eklein@umd5.umd.edu (Ed Klein) (07/26/89)
We're running a few games of Conq here, and I've had a consistant
problem with one person's nations. He makes his countries with
a huge army to begin. His budget screen says he'll be about
a million bucks in the hole. However, he always seems to be
right around zero after each update. Is anyone else having this
problem? Anyone got a solution? (I considered going in as god and
changing his money, but I noticed that you can't make a person's
money negative.)
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eklein@umdd.bitnet Ed Klein - Consultant, NeXTDude
eklein@umd5.umd.edu Computer Science Center
{backbone}!uunet!umd5!eklein U of Maryland
"I used to get mad at my school, now I can't complain...." ksmith@miro.Berkeley.EDU (Kevin Smith) (07/28/89)
In article <5130@umd5.umd.edu> eklein@umd5.umd.edu (Ed Klein) writes: > >We're running a few games of Conq here, and I've had a consistant >problem with one person's nations. He makes his countries with >a huge army to begin. His budget screen says he'll be about >a million bucks in the hole. However, he always seems to be >right around zero after each update. Is anyone else having this >problem? Anyone got a solution? (I considered going in as god and >changing his money, but I noticed that you can't make a person's >money negative.) Conquer has a serious problem with the handling of money. The problem you are running into has to do with "inflation". A countries inflation is proportional (sort of) to the square of a countries capital. So, when I managed to sack one orc nations capitol, and aquire 55 Million, I found my inflation was at 1600%!! So the reason the one player who is always a million bucks in the hole is doing fine is that inflation is decreasing his national debt to basically nothing. Two problems I see with money handling: 1) Money isn't really gold. Inflation is a local issue. That is, one country's inflation is not the same as another country's. Yet, different countries are allowed to trade using money as a basis, or to buy from the Merchant's Guild with money. This makes no sense, as the money in one nation is clearly on a different scale as money in another nation. And when you take another nations $55 Million, does it really have any value in your own nation? Clearly, money isn't really gold, or there wouldn't be this serious inflation problem. 2) Inflation should be adjustable by the ruler. There really aught to be two user parameters to allow a person to adjust income. Tax and inflation. If a ruler is in debt over his head, he will just print more money, increasing inflation. This should, of course, increase the chance of a revolt. This has always been a problem in wars... in Nazi germany, inflation got so high that most businesses installed printing presses in their basements so that they could pay their employees twice a day (at 40% inflation a day, no one was willing to wait a week for their pay checks). It probably isn't worth the effort to simulate a real economy in the game. There are probably a couple quick fixes, though, which should do the job well enough. 1) Remove inflation. (easy) This will force people to pay their debts. It is entirely inaccurate, though, as when a ruler begins to stockpile money, this would lead to deflation (unless he printed more), and since there would be less money in the economies money supply, he would not be able to aquire quite as much tax money on the following year. Suggestion 3 could deal with that problem, though. 2) Use inflation to pay for debts. (not too difficult?) Allocate a certain amount of money per civilian to the population. Say, we assume there are $500/civilian in the money supply. So, a population of 1000 will have a total of $500,000. So, a ruler who goes in debt by $200,000 will have to pay it off through inflation of 40%. This should probably darn near guarantee a revolt... 3) Penalize stockpiling with decreased taxes. (fairly easy) Supposing a ruler has $200,000 saved from a previous year. If the population is 1000, and we assume $500/civilian == a money supply of $500,000, then the ruler has an entire 40% of the money supply! Therefore, he would only be capable of aquiring 60% of the amount of tax money that he would otherwise be able to achieve (as the people have significantly less to spend or earn -- this would be a period of recession, but we can ignore those details).