It will be difficult to have the player set arbitrary prices and wages in light of the above without sliding into a more capitalist mode.[/quote]
I don't know how I'd price in a Marxist economy. I know I said it was a Marxist RTS but the name is Corporation-States.

And I don't know if they are really corporations or socialist states.

Here's another way that my economic model is interesting: The government in the real world subsidizes the mining industry. Cheap prices can help stimulate economic growth, even if that industry is running at a loss. In my game, players might be running some building at a loss but it might be essential to their economy too.

As for technological innovation, I was thinking I'd have 10 levels to upgrade to each building. Upgrading will increase efficiency and productivity but require a high investment.

[color="#1C2837"]Any currency you have will have to be pretty tightly controlled based on labor your system could spare.[/quote]
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[color="#1C2837"]Money will go into the game as more players buy more in-game currency. So I guess that would count as inflation, if the economy doesn't grow at the same rate.

[color="#1C2837"]The value of a thing will be defined in several different ways under such a system. Exchange value will fluctuate based on relative amounts of commodities, for example. The value of a thing will be the labor power invested into producing it, as well as any precursors that need to be produced. The use value of a thing will be what can be accomplished with it. You would need to keep a dynamic assessment of all of these for your simulated workers to respond to.[/quote]

[color="#1C2837"]The way it works right now, is that workers spends all their remaining money on Consumer Goods. I think workers responding to those values means an elasticity demand curve (where the amount that they're willing to buy depends on the price of the good).



[color="#1c2837"]Actually, the amount they buy already depends on the price because they will buy as much as they can afford.

[color="#1c2837"]But... the use-value of water is higher than the use-value of diamonds, and yet diamonds and are a lot more expensive. And under a Marxist economy you would have them priced according to their use-value.

[color="#1c2837"]The market price of a good equilibrates at the point where the supply curve meets the demand curve.

[color="#1c2837"]The supply curve tells us how much of a good the producers are able and willing to supply to sell at a given price.

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[color="#1c2837"]The price equilibrates at the point where the two meet because suppliers make the most profits that way.

[color="#1c2837"]The profits earned = units sold times price per unit.

[color="#1c2837"]Increasing the price will decrease the amount that people are willing/able to buy.

[color="#1c2837"]Decreasing the price will increase the amount that people are willing/able to buy.

[color="#1c2837"]Because revenue = quantity times price

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[color="#1c2837"]The geometric area of the square with sides of length quantity and price is a geometric representation of the revenue.

[color="#1c2837"]To maximize revenue, you want to maximize the area of that square.

[color="#1c2837"]To put it into an equation,

[color="#1c2837"]Revenue = Quantity x Price



As you can see from the diagram, a lower-than-equilibrium price will give a smaller quantity because the suppliers are less able/willing to supply the product.

And, a higher-than-equilibrium price will give a smaller quantity because the consumers are less able/willing to buy the product.

That is why the price equilibrates where the supply and demand curves meet.

Now, even though the demand curve for water is greater than that of diamonds, it is further to the right, or higher up, depending on how you look at it (meaning that people are willing to pay more to get a certain quantity of it).

But because the supply curve is so flat and low (meaning that suppliers are able to supply a lot of it, at a low price), the price equilibrates lower than diamonds, which have a very high and steep supply curve (meaning that even for low quantities, it is very expensive to supply), even though the consumer demand for it is less, giving a higher price for diamonds.



So even though the market price has no necessary relationship to the value that consumer place into that product, it still takes into account use-value.

That's what I think, at least.

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It will be difficult to have the player set arbitrary prices and wages in light of the above without sliding into a more capitalist mode.[/quote]

[color="#1c2837"]I don't think there's enough variety of goods to make an interesting comparison between socialist and capitalist economies.

[color="#1c2837"]In the future, I plan to give workers the ability to buy houses. That is, players will be able to construct private houses that workers will be able to buy (instead of renting from players). Also, they will be able to buy cars. This might be a financial investment if over the long run, the car saves them money, by allowing them to get to work faster and allowing them to work at higher-pay jobs that would otherwise not be as time-profitable because of the time needed to get to those jobs. Over the long term the money saved/earned will have to outweigh the cost of the car and the cost of the fuel. I'm not sure what kind of heuristic I will use for the workers to decide whether to buy a car or not. Also, I was planning to add banks and give workers the ability to hold visa cards. The players that own banks would be able to give workers loans that would have to pay back with interest. This might be profitable to the workers if the amount they save/earn in the long run by buying a house (and avoiding rent) and/or buying a car (and getting to work/shops faster and being able to get to higher-pay jobs) outweighs the amount spent on the interest, the cost of the house and/or the cost of the car and fuel.

