance is, is one of the things you have to figure out.
4. Is foreign investment, accelerator and multiplier affect modeled?
no
5. Is having a huge amount of starting money in the treasury bad for the economy?
It can be, if they have a huge ammount they are more likely to sell at a loss to improve DAR and stuff, which doesnt have to be good. Just like in rl it is good to have cheap countries producing cheap for the richer countries. If everyone wants to be rich (or is rich for a short period) it will most likely mean shortages sinse there's not enough (raw) production in the world.
I agree that the "documentation" and discussions about the games are both dispersed around the internet, and sometimes difficult to parse depending on which game in the series they apply to. However, I have encountered informative discussions on a few of these topics so let me offer what I have:

1. I have no recollection of any specific discussions of this.

However, my guess (based on a general impression I get from reading the wiki essays of those who have delved deeply into the external files of the .exe and other evidence) is that these various tax categories do not do anything, except sum into a total and then get divided by the total number of categories to equal an "average tax." The average tax is then used to determine income that goes into the treasury and how much buying power the population has (which is then used to determine approval rating and consumption of domestic goods). At least at the time of SR2020, there were quite a few "elements" in the game which were vestiges of planned features which were never implemented.

2. Inflation: ideal is 3% or less (not sure if deflation is modeled, I doubt it)
http://www.supremewiki.com/node/252
Countering Inflation
There are a number of methods which have been suggested to stop inflation. Central Banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve can affect inflation to a significant extent through setting interest rates and through other operations (i.e., using monetary policy). High interest rates (and slow growth of the money supply) are the traditional way that Central Banks fight inflation, using unemployment and the decline of production to prevent price increases.

There are several effective ways to fight inflation, including:

Decreasing Domestic Demand for Commodities
Decreasing Social Services
Increasing Taxes
Decreasing Production or Deactivating Industries
Increasing Migration
3. I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about, but in my experience, unless you are trying to attain some specific GDP/c threshold in order to "win" or something, the stat is effectively just a descriptive statistic, i.e., it is useful in the table to get a sense for how affluent and advanced a region is. A region with higher GPD/c will have happier pops all else considered but apart from that fluctuations in it are probably irrelevant.

4. "foreign investment" hmmm, are you talking about the "support nation" thing in the State department interface? It is a good question whether or not this actually does anything. My guess is yes it does, i.e., if the player supports a nation they will have more money.

5. Why would having a huge amount of money in the treasury be bad for the economy?
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Balthagor
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by Balthagor »

evildari wrote:The reason why i think this is a major issue: (like in real life) it all depends on the money. "It's the economy, stupid"
Once you are Pakistan with >$18,000,000M in 1955, the economy does not really matter.
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by evildari »

Balthagor wrote:
evildari wrote:The reason why i think this is a major issue: (like in real life) it all depends on the money. "It's the economy, stupid"
Once you are Pakistan with >$18,000,000M in 1955, the economy does not really matter.
with that bug you can get that treasury quit easy (without trying) down to zero..
That $18,000,000M gets eaten with that $90,000M / day unaccounted bug in 200 days..

And also its about 3 times harder to even get that treasury in the first place.
Especially for the AI which could also be one of the reason why AI cant compete with humans
Maybe you could really save lots of time tinkering about competing AI, if you solve this "financial" issue...

Is it really that hard to use real basic calculations one time per gameday like in ..elementary school with today's processing power ?

And for that screen cap fetish guy.. the formula does not change just for this one game day the moment i take a screenshot..
It is not happening one time in 18 game years, but at least every day (and if i read some post of balthagor right even every minute - though that would be wasteful for "daily" income calculation)
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by Balthagor »

As your treasury diminishes the impact diminishes. If you have a case where millions are being lost in the economy with a treasure under 100M, I'm happy to take a look and review some calculations.

And I'm not the one to fix any of this, I don't do any coding. I can only relay the responses I get when I ask similar questions.
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by evildari »

no need to have millions/day unaccounted for with a 100M$ treasury
just 300K$/day unaccounted for and your treasury is gone within a year..

the issue is really that you have to make way more surplus than the UI makes you believe, to even hold your treasury.
Or could you just include this unaccounted $ as a deduction in the finance tab so it is at least visible, else everyone who can count would think you (the programmer) can not...
(i am a numbers guy - this really hurts - sorry)
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by irfanahmed1979 »

Balthagor wrote: Feb 09 2018 We have said many times that once the treasury/economy gets too big, some rounding errors can create strange values. There are shortcuts in place that are needed to get the level of performance we have. Removing those shortcuts would increase economic precision and slow down the game. It's all about the weight of the calculations.
Hi, long time no see. I heard about the latest patch. I was wondering if the above mentioned issue has been resolved or mitigated.
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by Balthagor »

As stated previously, anything we do to reduce floating point rounding issues would impact game speed. No changes have been made to how high number calculations are done.
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by irfanahmed1979 »

Ok, thank you
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by evildari »

consideration to have right calculation in next game ?
at least as an option
you know processor speed and cores increased since the '90...
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by irfanahmed1979 »

evildari wrote: Jul 15 2020 consideration to have right calculation in next game ?
at least as an option
you know processor speed and cores increased since the '90...
Yeah, hope is a good thing to have. :-)
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by evildari »

"Once upon a time programmers went to great lengths to avoid floating point calculations because they were very slow and cumbersome compared to integer calculations. With the Pentium that's no longer true. In fact a floating point multiply is more than three times faster than an integer multiply (3 cycles versus 10)."

http://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi28/hug ... 0point.htm
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by CertainDeath »

not even float is perfectly accurate, so with your method you would still see approximations to the mathematical correct values.
you also would not need float, when u only use whole numbers, you would be better of with large unsigned int, because of a wider number range in the positive the variable can hold.
i step aside from the discussion what is faster, cause i would need to test that first, your link text does not matter only real life test results do. for every opinion i find someone in the internet^^
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by evildari »

No need to have scientific perfect accurate numbers, just financial perfect would be enough as in basic maths like 1+1=2 and not -1...
The devs already stated that the do this inaccuracy as an optimization - and i doubt you will find an opinion on the internet that denies the cpu computing increase over the last 3 decades...and luddites usually dont have a visible web presence.
It was not about how to code in asm (well could help just in case- they really dont know and use this optimization excuse ;) - its about the remark "...Pentium..."
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Re: Taxes and Economy need explanation

Post by Rosalis »

You would think BG life mission is to burn all the pentium's from the world. Thats why they leave it as minimum required specs :lol:

Anyway with the ammount of calculations, im pretty sure 1+1=2 is much simpler then something vague times something vague, but thats just me. Maybe with correct math, the score atlas would actually make sence. Like i can have best research and still be ranked 198. If you want to protect that, thats nothing and shouldnt be calculated at all. If that doesnt work, how will features work with calculations behind the scenes? How will the ai judge it has enough military, or put enough money in social policies? It doesnt, simple as that. Max social policies , max taxes, and lower domestic prices, as long they got the money. And ofcourse since ai can build research centers, keep building those. Whoever said land fabrications are usefull, is long gone. Well atleast they dont get scrapped, ai scrap pretty good.
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