Author Topic: Wealth Generation  (Read 13203 times)

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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #15 on: January 27, 2019, 06:35:12 PM »
I think linking it to employees is going to be weird, and not accomplish the intended purpose of making populous but poorly industrialized countries poor.

Consider, a nation with few factories will produce less money, but they'll also use less money, in a rate directly proportional to how much less they generate. The only real effect from the change would be that you need a certain ratio of wealth producing buildings (financial centers, and to a lesser extend mines/maintenance facilities or factories/shipyards/research labs not being used at the time) to wealth consuming ones, and that ratio stays the same whether you have a thousand or a million buildings.

Yes, in general that is true, although given the various research lines for different production types the ratio is going to change a lot. The main point through was to break the link between wealth and total population without making all population equal. In many countries, the poor agricultural areas produce less wealth than the industrialised areas.

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You'd get the same effect from just starting poorer nations with less conventional industry/TNE factories, and they'll grow out of it at the same rate.

No, because the excess population generates wealth.

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Edit: I guess the concern here is more about a nation with lots of unemployed populations sitting around rapidly reaching the wealth cap. If that's the concern to be addressed, though, I'd suggest making financial centers (and maybe conventional industry) the only thing that produces wealth - having shipyards produce 1/5th the wealth they consume or similar will just make things confusing.

Yes, that is the general concern. Shipyards wouldn't produce 1/5th of their consumed wealth (or whatever the number was) because the amount they consume is based on SY build rates and the actual ship they build or the upgrade they choose, which will build at different rates depending on size, while the tax revenue for the workers is just based on how many SY workers there are. The latter is not linked to the former.

The idea of financial centres being the only wealth generator is an interesting suggestion (apart from civs I assume). That might be a simpler option, although that takes away part of the reason to create new colonies. An option might be a combination of a much smaller amount for population, plus a large amount per financial centre (and a smaller amount for conventional industry), plus the income from civilian shipping lines and mining complexes.

However, I do like the idea of industrialisation itself creating wealth, which avoids drastic changes in income vs expenditure, but still requires a balanced approach and decisions regarding spending, especially when shipyards (for example) require far more wealth than their workers generate in taxes. Even in that scenario, financial centres would be important. This would allow a starting nation with a high population but limited industry to grow sensibly over time without huge wealth swings, but with an advantage over a country with similar industry but less population. I don't think this is confusing to the player because the key factor is how many workers there are, not what industry they are working in (with the exception of financial centres).
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #16 on: January 27, 2019, 07:53:43 PM »
To be honest, wealth has kind of always been in an odd spot in Aurora since it's a concept most applicable to a free market economy (where the government would be paying privately owned factories to build tanks/ships/etc) but Aurora works more similarly to a command economy (where the government itself builds the factories). And to be fair, I like having the latter - I've played strategy games that tried to simulate a mostly autonomous civilian economy and it was always more frustrating than anything.

I don't see any easy alternatives, though, and removing it entirely would cause problems with civilian shipping and mining complexes.
 

Offline the obelisk

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #17 on: January 27, 2019, 09:51:38 PM »
The issue with financial centers is that there is very little interesting choice involved with them.  A system where industrial facilities generate wealth to partially offset the cost of operating them still results in a situation where, in general, the economy is ignored until you're operating at a significant deficit, at which point you build financial centers.  Even if the economy is going to stay so heavily abstracted, it seems like there should be more than just throwing financial centers at deficits, and occasional researching an economics tech.  Maybe some kind of diminishing returns on wealth generated by people working in financial centers past a certain percentage of the planets population, while making trade and civilian mining operations more significant?

Also I think that jobs outside of the player controlled facilities should generally still be capable of producing some amount of wealth, especially since civilian mining colonies sending TN minerals to the civilian economy would imply the existence of a TN civilian economy.  Large population not necessarily translating into good economy could maybe be implemented by having the wealth production of civilian jobs be linked in some way to the amount of TN minerals going to the civilian economy.  The strength of the civilian economy could also be tied into the production of trade goods, to further reinforce that massive population =/= good economy automatically.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #18 on: January 28, 2019, 03:04:36 AM »
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Maybe some kind of diminishing returns on wealth generated by people working in financial centers past a certain percentage of the planets population, while making trade and civilian mining operations more significant?

