New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggestions?

General discussions and Technical Support for Capitalism II.
woubuc
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by woubuc »

Work's been hectic lately and unfortunately I haven't had much time to work on the concept. I'll try to keep this discussion alive a bit more though.

There's no register page, I disabled it until I'm done writing down how I see it, then I'm planning to open it up and let others add what they think.
counting wrote:Since "game theory" is a major part of the micro-foundation in economics providing tools for models, that could be a field to create players interaction templates. As for macroeconomics phenomena, that would be more interesting and some what difficult. We've learn from observation that individual behaviors don't always transfer in macro scale. And most of the time, irrational behaviors (economics like to called them bounded rationality) don't generate chaos, but rather patterns and complex phenomena, and most of all, usually required a lot of individuals for emerging property to express.

Although a small group of people follow a set of rules, that can be modified and adapted over time, could form a stable economic system. But on the scale of modern financial market, that usually required a lot of bounded rational traders in thousands to millions. The ideal situation would be to somehow let AI agents generate enough complex behaviors or set of feedback information, so players can be part of the system, rather than outside variables.
I must admit I'm a little bit lost in the technicality of all this, but yes I definitely want to make the player "part of the system", and the entire financial and economic system should keep running through the AI of the outside world and other local business, even if a player doesn't do anything - I want the world to constantly evolve and present new situations and challenges to the players.
counting
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by counting »

Looking forward to some updates on the wiki :)

"Game theory" is a branch of mathematics and logic dealing with dilemma and choice in "game-like" scenario, and an important foundation for modern economic theory. Ironically, it's rarely implemented for actual computer game AI. Programmers usually don't like hard core mathematics.

Anyway, if agents want to exhibit complex decision making behaviors and interact with human players naturally without too much computation resources, game theory could help implementing adaptive/evolutionary models, so AI behavior is depend on each other and evolved over time than simply react to player's decision.

For example, if you like to implement auction / contracts system so AIs and human players both join the bidding process, where higher bid price can get the bid, but hurt the profit, this kind of dilemma and choice is perfect for game theory. Normally you need sophisticated AI that can interpreted other's actions, otherwise human usually see right through computer's strategy and beat the game. What game theory model could do, is using few rules to keep itself with higher reward, but adaptive different strategy profile when situation present itself. Hence human may be able to see through the simple strategy at first, but AI can adapt their "game plan" over time when they losing previous round and come up with new strategy combination (and not by blindly trial and error or brute force, but by game theory rules). More interestingly is that agent with adaptive models can even adapt other agents' game plans to co-operate or compete with each other, and human players may entering an scenario where ground rules are completely different.

However this require AI to have enough "game plans" stored, and some delicate game mechanism, so AI won't act stupidly in unforeseen paths and situations. Usually this works better when strategies can combine together to form enormous amount of new combination strategies, and human players also limited to choose from the same action polls.
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bijou666
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by bijou666 »

Any updates on this? It did seem quite interesting :)
woubuc
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by woubuc »

bijou666 wrote:Any updates on this? It did seem quite interesting
I'm currently working on a multitude of other projects, two of which are game-related, and unfortunatly this leaves me with little time to work on this particular idea. I'm still working out the concept part-time though, and plan to start development somewhere early/mid next year (this is an estimate, I don't know when exactly my current projects will end).

In the meantime, if you're interested in contributing your own ideas and opinions here on the forum, or if you'd like to help us out in another way, of course all help and input is still welcome :)
Tyra
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by Tyra »

I am quite curious to see such ambition stirred around this rather basic business simulation. Capitalism was never about graphics, don't get me wrong about that.
However I really think that if you really want a true Capitalism II successor, I will give things that MUST be implemented for it to gain the same privileges and enhanced experience only a true capitalist can dream of.

1. Stock Market System: This is my favorite unique feature in this game and probably one of the reasons why it is used by the board of education. Also expand the stock market a bit more by each brand and resource having its own stock market value! That way I can invest some money on other peoples products in multiplayer while people can do the same to some of my products. This takes tons of work, but it also is very rewarding to people or AI that make the right investments based on their competition successes.

