Improving the long-term challenge of the game

I think we need to avoid just seeking to make things “harder.” There are definitely tweaks that need to be made, and greater exploration of things like implementation time, but I don’t think making things have less impact or making certain events be unreasonable powerful, or outright unfixable, is the way to go to make it rewarding to play.

Debt has to be pay-offable, crime has to be solveable, the climate has to be cleanable, the GDP has to be growable. It’s just a matter of how we reach these places. And if we make the conditions harder to solve, then we need to also increase options for solving them. If too many people are instantly fixing the environment, so we feel tempted to make it so “Year” makes it gradually impossible to have a good environment, then we need to add options for International Climate Treaties and so on as policies, to reduce global emissions at great expense, so we can preserve the good environment.

Otherwise the game just becomes arbitrary in it’s difficulty. And if we want things to be arbitrarily difficult, then we may as well just slash every positive effecting policy by 50% and double the impact of every negative. Is the game made more challenging? Sure. Is it more fun? Definitely not.

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You could use dilemmas to increase difficulty over time. Make the positive opinion changes from dilemmas decay, but the negatives permanent.

This is pretty reflective to how people think in the real world, and would create escalating difficulty.

Exactly. I think complexity ought to be the foremost priority, followed by difficulty, as the first will inform the other in the most satisfying ways. There’s no end of ways to do that, but to think of the poor devs for a minute, re-lacing the way the game comes together so the mid and late-game pictures are dramatically difficult is a rather exquisite design challenge.

As a player with no experience in the industry I can name new policies, situations, simulations and decisions until I’m blue in the face, but the ways those additions ripple across every other variable in the game in a way where none of the plates stop spinning, so to speak, is quite beyond me.

Oh I agree a lot of the things I suggest would be a lot of work, but I do think it’s “better” overall to go for the complexity route rather than the arbitrary one, if we’re going to be talking in terms of ideals. And I’d also add that I think I’d rather nothing fundamentally changes, than changing to go down the arbitrary path. Gaps in complexity can be generally filled by the modders, we just need to make sure the fundamentals of the game are sound.

If I had Excel then I would try my hand at using the Modding tool to add in these things myself so I could be a little more informed in what the hell I’m talking about, but for now I remain poor, in money and in knowledge of the game.

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Ok, I’m seeing something developing that I get into arguments with people about outside of the gaming world: The idea that technology kills employment.

At least where I’m from, a lot of people seem to have decided that self check outs at the grocery store are the proverbial line, and that I’m somehow an unethical person if I use them because they take a cashier’s job away. By the same logic, we should stop buying our own milk at the grocery store because that kills the milk man’s job. Additional jobs are lost any time anyone gets paid by automatic payments, pays their credit card online, uses the “cash back” option at any retailer, upgrades the insulation in their home, pumps their own gas or carries their own bags to their own hotel room.

If you were to model the economy of 1850, then remove all the jobs automated since 1850, you would probably have an unemployment rate upwards of 90%, yet that is not the reality we live in. Prior to this virus taking the world by storm we were seeing record low unemployment across much of the developed world. We find new ways to employ ourselves, and these new jobs would not be possible if not for the “job killing” technology that enabled them. Certainly there weren’t any computer game developers in 1850.

I could get into what I think does cause high unemployment, and did start writing it out, then realized how much of an argument I was going to cause, and how much that argument would take focus off technology. Folks, technology is not the problem.

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The question is whether you can do that while also having expansive social services. - without gaining that wealth from, say, oil, which is very location-dependent and also very much not green.

But perhaps you could. If there wasn’t debt interest to pay, it might be reasonable to have a broad social services while still balancing your budget. Have your cake and eat it too so to speak.

Really it’d be enough if the tutorial explicitly pointed out how much, say, a bad situation currently costs you and how getting rid of it will consequently free up a lot of money.

Are you also collecting variance on these? Did you try checking what the actual distribution here looks like? Could be interesting to see how narrow these things are.

Actually, there’s an issue there in that climate change costs billions and trillions and possibly quadrillions of dollars in the long run, so truthfully, it’s more economically responsible to care for the environment. Most climate change solutions are projected to be far more cost effective than just not caring and letting things go to crap. - It’s a matter of time scale though.

I think making it so technology kills employment is just the most simplistic way of simulating what would actually be the reduction in low skilled jobs and increase in higher skilled jobs. But we can’t really get into simulating that, without making there be different classes of Employment, and saving data for how many in society are in each level of Employment.

