Hey everyone. I was, as you know, hoping to post a while back, but I'm afraid my most recent endeavors have found less success than last month's work. Despite my frustration with how long these problems are taking to solve, the work is, nonetheless, highly rewarding.
Multi-Commodity Economies with Productions
It should come as no surprise that I have been working on the expansion of the economy / system development / 'capital expenditure.' As detailed in my last log, my formative ideas on the subject were "you gotta try it." Sadly, a careful scrutiny of that thought process reveals an unfortunate blunder: I was thinking too much in terms of a trivial economy. I kept speaking about trade stations and how to position them. This is a hopelessly difficult problem, and it's no wonder that my only answer was "try it!"
Indeed, as embarrassingly obvious as this is in retrospect, it was only upon writing the code that I began to realize how pointless trade stations (and interesting developments in general) really are in a system where the economy consists of mining ice and selling it to colonies
Now, if we were mining ice to take to an ice refinery, which produces water, various minerals, and trace amounts of Talvienium, and water is required as a coolant to nuclear reactors, which pump out the energy cells necessary to power Talvienium Warhead Factories, which of course supply everybody's favorite missiles, but alas, colonies also demand water, etc. -- now here is a setup where we can actually start to reason about new capital assets.
So, my time over the last few weeks has been spent primarily on implementing factories, production mechanics, and on getting the AI to a place where it can make such an economy work smoothly. This work is a great chance to begin scaling up the game content to a representative size/complexity, which is a major goal for the coming months.
Using Net Flow to Make Smart Choices
Now, back to the problem of deciding how to spend money. With a multifaceted economy, the question is actually much easier. With access to flow data, the algorithm becomes more-or-less common sense: we sum the flow values for the entire system ('net flow'), then choose the asset whose contribution to this sum would maximally reduce total pressure.
In my own bizarre terminology this sounds a little obtuse, but a concrete example will make it clear that this is, frankly, just common sense:
Code: Select all
Gamma Centauri
Ice Refinery
- 50 ice/s
+ 100 water/s
+ 5 Talvienium/s
Nuclear Reactor
- 1 isotopes/s
- 10 water/s
+ 100 energy cells/s
Ballawhalla Prime
- 50 water/s
- 200 energy cells/s
Ice Mining Barge 1
+ 20 ice/s @ Ice Refinery
Ice Mining Barge 2
+ 20 ice/s @ Ice Refinery
Water Trader 1
- 10 water/s @ Ice Refinery
+ 10 water/s @ Nuclear Reactor
TOTAL
- 10 ice/s
+ 40 water/s
- 1 isotopes/s
+ 5 Talvienium/s
- 100 energy cells/s
)Clearly, Gamma Centauri has several net flow problems that we could address: there's a slight ice shortage, but that's not nearly as pressing as the isotope shortage, since the nuclear reactor is going to be stalled indefinitely if we don't address that problem. We could use more energy cells, but building another nuclear reactor is out of the question unless we solve that isotope shortage first. Someone should do something with that Talvienium, because right now it's just going to pile up at the ice refinery.
Assuming there's a source of isotopes in the system, the obvious choice is to buy a new mining ship and send it off to go mine isotopes and deliver them to the nuclear reactor. After that, we should consider building another reactor to put that extra water to use and solve the energy shortage. Each of these changes will inevitably reshape parts of the economy, but at the end of the day, we can always take a new sum of flows and get a decent idea of what needs doing in the area.
As demonstrated by this example, flow data is useful for more than just decisions that involve a single node or a connection between two nodes; by summing flow data for all entities in a specific place, we can quickly determine the net flow for the whole, thus enabling reasoning about the global impact of various choices. Naturally, this strategy of hierarchical flow application can be applied more generally to zones, systems, and even entire regions. If we want the AI to think more globally, we can throw a bit of regional flow weighting into the decisions, such that AI players will address shortages/surplusses that aren't localized to a single system.
Fitting Prices to Flow and Vice-Versa
In all this talk of flow, we seem to have mostly sidestepped money and prices. But money is clearly a crucial piece of the economic puzzle. At the end of the day, everybody needs to get paid. How do we make sure that everyone gets paid when decisions and balancing are performed on the basis of resource flow rather than dollar bills? Moreover, how do we ensure that the flow of money 'conforms' to the flow-based model? The problem is harder than it may at first sound, because it involves bridging the gap between rates and instantaneous events.
Let's think about the initial decision to create a water trader for linking the ice refinery to the nuclear reactor (from our above scenario). Obviously it's a good decision that needs to happen in order for our economy to work. In flow terms, water flow at the refinery goes from +100 to +90, and at the reactor from -10 to 0. At both endpoints, flow is pushed toward 0 (a net flow of 0 is the ultimate goal), so the decision is a win-win. It's important to recognize the monetary implication here: water can be bought at the refinery for a lower price than the reactor will pay for it. Otherwise, the decision isn't profitable (which contradicts both common sense and our flow data). Evidently, resource flow shapes prices. Moreover, it is obvious from this thought experiment that pricing must be proportional to resource flow in order for price-based decisions and flow-based decisions to be equivalent. To be even more precise, since flow is a rate but prices are instantaneous, what this actually means is that average price must be proportional to resource flow. Price fluctuations that balance one another out are permissible.
Sadly, I am now reaching the end of that which I've actually worked out thus far. I'm not yet confident in my pricing algorithms, although I do know, generally-speaking, how to resolve the sustained / instantaneous dichotomy with a temporal pricing model, such that average price agrees with resource flow. With regard to the specifics, I am still developing ideas and watching how the (now significantly more-involved) economy reacts to new AI algorithms. Ultimately, I'm trying to get it all to a point where things stabilize to a good equilibrium. For my purposes, 'good' means that factories are achieving close to 100% uptime by stocking enough supplies and setting prices correctly to ensure regular supply deliveries, traders are continuously choosing profitable trade routes that alleviate demand, AI players are continuously monitoring the economy to change how assets are allocated/switch jobs when necessary, and so on. Interestingly, it is completely obvious when flow-based reasoning doesn't match price-based reasoning, because the AI will quickly go broke due to making trades that are flow-favorable yet not profitable
Again, with a correct pricing model, that should not happen (at least, never in the long run).---
I apologize for not having pulled through with enough brainpower this time, but such is life. I am really hoping to have some better insights this week (but even if I don't, the brute-force method of trying a lot of things and seeing what works is close to completion, so perhaps it will all be resolved by sheer force of will...).
Until next time
It might even be useful to consider entities as temporary patterns by which energy flows (Not to get too philosophical, but you are in reality just a pattern of energy interacting with other patterns within patterns [/Buddhism]) This principle can also be applied to economies, in that everything in the game is flowing from blackbox resource sources through multiple temporary phases and patterns with variable stability on its way towards destruction or blackbox sinks.
". If handled via multiple small tweaks across numerous NPCs, it would be entirely unnoticeable that The Force is raising the price of Talvienium by 10% because the AI hasn't been able to properly value it. Yes, this is sort of cheaty and gamey, but we were already having the game manipulated by the blackbox.
so I'm getting that taken care of now. On that note, I did notice the 