Inflation for EB 2 economies

[gamerdude873]

Hey I was wondering if some basic "Inflation" would be included in EB2 to simulate some of the trouble of running an empire. As I understand it, the Romans had some terrible trouble with it at intervals, forcing people to even revert to bartering. I was thinking that this might be useful in helping control runaway treasuries with almost limitless supplies of money. Inflation could help keep the real buying power of said money down by either 1) raising the costs of unit recruitment (unlikely and probably not possible) or 2) simply taking a big chunk out of tax income as one's empire expands.

Personally, it gets kinda dumb when i can buy virtually all the soldiers I want.

[WinsingtonIII]

You can definitely accomplish simulating inflation, as I know that the M2TW mod Deus Lo Vult includes a feature like this. However, I obviously have no idea whether it will be included in EB2.

Edit: Here's how the DLV feature works (In spoilers):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1.7.4. Economic Status Screen + Inflation

An economic status screen is shown in the financial overview popups: it is calculated by the stochastic economic +- events:
Interest Rates of your savings account are although calculated dependent on the actual economic stratus:
+5 Overheated Boom (all economic events are positive) …….20% interest
……………….
0 normal....
………
-5 Depression (all economic events are negative)... 0% interest

Subscreen Inflation:
Fieldcosts and settlement costs will double\triple if higher inflationlevels are reached, new inflation popups in financial overview screen:
- normal inflation: player treasury < 50000
- high inflation: 50000 < player treasury < 100000
- extreme inflation : player treasury > 100000

The info is from this link

[bobbin]

Personally, it gets kinda dumb when i can buy virtually all the soldiers I want.

I don't know about the other stuff but the recruitment replenishment rates will be adjusted to prevent armies full of elites, which would go someway to solving your problem.

[Tenebrous]

Then yours stuck with huge amounts and money and unable to train any solidiers...

[bobbin]

I did say it only went part of the way to solving the problem.

[Ibrahim]

You can definitely accomplish simulating inflation, as I know that the M2TW mod Deus Lo Vult includes a feature like this. However, I obviously have no idea whether it will be included in EB2.

Edit: Here's how the DLV feature works (In spoilers):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1.7.4. Economic Status Screen + Inflation

An economic status screen is shown in the financial overview popups: it is calculated by the stochastic economic +- events:
Interest Rates of your savings account are although calculated dependent on the actual economic stratus:
+5 Overheated Boom (all economic events are positive) …….20% interest
……………….
0 normal....
………
-5 Depression (all economic events are negative)... 0% interest

Subscreen Inflation:
Fieldcosts and settlement costs will double\triple if higher inflationlevels are reached, new inflation popups in financial overview screen:
- normal inflation: player treasury < 50000
- high inflation: 50000 < player treasury < 100000
- extreme inflation : player treasury > 100000

The info is from this link

can deflation be simulated alongside inflation? because any steady decrease in revenue, but increase in demand for that revenue, willl doubtless cause an increase in the price (buying power) of currency; in other words, deflation of currency.

one must also have a certain level of control for inflation, not just get a serious inflation on reaching a certain level, if they wish to add to realism. however, I doubt if this can be done, though I may be mistaken.

[ARCHIPPOS]

This is really interesting. I love such economic aspects of the game. Here's some ideas.
-Corruption could drasticaly decrease income.
-Mines could be engineered to dry out after some decades.Especially if the player chooses to upgrade them.
-High fertility rates could be perhaps linked to the rise in the cost of training and building??? (remember more people>food prices up>everything becomes more expensive).
-farm improvements and long range sea/land trade (ports/roads) diminish inflation (thus reducing costs).

i dunno if such stuff are hardcoded or can be changed by the EB team.

[vpapako]

I don't know about the other stuff but the recruitment replenishment rates will be adjusted to prevent armies full of elites, which would go someway to solving your problem.