Generally speaking we could have it so there is a total pool of unemployed people, and then a starting rate of low, medium, high skilled workers. And make it so that as you make certain services bigger, there are more unemployed who go into that, but they have to be of the right class for the job. There is infrastructure in the game already present for that purpose. Adult Education Subsidies could help to take Low Skilled population and turn them into Specialists.

But it would take a hell of a lot of work to actually implement. And I think for that reason it will likely be left as it is, at least, until the time comes for DLC or major mod packs. But I would like to see more distinctions for types of industry and types of employment myself.

Well, climate change may ultimately impact the economy by that scale, but in the moment it would cost more to act than it would cost to not act. Over time, as Pollution Crises and so forth appear in game, it would definitely impact Health and therefore Productivity, and thereby GDP, as well as from a number of other avenues (having to spend money on emergency disaster relief). But that doesn’t change it would still cost money to begin implementing Climate Policy.

Also climate change would potentially benefit certain areas, temporarily. Canada I believe was set to become an agricultural powerhouse if the earth increased in temperate by 2 degrees? I may be wrong on the figure, but it all depends on area. England used to have flourishing Vineyards during the Medieval Warm Period, that’d be a good boon to the economy I’m sure. But after a while, things would definitely get worse.

Don’t do this. No dilemma effect should be permanent, unless it’s taken out of rotation as well. - You could eventually add up permanent dilemma outcomes such that a certain group is no longer placatable under any circumstances at all. Which is just silly.
(You could certainly make them far longer-lasting though)

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Right, presumably Skills should work much like Income Classes. They would be correlated somewhat, but not entirely. And higher technology would shift demand towards higher skill labor and higher education would shift supply towards that as well.

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I suppose the issue with this, would be that it would need to be balanced out by creating an entirely new system, a war mechanic, or at least a Foreign Embargo mechanic. As that’s really the impact of moving the economy into high end service work, if you lose your low skilled manufacturing and agricultural base, then you become susceptible to the will of the foreign countries you import those goods from, needing to get a trade deal. As well as the whole risk of WW2 Britain where if you get yourself involved in a bad war and don’t have the military spending to protect your trade, then you’ll be blockaded and not get the goods in.

On the topic of technology causing unemployment, I totally agree that historically this has not been the case. However what a lot of futurologists and AI experts worry about is that (and I accept this has been thought before) this time it is different.
tech in the past has basically replaced muscle, whereas AI and new tech is replacing cognition.

In the past, you made an agricultural employee redundant with a combine harvester, but he could learn to do something more cerebral, become an engineer, a computer programmer yada yada. as we get stronger and better AI and robotics, the pool of jobs that a human does better than AI/robots will shrink.

The most obvious example of this is truck drivers. Self-driving trucks will put a staggering number of people out of work, and there is concern that we simply do not need that many new computer programmers etc to compensate for all the lost driving jobs.
maybe…
who knows :smiley:

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I’m of two minds on this. Weirdly, AI is simultaneously becoming way smarter way more quickly than you’d think, in certain situations thought to be hard, but at the same time sorely lacking in other stuff you’d hope to just happen automatically. A lot of silliness occurs if you ask an AI with incomplete context for help. And sure, often that silliness is mostly benign and fun. But once we’re talking security-relevant, sensitive-or-protected-group-involving real world tasks, those same fun anecdotes may quickly devolve into personal horror stories.

I’m really curious how this will go. As far as I can tell, AI is as likely to usher in an utopia as a dystopia (and not just because of job loss)…

I see how it would make for awkward gameplay, but would be reflective of reality. There are plenty of people who will hate a particular politician for something they said or did 10 years ago, so thoroughly that they won’t have even noticed any time that politician favored them since then. Political careers do so to speak “expire” after a while, as the politician has accumulated too many piss offs. People might not like the game becoming unwinnable after a 4th or 5th term, but it would be realistic.

Although oddly enough, not many economists. The economist worry is that the cost of labor might plummet, and we return to the Victorian status quo that everyone either employs servants or is one. Which is not good, but very different from the typical image of “technological unemployment.”

To put that in D4 terms, high automation might effect equality, not automation.

Edit: As for the idea that automating away intellectual work is new, seen any scribes lately?

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“Futurologist” is a phrase that makes me cringe just a tad.

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Transcribers still exist at least, although computers are already very good at that by now.

Not sure if this was said, but game is completely static:
When you don’t change, remove or add policies, nothing ever changes (maybe except stuff impacted by year variable, but it stops growing after certain point) after initial settling and random event/dilemma pushes.

Maybe add sin(t), cos(t) and their combinations to year mechanic?
This way there could be sinusoidal changes like we have one with global GDP trend mechanic.