Any way to combat Waste ?

[Uncle_Joe]

For GAMEPLAY purposes, it doesnt matter whose eyes we are viewing it through. Whether its WW2, Modern, Napoleonic, or Buck Rogers is immaterial.

What DOES matter is that the cost of the options (physical or opportunity) matches the benefit of the options or else those options are not viable. This is not limited to just Upgrades. Its also labor allocation. Why put more population on luxuries or textiles or whatever when it is just lost to waste? You are better are throwing that population into the army and going to conquer.

In other words, there is little pay-off or incentive to do much else than crank military upgrades and throw every able-bodied man into the army for conquest. Yes, that is oversimplifying it a bit, but the point doesnt seem to be getting across any other way.

So, in summary:

Economic invest consists of more than just Farms and Factories. Labor allocation and what you do with your population also figure into that. Roads increase the capacity for population (which appears unnecessary in the civilian sector past a certain point...they become dead-weight mouths to feed). The options to trade become less and less relevant as well as what you get becomes waste.

If Economic investment is not a viable method to improving your long-term econ, then what is left? Conquest. So, it appears that the 'best' option is to simply forgo most economic decisions and commit to the military path. The is pretty much regardless of what nation you play.

[mogami]

Hi, OK then what is the problem? Development is not the path to victory (or glory)
Don't think of it as trying to optimize every province. You have to have farm upgrade as an option in places where it makes no sense in order to have it as an option where it does.
The game is about conquest. If you could win by just building what you start with history would be a lot more peacfull.

[ahauschild]

I actuly dont consider waste as waste. Its just a badly picked word.

Most things perform the same way. To get a average level of performance/output you have to put average resources into it. Up to a certain point it is ussualy linearly related. But once you are trying to get past a certain point of output/performance you have to spend increasingly more resources to acchive that.

Example.

To make a car that goes 120 miles per hour, is easy, cost about average for that car.
To make a car that goes 150 miles per hour, the cost is expedentialy increased as you have to invest much more money per hoursepower.
To make a car that goes 200 miles per hour your cost per horse power is astronamicle.

So in fact, if you are running an average output in your economy, you will invest average, but if you are trying to get the utmost of output, 110%, then you have to invest increasingly more to do so. So in fact that is what for me waste reflects, just it shows up in goods lost rather then in resouces spend, the end result is pretty much the same.

[jchastain]

You are right that waste is just a term, but really it is just a game balance mechanic. As has been stated before, it exists to make incremental production less and less useful so that it is difficult to manage a vast empire and no nation can just conquer everything in sight.

And as has been stated, farms and factories are pretty realistic just as they are. The question on the table isn't whether or not it is modeled in a realistic fashiopn but rather whether or not it is balanced in terms of gameplay. Why create a complex economic model with upgrades if the impact is so small that players will never use that functionality? In order to be successful, a strategic game must give you various options, all of which have merit, and allow you to choose between them under a system whereby there are multiple avenues to success. I think CoG is close. The question on the table with regard to upgrades is whether bumping their impact a bit might make them more viable so that players have additional choices on how best to grow their empire with none of the options being a waste of time and none being so significant as to be a "must do".

[ericbabe]

In my way of thinking about the economy, waste represents "diseconomy of scale" in addition to difficulties in transportation and the other more physical explanations that were mentioned. The equations for diseconomy of scale that I've seen suggest that it dominates economic systems that become sufficiently large... and that in addition to the other (more directly physical) sorts of waste that waste in COG is meant to represent.

I'm strongly considering three tweaks regarding waste:

(1) Courts lower waste overall.
(2) Developments lower waste in their area of expertise: factories lower labor waste, farms lower horse waste, etc.
(3) Trade income is subject to only 50% the normal maximum waste (which can get as high as 90%).

I like Uncle Joe's ideas on limiting labor from conquered provinces also.

Opinions?


Eric

[mogami]

Hi, The current system works. You have to be able to build a province back after it has been ravaged by war. While it is expensive to expand already developed areas wait for enemy army to plunder one of these and then you will see the value of the model.
(It works great to get back what has been destroyed but not so great to expand where things are already near the limit of output.)
Personally I think we jump into questioning games much too soon. I require several complete games just to understand how the systems work (before I can begin to suggest how they don't work correctly)
The current model troubles me not at all. I like it. But I am not trying to play civIII.
How many players have finished game that ran 15 years? In real terms 15 years is short period to increase an areas output in any significant way. (But long enough to repair a war ravaged area)

[Reiryc]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

In my way of thinking about the economy, waste represents "diseconomy of scale" in addition to difficulties in transportation and the other more physical explanations that were mentioned. The equations for diseconomy of scale that I've seen suggest that it dominates economic systems that become sufficiently large... and that in addition to the other (more directly physical) sorts of waste that waste in COG is meant to represent.

