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Games with interesting economic systems

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Tropico does a fairly good job of showing what happens when you do/don't provide social services for people and when you do/don't pay them wages high enough to let them live in something other than shacks.

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The only thing I can remember that's anything along these lines was a serious game about a family in a third world nation, and you had to plan their day to try and pull them out of poverty. Can't remember the name of the game, though.

 

There was a short online game called Spent, where you had to survive a month on a thousand dollars. Not the same, because it's more about the impossibility of financial planning below a certain threshold than anything else, but similar.

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I still haven't found a game where there is a strong incentive for raising the living-standard for the poorest, but today I'm thinking about the similarities and differences between Chicago Express's shares/currency relationship and the international-project system introduced to Civilization 5 with the Brave New World expansion. Chicago Express's amazingly succinct model of corporate-capitalism was described very thoroughly on the first page of this thread, so I'll describe the international-project system for Civ5.

When a proposal for an international-project, such as an Olympic-games style event, passes through votes in the World Congress (that's not the important part in this discussion, though it is somewhat influential on who has more incentive) all the civilizations can then decide to produce toward that international-project in their city-menus. The info that is provided to you as you are choosing how much production to invest is what the top investor gets and what the second and third largest contributor will receive. You also see the percentage of the project which has been completed, what percentage you have contributed, but not how much other civs have contributed. The effect of this is that you have no incentive to continue contributing production once your contribution achieves 51% of the effort required to produce the international-project. This aspect is really similar to the change in incentive that occurs in Cannonball Run once a majority of shares for a railroad is owned by one player, but it's inverted. If you become a majority share-holder in Cannonball Run, you get a huge increase to your incentive to invest in that railroad because you know no one else will do so since you are the one who will profit from it the most. In the international-project system of Civ5, you rarely can tell if any other civ has managed to contribute more than 50%. This secrecy encourages you to continue to invest long after it stops benifitting you to do so (if you have not yet contributed 51%). I think that is so interesting.

Another big difference is how the wider game of Civilization 5 can have such a massive influence on your incentive to contribute capital to the shared-project. If I got war on two of my borders, I couldn't care less about the 200% increase in tourism for 20 turns. The opposite is also true. If a country has already invested a lot in their tourism, they have more incentive to make sure they contribute the most to the international-games project. Cannonball Run is so abstracted ( for elegant purposes) that the incentive for investment is the potential to invest more.

Good stuff.

I'm still interested in seeing a good procedural argument for welfare though. I want a game to be able to convince me that raising the living-standard of the poorest, benifits the most wealthy.

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How about Anno 2070? I haven't played it myself, but success in the game is based around giving the citizens what they want, right?

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Uwe Rosenberg's games have some pretty interesting economic systems at work in his games. Even something simple like Bohnanza is a pretty clever implementation of supply/demand problems.

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Uwe Rosenberg's games have some pretty interesting economic systems at work in his games. Even something simple like Bohnanza is a pretty clever implementation of supply/demand problems.

I've been playing Le Havre on the iphone (the screen size is too small). I love how a business-plan develops over time based on what I already have available. I always end up slaughtering cattle and making leather because cattle is such a great way to feed my workers at the beginning and then I'm like "I could use that tannery". I should check out some of the others.

 

How about Anno 2070? I haven't played it myself, but success in the game is based around giving the citizens what they want, right?

I'll look into it. Thanks.

 

 

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Yeah, Le Havre should be treated as an iPad only game. It is basically impossible to play on the iPhone screen.

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Have you considered Victoria 2? While industrializing, you get to deal with the rise of socialist ideologies. Your social policies have a major effect on your country's happiness, and it's satisfying to see that literacy number creep up.

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Have you considered Victoria 2? While industrializing, you get to deal with the rise of socialist ideologies. Your social policies have a major effect on your country's happiness, and it's satisfying to see that literacy number creep up.

 

I was just thinking! Also, different economic systems exist for nations, often trading efficiency for player control or vice versa.

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I'm not sure if this is strictly what the OP was looking for, but Sacrifice had a weird, interesting and super stressful "economic" system. You control a wizard (yeah!) that performs missions for five gods. In the battlefield, your goal is to desecrate the other wizard's altar while defending your own. You summon creatures to aid you by spending souls. When a creature is destroyed its soul (or souls) are left floating by its corpse for you, or the enemy, to collect. You can collect friendly souls just by getting close enough, but in order to steal souls from fallen enemies you first have to convert them. This is done by ordering Sac doctors to extract the souls and transport them to your altar for the ritual. Sac doctors themselves are of course also vulnerable to enemy attacks.

 

Fighting the enemy wizard and his troops, protecting your buildings, taking care of your souls and stealing from the other wizards soul pool - all done in third person view, controlling the wizard directly - became so hectic and stressful after a few missions that I just couldn't finish the game. Still, Sacrifice is one of the most interesting games I have ever played and I'm hoping that there will be a sequel or remake at some point. I'm just not sure if I would play it personally..

 

Edit: Sacrifice is on GOG. Idle Thumbs should stream this game.

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Another boardgame with a cool supply/demand mechanic is Container. A game where you are producing stuff for other people to store so that another person can ship it to a location where it is then auctioned off.

 

What is interesting whenever we've played is how easy it is to just fall into the pit of overpaying for stuff far beyond its value. I'm sure more analytical gamers wouldn't fall into that trap but the fluctuating prices are great to see in practice.

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