2. Customizable products: People should give a brand name for their products and also some flexibility in imagery so they actually care about what they are selling. Since we are on this topic I would name my corn flakes "Barn Flakes" with a target overall rating of 125 with at least 20% of it coming from brand rating. They even have a brand rating which annoys me that I do not have the right to name what I am selling even if it is obviously corn flakes. What even makes me more angry that you can produce the exact same product in a different factory, but it will not be a part of the brand making it impossible to meet the broken version 1.01 supply and demand. This line would break a forum rule just to give you an idea of how irritated I am with this.

Note: In relation to this topic of "Customizable products" is one simple question: Where is the cheese? Developers miss things and to make the creation of these things less of a hassle give the players some interface friendly editor built in game to fill in the missing gaps? I am sure digital providers who are resourceful like Steam would love to see more people use the Steam Workshop for new additions to every players game.

3. More realism in storage space: Since when did you see a full fledged supermarket with only 4 products? Why does the supermarkets who have the same logo pasted on it all sell different items where people are never sure which super market sells nothing but wine, smokes and cigars to the supermarket that sells bread, milk, canned chicken and shampoo? Point is this game need more versatile stores that can hold 20+ items or I ain't buying this!

4. Modernization of business practices: Computers, banks, unions etc. need to be overhauled to modern day standards for the sake of recognition. Without this overhaul schools will avoid this simulation because the world of business has changed so much to the point of making the representation obsolete and useless.

5. SMART resource management: Why would I care if I see 1 nobody buying my "Barn Flakes"? What I do care about is the number of sales and overall quality of my goods as there is always a price to change or a manufacturing error to correct. Why waste time animating moving traffic or machinery unless you actually have some sort of transportation industry and some sort of interactive features to the animated machinery? My point is clear as purpose over eye candy.

6. A sense of progression: What gets under my skin is when your empire is always profitable but you do not see any progression or changes in your super markets, city developments, stock market prices for manufacturing materials (ex. Gold, Silver, Copper, wool, cheese, milk etc.). What is even worse is that Capitalism waste time giving a interior view of the supermarket and industry that serves NO PURPOSE OTHER THEN TAKE UP RESOURCES!!!!

7. More user friendly interface and good servers: How much I want to break the forum rules to what I think of the lackluster multilayer interface because NOBODY PLAYS THIS GAME ONLINE AND THERE CURRENTLY IS NO GAME LIKE THIS ONE THAT DOES MULTILAYER PROPERLY. To this date I can safely say that there is a million dollar potential in the first person who can bring the true successor of Capitalism II to both individual game (1-8 player potential with an optional AI additive) style serves and large scale world wide game serves for strangers with the highest score when the host shut downs the server.

8. Warehouses and the trucking industry: Capitalism II has the Mining Industry, the oil industry, the agriculture industry, the manufacturing industry and the markets. If the successor of capitalism had the trucking industry, I would call this the most impressive and dominate economic simulation made by man.

9. Keep the graphics simple: Don't follow the direction of Simcity Societies, the SimCity reboot, Cities XL, The settlers series, and anything that relies on eye candy. Capitalism is not a beauty contest unless you started a fashion industry or some kind of weird brand cult by sad civilians.

10. Make the game familiar to people who like the economy without watering down the games potential complexity or making the interface way to confusing to navigate (I would suggest the addition of a semi guided search bar Google suggestion style instead of a scroll bar for easy management of near infinite room for products, resources and available stock available. Please also add the exact same search bar for simple but unique manufacturing configuration constructions that requires the specific raw resources or sub products.

Making the vanilla release of the game staying true to this guideline in capitalism II fashion would be an automatic success especially if you don't animate things that have absolutely no purpose.
EDIT:________________________________________________
I would create a separate guideline that will include concept art, diagrams and charts Capitalism II style for the sakes of it being familiar on the Capitalism II forums. However I don't detect a sign or thread of life and will assume this forum is dead. If that is the case I will predict we won't see another good realistic capitalistic style game of the same privilege in about a decade.