. . .  Large population not necessarily translating into good economy could maybe be implemented by having the wealth production of civilian jobs be linked in some way to the amount of TN minerals going to the civilian economy.

I kinda hate this idea.  If I plunk a colony on a gas giant's moon (that has no TNE minerals) because it's a convenient place for a fuel dump, I don't want to have to ship in factories and minerals just to have the local population generate money.  I'd say 'Financial Colonies' are quite common in my games, when I want populations on a world with no (or, very few) Trans-Newtonian Elements.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #19 on: January 28, 2019, 04:23:05 AM »
Also, just because TN materials allow for effective interplanetary/stellar transport and combat that doesn't mean that the entire civilian economy runs on TN materials. If anything, the fact that planets provide various non-TN trade goods in large numbers would indicate to me that non-TN materials are still a key component of the civilian economy. And why wouldn't it? Just because you can create a TN material based anti gravity device that doesn't mean you need one for your 3 story suburban home, and such a thing is expensive.
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #20 on: January 28, 2019, 04:33:30 AM »
Maybe one way to model very "poor" countries or pre-TN starts would be to introduce base civilian wealth technology that needs to be unlocked "before" the research game even starts so to speak.

Pretty much like a mirror to "Expand Civilian Economy", but these techs are by default all unlocked already by any TN start.

Something with final effects being about:
- Agricultural Age Economy = 10% Wealth Generation & 85% workforce added to "Agriculture and Environmental" category
- Pre-Industrial Age Economy = 20% Wealth Generation & 60% workforce added to "Agriculture and Environmental" category
- Industrial Age Economy = 30% Wealth Generation & 40% workforce added to "Agriculture and Environmental" category
- Oil Age Economy = 50% Wealth Generation & 20% workforce added to "Agriculture and Environmental" category
- Nuclear Age Economy = 60% Wealth Generation & 5% workforce added to "Agriculture and Environmental" category
- Information Age Economy = 80% Wealth Generation
- Weak AI Age Economy = 100% Wealth Generation

The main point of these would be that you can always "catch up" to the same baseline eventually, but that it takes time.
 

Offline Rabid_Cog

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #21 on: January 28, 2019, 04:51:28 AM »
I disagree that Services and Agriculture do not produce taxes. On the contrary, I feel they should be the bulk of your wealth income, with employed workers on average having higher costs than income. The only real exception is the Financial Center, which is functionally just the government creating a space where civilian industry can happen at a highly intensive level and be directly managed. Like a parastatal. It also functions as a workaround for smaller populations to still produce a goodly amount of wealth. Unemployed people should give nothing though (or even cost you something).

This creates a situation where high population worlds are valuable because they can economically employ such a large percentage of the population through Agriculture and Services, but low population worlds are still viable through the use of financial centres.

I like the Wealth Cap. You CAN "save up" economic capacity by assembling and storing intermediate products, performing maintenance, increasing training, having more public holidays, etc to some extent. War fatigue is a thing and a healthy, happy population is more resistant. There is a limit, however, so I would say 100% of bruto income is a fine limit. That allows you to, in effect, have your economy produce at 200% for a single year with no ill effect, provided you had saved up to the maximum. It falls apart a bit when you consider that also means you can have your economy produce at 1300% for a single month with no ill effect, but I figure for the sake of simplicity that is okay.
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Offline TMaekler

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #22 on: January 28, 2019, 05:32:10 AM »
In general I think your planned changes could work, in that it simulates how much economic power a nation needs to be able to project military power. You can be perfectly fine as a smaller nation with two or three battle groups and have no (or little) financial centers to keep your society running.
On the other hand, if you want to be a US-type superpower, you need an economic backup and therefore have to build financial centers to do so. Financial centers are then bascially an abstraction of economic power.