[color="#1c2837"]The time-profit of any job-opportunity is calculated like this:

[color="#1C2837"]Time-profit = Labour-spent-working-at-job * Amount-earned-per-labour / ( Time-spent-working-at-job + Time-spent-getting-to-job )

[color="#1C2837"]It is basically the revenue earned divided by the time spent working and getting to that job.

[color="#1C2837"]What a car does is reduce Time-spent-getting-to-job, thus increasing the time-profit of each job-opportunity. But it also adds the cost of fuel to give this equation:

[color="#1C2837"]Time-profit = [color="#1C2837"]Labour-spent-working-at-job * Amount-earned-per-labour / ( Time-spent-working-at-job + Time-spent-getting-to-job ) - Cost-of-fuel * Time-spent-getting-to-job

[color="#1c2837"]Under a socialist government, housing would be provided for free (in addition to education and healthcare, which I haven't figured out how to simulate), in exchange for an increased price everywhere else.

[color="#1c2837"]Actually, I could simulate education too. Let's say that some jobs, like Nuclear Powerplants and Refineries require a higher education level. They also have higher pay. Workers get education at Institutes in exchange for money. The players who own the institutes have to hire higher-level education workers to teach lower-level education workers. The workers will get education if the cost is outweighed by the higher pay earned working at the jobs that require the higher level education.

[color="#1c2837"]So, I have some ideas as you can see, but I haven't figure out how to make an interesting comparison between socialist and capitalist economies.

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Any currency you have will have to be pretty tightly controlled based on labor your system could spare.[/quote]

So let's say that in a given year your economy produces X goods. And you give out Y money, which is enough for the purchase of those goods and not more.

The way it works now is that the players can change the prices and wages as they wish, so you may have more goods produced than money the workers have (in which case some of them will die, if they can't buy Consumer Goods), or you may have the workers with more money than there are goods (Consumer Goods), in which case the workers will just hold on to that money until they can spend it.

I am giving the players the ability to sell buildings to other players, but I haven't given workers (AI) the ability to buy them. If workers had enough money (and I programmed the AI), maybe they could buy it and acquire their own capital, which would make for an interesting simulation. But I already have a lot to program, so that will have to wait.

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The chief engines of economic growth will be population growth and technological innovation, with the latter requiring a substantial investment of labor to support. [/quote]
I hope that it will play out like that. A higher population will require more apartments and more consumer goods. Instead of making more buildings, players will have to upgrade existing buildings because land is limited.

[color="#1C2837"]That's a serious problem if you want to simulate Marxist economics. The idea of currency is that it's an output of labor that is durable and high input. Money doesn't exist independent of overall production, because money is production, which gives it its value against other products. [color="#1C2837"]I suppose you could do something like players put in real life money and in exchange get in-game production inputs directly. So, put in $10, you get 5 extra citizens or a new factory or tech research investment, or something like that. This way you don't get an unbacked influx of currency, the only purpose of which is to buy those same things in game (while devaluing all existing in-game labor in the process).[/quote]
[color="#1C2837"]Well, as players join, they also get 100 of (almost) each resource, which they will immediately spend on construction. Existing players who put more money into the game will spend it on upgrades or new construction or buying resources. In my previous experience the workers spent a lot of time just standing around, doing nothing. That's unused labour. If the players have money they can spend it on more labour. That will increase the whole machinery of production and put more goods (consumer goods) on the market. I don't know, I think inflation kind of doesn't apply to my game yet. Like, I mean, I can definitely imagine prices increasing as a player puts more money into the game and is able to buy more resources, and other players notice that, and increase prices in response. Like, if a new wave of players joined, or if a promotional give-away occurred that put more money into the game economy, I can imagine players raising prices.

[color="#1C2837"]But inflation isn't just increased prices, but unbacked goods. If the workers have more money than there are goods available, then the players can just raise prices. Right. So that solves that problem.

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If you want Marxist economics, you can't have money in the sense that you seem to hold (and a very bourgeois sense it is). You can't generate cash by fiat or speculation, it comes from the labor that the workers exert. You get growth that is slower, but (ideally) steady and difficult to disrupt, and very evenly distributed based on the contributions each individual makes. But at the same time you don't have consumerism, where people work for cash (returned as a portion of the labor they sell) and then buy this or that, cycling that cash around while it is siphoned upwards.[/quote]
I don't have banking in the game yet, so you can't really generate cash by fiat.

And the money in the game is backed by real Canadian dollars (that is what my game currency is based on, because I'm in Canada).

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A Marxist economy shouldn't grow in the capitalist mode. Your consumer goods can't be black box materials whose contribution to the economy is just their price, and the pay for the workers shouldn't just be adjustable, nor the sale price. Something like a shopping complex probably isn't going to happen. If I were to design a system for a game like this, I would start by imagining gold as the only currency (because it's easy to measure in terms of input labor, and helps to avoid the thoughts of currency as people generally think of it). Then even if you want to measure things in cost of gold, you can still keep thinking in terms of labor without much difficulty. Then I would start to lay out many different consumer goods, and give them attributes that simulate their effects on people who have them.[/quote]
Yes, I was thinking of having different goods, and giving workers a propensity to buy each good. Food would be one good that has a definite purpose. But I haven't thought of any others.