The reason why I made this guide because I never went bankrupt before ever. This game is far too easy for something used by university students (I never took an accounting course or business related courses and I am a recent high school graduate. I am disgusted on the price of education (15 grand) for something I do for FREE AS A __Insert rule breaking curse here__ HOBBY!
counting
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by counting »

Tyra wrote:...
EDIT:________________________________________________
I would create a separate guideline that will include concept art, diagrams and charts Capitalism II style for the sakes of it being familiar on the Capitalism II forums. However I don't detect a sign or thread of life and will assume this forum is dead. If that is the case I will predict we won't see another good realistic capitalistic style game of the same privilege in about a decade.
...

Most of the active topics are in Capitalism Lab boards, most updates and new features are there. The suggestion of transportation extension and city simulation would be release soon. And warehouses and storage facilities have already been introduced in Capitalism Lab. It's a lot realistic and much harder than Capitalism II. Even with some basic modding and script functions.

However the lack of mutliplayers or customize contents are still ways to go. The first utility and service industries as energy business are being discussed and on going. Even tax system and more financial facilities are being discussed. It's a slow process, often take years to add new features.

But for a capitalism-inspired game, it won't have the baggage from the past, and could include the features as players would like from the beginning. However it's impractical to include all features. Thus good suggestions could be helpful to identify which features are the core and which are supplementary. I was working on a table-top broad game with a Capitalism theme, perhaps it could help identify the most fundamental features.
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woubuc
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by woubuc »

Currently I'm taking a small break from this project (as in: I got too much other stuff to do right now) but I'm planning to get started developing this thing somewhere early 2015. That being said, Tyra raised a couple of very good points..
Tyra wrote:1. Stock Market System: This is my favorite unique feature in this game and probably one of the reasons why it is used by the board of education. Also expand the stock market a bit more by each brand and resource having its own stock market value! That way I can invest some money on other peoples products in multiplayer while people can do the same to some of my products. This takes tons of work, but it also is very rewarding to people or AI that make the right investments based on their competition successes.
I've already contacted a few economics professors from a local university, asking them to assist me in creating a realistic, flexible, working stock market system and to make sure the general economy runs as it should. At least one of them has already agreed to help out, and I think once I get really behind it that I can gather a few more people with decent knowledge of the subject to advise on this. My main issue with the economy in Capitalism II is that it's very "flat" and doesn't really do much except for facilitating product sales, and that's a pitfall I want to avoid in my game - I want a truly realistic economy with stock market, linked to the activity of all players across the world.
Tyra wrote:2. Customizable products: People should give a brand name for their products and also some flexibility in imagery so they actually care about what they are selling. Since we are on this topic I would name my corn flakes "Barn Flakes" with a target overall rating of 125 with at least 20% of it coming from brand rating. They even have a brand rating which annoys me that I do not have the right to name what I am selling even if it is obviously corn flakes. What even makes me more angry that you can produce the exact same product in a different factory, but it will not be a part of the brand making it impossible to meet the broken version 1.01 supply and demand. This line would break a forum rule just to give you an idea of how irritated I am with this.
YES. Companies aren't the same as brands, and a good brand is actually a very important part in selling a product.

How the structure I envision would work: A player can own one or more corporations (either by founding them or by buying his way in); Each corporation can own as many brands as they want; Player can configure corporation-owned factories to produce a product for one of the corporation's brands; No matter where it is produced, just slap the brand on a product and you have your unique, branded product. If you have multiple versions of your product you can even add "variations" (e.g. regional versions of the same brand).
Example: Player owns a corporation "Coca-Cola". This corporation owns the brands "Coca-Cola", "Fanta" and "Sprite". Player has 4 factories: 1 makes a "Fanta"-branded soft drink, 1 makes a "Sprite"-branded soft drink. Both other factories make "Coca-Cola"-branded soft drinks, but the recipe for both is slightly different so one of those is making the variation "Coca-Cola Light" and the other one is making "Coca-Cola Zero" - but both benefit from the brand image of the same "Coca-Cola" brand (and in lesser extent, from the "Coca-Cola" corporation).