That prevents you from recruiting only elites but it doesn't prevent you from recruiting endlessly. In this game you can constantly be at war. Constantly. That is not realistic. When an empire loses a big amount of men in war the are willing to offer terms to the enemy because their population isn't suficcient for endless warfare. Little boys need to grow up in order to be recruited as soldiers. Unless the romans had cloning facilities

[vpapako]

This is really interesting. I love such economic aspects of the game. Here's some ideas.
-Corruption could drasticaly decrease income.
-Mines could be engineered to dry out after some decades.Especially if the player chooses to upgrade them.
-High fertility rates could be perhaps linked to the rise in the cost of training and building??? (remember more people>food prices up>everything becomes more expensive).
-farm improvements and long range sea/land trade (ports/roads) diminish inflation (thus reducing costs).

i dunno if such stuff are hardcoded or can be changed by the EB team.

Also resources shouldn't be equally distributed across the map. There were countries whose resources made them unique in economic value and gave a motive to an empire to conquer them. For example, the mines in spain, the grain of egypt, the farms in greece and others. Mines in spain could for example produse significally more than other mines

[Bucefalo]

I really don´t like how "corruption" is represented in M2TW, i mean, the further you are from the capital the more corruption there is, a big nonsense. Instead i would suggest to represent corruption in larger empires by increasing the chances of characters getting bad traits (like: corrupt, disloyal) the more settlements the faction owns. So a small faction would have good characters, but arche seleukeia for example might start to get bad traits from some of their governors, as they become corrupt or disloyal. Corrupt is simply just a trait which decreases a % of money in the settlement, while disloyal would be a trait that reduces loyalty. I think that would give larger empires more headaches and increase fun playing as them as well. If you make it so that each settlement needs a governor to be run (for example not being able to do manual recruitment/construction without one) then it would affect practically all the settlements.

[Subotan]

Government revenue is not the economy. What is being proposed for methods to model inflation is entirely the opposite to what has been observed in practice. Inflation is generally caused when demand for goods outstrips supply, leading to suppliers upping their prices, which in turn leads to a decline in the value of currency.

I think we would all agree that higher taxes lead to more government revenue, and are the primary instrument of increasing government revenue in R:TW. However, Higher taxes leads to lower demand (As people have less money to spend on togas, olive oil etc.), which would lower inflation. In the simulation proposed, inflation would be weakened by lowering taxes and increasing government spending; the exact opposite of what happens in reality!

[ARCHIPPOS]

The RTW machine however adds a realistic aspect of tax-raising. If you increase taxes you decrease economy's growth (population growth). Which makes sense. Lots of free people (traders, medium scale manifacurers etc) would move their business elsewhere...

[Andy1984]

Government revenue is not the economy. What is being proposed for methods to model inflation is entirely the opposite to what has been observed in practice. Inflation is generally caused when demand for goods outstrips supply, leading to suppliers upping their prices, which in turn leads to a decline in the value of currency.

I think we would all agree that higher taxes lead to more government revenue, and are the primary instrument of increasing government revenue in R:TW. However, Higher taxes leads to lower demand (As people have less money to spend on togas, olive oil etc.), which would lower inflation. In the simulation proposed, inflation would be weakened by lowering taxes and increasing government spending; the exact opposite of what happens in reality!

The underlined part seems to be too modern an approach on economics, based on the idea that you need to tax your entire population. This doesn't seem to be true in Rome or in the Hellenistic states, where the upper social strata basicly delivered funds, arms and armies to the king (or proclaimed their own kings). Taxes transfer wealth within a population (i.e. enable large-scale undertakings in agriculture, mining or fleetconstruction where otherwise more private undertakings would be used to enable the same effect). If they have any effect at all on government funds (which seems doubtful to me), it lies in their economies of scale, i.e. in real economics rather than in the equivalent of todays budgettary politics.