I'm strongly considering three tweaks regarding waste:

(1) Courts lower waste overall.
(2) Developments lower waste in their area of expertise: factories lower labor waste, farms lower horse waste, etc.
(3) Trade income is subject to only 50% the normal maximum waste (which can get as high as 90%).

I like Uncle Joe's ideas on limiting labor from conquered provinces also.

Opinions?


Eric

These sound like good improvements...

I'm curious, what kind of effects are you looking to implement? I am all for increasing the usefullness of economic investments beyond just replacing pillaged resources, but only so long as they aren't over powered either individually or in total.

[carburo]

Ii agree with Uncle_Joe. The problem is that if economic improvements are not effective, why would I invest any resources on it? That left me with only one option: built as many armies as I can afford and conquer everything taht is at hand as soon as possible. I'am not saying there is anything wrong with having only the conquest all option, if it was intended that way, but why bother with a "complex" economic system if at the end you can't really do anything about it.
I think we should be able to upgrade the economy, but only in the home provinces, and that the conquered regions should be an economic burden, modeled through an increase of waste for the whole empire for every conquered and not assimilated province, so that the more and the fast you annex, the less resources you would have available to hold to your new lands. You should be able to assimilate your new provinces, and meke them "home provinces", but at a slow pace and after significant investments and a long period of uninterrupted occupation. If you lose the province before it is assimilated, you would have to start the period of occupation from 0 again, and if you lose to it's original owner, they could use all the improvements you built.
If the newly comquered provinces are a burden instead of a boost to your economy, it would prevent the steamroller effect that waste seems desingned to avoid, and the economic aspect of the game will be really important.
So, IMO, waste should be linked to the amount of foreign provinces you hold, and not to the production of your home provinces. If you expand too fast your economy should go on free fall, with high levels of waste, but you should be able to upgrade the econ in your core regions to support the expenses of conquest.
Of course implementing something like this would have other consequences. I can think of slow expansion, some sort of stalemate in the borders, etc., but I would like it this way. Just my ideas.

[mogami]

Hi, Also it is not a simple question of spending money to increase output. If that were so Russia would not drop from being the most powerfull nation in 1792 to a large backward dinosaur by 1848.
It is not as simple as aquiring a fresh territory and then investing to get increased output.
The world in this period was limited in how much produce could be maintained by factors that would have to be included if you change the model.
1. Transport nets and methods
2. Education levels of populations.
(In order to turn an undeveloped area into production center you would need to
1. Build cities and move population from rural area
2. Educate them
The cost is enourmous and takes time to transform undeveloped area into industrial area and all this in persiod of history before IR has begun (except maybe in Britain and to a lesser degree France)
I mean you would need different models for each nation because what England in 1800 can attempt Russia cannot try before 1900. (Russia is pretty much a slave labor nation right up to 1980's)
I have 2 questions
1. The option does not have to be viable in every area to be required.
2. Why would a developed but conquered area produce more waste then trying to develop a friendly (home) area? The waste comes from trying to get more then your system can efficently produce not from gaining control of already efficent areas.


You still need to be able to fix what becomes damaged. Even if you can't squeeze more from the area by expanding past a certain point.

Here is a hint I think is being ignored. Rather then taking an area to obtain increase for yourself. Take the area to deny the output to the enemy. I think the wars of the period were more about denial then aquiring an increase.
When you lower the enemys output you decrease the force he can employ against you. This results in the force you have becoming greater in proportion without any actual increase in size.

I think the economic development model is a tree being taken for a forrest. It is a small but important part of the larger whole. It is not an object unto it's own.

[jchastain]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe
I'm strongly considering three tweaks regarding waste:

(1) Courts lower waste overall.

They need a purpose. This seems like a goods idea.

(2) Developments lower waste in their area of expertise: factories lower labor waste, farms lower horse waste, etc.

This would give them a bit more impact so that they could be valuable without having to change the 10% bonus factor. Perhaps a mix of these two - horse waste is reduced by a some fractional constant * (2 * farms + courts) and labor is reduced by constant * (2 * factories + courts). That way investing in courts yields a little benefit across every area while investing in a focused area yields a bigger impact in that one area. For unspecialized provinces, courts is a better investment. When a province is specialized, it will make more sense to invest in a farm instead of a court while both are at a level of 3, but when courts is at 2 and farms is at 8, maybe buying two courts is a better option. In addition to giving additional purpose to multiple improvements, there are just a lot of dynamics involved that make for strategic decisions.

