This week has been great for progress. I’ve made large steps forward on the economic system. There are a number of chicken-egg problems, so I’ll be going back and forth in the system as necessary. The most notable example of this are buildings: buildings need resources to be constructed, but you need buildings to produce resources. So for now, buildings only need time to be constructed.



Construction projects and buildings



I’ve finished up the mechanics of construction project and the resulting buildings. So, the system works now like this:

1: You’ve got available buildings you can construct.

2: You’ve got active construction projects. Once production and trade is functioning, you’ll pour resource into these projects each turn. You can halt them, if they’re becoming too expensive, and cancel them.

3: You’ve got the constructed buildings. They can be demolished, deactivated (for production buildings, this means they don’t produce anymore) and change their priority (which is relevant while dividing workers and resources for production buildings).







Buildings currently come in two varieties. There’s the plain variety, which doesn’t have a size (so it’s either constructed or not). These will function to give a variety of effects. And there’s the production variety, which has a size and are built gradually. Since I needed buildings especially for production, I’ve been primarily focusing on the production buildings.



Dividing workers over buildings



Each turn, prior to producing, each building tries to gather a workforce. This gathered workforce will be employed during the production of goods. Agricultural buildings gather farmers, natural resource buildings laborers and manufacturing buildings craftsmen. Each buildings can employ an amount of workers up to its size. Since the construction and size of agricultural buildings is limited by the arable land available, the arable land also limits the possible amount of employed farmers in the holding.



It’s possible that the population is larger than the possible employment in a holding, meaning that not all workers will be employed. On the other hand, there might be a shortage of workers. In order to give the player control over production, you can give buildings priorities. Higher priority means first pick on the labor market.



Quantity Per Population



Quantity Per Population (QPP) is the amount of a good a single employed population unit produces in a building. So, in a simple situation: 1 pop producing 1 unit of grain on a grain farm means 1 QPP. On the other hand, 1 pop producing 0.05 units of gold in a gold mine is 0.05 QPP. Simple enough. QPP comes down to production efficiency.



While implementing QPP I really got the benefits of earlier systems I implemented. The base QPP is defined by the good itself. However, it can be modified in the following ways, with some possible examples provided:

-Good traits: Rice might be farmed at an 50% increase in warm climates

-Race traits: Dwarves might mine 30% more than other races

-Location traits: Due to the ‘Lake of Plentyfish’, all fish production increases 100%

-Modifiers: An event 'bad harvest’ halves the agricultural production for 6 months

Once I come around to technology and research, there will definitely be technologies improving QPP. In the meanwhile, the type of effects described will suffice.



Production and revenue



And, finally, some goods are produced. Once buildings have collected workers, they’ll use the farmers and laborers to produce goods. These produced goods are sold to the local stockpile, which returns revenue. The worker populations are paid a percentage, according to their contribution, and the rest goes into the country’s treasury coffers.



That’s where the system currently ends. Nobody buys goods. Goods will be bought by populations to satisfy their needs, by buildings to produce and by governments, probably to wage wars and whatnot. Also goods aren’t traded yet. The trading will involve route building and establishing market prices. Once all these elements are in, the economic system is done.