Furthermore your approach neglects the aspect of economy of the gift/plunder which was almost certainly present in more barbarian regions (and probably in more civilized areas as well), where people weren't taxed by their respective governments or kings, but rather robbed by a hostile one. Redistribution in these economies didn't happen by means of taxes (as I described above) nor by real economies, but rather by something that resembles feudalism and conspicuous consumption. French economic historians have extensively studied this 'economy of the gift' in the early middle ages. If traditional economics don't hold for the middle ages (and they don't, trust me), why would they do so for the classical era? Essential economic assumptions regarding the mechanisms of markets are simply not valid for many products that would make up the larger part of government expenditures (e.g. weaponindustry, the building of ships, all kind of luxury goods, marble,...). Sometimes these products were given to the state in an act of patriottism (or as an act of buying political or social goodwill), other items were simply stolen (like loot on a battlefield, gold that could be remelted into coins, statues,...). I don't think Caesar, Crassus nor any barbarian warlord became wealthy because of the taxes their subjects paid. I believe Tacitus even states the lack of taxes in today Germany as a reason why some German tribes didn't want to become a Roman subject. Taxes as we know them are a rather recent invention of mankind.

Aspects of inflation not or hardly influenced by the amount of taxes are in my opinion these: (1) Certain factions like Pahlava would have a steady inflow of gold and silver, not because the lack of taxes, but at least partly due to trade and gold- and silvermines. (2) Other sources of inflation that did exist were clipping and the habit of states to mint coins with too small amounts of gold in it.

kind regards,

A graduated socio-economic historian and economics-student to be

[WinsingtonIII]

can deflation be simulated alongside inflation? because any steady decrease in revenue, but increase in demand for that revenue, willl doubtless cause an increase in the price (buying power) of currency; in other words, deflation of currency.

one must also have a certain level of control for inflation, not just get a serious inflation on reaching a certain level, if they wish to add to realism. however, I doubt if this can be done, though I may be mistaken.

I really couldn't tell you. I don't think DLV has it as a feature though. Like you say, it may not be possible within the limitations of the engine.

I'd also like to point out that I don't even really like the economics system of DLV all that much, with its random events and boom and bust cycles. I think it doesn't do a very good job of actually emulating how most medieval economies would have worked (particularly those that were almost entirely agricultural) and rather is simply there to make the game more challenging for the player. Of course, for most of the kingdoms/empires present at the start of any M2TW game in 1080, having a centralized tax revenue system is hardly realistic in the first place, so I guess a lot of the problem is with the limitations of the engine. But I'm getting off topic. My point is, I'm not sure whether these measures are really an effective way of simulating a medieval or classical economy in the first place, particularly in the parts of the world where the economy was almost entirely agricultural at the time.

[Subotan]

The underlined part seems to be too modern an approach on economics, based on the idea that you need to tax your entire population. This doesn't seem to be true in Rome or in the Hellenistic states, where the upper social strata basicly delivered funds, arms and armies to the king (or proclaimed their own kings). Taxes transfer wealth within a population (i.e. enable large-scale undertakings in agriculture, mining or fleetconstruction where otherwise more private undertakings would be used to enable the same effect). If they have any effect at all on government funds (which seems doubtful to me), it lies in their economies of scale, i.e. in real economics rather than in the equivalent of todays budgettary politics.

That's true, but does the R:TW engine represent that? Judging from the effects on population growth, it appears that a modern tax system has been applied to Antiquity. So, if we want to model inflation properly, we have to take into account the guidelines set by the engine, regardless of Ancient Economics (Blame CA, not me)

Furthermore your approach neglects the aspect of economy of the gift/plunder which was almost certainly present in more barbarian regions (and probably in more civilized areas as well), where people weren't taxed by their respective governments or kings, but rather robbed by a hostile one. Redistribution in these economies didn't happen by means of taxes (as I described above) nor by real economies, but rather by something that resembles feudalism and conspicuous consumption. French economic historians have extensively studied this 'economy of the gift' in the early middle ages.

Again, that's very true. However, the engine treats barbarian society in a very similar way to that of "civilised" societies. It would be very hard to implement an econ simulator that did X for barbarians and Y for Med civilisations.

Aspects of inflation not or hardly influenced by the amount of taxes are in my opinion these: (1) Certain factions like Pahlava would have a steady inflow of gold and silver, not because the lack of taxes, but at least partly due to trade and gold- and silvermines.

That seems like it could be feasibly represented in-game, although it would screw over factions such as Baktria, Makedonia etc.