I want to provide an easy to use tool for players to create their own product ideas using custom recipes and manufacturing processes (deploying an in-game "patent registration" system so that we (the devs) can check the items first for gameplay balance, since this will be an online game and it has to stay fair). When a player creates a new product, they will be the only ones allowed to manufacture it for a period of time, before the recipe is opened up to everyone (although you can't just make anything you want - you still have to conduct your own research, reverse-engineer existing products, or purchase manufacturing blueprints).
Tyra wrote:3. More realism in storage space: Since when did you see a full fledged supermarket with only 4 products? Why does the supermarkets who have the same logo pasted on it all sell different items where people are never sure which super market sells nothing but wine, smokes and cigars to the supermarket that sells bread, milk, canned chicken and shampoo? Point is this game need more versatile stores that can hold 20+ items or I ain't buying this!
Another big yes on this one. A store selling only 4 products is downright crazy. Similar to brands, I want to make corporation-owned "Chains" and provide one central configuration screen where you can choose what brands or products your chain will sell. Then you build a store, slap the chain name on it and voila: your store is operational and selling everything you want it to sell.
Of course it will still be possible to micromanage and set the individual store prices (or hire someone to watch over the prices in the area and make sure that you make as much profit as possible), choose which specific products you want to sell, select manufacturers and delivery routes,... But getting started should be easy, and the entire store system (which is one of the most important parts of the game, since it's where most of the money is made) should be flexible and should offer loads of possibilities.
Tyra wrote:4. Modernization of business practices: Computers, banks, unions etc. need to be overhauled to modern day standards for the sake of recognition. Without this overhaul schools will avoid this simulation because the world of business has changed so much to the point of making the representation obsolete and useless.
Definitely. Everything that is part of our modern society should be in the game, even including the internet (things like web shops, crowdfunding, etc should also be possible in-game).
I want to incorporate the more classic parts of Capitalism and Capitalism II as well, though, and that's what I want to achieve with a "living world". The world will be huge, and will be divided into countries (with different currencies, adding currency trading and everything that comes with it to the complexity of the economy), and each country will have a specific social situation. One country could be a welfare state, have loads of high-tech products going around, and have high taxes, whereas another country may have low taxes, few social services (making man hours a lot cheaper) but be less advanced technologically. This can change throughout the game though, if for instance a lot of tech research is done in less advanced areas.
Tyra wrote:5. SMART resource management: Why would I care if I see 1 nobody buying my "Barn Flakes"? What I do care about is the number of sales and overall quality of my goods as there is always a price to change or a manufacturing error to correct. Why waste time animating moving traffic or machinery unless you actually have some sort of transportation industry and some sort of interactive features to the animated machinery? My point is clear as purpose over eye candy.
In fact I do want to add transport industry, because it's ridiculous that you would manufacture your product in one place and then it just magically gets teleported to some store in another country. But, with all the features I'm envisioning the game will probably look like sh*t in the beginning, because like you say I too focus on functionality, features, and playability. The game looking beautiful comes at the very last (just above getting rich from it, cause I realise that probably won't happen either - I just want to make this game cause it's a game I would love to play myself).
Tyra wrote:6. A sense of progression: What gets under my skin is when your empire is always profitable but you do not see any progression or changes in your super markets, city developments, stock market prices for manufacturing materials (ex. Gold, Silver, Copper, wool, cheese, milk etc.).
This is why I want an online game. If one player does something in a single-player game, the game can react to the actions of this player, but that's about it. AI will never do anything irrational or unpredictable. So if, instead of AI, you have a thousand people playing in the same world, buying, producing and selling resources and products, trading stock, setting up contracts, transporting goods, building factories, malls and skyscrapers,... Then that is bound to have an influence on the economy, and on the world. Added to that I want the citizens to really 'live'. And not just in predefined city centers, I want people to be able to move to better places if their needs aren't filled - creating a huge, living, breathing world. Now I know especially this part sounds ambitious, and it will probably not be as utopian as I explain it here, but that is what I want to work towards.
