rounding issues stacking?

Place bug reports / questions here.

Moderators: Balthagor, Moderators

Post Reply
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
Joined: Jul 08 2008

rounding issues stacking?

Post by mrgenie »

NOTE: place inline and upload attachments is bugged! the view after submit is NOT equal to the Preview and it does delete uploaded attachments and re uploading them doesn't put the in the right spot either.

First of all one of the key topics we learned for programming at university, just a side course not my main profession, was that any GUI should be self-explanatory and reflect the true values!
i.e. just because of rounding issues you won't find professional software for tax, excel, or database software that shows you +350 Million in the GUI but the values in memory are rounded and summed up to -80 Million.

You simply can't do that!

Thus referring to my older post where I pointed out, as the country grows, as you conquer more, you might see +300 or more per day but losing money every day. BG claimed this is due to rounding issue, which may be true,
but wrong anyway because see first line! That's not the way to properly do a GUI!

The user must always be presented the real facts and numbers and not some fiction numbers.


But I also for the sake of testing did some weird stuff like putting tax and social to 0% for a while and followed by maxing them out.
result: the values go back to real values. So the rounding error gone if you let the game run at 0% for everything for a while followed by max taxes and max social spending.

So the rounding error something that stacks up over time?

Which gets explaining why, on games I run for days in the background, over time it's impossible to get positive income. Over time, and conquering large land masses I always go negative, eventually I can
tax max out and social on 0% and still lose money as game progress! This is far from reality of course. So a bug? Yeah definately! This cant be right. Ever less spending on research, smaller army in relation to the country
but always losing money?

So I started to compare numbers and found out they are off as well, just like the "rounding error"

In the beginning when you count the income and expenses all looks pretty good. No weird stuff going on.

But for example a game I started in 1914 is now in 1959 and I only make less money, my country is 10 fold, GDP trippled, but income just going down and down?

So I did some checking. Let's stick to income, as this is most notably decreasing instead of increasing with growing GDP and more people buying your stuff.
tax income.png
As you can see I have 32% sales tax, a total of 446M per day.
Really?
Let's see what my single sales tell me:
Goods.png
-1) goods is 30084*8351*0.32= 80M (rounded)
electricity.png
-2) Electricity is 1260366*13*0.32 = 5M

I'll spare copy paste the other screenshots, just an example how I did the calculation in case I assume it wrong to do this
other sales:
-3) Coal 0,065M
-4) Oil 23M
-5) Timber 2M
-6) Food 72M

The sum of all sales is: 182M not 446M

For this I assumed the sales price is roughly production costs as profit in a free market is usually just a small percentage due to competition.
So let's say the profit for companies would be 10%, that would add up to roughly 200M

But if the real sales even bring less then what the overall interface is telling me, I would even go bankrupt a lot faster!

To fix this and make a lot of profit again, I just need to get rid of all the conquered land!

To finance and maintain my large army, I rather get rid of 80% of my tax paying citizens and I can afford army and everything again.
But if I have a huge conquered empire with a billion of tax payers, I can't?

The economical model in SR needs definitely an overhaul. Most of all the numbers in the GUI just dont add up.

A GUI must always show the true values and not some magic behind the scene the user can't know about doing "tricks"

Anyway, I think the economical model is false as with bigger countries and larger populations the social costs versus income from sales and
other tax income is just exploding!
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
[UI-MOD] All-In-One viewtopic.php?f=91&t=31906
YoMomma
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 768
Joined: Jun 27 2015
Human: Yes
Contact:

Re: rounding issues stacking?

Post by YoMomma »

Yah, you know what this game made me do? Conquer them and kill as much pop as possible, scrap what i dont need, if they have potential to still use them somehow i keep them, else release them , then puppet them. Atleast when i wanna end the current game and change to conquer the world mode. Problem with puppeting or releasing only is they still super weak, because of lacking key techs, like improved powerd grid 1-4 which take way to long to complete in 2020.
Gameplay 1st
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
Joined: Jul 08 2008

Re: rounding issues stacking?