Other sources of inflation that did exist were clipping and the habit of states to mint coins with too small amounts of gold in it.

I suppose certain buildings could represent that.

All your points make perfect sense, but the constraints of the engine mean that we have to work with what we've got. I was just pointing out that lowering taxes to curb inflation was a bit silly.

kind regards,

A graduated socio-economic historian and economics-student to be

Kind regards,

A-Level economics student and soon to be Oxford economics student

[Megas Methuselah]

Hey guys, I aced my economics classes, but you don't see me walking all over people for it.

[Ibrahim]

Government revenue is not the economy. What is being proposed for methods to model inflation is entirely the opposite to what has been observed in practice. Inflation is generally caused when demand for goods outstrips supply, leading to suppliers upping their prices, which in turn leads to a decline in the value of currency.

I think we would all agree that higher taxes lead to more government revenue, and are the primary instrument of increasing government revenue in R:TW. However, Higher taxes leads to lower demand (As people have less money to spend on togas, olive oil etc.), which would lower inflation. In the simulation proposed, inflation would be weakened by lowering taxes and increasing government spending; the exact opposite of what happens in reality!

true..very true.

which actually gives me an idea: can inflation caused by the government (namely by debasing the currency), be implemented in M2:TW? I do know that in ancient times-particularly Rome, debasement of Gold currency led to a hyperinflation in the 3rd century AD. if this can be done, I'm all happy.

EDIT: Keynes or Austrian?

[Subotan]

Hey guys, I aced my economics classes, but you don't see me walking all over people for it.

I only mention it when it's relevant.

true..very true.

which actually gives me an idea: can inflation caused by the government (namely by debasing the currency), be implemented in M2:TW? I do know that in ancient times-particularly Rome, debasement of Gold currency led to a hyperinflation in the 3rd century AD. if this can be done, I'm all happy.

That'd satisfy me. It's impossible to create a realistic econ sim using the R:TW engine, but just one measurement of inflation would be ok.

Keynes or Austrian?

Keynes.

[Ibrahim]

That'd satisfy me. It's impossible to create a realistic econ sim using the R:TW engine, but just one measurement of inflation would be ok.

that would indeed do.
perhaps gold could be set against a certain unit, like the mnae currently used; that way, currency starts with 1 mnai currency = mnai gold. then, as government mints debased coins the mnae currency's value drops, so that say by the time we debase the coinage value by 50%, it'd be 2 mnai currency= 1 mnai gold (pardon me if there is a mistake in the inflation calculating). However, This relies on having the player control economic policy. perhaps a special code typed in with the ~ key?

Keynes.

I see. I suggest that in the future, to avoid any channel on YT with the name shanedk. he's hardcore Austrian.

[TancredTheNorman]

Constant warfare was the job description of some of these factions.

Romani obviously had endless warfare in Italy at first then against Carthage constant warfare with Celts in the North, with all of the Greek factions, ultimately a war without end in the Iberian Penninsula, after they defeated the Selucids they recieved wars in Asia Minor, there were also Getai raids to deal with.

Carthage had constant warfare in Sicily before the Romans gave them the boot, much warfare in Corsica and Sardinia, after losing the First Punic War the Barcids brought Carthage into war with very large numbers of Spanish tribes, and when Carthage was disarmed by treaty the Numidians made a lot of trouble for them. Unlike Rome the secret of Carthage was the mercenary.

The Diodachi were constantly at each others throat, I think everyone here knows about how merciless the Ancient Greeks would be to each other.

[Ibrahim]

Constant warfare was the job description of some of these factions.

Romani obviously had endless warfare in Italy at first then against Carthage constant warfare with Celts in the North, with all of the Greek factions, ultimately a war without end in the Iberian Penninsula, after they defeated the Selucids they recieved wars in Asia Minor, there were also Getai raids to deal with.

Carthage had constant warfare in Sicily before the Romans gave them the boot, much warfare in Corsica and Sardinia, after losing the First Punic War the Barcids brought Carthage into war with very large numbers of Spanish tribes, and when Carthage was disarmed by treaty the Numidians made a lot of trouble for them. Unlike Rome the secret of Carthage was the mercenary.

