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Great way to show the failure of Stalinism

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I LOVED this!, though I would prefer to have a colored triangle for increasing/decreasing inventory for commodities

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Wow thank you! 

Yes you're probably right that simple colors would be better than the little line graphs -- I was mostly just showing off the linegraph component I had already made even though it's not the clearest way to display that information :P

I'm glad you liked the game! Command Economy 2 will be finished some day... 

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the margins are zero if you dont want any unrest you have to make it to were you have 0 profit

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 That indicates a serious math problem in the game, since in real life, workers don't take home the full value of what they produce, because we produce more than we individually need. 

hmm this is an interesting point. Thanks for raising it.

e.g. the workers producing bread make 10 bread each per day but will only buy according to their demand which is basically always less than that (though never less than 1). However on the monetary side, essentially the money just flows back and forth between you and your workers, so any "profit" you make means you are charging more for goods (based on their demand) than you are paying your workers. So At any given time either you are losing money or your workers are so it is a bit of a balance.


This is all true until you get access to gold and then can produce more money. In which case it is possible for both you and your workers to be making money at the same time because you are digging it out of the ground. Though perhaps in real life if rate of monetary production far outpaces the prices of goods, people would just stop working since they no longer need to work to buy things. This doesn't happen in this game as employment rate is as high as you decide.

I'm curious what you would change about the game to better match your expectation.

FYI I'm working on a Command Economy 2 which will have a significantly more complex economic/social system that will hopefully account for surplus-value-type interactions.

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Wouldn't the surplus value be accounted for in the form of having more good in your inventory? The bigger issue IMHO is that goods require *only* labour and when used disappear into nowhere with absolutely zero effect apart from shuffling some money around. It doesn't matter whether you give your people 100 cars or 10, they'll be equally happy as long as the minimum amount is reached. This is obviously not the case IRL. Surplus value in the form of excess goods just sits there and does absolutely nothing. Productive forces are not simulated, allowing you to ramp production skyhigh at zero cost.

So, I suggest a solution: an expected standard of living, factories, and foreign trade.

There is now an expected standard of living, which is a function of the different good demands. Demand per labourer for a good starts small, but grows up to a certain point, faster if it is fullfilled. If demand is 100% fullfilled for some time,it actually decreases a bit (to simulate people stopping hoarding it. Also means that during shortages it can suddenly jump up).Therefore people will get mad over a lack of pocket watches if they are used to them (high demand) but not if they are a novelty.

The actual living standard is how much a labourer can afford, which is usually not enough to satisfy all of the demand (expensive stuff doesn't have to be bought whole. Gotta save up for that Trabant) If it is, labour savings appear and demand rises much faster.

Unrest is no longer directly tied to shortages, but to a big mismatch of expected and actual living standard.(small mismatch is fine.)  Exceeding the expected standard should have bonuses-slower rate of demand increase maybe? Or possibly higher population growth.

To produce something, you now need to spend resources to build up factories for that first. Resources are a type of good that can be produced, but can't be sold to the populace.

There is also a counter for how much foreign currency you own- that can be increased by selling goods abroad and can be used to fullfill shortages of goods or resources.

Overall this gives the choice between making an export economy and just buying consumer goods from abroad, industrialising to bring long-term benefit at the cost of short term bad living standard, or going after consumer goods and increasing the living standard.Research should ideally depend on your living standard and light sector, as intensive growth is what planned economies historically struggled with due to overfixation on heavy industry. 

Another suggestion would be adding a MIC, which is for all means and purposes an unproductive money hole that if ignored could lead to an invasion and game over.Maybe have it give a small research bonus tho.

I have no clue why I just wrote all that, it's late and I want to sleep. But yeah, THOUGHTS?

Thanks you for your thoughts! I really appreciate the discussion this game has generated. Much to mull over here as I have no formal background in economics (not even any micro/macro classes in high school).

I particularly like your idea of having imports as a way to use money to bridge gaps in your supply chain.

This game is probably just going to stay how it is, but I have put in a good amount of work on sequel to Command Economy that focuses on various socioeconomic classes instead of just proletariat. And this is some good stuff to mull over for that one.

Great game, thanks for the effort!!
Did you consider making this game open source? I would love to contribute!

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Guide:

This game is easily won by making everything as expensive as possible, making everyone work at all times and not allowing your population to grow their savings.

Try to always make everyone work at all times and increase prices of everything to curb demand. It's a good idea to overproduce to increase your inventory. When you reach gold mines and you produce more than the demand make all new people work 24/7 in the gold mines.

When you reach cars make them as expensive as you can to reduce the demand for cars and thus oil.

Research will boost your production tremendously. Put people from overproducing goods into research until research has reduced everything to 0.1. Then put all researchers in the gold mines.

Make everyone work, keep wages low, keep prices high. If your people's savings are dropping, increase wages, but if you see that they are making savings you need to lower the wages or increase prices to stop them from getting ahead.

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Hey thanks for this comment. This is a good strategy for winning. The demand modeling is admittedly a little simplistic since raising prices helps you so much.

I’ve considered having a separate “utility” or happiness metric of your citizens that exists independently of their demand for goods and would be affected by un/over-employment or low wages or expensive goods, and would feed back into unrest. 

I’ve also considered having randomized events that would drastically change the scenario and force the player to adapt. Like demand for a certain good going way up, or inventory being lost or destroyed. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed the game, and thanks for playing it!


edit: I’ve also thought about UI indicators to help show you what direction your money, etc is going. But I’ve decided for now that I prefer having to figure it out while the game is running so that you can’t pause and adjust everything constantly - sometimes you have to sit and watch to see what is happening. I like the idea of turning the numbers red when they get too low though

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Cool game.

I wish there were some visual indicators (like up and down arrows) to show whether inventory is rising or falling.

Also maybe some red background color for the boxes if the inventory is going down and will be empty in the next 10 seconds.

The "lower wages" and removing people from jobs should add to unrest. It seems more realistic to be upset by getting pushed around and deprived than not being able to buy a pocket watch.