To repeat myself: Is this really necessary at this point - Demo5-wise

May I suggest a new acronym:

YAGAYAFII

(You Are Getting Ahead of Yourselves And Forgetting the Important Issues)

I think YAGAYAFII

And BTW:
Losses of manpower during military conflict have had serious impact on society on numerous occasions historically.
Richard mentioned WWI. The massive mobilisations combined with the large demand on industrial capacity put serious drains on man-power (which was then replaced by woman-power). This has had immense impact on society.

I have a fairly comprehensive post on how to handle the differing timescales to avoid serious wierdness.

The info on how the military and economic scales should interact is in the Military Model III thread. 2nd post in the the thread. A quote from it.

"...I think feeding and paying the troops should use up food and money at the same rate as people in the regular economy. If the troops only consumed one month of food and pay per turn, it would be very easy to maintain unrealistically large standing armies."

Please excuse this a little OT:
Mark: I checked you post in the other thread about scales and I agree we simply can't have the whole game in a realistic way regarding econ/civil-military interconnections. We have to choose "flash buildings" or absurd military activities in a given period of time (like unit movement in civ2) or, as you propose, a little of both non-senses. Of course, the player can choose to play the whole game at the one-month scale for both sides of the game and get rid of most of the absurd things. A very long game to play, of course, but that's the player's choice. My question is, Is it possible to change timescales during the game? Can a player during the game choose to switch to the "realistic" (one-month for all) game if he wants? I think that would be great. The player would be choosing what periods to play realisticly and what to play with some non-senses just for speed. At the start of what I would consider a major war for my civ, I'd love to switch to the realistic mode and at the end of it go back to the unrealistic-but-faster game. Can we do that?

LA CENSURA ES UNA REPUTA MIERDA!

Your plan on the timescale thing seems quite reasonable to me.

Guys:

On the profanity filter, we are stuck with it, its a required part of being hosted here to keep the site profanity-free (at least with respect to the blocked words). Please do not subvert the blocker since I will need to waste time editing your posts to remove those words. I know you don't like it, but those are the rules.

This is from Markos and Dan, who run Apolyton:

Why do you censor certain words?
Because there are lots of people(including us) who don't like reading these kinds of words. The list of censored words may vary depending on the way people use the forums.

quote: Originally posted by roquijad on 09-29-2000 05:22 PM LA CENSURA ES UNA REPUTA MIERDA! (They don't have a list of spanish bad words, do they?)

Lol!

quote: Originally posted by 4VAlien on 04-11-2001 06:28 PMare there files/models already done that i can study?

Right now all it does is use a very simple algorithm that relates population growth to just food per capita. So the food the people save to eat during the econ phase is saved and consumed during the population phase. Population growth or decline is a direct result. Obviously all the stuff about true nutrition, health care etc. is not done yet.

I think that the population model should be run at province level, but i still don't know how large a province is.

things i certainly want to use are:

-growth is somehow related to food production
-of course there's the disease model {duhh}

-i think we should run the model at province level but i don't know how complicated the other models are so i will have a look at that. i don't want the population model to be extremely light or heavy in comparison to the other models. (hey.. i'm repeating myself, sorry)
-the derived/production races don't need an % workforce cause i think they'll only create usable persons.
-the reproduction race would have a varieting % workforce, but i think we can relate that directly to the social model.
-to save memory/speed i think we can work out the classes only for provinces, cause generally in a certain area the differences between the squares will be pretty small.

please give me feedback suggestions, i tried to make something not too simple, and not too complex at the same time.

Thanks for getting this area going again!

I think you should do the architecture on a map square level. I think F_Smith's comments long ago that we should push data storage down to the lowest possible level is correct here. For now, to make life easier, I think you should do the entire pop model calculations at the map square level also. The economic model is at the square level for now, and it uses at least 20x as much processing power as pop is likely to. So you might as well do it the easy way. If we need to agregate up later it should not be difficult with good design. For now we are following the rule: "Don't optimize prematurely". You can see further ideas about the extreme programming (XP) philosophy we're following in the coding discussion thread if you're interested.

I won't say anything about non-human population because there are so many things I need to spend time on before considering that... So I won't comment, but reserve the right to criticize later . Hopefully Richard, who put them in, can discuss that with you.

"-to save memory/speed i think we can work out the classes only for provinces, cause generally in a certain area the differences between the squares will be pretty small."

Probably correct, but why don't you try it at the square level first for simplicity as I outlined above.

"-recruiting military troops should be taken into account. The people recruited should be removed from the population, and be added again when the unit disbands. "

Agree!

I agree with much of what you say. I will wait for Richard to give you some of the further details you're looking for, because he's much more familiar with the model. If there are any big problems you need info on fast, just let me know, and I'll do my best to come up with something.

Thanks again for taking this on!

quote: Personally I'd say just hold off on the classes and ethnic groups for now. If you want, you could put placeholders in. The reason I'm suggesting you not do those yet is that Gary is going to hook up the govt/social code this weekend (I hope! ) and so he will then know about the architecture of that stuff. Gary is a pro java coder, and can help in figuring out the right archtiecture to use with the population model. I could make guesses, but they wouldn't be well-informed guesses.

I am a pro Java programmer. Architect even.

Unfortunately, one of the things I always do (otherwise I would lose my job) is to provide comprehensive test routines for EVERY class I write. For the tech model, I will provide:

1. The tech model
2. The GUI for it
3. The underlying classes
4. Test classes for all of this

This will almost certainly be available over the Easter weekend.