Tyra wrote:7. More user friendly interface and good servers: How much I want to break the forum rules to what I think of the lackluster multilayer interface because NOBODY PLAYS THIS GAME ONLINE AND THERE CURRENTLY IS NO GAME LIKE THIS ONE THAT DOES MULTILAYER PROPERLY. To this date I can safely say that there is a million dollar potential in the first person who can bring the true successor of Capitalism II to both individual game (1-8 player potential with an optional AI additive) style serves and large scale world wide game serves for strangers with the highest score when the host shut downs the server.
This game would be located on one huge ("the world"-size) online server that people log on to (similar to most MMO games). This may sound a bit disastrous (especially taking into account failed attempts at "online" games like SimCty), but I believe for a game like this if it's done right the gameplay would actually benefit because you actually get to interact with other players in a real-life, living world, instead of just 'existing in between AI players' like in the Capitalism games.
Tyra wrote:8. Warehouses and the trucking industry: Capitalism II has the Mining Industry, the oil industry, the agriculture industry, the manufacturing industry and the markets. If the successor of capitalism had the trucking industry, I would call this the most impressive and dominate economic simulation made by man.
I mentioned it earlier in this post, transport industry and warehouses are definitely in the plans. No production chain is complete without those. I even want to make it that instead of just saying "I want this product to be delivered by train/boat/truck", players would be able to found their own logistics firm, purchase vehicles (trucks, trains, ships and planes), hire drivers, and just deliver packages for other players (or for themselves). This opens up the possibility of having a small boutique shop somewhere in a suburban area, but also owning a webshop and selling your goods all over the world by making use of these kinds of logistics services.
Tyra wrote:9. Keep the graphics simple: Don't follow the direction of Simcity Societies, the SimCity reboot, Cities XL, The settlers series, and anything that relies on eye candy. Capitalism is not a beauty contest unless you started a fashion industry or some kind of weird brand cult by sad civilians.
Exactly. I was thinking to maintain a look similar to Capitalism and SimCity 4 for the world overview, but provide a flexible, intuitive interface to manage your entire corporation.
Tyra wrote:10. Make the game familiar to people who like the economy without watering down the games potential complexity or making the interface way to confusing to navigate (I would suggest the addition of a semi guided search bar Google suggestion style instead of a scroll bar for easy management of near infinite room for products, resources and available stock available. Please also add the exact same search bar for simple but unique manufacturing configuration constructions that requires the specific raw resources or sub products.
I mentioned this earlier as well, I want to make the game easy to get started with, but still allow for finetuning and micromanaging for people who really want to squeeze every penny out of their companies and want to drive their profit margins up. The game's feature set should be a lot more extensive and go a lot deeper than Capitalism II, but at the same time the game should be a little bit easier to get into for new or casual players. Those casual players will probably never make the highscore charts (which will be filled with micromanaging tycoons and enthusiastic, profit-hungry entrepreneurs), but they should still be able to own some firms and make a nice bit of profit without having to devote days of their time to the game.
Tyra wrote:I don't detect a sign or thread of life and will assume this forum is dead. If that is the case I will predict we won't see another good realistic capitalistic style game of the same privilege in about a decade.
I'm currently very busy with other projects so I don't have much time to spend on this project, but I still plan to get started making this game, I'm aiming for somewhere early 2015. I still have to figure out how I will go about it, and how I will fund it, but I'm convinced that there are enough people who would love a real in-depth successor to Capitalism II.

I'm a web developer myself and I don't know the first thing about game development, so I would have to hire someone else to do the actual programming, except if I make it all web-based (as in: text-based in a browser), but that would make it VERY technical, especially with the complexity I envision, so I do think a visual representation of the world and all the info is required and that's something that will be quite hard to achieve in a browser.

Furthermore..
counting wrote:it's impractical to include all features. Thus good suggestions could be helpful to identify which features are the core and which are supplementary. I was working on a table-top broad game with a Capitalism theme, perhaps it could help identify the most fundamental features.
I completely agree. Putting all these ideas into a game at once will lead to a lot of unpolished functionality, so focusing on the 'core' part of the game and the most important / most requested features for a first release will be best.
virtulis
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Re: New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggesti

Post by virtulis »

Oh hi :)

I just posted an Indiegogo campaign of my own and then found this thread. I'm not in any way surprised someone wanted to make this before me, it's good to know, actually. Also, you have quite a discussion here, which might be useful for me, so thanks. I haven't read all of it yet but I certainly will.

Anyway, here's the campaign: https://igg.me/at/supply
It's still at $0 as I'm writing this but I really hope to see that number change today.
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