Economic Simulation And Fidelity

What parts of real life markets are important to simulate and what only eat your performance budget

Introduction

An important part of both history and fantasy strategy games is how the economy works. Of course you can have simple 4X type stuff with gold, mana, and shields or w/e. At that point you are just doing some balance testing. But what if you want something meaningful? A system that can help differentiate more than 4-5 factions? What if you care about history or verisimilitude? Then things get more complicated.

When you want economic management to be a core part of a detailed strategy game you have a lot of choices to make. Do you want tons of materials and goods? Buildings? How does that play into combat unit recruitment? Do you want complex geography? How do you make trade interesting? Unless you want to have limited resource requirements and just provide abstract bonuses based on trade good access having a good trade system is tough.

An important limitation in a game with a large scope and a lot of agents is performance. Many games even by major studios hit performance limits pretty hard because of sub-optimal design choices. Part of this is that the “designer” and the actual “exectutors” are different people. Another large part is fancy graphical stuff. Both things Axioms doesn’t have to deal with. Still, it is crucial to consider what part of your performance budget you can afford to assign. Being turnbased is a big asset yet again due to multithreading potential and expectations on turn update speed. Niche turnbased strategy gamers are also naturally more patient, though you can’t abuse that leniency too much.

Core Design Choices

A lot of games that do complex economic simulation choose to focus entirely on that. City builders, medieval town simulators, mining games, shop games, and so on. This obviously provides some advantages as far as a tight core game loop, no competition for the performance budget, and a simpler overall system. But it costs you context, to some degree. These games also generally use much of their advantage to go real time.

Axioms wants to have a system generally similar to a city builder as far as economic model but it needs a larger scale and provides more context for “why”. Axioms also wants to engage with fantasy crafting mechanics and dynamic building types which creates some issues but a lot of this is again ameliorated by being turn based.

So it is pretty well known that “logistics” is in no way a solved issue. You are going to have over and under runs all the time. And of course a videogame is simming far less data so it is arguably harder than real life. Many games with economic sims handled by computer player have huge issues.

A very simple shortcut here is to simply not try to be totally optimal. This is a pretty good method because in real life people generally aren’t optimal anyway and because it really only impacts the player. Other NPCs involved in trade won’t be able to easily exploit the sub optimal results since they’ll also be acting sub optimally.

And Axioms, as always, receives a unique benefit from this choice. The game can expend a little extra time for Characters with high Attributes and Skills related to economics and trade to find slightly more optimal deals. The game can also order Characters in the processing queue based on this data.

Additionally because Axioms is a pre-industrial setting in general the markets and trade zones are not global which reduces the complexity of the simulation. A lot of people ask me what period Axioms “stops” mechanically, even if you can of course keep playing. And the answer is roughly the equivalent of 1900 in the real world even if magic muddles things a bit. This also helps with balance issues that would be cause by any kind of industrial revolution. I actually considered going all the way to like the 1940s but I decided that would be a ton of work and cause a ton of issues that are best avoided. Sure there are peaks and valleys between ~5000BC and 1900AD but things don’t ramp up at a continuously increasing rate like they do following the industrial revolution truly kicking off.

Minor Design Concerns

Since Axioms exists in a world prior to truly global concerns, especially if you haven’t simulated more than a few thousand years of turns before starting your game, which applies to all of the on release worlds the game is pre-loaded with, trade and economics are generally a lot simpler. Relations between “agents” involved in trade and production and logistics are required for them to interact.

Each agent can only connect to other agents they are aware of. Of course there are mechanics for expanding your sphere of interaction but you’d generally be interacting with less than 200 other agents, and in most cases far fewer.

This is actually another area the recent post about “Connections” applies. Non-trade agent connections can make you aware of new opportunities. Some would be intentional and transactions but in some cases it might merely be a request for some food or good they experienced elsewhere and would like to engage with again. And due to the “imperfect information” prevalent in Axioms they wouldn’t necessarily know if you could acquire the thing they wanted.

You would also have cases where if you were an independent trade some politically or militarily powerful agent might be in need of strategic goods and fund you to acquire them. And this also brings up an interesting potential in Axioms. Historically you’d often have merchants, sanctioned or otherwise, and slave traders and loot buyers, accompany military expeditions. In Axioms you can do that as a merchant character. Or maybe hire another character to do so. And that is a way to build connections with characters in a different social sphere who could then hire you to fulfill special requests.

Conclusion

Axioms has some unique advantages that help offset the scope of the game when considering performance because it actively wants to have imperfect results in many situations including in economic, production, and trade spheres. Of course it also benefits from being turn based, as far as organizing data processing and it is built from the ground up with these kinds of considerations in mind. No random greedy content releases several times a year that weren’t anticipated and then cause problems that are difficult to account for.