Although I would keep an upper wealth limit for in that if you are rich like crazy and don't spend it on your nation, people can get angry at you. So stockpiling wealth should have a penalty to it.
 

Offline Graham

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #23 on: January 28, 2019, 08:20:05 AM »
I personally don't really like the idea of making non government employees useless. While it fixes the issue of a non TN China having ridiculous wealth generation I think it would negatively impact civilian wealth generation colonies in the later game.

My preferred solution would be to add a industrialisation or some such factor to each colony. This would be between 0.1 and 1, and would be a direct multiplier of wealth and trade goods generated by population outside government buildings. This would naturally tick up some rate, dependant upon the percentage of TN industry to population, and buffed by the amount of CMCs in system.
There should probably also be an option to build civilian development projects or some such in government factories to boost it faster.

You could start with a China with low industrialisation and wealth generation, but which can slowly catch up. But also you can have new colonies which might start at say 0.6, and then you have incentives to help them grow economically.

I think this would fix most issues with a fairly simple and intuitive system.
 

Offline the obelisk

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #24 on: January 28, 2019, 08:29:02 AM »
I kinda hate this idea.  If I plunk a colony on a gas giant's moon (that has no TNE minerals) because it's a convenient place for a fuel dump, I don't want to have to ship in factories and minerals just to have the local population generate money.  I'd say 'Financial Colonies' are quite common in my games, when I want populations on a world with no (or, very few) Trans-Newtonian Elements.
The transport of TN minerals in the civilian economy could be abstracted.  As long as you've got civilian mines somewhere, the minerals they're sending to the civilian economy could be spread throughout your empire, proportional to the populations at your various colonies, and maybe weighted in favor of the populated colonies in the same systems as the mines.

Also, just because TN materials allow for effective interplanetary/stellar transport and combat that doesn't mean that the entire civilian economy runs on TN materials. If anything, the fact that planets provide various non-TN trade goods in large numbers would indicate to me that non-TN materials are still a key component of the civilian economy. And why wouldn't it? Just because you can create a TN material based anti gravity device that doesn't mean you need one for your 3 story suburban home, and such a thing is expensive.
By civilian TN economy, I mean civilian owned facilities using TN materials, in the same way the facilities the player can create require TN minerals to create, and are more effective than conventional industry.  It wouldn't be that the civilian economy is only producing TN-based products, but that it's using TN materials to make more of whatever it was already making, as well as to improve civilian infrastructure, like transportation.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #25 on: January 28, 2019, 09:34:23 AM »
I personally don't really like the idea of making non government employees useless. While it fixes the issue of a non TN China having ridiculous wealth generation I think it would negatively impact civilian wealth generation colonies in the later game.

They aren't useless. Just outside the scope of the decisions in the game. For example, the Aurora 'government' doesn't spend anything on health, education, welfare, etc. which are the majority of a normal government's spend. It could be argued that the tax raised in the service sector is handling all that hidden expenditure and as the service sector grows in relation to population, the portion of tax going toward those areas increases too (as more developed economies always seem to end up spending more on welfare, etc.).

The tax raised from the manufacturing population is the tax dedicated to government expansion in the military-industrial complex.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #26 on: January 28, 2019, 10:11:55 AM »
1) That's generally not how spending of taxed moneys is done (that's usually more of an 'pile all the money and dole it out everywhere necessary' thing).

2) The reason more developed economies spend more on welfare is because more developed economies have more resources to spend on welfare relative to less developed economies without making work unprofitable. There's a reason welfare spending wasn't really a big thing until industrialisation made the secondary and tertiary labour sectors vastly greater than the primary sector.

3) It's entirely conceivable that a government, sufficiently pressed, decides to scrap every job not necessary for its survival today, regardless of how it will impact tomorrow, because if they don't there won't be a tomorrow. Which would mean shifting all the proceeds from taxing the service sector towards the military industrial complex.
 

