Flaw in the economical model killing long term gaming.

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

Flaw in the economical model killing long term gaming.

Post by mrgenie »

I always wondered why long term at some point I always went negative, no matter what I did.

I finally found out why, after testing new economical modifiers in the scenario we're testing for ourselves

in the real world, due to lower costs on labor industries, manufacturers, etc move to low cost countries. Countries with a lower GDP, where labor costs which at times can make
up to 90% of a product price, are lower because of the lower GDP and lower wages.

Not so in Supreme Ruler!

Playing multiplayer we found out India, with a GDP of 2.500$ in 1945 and western Germany with a GDP of 26.000$ have EXACTLY the same production costs.

This means that the economical model of Supreme Ruler ALWAYS leads to the production costs, and thus price to produce, to rise with the rising of the higher GDP countries.

At some point, when the higher GDP sky rocket in the game engine, the low GDP countries just can't handle the rising production costs anymore and ALWAYS go bankrupt!

This is wrong of course, a country like India which has much lower GDP also has much lower costs, in the real world this works pretty well so all countries can build up.

I assume, this is the reason why on long term games you can only be victorious if you achieve highest GDP.

BUT to catch up, you get inflation like 10% and more, which also doesn't work of course.

The real issue is, the game model really benefits high GDP countries and make low GDP countries to run dry on finances eventually.

And it's wrong, you can argue whatever you want but it's wrong! Russia, India and other countries in real world economics show pretty well a country can easily maintain a large military and avoid huge debts even at much lower GDP,
simply because their production costs are also much lower. But this is NOT reflected in the game economical model.

This has to be fixed, it can't be that production costs are identical to all countries no matter what their GDP and resulting purchase power of their population is.
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evildari
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 629
Joined: Aug 10 2017
Human: Yes

Re: Flaw in the economical model killing long term gaming.

Post by evildari »

this sounds rather like a bug that should not be in the mod forum (even if you found it while running a mod)
but dont worry to counter that the market price is at least a total random value without any connection to either costs or charged markup |O
my mods
http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 79&t=25932 (even techs and units for everyone - AI will own you too)
http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 79&t=29326 (MARSX2)
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
Joined: Jul 08 2008

Re: Flaw in the economical model killing long term gaming.

Post by mrgenie »

evildari wrote: Jul 22 2019 this sounds rather like a bug that should not be in the mod forum (even if you found it while running a mod)
but dont worry to counter that the market price is at least a total random value without any connection to either costs or charged markup |O
Ohhh, I saw the "issues & support" without realizing it was limited to "modding" sorry!

but I don't think it's a "bug"

I think this is just a choice of concept to make the production cost a single value throughout the game.
So I think it's a conceptual mistake to make this choice, but not necessarily a bug.

I know from "game performance perspective" a lot of developers go for a "single value" rather than an array of values or giving each object an additional variable to store the value
because it's lower memory demand obviously and lower CPU performance need.

Supreme Ruler is designed as a tactical war game, with slight strategical planning on the grand scheme of things but limited in time thus not fully strategical long term planning.

I understand that. I understand it's not a game planned to run for 10+ hours or even days going through decades of warfare.


But since the tactical is already so advanced and beats ANY game on the market by factor 10, for the sake of fun and game play it's time to work
some more on the long term game playing, thus less effort on the tactical "how units behave" and more on the "how countries build up"
and some more accurate economical model would suit that.

So I don't think it's a bug. It's just a choice. But choices are there to be revised :)

Personally I think BG, yes I understand they are a smaller developer studio, should spend more time in developing the game as this game simply is the best AI out there
and this game is worth to invest a lot of time in.

That's why I would favor them to release some SDK, c++ source codes so we modders can add/change functionality.

I wouldn't touch the whole AI handling units. I think it's so complex better BG would just focus only on that one. It would take MONTHS for anyone
to work through the code what already has been done. SO better not to touch that.

But things like adding more resources, a more complex industry, more "build up the country by AI" etc are things a modder could get into.

Again, my comments are from the perspective I love what BG created here! It's really an amazing development. How the units act, the AI response,
how smart they behave.

Yet still a lot of things that could improve... I stopped wasting time on games like Civ***

I'm sorry to say, but since every few years they reinvent the wheel, that game isn't worth wasting your modding time on.

But SR, now that's a game under continuous development and from that perspective a game that's really worth for us modders to spend time on.

But the lack of the source codes and recompiling our own mods, is a huge drawback as it means the whole programming is limited to the performance
of BG studios and I know if you have 1 or 2 programmers working on such a huge task as an AI engine... you're always running behind the facts..

This game could improve drastically if it had 10 or more programmers working on it as modders in their free time.
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