[color="#1C2837"]Food wouldn't be just wholesale produce from the farms, but would be packaged, processed foods sold at retail outlets.

[color="#1C2837"]And I already mentioned cars and private housing. Also mentioned buying capital by AI.

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The point is that people can't act based on what is fiscally efficient, but society as a whole needs to function on the output it can muster, and allocate that output to meet the society's needs.[/quote]
Maybe in the future I will add the ability to customize the economy to run in a socialist mode. You'd be able to create economics plans and get a census of the demand of the population. But you'd have to take other corporations into account, because the workers could work/buy from or for any corporation. Maybe I would make it so that workers can only work for one company at a time (they'd have a job that they would come back to each day, that no other worker could take, and that they would only give up when they found a better job-opportunity). I could either make it so that workers can only work for one company (at any building/job that company offers). Or so that workers can only work at one buildings/job. I think that's the difference between a corporation and a socialist state - in a corporation, each worker can only work at one job, while in a socialist state, it's citizens can work at any of its jobs. That is, if I was to say which one is more socialistic or corporate, I would say that... never mind. Just thought it was an interesting comparison.

[color="#1C2837"]Now you are catching on. That is one interesting aspect of a Marxist economy. A socialist state is essentially a corporate entity operating on a national scale. The citizens are its employees, and they get rewarded for the amount of labour they contribute to the system. Their choices are limited and offers no flexibility in what they can or want to do. Even on their own time, there is not a lot of variety in terms of spending money either. Also, a lot of public services are subsidised by the system. Prices are usually fixed, but cheap none the less. Essentially you have system that is not very flexible, and neither is adaptable to market fluctuations, or to changes in value of the goods and services. The system competes against itself.[/quote]
[color="#1c2837"]Well, the socialist state would be competing against other socialist states I guess. If the workers could choose to work/buy from other socialist states.

[color="#1c2837"]If you had one of each building, you COULD have a self-sustained socialist economy. But players will depend on other players at first. But you'd probably need more than one of some buildings.

[color="#1c2837"]You could have an economically isolated region if you cut off the roads, powerlines, and zetrol (oil) pipelines. Then resources couldn't be exchanged by trucks, electricity couldn't be bought from other companies or sold to other consumers (and likewise for zetrol/oil). If you were far away enough, it would even be economically unprofitable for the workers to travel to buy from other players or work for them. If you ran out of consumer goods, though, they'd still go to the other players.
[color="#1c2837"]Maybe I'll give a way to regulate the goods entering your areas or apply tariffs. You don't own land in the game yet, but I can add that. You'd then have the concept of land value. Land close to high economy activity and many workers would have higher value. Or land with deposits of minerals or zetrol (oil). And what would enforce these land agreements? I was thinking of marking players that violated land agreements by marking them in a certain way known to other players, maybe acting as a signal prompting other players to take military action against them (and basically take anything they want from that player?)


[color="#1c2837"]Another feature I was thinking of adding: stock markets. You'd be able to sell stocks of your corporation on the stock market. So if a player owns 40% of a company, that means he will get 40% of that company's profits/revenue. The original owner of the company sells his stock to potential investors. So the money that players spend on stocks is investment in the company. Even if 100% of the stock is sold, the original owner still retains executive control. That kind of sucks though, right? The player will never be able to profit, and it becomes kind of pointless to play the game. The only way he can buy back the stock is buy selling capital ... but wait, that money would go to the stockholders too, wouldn't it? I'm not sure how it would work then. I have to read more about stock markets.


[color="#1c2837"]EDIT: This parallels the socialist-state-as-corporation idea:

[color="#1c2837"]http://en.wikipedia....tate_capitalism

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[font="sans-serif"]The term State capitalism has various different meanings, but is usually described as management of business and productive forces by the state-- especially when such management is done in a capitalistmanner, even if the state is nominally socialist.[sup][1][/sup] It may be compared to the term state socialism, which has a different theoretical emphasis but largely overlapping meaning in practice.[/font]
[font="sans-serif"]Corporatized[/font][font="sans-serif"] (partly privatized) government agencies and a state that owns controlling shares of corporations listed publicly, thus acting as a capitalist itself, are two examples of state capitalism.[/font]

[color="#1c2837"]...

[font="sans-serif"]Marxist literature typically defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism — the wagesystem of producing and appropriating surplus value in a commodity economy — with ownership or control by a state. By that definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation.[/font][color="#1c2837"][/quote]