The money yo-yo

[bigcat]

Watching playthroughs on youtube, I've noticed that the money coming in, or not coming in, seems to swing wildly between peaks of high income and high outgo for what seems like no reason at all. What is going on?

[Dragon]

It's mildly important to realize that spending money reduces the excess budget.

Also, the population dynamics change as individuals go up and down the social ladder. And it takes time for districts to be filled out. And then time for those buildings to be populated, and then for them to set up production.

Basically whenever a law that impacts income or happiness or pretty much anything is changed, then money will yo-yo as the economy balances out.

[Rennoch]

also deaths. people die. that affects income and taxes too.

keep them alive as long as possible...

[Duckie]

The devs and several lets player videos have stated the main cause for the up and down. Is not some simulation that the other two posters are thinking. But a fake mechanic to create artifical difficulty. Called the "world economy" it doesn't actually appear to be simulated at. It just happens at fixed points to make the game harder. Tho those points appear to be based around historical events so thats something atleast.

I hope im wrong, but in all honesty from what I have seen the economic simulation does not appear to be THAT deep. But I will see for sure when I get my hands on the game. But the videos strongly hint that it isn't sadly atleast not in the first two era's. Would love it if anyone ccould show me something about the devs explaining how deep the simulation actually goes..

[Croc]

There are loads of strategy games which have the economy bouncing all over the place, even if your balance is positive. I don't even know if you could class it as a bug, but dynamic systems tend to go through oscillations.

A while back I got heavily into Screeps - an RTS MMO where you have to program everything in Javascript. You harvest resources, and then use them to spawn new bots and upgrade stuff. I had huge problems with my hive going into recession because your income and expenditure go out of sync, and a few random events like an invasion can knock the system harder and everything collapses. I programmed in a system where I had two major energy 'pipelines' - upgrade, and spawning - and the surplus energy went into storage as a slush fund for recession. Then, I worked on an early warning system for detecting recession, which reversed the pipelines so that my drones would draw from storage. It was an absolutely fascinating game. I set it to send me emails every time the hive went into recession so I could watch my bots switching priority.

[Rennoch]

i know that game! a friend of mine set up this insane distributed energy network so that no one part getting hit could take a section down, everything could feed and draw off of each other, it was wild to watch it go into action when something went down!

[Mansen]

It definitely feels like there isn't enough contextual information to account for the rather massive economical dips and rises that has happened in Quill's playthrough. :/

[Zero, Dark Knight]

A possibility of what this could be; Research unlocks new business types, possibly factories shutting down to make room for the new industries, which factory income goes down, shop income goes down, citizen have less money to pay taxes with, and to spend in shops, until it's all "fixed".

Just a thought.

[Rennoch]

yeah the one thing i would say is there is a distinct lack of contextual info in the UI displays on quill's LPs... heck you can see the poor fellow trying to bring up mouse-over tooltips even after he knows they aren't there.

that's is information starved. :(

[Psychic]

Originally posted by rennoch:

yeah the one thing i would say is there is a distinct lack of contextual info in the UI displays on quill's LPs... heck you can see the poor fellow trying to bring up mouse-over tooltips even after he knows they aren't there.

that's is information starved. :(

This is so true, I think he tries to hide the fustration because of being paid.
I hope they improve this on release date, this is not an Early Access game...