The Economist ~ New economy module concept ideas - feedback please!

Day 1,668, 12:26 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,

I wrote an article a couple days ago about the new military module. At the time there were hundreds of shouts demanding an economy module update to go with the military module update we were given. I think it’s no secret that the admin HQ has changed over the last few months and as such they are in fact actively working on changing modules. Whether those changes are actually going to be any good, I don’t know.

In light of this, I decided to have a bash at designing the economy module myself. I’ve started with a few guiding principles, then conceptualised them, then put in some numbers and justifications. Obviously I’m bashing this together after getting home from work- it’s not my full time job like the admins. I’m just a player at the end of the day, and an hour or so is all I can spare. If they’d like to pay me to design it properly, that’s another matter 😉



To begin with we need to start with a few guiding principles. Here are mine:
- No complex changes at this point
- Big increase in demand for products across the board
- Work as Manager (henceforth referred to as WAM) to be reduced in importance
- Q1-5 to be given a more prominent position


Now let me explain these principles in brief.

Firstly I don’t want to make any huge changes to the game at this point like adding jets or battleships or whatever. I just want to make sure that the system we have now (more or less) continues, except it actually adds up and gives some potential for growth.

Secondly I want to increase demand, especially for raw materials, but also for finished goods in general. In some cases this involves spreading existing demand, but also giving players incentive to invest in more companies. This won’t make players richer, but it will make the gameplay richer.

Thirdly I want to significantly reduce the role of work as manager. At the minute it provides a very simple way for players to produce goods for their own use and to make money. Unfortunately it also destroys demand and began a continuous downspiral of product value to the point where only Q6 weapons exist as a marketable product, and only then because the huge investment cost makes WAM-ing your own weapons a bit silly.

Finally to make Q1 - Q5 weapons profitable to both own and to hire workers for. This will give people the opportunity to get onto the business ladder at less than a 425~ gold investment (or whatever a Q6 is during the company offer). Even from an admin money-grabbing perspective, they can see that not everyone is going to invest 100+ euros in their first purchase, and that the economy module should appeal to small and medium gold buyers as well as the rich.



OK so let’s begin with the major issue at han😛 raw materials production. At the minute we see a massive overproduction of raw materials. That’s because the physical production limit of players is much higher than the consumption of the current number of Q6 companies in existence. There are obviously two different ways this can be tackled. Firstly by increasing the consumption of companies, secondly by reducing the productivity of raw materials companies. I plan for a combination of the two.

The current system has a five tier production of raw materials, with three of the five companies being purchasable with currency and the other two only available in gold. The problem here is that the cost of gold is not a fixed value, and so two of the companies are now ludicrously overpriced. For a mere 40% or so increase in productivity (saltpetre->rubber) you pay ten times the price. It’s 8500 currency for a Saltpetre with a base production of 175, and about 84000 currency for a rubber factory with a base production of 250.

This system needs to go immediately.

My suggestion is that this is done in two stages. Firstly that all companies other than Saltpetres/Cattle are remotely dissolved by the admins. In the place of these companies you would get reimbursed the following:

Rubber/Deer: 30g and a Saltpetre
Iron/Fish: 5g and a Saltpetre
Oil/Fish: 3000 currency
Iron/Grain: 1500 currency

After this change we would only have one type of raw material company for food and one for weapons. At this point it is possible to re-complexify the system, but rather than have different productivity, introduce different products. Basically the admin would then reintroduce Iron, Oil, Rubber, etc companies, but instead of them producing the current generic “weapon raw material” they would produce the item that they’re listed as. So Aluminium mines would make aluminium and so forth. All these factories would cost the same: 8500 currency. The way the system would work is simple: Each level of factory from 1-5 would have a corresponding bill of materials. Q1+2 would be one material, Q3 would be two, and so on up to Q6 which would require 5 different materials to produce.



Few things before I go into the maths: The basic material needed by everything would be Saltpetre/Cattle. That’s what everyone has to begin with, though there would be a migration option. The migration option would be introduced AFTER the change. That way there’s no second guessing demand. The reason I decided to go with this more complex system is simple. It creates a supply-demand sub-market amongst companies. It would mean that investing in companies isn’t as simple as dividing the market price of WRM by productivity to ascertain the cost/value of a company. With five different products available, it’s possible to actually invest wisely and play the market somewhat. It also means things like material shortages can happen.

OK so the maths. Base productivity for these companies would be 50. That’s about 28.5% of the productivity of a Saltpetre currently in case you’re wondering. This should significantly screw up the global economy, which would frankly be awesome. The price of raw materials would rocket as demand will very much outstrip supply.

Productivity bonuses would work exactly the same with regard to resources. I hesitated around the idea of requiring certain regions to produce certain materials, or giving bonuses for regions held, but it’s not a particularly good model I don’t think. So we’ll stick with the current 20-100% bonus.

However into the mix we now throw a worker bonus. I don’t like the current system which is far too dependent on people working in their own companies to produce things- it’s too easy and leads naturally to overproduction. To stimulate demand I’m introducing a worker bonus for raw materials companies. All RM will now be able to “use” up to four employees per day, using the same employment system that we currently have. Workers will have a base productivity of 120%. The first worker will therefore produce 60 WRM instead of 50. After that, each following worker gets a 10% bonus.