The govt/social model, if I am to do it, will be to the same standard. I do not expect either to have any bugs or require any patches. Hey! that's the way I survive. I also code very fast, around 200 lines of tested code per day. I do have a lot of trouble lowering my standards. Actually I don't lower my standards at all! People who use my classes (which do a lot of nice things in the GUI area) never have to worry that they do not work.
From my inspection of the govt/social model they are well defined, and the tech infrastructure will exactly fit. I REALLY hope to start on them tomorrow. But life ain't always kindly.

Right now (8pm Easter Friday) I am finishing the test methods for a class called NamedObjectList which, with its associate classes NamedObject, NamedObjectIterator and NamedObjectRenderer, allow the JList methods to immediately implement any reference to things like the list of Technologies, Applications, Activities, Religions, EthnicGroups, GovernmentIdeologies, or anything else that can be read from an XML file. The XML file stuff is all written and working with test routines.

Anything I write is delivered with the test routines. If anyone makes additions or modifications, they can run the test routines and immediately see that the modifications work (or don't, as the case may be). In my view this is a critically important part of XProgramming (see the XP website).

Sorry for the rant, but this is where I am coming from, and it is better in the long run. So far I have spent around 300 hours on the tech stuff, mostly on providing a good infrastructure.

Mark: what I am doing now is designed to fit the govt/social system into the same paradigm as the tech model. I still expect to send you the tech stuff, complete, this weekend. The govt/social I will try for this weekend, but can't guarantee. I am also negotiating with my ISP to provide a CVS repository for all the code. This will mean that any coder can check out the most up to date code at any time, or check in their latest version. Keep your fingers crossed.

As far as the population model is concerned, one of the odd things I have done in my life is to publish a paper on population projections (Thomas, 1970) using "characteristic functions". This has always been one of my interests. So maybe, when I get finished with the coding for the tech and govt/social model, I can help with the model. Around Thursday, with luck.

I think the age for the cohort boundaries should just slide as the society changes. On educating the young, I think that will work out ok with the present econ system. Education costs work (services) both for the educators and the educated. So if your young are being highly educated, they are of necessity not doing any other type of labor.

Gary:

My point was that soon you'd have probably enough experience with the architecture surrounding classes and ethnic groups that you could be able to help as an advisor in specing the population model architecture. You'll undoubtedly be there long before you completly wrap up the social model.

Thanks for the overview. A lot of your post could IMO be usefully crossposted to the coding discussion. Your approach description is valuable as it is, and of course the list facilitators you mention should be known to the other programmers, who don't check all the threads.

We could even start a soapbox thread for you to tell us non-pros how it should be done when you see something that doesn't work.

quote: I think we should at least have 3 cohorts, namely young, working and old.

quote: The most difficult is the derived creation. Their growth should be related to others races death. And i have still no idea about the transition from cohort to cohort, what kind of formula shoud be used there?

quote: -the derived/production races don't need an % workforce cause i think they'll only create usable persons.

Not necessarily. Some cyborgs might be rich people who pay for teh procedure to stay alive but don't or can't do work. I don't think we should limit functionality. The code would presumably exist already for the normal races.

The only real difference between the types of races is the Birth() method. I think they should have the same functionality otherwise.

quote: -i think it's not fair to implement gender, cause the reproduction race would then become extremly vulnerable compared to the other races

The other races won't be a problem in the normal game, they are only for sci-fi extensions. I don't think we should reduce normal game functionality just for the possible expansions. The proper functioning of normal races (Humans) is more imporant for the game than the other extra races.

Besides, that vulnerability would be probably make a good, challenging scenario.

quote: The population part of the province could contain a value that is made higher when man/women are not equally removed and would slowly stabilize back.

Tribes and ecological provinces

When farming started, the human population was 6,000,000 and appr. 90% of the land mass was inhabited by humans. 6,000,000 people / 0.9*0.3*510,066,000 km˛ = a population of 435 people/10,000 km˛.
In The Beginning each inhabited eco-province would have its own tribe, accustomed to the climate, food and with appropriate customs to sustain themselves in that province. For example, a tribe in a hilly forest might be hunter-gatherers, while a tribe on the low-covered plains might be herders, driving around their herd; a tribe in a river ecological province might already be settled and farm minimally. Such a tribe has at most one center that is more densely populated then the average and is centre of the authority in the tribe. Those tribes might develop into civilizations at any time; they can also remain tribal, which is what most will do (until they are forced to modernize in some imperialist's empire).

On an earth-sized planet there will be appr. 13,771 squares inhabited. I suggest ecological provinces AS BIG AS POSSIBLE to keep them to a reasonable number to start with. An average size of 200 squares would give appr. 75 provinces on land mass, 25 provinces in oceans, seas, etc.

quote: Originally posted by Simon Loverix on 04-19-2001 12:04 PM Is there any population when the games starts, apart from Civilizations?

The current plan is to have widely spread people, but they will all be part of one civilization or another.

But civilizations won't be limited to the major players - so the number of civs could easily be of order 100 if the player desires. Some however will have no centralized control, and be merely groups with similar culture with at most local-level govt. If the tech level were also low these would be analagous to your tribes. (Which I take to mean a Chiefdom or other form of organization lower than a state).

The problem I see with your approach is it could give literally thousands of little tribes, which is certainly more realistic, but is probably not of significant benefit to the player.

Other than the limitations I've noted above I think your proposal is pretty good. Are you interested in refining it in light of the new info I've provided?

The main goal of the ecology-linked tribes was to simulate the normal spread of the human species before civilization. Making them evolve sometimes could 1) make the step from non-civilized to civilized smaller and thus more realistic and 2) provide a starting point for civ's that start later in the game. This would lessen the feel of having a civ placed at a random location on a bare map.

Those tribes could also be used for generating barbarian hordes, so they don't appear out of the void.

Real Life is becoming rather pressing next week, so I probably will be out for so long.