(3) Trade income is subject to only 50% the normal maximum waste (which can get as high as 90%).

I really like this idea. Right now, trade is largely unneccessary. You trade a few of what you have in abundance for what you need but generally speaking less trade is better since it is disrupted by the diplomatic situation. This suddenly makes trade a WHOLE lot more desirable. Make it on net trade though - we don't want people trading 10 iron for 10 iron with an ally or doing a round robin of wool for iron, iron for wood, wood for wool to produce a giant circle just to reduce waste through complex transactions that don't actually change anything.

[mogami]

Hi, Speaking only of horses here. There is always going to be waste in horse because they are living creatures that will die no matter what. (They get old)
How long can a horse be used for war? You don't charge the enemy on the back of a 20 year old horse.
To maintain a 10,000 man (and horse) Division from month to month would require more horse then human replacements.
There is simply no way to avoid wastage. In fact I think that is how it has always been refered to.
In The American Civil War the South began with units mounted on blooded stock. (The troops provided their own mounts) Now of course these units could (and did) ride rings around Northern Units mounted on govt issue horse's However the north was able to deal with waste better then the south (it was impossbile to replace those throughbreeds)
There was a limit to where the south could not only not raise new units they could not maintain existing units. And this was all do to waste. (and the fact that horses wear out and die)

Everything you issue a soldier wears out (or gets tossed away or lost or broken)
Waste to me is simply the cost of keeping what I have. It gets more expensive to expand because the cost of replacing items that get wasted goes up faster then increase in surplus.

If you are at 75 percent max output and sustainable level it is hard to get that extra 25 percent increase because the waste will increase. (Real life not game)

I think the focus should shift from trying to increase output and stockpiles to realizing this is a real problem today and more so in 1792. A 50 percent efficent system in 1792 was a real streamlined machine.

However I think waste of horses should be strongley connected to how many you have assigned to units. (above and beyond replacements that come along with replacement humans. Horse are not waste by being on farms. They are wasted just maintaining peacetime units. How many troopers in the period do you think rode the same animal for more then 6months? a year? two years? I think to maintain 100,000 cav for two years you'd require at least 100,000 remounts.

[Uncle_Joe]

Mogami:

You are still thinking 'real world'. In that arena, I agree with everything you said. But as jchastain pointed out, this is not about 'real world'. In the real world you cant just click a slider and crank out output of 'x' or 'y'. The 'real world' is a lot more complex than that. We understand that. We are not trying to model that.

In the game however, options exist which are never wise investments. So something has to change in order to correct that or else those options should not exist at all. As pointed out, in order for the game decision to have any relevance, the benefit must be tangible relative to the cost within the average timespan of the game.

So, what it comes down to is that while reality is accounted for in the mechanics, the overriding factor has to be that gameplay comes before total realism.

OK, so far, ericbabe has proposed the following suggestions:

(1) Courts lower waste overall.
(2) Developments lower waste in their area of expertise: factories lower labor waste, farms lower horse waste, etc.
(3) Trade income is subject to only 50% the normal maximum waste (which can get as high as 90%).

I think implementing all of them would be a great start. In addition, I think greatly reducing labor production in captured lands would help differentiate them from home territories. Finally, distance from your homeland should impact what actually gets produced as well, especially for certain resource...ie luxury items should be easier to 'get home' than staples like Food, Iron, or Wood. These are more problematic to transport in large quantities, especially over land. The cost of transport could almost equal their value.

So, to simulate that, 'waste' from distant provinces could be higher on those types of resources, again encouraging players to invest in their home econ rather than subsisting on conquests. If a territory is a port, perhaps allow Merchants stationed in the neighboring sea zone to reduce a portion of that 'distance waste' as they might represent merchant marine and transport capacity. The result of that would be that having protected sea routes allows for less waste from transport than relying on overland shipping.

[mogami]

Hi, They are "wise" investments in areas where war has damaged the region. They might not be "wise" investements in already developed region. Only circumstance can tell. The system has to be there to repair Paris after 200,000 enemy troops have been on a rampage there for 6 months.

[Mynok]

If you reduce production in captured lands, then you will cripple Turkey. Most of her provinces are conquered provinces.

