Unfortunately, the entire market system still doesn't make any sense to me. Mind you, I also have an focus on underlying system mechanics, (per my TLF obsessions). I'm trying to understand the volume of items and the naming system in regards to market system and economic contributions to the player's race, and I keep coming up short.
My problem is that it seems like the market system is combining too many different things, and I can't really imagine how it works. For example a single military market item (e.g., the AK-47 and its numerous produced units) would be a small fraction of the total amount of the total military market for a race. Likewise a single poetry novel would be a pittance compared to a single military item. The number of copies of 50 Shades of Blue that would have to be sold to make keeping track of individual items worthwhile seems out of scale. You'd see something like 1000 different poetry book items would have the same impact as 1 military weapon items. And a 100 military weapon items would have the same impact as a single type of livestock sales to Burlusts.
Quantities don't come into play here. Rather it's a matter of "do we supply AK47s to you, yes or no, and how much do you value that." You have to have a certain manufacturing capacity to supply AK47s to a race, but again there's not quantities involved in the transaction. The AK47s, meanwhile, are basically a procedurally-generated technolgy in the Civ sense -- they have some buffs that they give you for having that market item in general, and they give a buff to whoever you are making them for while you are supplying them. In return you get money and goodwill and whatnot back from the other race.
Similarly, they might have 50 Shades of Blue that they are willing to sell you copies of, or they might have a new philosophy that you outright buy or sell one time (once that knowledge is transferred, that's it, in those cases).
Different kinds of market items give different sorts of benefits, but they are all basically like procedural techs. Exactly how many of these you will see in a given game is a question still, but my intent is for it to not be too many so that they remain valuable and so that they aren't in your face constantly. THAT said, the amount will vary greatly based on whether you are focused on the market aspect of the game or focused on some other area. Same as with the military -- you might do a lot of fighting, or comparably little.
But either way, it's all about the "procedural techs" here, not about quantities of items or whatever. There's more to it than that, but that's enough for now I'd think.
One of the big problems with M003 was they added too much detail without any real difference. You'd see technologies that increased missile speed by 5%, and it made all the research feel trivial.
I'm quite sensitive to that problem, and that's one of the things that my dial-tuning is involving. How much you can do on a turn, how big of an impact this and that has, etc. I actually cut 34 technologies from the main tech tree, combining them into other techs, because I felt like I was getting too many techs too quickly, and each one had too little impact.
Previously I had done a similar thing with the social progress system, because I felt like I was getting too many of those with 36 levels of social progress. More recently I realized that just having 8 categories of social progress gains was not exciting to me, and even with less granular improvements per level I was just not excited by the system. So I'm in the process of switching that system around into something that is actually based heavily around the skill trees in Dying Light, which I've been playing a lot recently and find really compelling. It has some similarities to the Culture stuff in Civ 5 as well, without being too close.
I haven't gotten into the balance testing on the market items yet, I'll be honest. Those are more middle-game and after, and I haven't gotten there yet except militarily. It's a big game, and that hasn't been my first focus because it's not likely to be the first focus of new players. But you don't need to worry about that winding up in a state that is frustratingly granular, because that's something that probably bugs me more than you.
I have absolutely zero patience for that.
From what it seems so far, this system has the same problem. You are either representing a massive class of items by a single item name (e.g., The NotDaily Show represents ALL (or a large segment) of broadcast media), which is a bit weird, because a generic label Media Items Class II would make more sense. Or you have a onslaught of individual items, each minute effects, which makes any single item trivial. Bionic Dues had this problem for me in mid-game. I was hard pressed to sort through all of that gear to find the best gear. Instead of optimizing (which does my little black heart good), I'd run with the same set of gear for a couple of missions, until either I was starting to slow down in killing things or couldn't take the inefficiency any longer. It wasn't as fun as I was hoping it would be.
Yep, understood. Here's the thing, though -- are you American? I think if you are (I am), it may skew your view somewhat. We have a ton of TV shows, for instance, that we export to all the countries in the world. But how many TV shows from, say, Kenya do we watch? If Kenya had a show called Broken Bad that everyone just loved, it's entirely reasonable that's their only Broadcast export. It's not saying that's the only TV show in Kenya by any stretch. But the other countries all have their own culture and so forth, and this is the only TV show that actually rises to a level of notability and hops the divide.
If you look at arms manufacture, that's a better representation. A lot of European countries make a lot of planes and tanks and whatnot. And they maintain those internally, for the most part. But some of them make a particular model that is so good that they sell those to others; but that's not to say that's the only type of plane or tank or whatever that they make.
Does that make sense? I'm not trying to simulate an entire global market -- that would be incredibly boring. Instead it's a matter of the trade items that rise to such significance that heads of state discuss them.
