I am working on background for a game setup based on real world statistics. I have a quandary. I am using the following to calculate the number of Conventional Industry (CI) for each faction.
CI = Nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) / 25,000,000,000. To say the least, the United States (U.S.) and European Union (EU) based factions are the strongest with about 800 CI each.
I also decided to look at the Wealth and Industry Percentages to model efficiency. The most "efficient" faction is based on Japan, where Population / CI provides the lowest ratio. I decided that would represent 100% Wealth Percentage.
Ergo, I could then do something like (U.S. Population / CI) / (Japan Population / CI) = U.S. Wealth Percentage, which was about 75%. So far, so good, the average U.S. citizen brings in less wealth via taxes than the average Japanese citizen. This extrapolated well to the other factions as well. For example, though the China based faction has almost three times the population of the U.S. based faction, it no longer earns almost three times the wealth via taxes. Instead, it earns about 40% of what the U.S. based faction does as wealth via taxes.
I am now wondering about Industry Percentage. I could effectively do the same thing, and just use the same percentage for Industry Percentage. However, that would destroy the CI effectiveness of everyone but the U.S., EU, and Japan. This strikes me as inaccurate just looking at world manufacturing. For example, electronics in the Pearl River Delta of China and petrochemicals in the Persian Gulf for the Gulf Cooperation Cartel (GCC) nations. I imagine these strengths should translate in some fashion to CI and Industry Percentage in-game. I suspect using Nominal GDP as a basis is flawed as Nominal GDP more greatly rewards the end of the supply chain, like Apple retail stores, automobile and aerospace manufacturers, etc. Of course, if my perception about world economic strength in terms of manufacturing is flawed, please let me know your argument.
Still, all that said, does anyone have any suggestions for calculating Industry Percentage in a realistic fashion, yet such that it does not economically cripple every other faction? This assumes that Industry Percentage effects CI or Construction Factory (CF) output efficiency. I am still not sure of the in-game mathematics for this functionality.