[carburo]

Mogami,
What I, and others, are proposing is mainly oriented to make the game deeper and give the player more meaningful options. Accuracy in modeling “historical” developments is part of the fun, but I don’ expect the game to be an interactive guide to early XVIIIth Century economics and warfare. We all agree that real life economy is a complex thing, but here we are trying to have fun in our spare time. Well, at least that’s what I’m trying to do.
The idea behind limiting the resources you can extract from newly conquered territories, and that holding them makes your whole econ less efficient, is that this way we avoid the the-more-I-grab-the-easier-it-is-to-grab-more effect, and preserve the necessary balance, and at the same time give more importance to the economic upgrades in the game. Conquering new provinces would negate resources to your enemy, but will also put a strain on yours, so you’d have to wait and consolidate until you could go for more of their lands. In historical terms this isn’t senseless either. Excepting colonial ones, usually empires didn’t got a lot, relatively speaking, out of their new conquests, and generally grew weaker as they expanded. You could of course plunder Europe and put together a Louvre, or plunder the world and built a British Museum, but imperial enterprises normally took a step toll on a nation’s resources and almost always exhausted them. Empires didn’t last forever in real life. But as I said above, this is not about modeling reality with 100% accuracy, but to make a fun and interesting game.
What I like about this idea is that sitting in your home provinces would allow you to upgrade and have a healthy econ, but you would also lose the game given that taking land from your enemies is the best way of weaken them and get ahead in glory (BTW, I would reduce the amount of glory you get from enemy surrenders). OTOH, expanding too fast would give you more points but your econ could collapse. The player would have to strike a balance between economic upgrade and military expansion, instead of focusing only on the later. As it is now, after some basic upgrades the importance of the economy is minimal; you basically build armies up the level you can afford, which won’t change no matter what you do due to waste, and wage war.

[Naomi]

Admittedly, incorporating waste into CoG really has come a way to model the economic reality of about 200 yrs ago. However, it's advisable to institute a further simplified economic model by leaving out wool and cotton (textiles being a proxy of them) and spice and wine (of which luxuries is a proxy).

[mogami]

Hi, Why is that advisable? Currently I have to expend wine,spice and lux (3 items not 1) to meet demand but also I have 3 items for trade.
Textiles are a finished good used by units while wool and cotton are raw materials. They are not the same thing.
I could grow cotton and trade for textiles. I agree I might not need all raw materials but I do require all finished goods. Some regions provide wool but not cotton and others provide cotton but not wool but each raw material works for making textiles and textiles might be in region that produces no raw material.
Here is a major difference in the value of a province. The more developed ones require raw materials while the less developed ones require finished goods.
I like the current model. I think it already quite deep and fun to play without requiring me to attend night school in preindustrial revolution economics.
I do not agree with what I percive to be an attempt (or request) to make all regions equal by their being allowed to develop at the same rate and cost.

[Uncle_Joe]

I do not agree with what I percive to be an attempt (or request) to make all regions equal by their being allowed to develop at the same rate and cost.

I dont know where you are getting this from. I dont think anyone is asking for anything of the sort. I'm just guessing here, but I dont believe most people are looking for Paris or London to have the same production potential as the middle of nowhere or some remote desert locale.

One thing that is not at all clear in the game is that all provinces have a baseline production based on their inherent resources. This is documented in the Ralegh guides, but it really needs to be more accessible in game. At any rate, that base level is then modified by Pop level, upgrades, and a other factors to arrive at the final production. So, regardless of upgrades, some provinces are going to be better at producing 'x' than others.

What IS being lobbied for is a reason to want to invest in the econ over simply going on a conquering rampage every game. As I noted above, investment means more than simple province upgrades. The current model does not make that investment worthwhile.

So, while you may choose to play the game in a 'conquest' mode, the option should be available to play a more economic game (and, indeed, that option is present, it just doesnt work at the moment). If the decision were to be made (at the design level) that economic development is beyond the scope of the game, then I'd prefer if the options were removed rather than left, but not viable. YMMV on that.

[jchastain]

Actually, it generally appears that wool and cotton production is far above what is needed for the textile industries. And even if you run out, it produces textiles anyway (reported in the support forum). Personally, I would like to try seeing how it would work if you needed 3 wool or 1 cotton to produce each textile and that without the raw material, your production would be limited. That might yield a bit more trade of commodities and it would make Turkey's cotton far more valuable (and perhaps give others the proper incentive to eye Egypt longingly).

[Naomi]

I am happy to have a response. [:'(]