Post by mrgenie »

Yes, colonizing everything seems to be the only viable option to rule the planet :(

It would be fine by me IF:
1) military complexes are not part of my empire
2) colonial military complexes allow colonies to produce the same tech-tanks, planes, ships as me the mother country but their armed
forces remain under their command, defend their own colony and only come help if needed or I explicit CALL-UPON-COLONIAL-FORCES
3) I can scrap and build colonial bases, buildings, infrastructure just as in my own country
4) a better GUI, or let's say additional GUI where you not only see ALL imports and exports you have with your colonies but can also set DEMANDS and GIFTS
and PERMANENT TRADE PROPOSALS ..
for instance I could make Malaysia a colony of the UK and not only thus the GUI present all current trade from UK with colonies but I could select
Malaysia and tell them every month 3400 Rubber they send to me.. if their production is too much, I can build it to make sure they can maintain the DEMAND
if I want to limit them to sell rubber on international markets, I can block them from selling specific resources to international markets or specific countries
to cripple economy of enemies.

I mean, basically Colony would be fine, if I had real colonial power over them to decide what they must do
[UI-MOD] All-In-One viewtopic.php?f=91&t=31906
YoMomma
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 768
Joined: Jun 27 2015
Human: Yes
Contact:

Re: rounding issues stacking?

Post by YoMomma »

Oh i like this ideas!! Thats basicly what the VOC company and later UK did in the 17th/18th century. And well we can always use the argument history repeats itself. So much diplomatic options and potential for this. Like wars just on sea to open up trade routes for others. Basicly make navy usefull.

But yeah that doesnt take away that China or India in 2020 still has problems because of big population numbers. Production and demand should have a bigger role. So if world is starving, price of food should rise, AI across the world should adjust their domestic markup as needed, and production price stay pretty much the same, unless very expensive facilities are needed to expand food production. If there is shortage of petroleum, well first of all units should only be deployed and moving if there is a very good reason, like conquering towards a region with petroleum, but yeah make the expensive facilities for these kind of production viable because sell price rise. Also mine production price might be much higher in US, then in China, so it might be viable to produce what you need, since people need jobs, but to export is another story.

Not like now, you need 1M agriculture, you build 400 facilities (slowly over time) and instead of production rise there is demand drop. I can understand if your 'just' a developper, but i think everyone understands principe of production and demand.

For the rest i also agree that GUI should show all the real numbers to the user (but yeah who can disagree here). If theres tons that being calculated, well show it. All we see now is unrealistic economy. The argument there is no space in the UI is very small. There's tons of games that have popups which you can cloose or move. It might be overwhelmig to a new user, but there's tricks for that, like small buttons for low priorty information.
Gameplay 1st
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
Joined: Jul 08 2008

Re: rounding issues stacking?

Post by mrgenie »

YoMomma wrote: Nov 13 2018 Oh i like this ideas!! Thats basicly what the VOC company and later UK did in the 17th/18th century. And well we can always use the argument history repeats itself. So much diplomatic options and potential for this. Like wars just on sea to open up trade routes for others. Basicly make navy usefull.

But yeah that doesnt take away that China or India in 2020 still has problems because of big population numbers. Production and demand should have a bigger role. So if world is starving, price of food should rise, AI across the world should adjust their domestic markup as needed, and production price stay pretty much the same, unless very expensive facilities are needed to expand food production. If there is shortage of petroleum, well first of all units should only be deployed and moving if there is a very good reason, like conquering towards a region with petroleum, but yeah make the expensive facilities for these kind of production viable because sell price rise. Also mine production price might be much higher in US, then in China, so it might be viable to produce what you need, since people need jobs, but to export is another story.

Not like now, you need 1M agriculture, you build 400 facilities (slowly over time) and instead of production rise there is demand drop. I can understand if your 'just' a developper, but i think everyone understands principe of production and demand.

For the rest i also agree that GUI should show all the real numbers to the user (but yeah who can disagree here). If theres tons that being calculated, well show it. All we see now is unrealistic economy. The argument there is no space in the UI is very small. There's tons of games that have popups which you can cloose or move. It might be overwhelmig to a new user, but there's tricks for that, like small buttons for low priorty information.
Yup not to mention on my 2560x1440 pixel monitors the GUI is very small!!! On modern monitors a lot more can be exposed!
Not to mention even my 2560x1440 pixel monitors are already old, my latest 3 purchases are all 3840x2160...

I only buy Eizo and Dell and the prices for 3840 start around 400 USD

2560x2440 starts at 300 USD

So I don't see the point of maintaining a GUI that also works on 1280x1024.. everything below 2560 I gave away for free to others and last 3 years no one even wanted them anymore so I just threw them away at the garbage disposal.
[UI-MOD] All-In-One viewtopic.php?f=91&t=31906
Post Reply

Return to “Issues and Support”