Quote:
AngleWyrm said:
One of the main probs with 4x is their economic explosion. There's some initial struggle to survive, a critical mass, and then an exponential growth that trivializes all money.
I think it is mostly because the currency is magically centralized.
If all resources were restricted to their locale, the game wouldn't explode. Freighters would have to be used to ship minerals to a factory. Shipyards could only produce with what's on hand. And the result would be a lot less explosion.
|
These problems are due to the extremely abstract nature of the economic model. You have a general availability of minerals, radioctives, and organics, and you have a general 'mood' of the population affecting productivity. But nothing about the logistics. The relative availability of one resource does not affect any of the others, and the relative availability of labor has only the very crudest effect (things stop when the population riots).
In the very early betas MM had workforce as a factor in facility production. Each facility required a certain number of workers to operate at full efficiency and if there were less available the output/production would be reduced accordingly. Unfortunately, when some testers complained he
completely removed it instead of trying to adjust it. If he had just tried some different models than 'fill from top to bottom' (meaning the facility workforces filled like a single resource tank and some would have zero work force while others were at full staff) -- proportional distribution would have been so much better -- most testers would not have been so unhappy. He could even have used
my suggestion to make 'productivity' itself a seperate resource. Worker time is also a resource, after all. So count each population point as generating a certain amount of 'labor' and have technologies that multiply this just like you do for mining or farming or whatnot. You could then have very high tech products that use little resources but require lots of labor to produce. (Like modern electronics!) This would lead naturally to large population centers being large production centers -- unlike the game is now where you can put a huge shipyard complex anywhere at all.
All sorts of interesting economic wrinkles are possible with a system that takes labor supply into account. But he was afraid to experiment anymore and that was the end of that.