The Diodachi were constantly at each others throat, I think everyone here knows about how merciless the Ancient Greeks would be to each other.

ok..now care to link it with the discussion of inflation or economics?

[TancredTheNorman]

ok..now care to link it with the discussion of inflation or economics?

I should have been clearer about what I was answering, this is what it has to do with it.

Someone said this

That prevents you from recruiting only elites but it doesn't prevent you from recruiting endlessly. In this game you can constantly be at war. Constantly. That is not realistic. When an empire loses a big amount of men in war the are willing to offer terms to the enemy because their population isn't suficcient for endless warfare. Little boys need to grow up in order to be recruited as soldiers. Unless the romans had cloning facilities

It isn't just the Romans who prospered under constant warfare, Carthage did to, war was actually just another marketplace tool for Carthage, Hannibal just made a bad high risk investment.

[Ibrahim]

ah, I see your point.

[ziegenpeter]

-Mines could be engineered to dry out after some decades.Especially if the player chooses to upgrade them.
.

Definatly NOT! MInes do represent an improved minig all over a whole region and mines can only be build in very resourceful regions. so it would be unrealistic that they dry out. I think in ancient times they didn't have the means to drain this much resources. This ain't modern industry.

[vartan]

Keynes or Austrian?

Austrian.

[Cyclops]

Look the EB period economy was IIRC a hotchpotch of systems, which the ancients themsleves ahd a pretty shaky grasp of. I studied the Oeconimica of psuedo Aristotle briefly at Uni and it seemed like a bunch of dirty tricks, the sort of stuff that people get gaoled for, and this was supposed to be government policy.

Econmic mini-games would be very cool, but the simple blocky system (set tax levels for varying consequences) works in a rough'n'ready way. Was inflation a problem in the EB period? Niot that I recall, although our knowledge of the classical economy isn't strong.

Introducing an extra variable like inflation would be good if you could also introduce other features like currency debasement (a typical dirty trick in the EB period) guilds and monopolies (like inflation, more of an Imperial thing) etc.

...Unless the romans had cloning facilities

refragatio est vacuus!

[ok I realise that isn't the borg smilie but I couldn't find one, and at least that has the eye-thingy]

[B-Wing]

I've got a bachelor's degree in economics, so I'm definitely fascinated by such topics, but I'm afraid that any economic system that could be incorporated into a game set over two millennia ago that covers the entire Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and most of Central Asia is going to have to be very, very limited. I love the fact that mods like EB and DLV (and their fans) have such lofty goals, but... inflation? Really?

Quoting the original poster:

I was thinking that this might be useful in helping control runaway treasuries with almost limitless supplies of money.
...
Personally, it gets kinda dumb when i can buy virtually all the soldiers I want.

The real issue is what to do (if indeed anything needs to be done) about factions having incomes that allow them to field as many armies as they want. I haven't really seen this happen to myself in EB, as I tend to quit campaigns as soon as I feel like victory is inevitable, but it definitely happened with vanilla M2TW and I understand the problem. I'm actually kind of surprised to hear that this happens in EB, since those high-end, elite units are so dang expensive. I would have thought the unit prices themselves would be have served as a sufficient sort of "inflation" to counter rising revenues. Perhaps they need their upkeep increased?

[TancredTheNorman]

Script assistance could save the AI, and doesn't medieval total war 2 have ways to keep you from being able to recruit for a number of turns (allowing the ai to recapture lost lands?).

[WinsingtonIII]

Script assistance could save the AI, and doesn't medieval total war 2 have ways to keep you from being able to recruit for a number of turns (allowing the ai to recapture lost lands?).

Every unit in M2TW total war has its own recruitment pool in each settlement. Basically, depending on the level of the barracks/stables/range in that settlement, you may only be able to recruit 3 of one unit at once, and you have to wait a certain number of turns before the next unit of that type is available once you recruit one. It's a much improved recruitment system over RTW.