So:

WAM: 50
Worker 1: 60
Worker 2: 65
Worker 3: 70
Worker 4: 75


All of this is a rough science because frankly I don’t have the important numbers that I need. Total WRM production, total demand, number of companies, number of active players. In addition I can’t accurately predict how far dividing the amount of raw materials in the world by about 4 will drive up prices, or how wages will be affected. The thing is, the insatiable demand for weapons will remain high, and so really the question is with a massive shortage of WRM will employing players in raw materials be a necessity? If so, then the price of raw materials will be high enough to sustain workers. The goal is to keep profits relatively low (certainly below 10% investment return/week). Raw materials in the past was a licence to print money, because it cost almost nothing to make and resulted in 100% profit. My system, if it worked, would reduce the WAM percentage of production to about 15% of global raw materials production. That 15% would be “free money” but the rest would be sustained by the need for weapons rather than an actual desire to make money selling raw materials. Importantly it would take a long time for production to catch up to this demand, and the worker bonuses would always mean that hiring workers offered an advantage over WAMing.



Secondly we move onto weapons. This is another major area which is unfortunately hard to model since I don’t have figures accurate enough to actually plug into spreadsheets. It’s all guesswork, but we can work on that.

So firstly at the minute there is a paucity of companies between Q2 and Q5, and those companies mostly exist because people either didn’t do the maths, or they needed the company for town hall upgrades. There’s not actually much point in making any sort of company other than Q6 right now. They can’t hire workers profitably, their outcome is fairly low and actually they are less efficient to use than Q6.

To change that we need to do a few things. Firstly we need to make each Q more expensive to make than the last, not just as a raw number but also in terms of cost/influence ratio. Higher Q weapons should do more damage, but also be more inefficient, so that they become a luxury item. People should buy them because they need to do more damage, but they should be a luxury item not a stock item.

So first of all we address the big issue: weapon uses. At the minute a Q1 has 1 use, a Q2 has 2 uses and so on. This is a relic from V2 that we can dispose of. In the new economy module all weapons would have the same amount of uses, 6. I am rounding up to the maximum because it’s a lot simpler than the opposite, and would result in less baww from the community, though rounding down to 1 makes more sense.

Secondly you need to stimulate demand for weapons, as opposed to Q6 weapons. At the minute people have the choice between bare-handed damage (baseline at 1) or Q6 (baseline at 2.2). I propose having a damage modifier of 0.5 for bare-handed fighting, 1 for Q1, 1.2 for Q2, 1.4 for Q3, 1.6 for Q4, 1.8 for Q5 and 2 for Q6. So if your max damage with a Q6 gun is 10,000, your max damage with a Q1 would be 5,000 and barehanded would be 2,500. This would mean buying a Q1 gun would double your damage for a relatively low cost.



With number of uses the same across the board, the main difference in weapon prices has to be the raw materials cost. Each level increases your max damage by 40% over the bare-handed amount to a max of 400% of barehanded. Relative to Q1, the damage increase is 20% per level. That means that for my plan to work, the cost has to be over 20% per level more expensive. Again this is difficult to calculate. At the minute a Q2 uses twice as many RM as a Q1, but I think if all weapons have the same number of uses a 600% relative cost increase would be major overkill between Q1 and Q6. On the other hand I don’t want to overprice Q1 guns by putting the RM usage too high, or reduce demand for RM by putting the Q6 requirements too low.

Although again, I don’t have enough figures or enough time to process them, I’ll ballpark a number and see what people feedback.

Q1- 20
Q2- 26
Q3- 34
Q4- 44
Q5- 56
Q6- 70

I just used a simple sequential increase here. Q2 is 30% more than Q1, and so on with Q6 being 25% more expensive than Q5 and 350% more expensive than Q1 (only counting RM costs).

In terms of workers, Q1+2 would have a maximum of 4, Q3 6, Q4 8, Q5 10 and Q6 would have a maximum of 20. I think the only real justification for putting the maximum as 10 for Q6 is money grabbing, and you have to give some ground somewhere. It’s a business but it’s got to be playable.



Finally we come to food. I’m sorry to say but food is utterly pointless in the game now. With the free companies players get, the demand for food is almost nil. I’m not sure which way to go on this. On the one hand I’m tempted to just delete food altogether and make it so you can heal up to 100/hour or whatever without the need for a product. It’s difficult to fix the quality system for food, since a Q6 only gives 6 times the health of a Q1 food, but the investment to build one is much much higher than to simply make 6 Q1 companies. Because of this, nearly all the world’s food is currently made by “work as manager”. I’d welcome feedback, but in my opinion deleting it altogether is the strongest option.

Alternatively you could penalise WAM in food companies, say by 50%, then introduce a more scaling production for Q companies. The problem is that whilst increasing the quality of a weapons company does in fact increase the quality of the product, increasing the Q of a food company merely increases the quantity of health produced. An alternative would be to change the pricing of food companies to reflect this, meaning a Q1 food company could be (for example) 25g, Q2 55, Q3 85, Q4 120, Q5 160 and Q6 205. That would make upgrading the company (to save space/health) a little bit more reasonable than buying 5-6 seperate companies, whilst at the same time making it slightly more expensive than just doing the above.



Finally, all of this should be tested in closed beta running parallel to the main game. Even with the correct figures, calculating closed supply and demand is impossible. You need to have the option to test in a “live” situation over a period of at least a month, and in that time you can alter formulas, change details and so on with no consequences for the main game. I think that this closed beta (call it adminland!) should remain open all the time and act as a testing ground for new ideas before they’re introduced to the main game.

This article is just a concept. It took me about an hour to write. Please give feedback. If you’ve got something long to say, put it in a PM and I’ll read it over. If anyone has the time (I wish I did) to do the full maths and work out accurate figures, I’ll include them with credit. The admins are watching 😛

Iain