In my search to try to verbalize my problem, I ran across The Atlas of Economic Complexity. It allows you to look at the categories of items and their contributions to trade levels on an import/export basis per country. It's pretty cool. For example, it will tell you that in 2012 Angola exported $1922 worth of umbrella or walking stick parts. It combines resources as long with commercial goods, which I thought was the difference between the Market and the Resources in tWiM, but you can still isolate things to get some perspectives.
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/usa/all/show/2012/
The CIA Fact Book is also a great source of information: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
For example in Niue a large portion of its GDP comes from exporting postage stamps to private collectors.
Cool resources! Those are definitely way more broad than I'm looking for, though, because they are focused around entire market segments, whereas I'm looking to represent key market leader items in given segments. Show me your most amazing car, Belgium, not every car you make. Etc.
tLF, Bionic Dues, and AWWW1/2 all suffer from having too many too similar items with minor differences, and it seems like SBR might suffer similarly. I think it lowers the appeal of the game to a general audience. However, I'm a single outlier perspective, and it might just be my imagination.
I actually agree with you on that assessment with all those games, and it's something that I am, as I said, extremely sensitive to. Part of the problem was me not playing those games enough in a direct fashion, because I get frustrated with that level of minutia pretty fast. I playtested all those games extensively, but doing "unit testing" versus whole playthroughs, is a very different thing. With AI War and SBR my testing methodology is very different, and one of the very first things I found with my "dial turning" stuff for SBR was a need to adjust the granularity of stuff.
I had already made the market items pretty non-granular in anticipation of not wanting to be bugged all the time, though. As I noted I have yet to really test those in proper play -- just unit testing so far -- so I don't know if it will feel too granular or not. If it does, then I'll be dialing that so that it feels proper before any testers ever get their hands on it.
On to the topic of the generation. The specifications seem reasonable. Having racial characteristic profiles would be a first step towards being able to parse things better. So for example, Burlusts have a high aggression trait and a low philosophy trait. So you'd see them offering a wide variety of customized weapon technologies and books about such technologies. In constrast, they would have very few philosophical works, most of which are at a rather primitive level of thought (whose main used might possibly be to wrap fish) and perhaps involving power dynamics via kinetic exchange. By defining what characteristics the races have, we could then rate or sort the word lists by those traits. Then use weighted probabilities of each race to select the specific words for their racial lists. You could also have preferences for types of market items, so you'd see the Burlusts produce more and be more interested in weapon items, especially the esoteric weird ones, while they aren't interested in delicate Skylaxian perfumes.
Yep, there's all that sort of thing defined. Various races don't even produce certain types of items, and various races have literally zero interest in certain types of items. The thing is, I'd like a system that is more flexible than trying to make a race-specific list for each thing. What if we add more races in an expansion? What if we decide that the Burlusts actually do have a philosophical bent? Etc. I'd rather have things like adjectives and nouns that are per-race that can be used across multiple item classes. So if a burlust noun was "blood," you might have "Fifty Shades of Blood" and "Blood Rifle" and "A Treatise on Blood" or whatever as items in three different categories.
Something along those lines would probably work, although I'm curious as to your thoughts based on the above information that I just shared. My thoughts are that it's going to be awkward if the burlusts are creating soppy poetry or if their broadcasts sound like something that are overly newsy or something. So having some thematic sub-groupings of things by tone would likely be good. Not assigned to specific races, but saying "these are sonnets" and "these are epic battle poems" might be good to make two lists. NOT both being 1500 lines long by any stretch, but some division of it.
So I don't see a major problem with the generation, the addition of racial characteristic lists would make things relatively straightforward. Fleshing out the races or letting the forum have access to some of the more fleshed out information about the races would also be nice. For example, I really don't have any idea how the Spire feel about Sit-Coms or Jellyfish.
Yep, I'll get you to that in a sec.
Then we'd need some proper nouns and/or adjectives as appropriate for the lists in question, with different rules per kind of list, as you noted. Since this could vary by race, it's something that we'd want different proper nouns by race in some cases, or different adjectives.
For instance, if there was a general broadcast named The {0} Show, then we might have a "hostile nouns" list that the burlusts plug into that sort of thing, which would include words like "Murder" and "Knife" and "Laser" and so forth. We might have an "underwater nouns" list that the yali plug into that same thing, with words like "Seaweed" and "Coral" and "Eel" and so forth.
And then there might be other groups of broadcasts that look for proper nouns instead.
Yep. That should be straight forward. There are two nice part about arranging things based on race characteristics instead of defining the characteristics of the words. First, it allows words to be multifaceted. Lasers are both weapons and elegant photon based artistic tools (as opposed to shotguns). Races that find aesthetics and/or war appealing would both like lasers. Secondly, it allows gradients in racial characteristics. So the Skylaxians might be 80% interesting in science, compared to the Evuks who are 100% interested in science.
Yep, I see you're already on the same track as me.