Offline zatomic

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #27 on: January 28, 2019, 10:17:26 AM »
As a thought, maybe the bulk of wealth generation should come from the civilian sector population. Ignoring availability of TN minerals, production capacity (factories/shipyards) is limited by the population to run them and the wealth to fund them. When population is the limit, spreading out to colonies help as smaller population colonies have higher percentage in the industrial sector (along with the bonus of higher growth rate). Perhaps when wealth limited, the solution should be more concentration so more workers are in the civilian sector creating wealth.

Then financial centers, instead of generating wealth directly, would boost the wealth generation of the civilian sector. I'm not sure where to start on a formula but I would think 1 financial center should create more benefit the higher the population of the planet's civilian sector, but with diminishing returns as the number of financial centers increases relative to the boosted population. (Or just rely on their usage of manufacturing sector workers as an effective cap).

Then, maybe just include some number of financial centers as part of the starting facilities, so in the same way you would simulate a high pop country with low research capability by just giving them fewer labs, a deficit they can build their way out of, you could give your high pop/low wealth country fewer starting financial centers making their large starting civilian population produce less wealth, a deficit they can build out of.

This could also go with another suggestion I saw about a tech line for population percentage required for agriculture/life support. So your high pop but low tech, low wealth country could both build their way out (more research facilities and financial centers) and research their way out (lower agriculture percentage techs moving more population to the taxed civilian sector) which allows for them to catch up, but in competition with military research and construction.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2019, 10:19:54 AM by zatomic »
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #28 on: January 28, 2019, 11:02:59 AM »
Or as another option, make wealth production completely dependent on Financial Centers, and let them produce wealth from a cap of (financial centers)*modifier million people in the Service sector. A sizable non-manufacturing/agriculture population would then be critical.

I mean, one of the issues with a wealth production based entirely on the manufacturing sector is that it basically means that the planetary population can be divided in 3 groups: 1) Needed for survival (agriculture and environment), 2) Needed for production and maintenance (manufacturing) and 3) Dead weight. With planetary populations eventually ending up 3/4th dead weight because you simply get nothing out of them.

Well, except perhaps the proceeds of shipping taxes.
 

Offline Graham

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Re: Wealth Generation
« Reply #29 on: January 28, 2019, 11:09:23 AM »
I personally don't really like the idea of making non government employees useless. While it fixes the issue of a non TN China having ridiculous wealth generation I think it would negatively impact civilian wealth generation colonies in the later game.

They aren't useless. Just outside the scope of the decisions in the game

This is what i mean in terms of useless. They provide no real game play effect. With respect, i see a major problem with your proposal.

In your proposed system, income comes from 2 sources. Government mines, refineries and financial centres, and civilian traders and mining complexes.
Realistically, no one is going to build more mines or refineries than they need just for a bit of wealth, and you have no real control over civilians aside from stopping them being shot down and establishing colonies. Therefore, the only real game choice when facing a lack of financing is build more financial centres. While there are some more nuanced options, it will basically always come down to that.

My proposal is instead that wealth generation continues to be completely from the private sector and Financial centres. In addition to my change earlier in the thread I would suggest re-examining the way population is assigned to jobs. In VB6 there are 4 populations. 1- Agriculture and environment 2- Service sector 3- Unemployed government  4 -Employed government.

I would suggest merging populations 2 and 3. The worker pool able to be drawn on would be every worker not in the critical agriculture and environment sector, which has to be fulfilled, and should probably be expanded slightly to all critical tasks. No one is just sat around doing nothing as in VB6, people either work privately or for the government. But as wealth (Which can be abstracted as the fulfillment of the populations needs) is generated only by the private sector and Financial centers, this forms the limit of the workers available to you.

If we look at the same scenario of being low on cash, we have some more options. We could as above build Financial centres, effectively nationalising parts of our commercial sector, increasing their efficiency. Or we could instead spend that production boosting the development of some of our colonies to increase the productivity of our civilian sector. Or we could shift some of our heavy industry to a less developed world, leaving more population free to work privately on our developed capital, giving us a net increase in productivity. And of course long term shipping people off world will be a short term loss, but the population growth will lead to eventual returns on that investment.