Economy Idea: Materials & Labor |
So I had an idea for how to implement a slightly different economic system for SE5... it's actually kind of based on the system that MOO3 had, but simplified a bit...
Basically, the three resources, instead of all being various types of materials, are as follows:
* Materials - These is matter, your raw building blocks.
* Labor - This is energy, whether it's produced by people or machines.
* Goods - This is matter that has been transformed by energy - i.e. something that's actually useful.
The interesting thing is, while you need goods as well as materials and labor to build things, the only way to GET goods is to spend materials and labor! This is because Goods are only produced in Factories, which are facilities that cost Materials and Labor to build (and thus to maintain), but produce Goods, based on the planet's Goods value (because of course some planets have rare and valuable treasures).
The other interesting thing is - where does labor come from??? Guess what? It comes from population (as well as robotic facilities) - so the more population you have, the larger your workforce! (Just put a negative sign in front of the population maintenance cost organics value in settings.txt 
)
So, what you basically have, then, is almost a workaround for the lack of the ability to require population to operate facilities - since what you need for a working economy is this:
* Mines and robo-miners which produce Materials
* Population and robotic worker facilities which produce Labor
* Factories tying the two together and producing Goods out of them
* Construction queues which can consume those Goods to produce ships, units, facilities, etc.
Nifty, huh?
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Sure - you just change all the components and such to only use "goods" (or radioactives if you don't want to rename all the text strings), and no labor or materials are consumed... and the consumption of materials and labor to produce goods is done through the maintenance system. I suppose weird things might happen when you run out of materials and labor (you still get goods but your ships suddenly die off due to lack of maintenance?) - I'd have to test that out, seeing as maintenance would be paid in goods only, so maybe ALL your ships would die if the game keeps killing ships until you no longer have a deficit...
Or you could make ships require materials and labor in addition to their goods cost...
~~~
The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious 
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Oh I'd insist ships take Labour and Goods to produce - some small amount of Materials too maybe, but producing ships with no worry of labour seems weird.
Hmm... it IS a nifty idea and I like it. I just have to suspend my disbelief of "how can labour from the other side of the galaxy contribute to building this facility here" and "how is labour Stored??" In short, from a pure numerics/game-mechanics point of view, I like it but there's that nagging feeling from my logical side.
Also, does negative maintenance for population work?
---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Go for it, sounds interesting. I've always thought that the economy should be more constrained by population.
Outsourcing 
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
The same way minerals/organics/radioactives from over here can be used over there...
And what, you never had to travel to get to work... rush hour can be such a killer!
Kyle
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Hey!
I've been away for some time now and had the feeling creeping that still I haven't missed much, but THAT'S A DAMMN GOOD CONCEPT!
I have spend a fair amount of time thinking how to make the whole economy thing more logical also and came up with quite similar ideas.
Minerals --> raw material of any form
Organics --> labor
Radioactives --> MONEY
I really can't understand why MONEY is left out. Best would be money beeing the 4th resource in game, though.
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Why not just have a production bonus (or penalty) based on population (labor), calculated at end of turn or beginning of each empire turn. Changing names equates to variable and constant changes inside the AI scripts which equates to a major overhaul of the game. Would also change the current algorithms on how the AI deals with the three resources inside the AI scripts.
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Thing is, I don't think there's a way to get the production bonuses to apply ONLY to organics/labor without also applying to the other two resources...
Though not renaming the resources in the data files and only in the text displayed to the user would probably be a good idea
~~~
The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Yeah, basically ships would have a mineral cost for materials, rad cost for cash, and organics cost for labor. Space yards would have a huge mineral and radioactive build rate, but be limited in organics. Robotics facilities would add to this build rate, as well as being affected by the population modifiers in settings.txt .
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
I've always though of rad as an energy resource that can be mined, like dilithium crystals in Star Trek. Minerals were the raw materials, metals and such. I can see organics as equivalent to labor as it provides maintenance for the workers. Of course, as of this changes when you take such things as mechanical races and organic technology into account.
Re: Economy Idea: Materials & Labor
Interesting, so you would have kind of a Proportions Mod thing going tying population to production kinda thing but with different resource type/values ...hrm.
It IS a rather nifty idea but is it feasible? I mean, the construction queues only need "goods" to build ships instead of minerals/org/rad's ..could that be built-in?