Command Economy
Prove Marx Right!
Capitalist economies are run as free markets where the business-people selling goods decide how much to produce and how much to sell for. The biggest competing idea is the so-called "command economy" where the government decides what to produce and what to charge for it. If executed well (that's a big if!), command economies promise to be far more efficient and equitable than market economies.
Can you lead your economy into the future? Or will your unsatisfied citizens depose you?
As the leader of your economy, you will:
- Assign laborers to production of commodities (like bread, clothes, etc)
- Set laborer's wages
- Set the price of goods
And then on each day of the simulation (2 days per second of real time), the following will occur for each commodity:
- Pay the laborers based on their wages
- Laborers produce inventory based on number of laborers divided by labor required per unit
- Citizens purchase that commodity based on its demand (demand is function of population size and price) and the inventory of that commodity available to buy.
If at any step in the above there is a deficit (ie there isn't enough capital to pay workers, or there isn't enough inventory to meet demand, or labor doesn't have enough savings to afford their demand), then unrest will rise. After a time of economic stability, unrest will start to fall again. If unrest hits 100% then the population will rise up and overthrow you.
Unlock additional commodities at fixed intervals as your economy matures. This game is winnable (a play-through takes 10-20 minutes), but I'll leave the win condition as a surprise.
Development log
- Added Line Graphs to Changing ValuesMay 26, 2022
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Ah, yes, socialism.
Not a critique of the game, but Marxism isn't the government controlling the economy, marxism is specifically a stateless society where the workers control the means of production and not owners or capitalists.
Also this conceptually doesn't make sense from the start. If the only labor is making bread and everyone is making bread, why should you have money to begin with?
This is essentially a game where you raise and lower prices in a state capitalist economy where no one is greedy and you don't need to worry about resources.
Anyway, always down to discuss communism.
Thanks for playing!
You're right about this not being Marxism, I just wanted a provocative tagline!
Also in regards to your point about a bread-only economy being pointless -- that is true. For the society to make sense it should start with several commodities. But I didn't want to overwhelm new players with too many parameters to balance and I just aesthetically like clicker/management games that start you dead simple and then build up from there.
So alas, the integrity of the analogy to real life has to take a backseat to the game design.
I haven't revisited this game in a while, but reading through all the comments again I am reminded that I was working on a sequel to this game at one point but got bogged down. The goal was to have an economy similar to the one in this game -- where goods are made and workers get paid out, but then to have several different factions (some combination of: landowners, business owners, intelligentsia, laborers, farmers, middle class, army, secret police, religious elite) that each has its own population and collective wealth, as well as specific policy goals about how they want the economy to work (like tax rates, minimum wages, rent control, subsidies, etc.). And then each faction has an approval rating for you as the leader which would depend on the material conditions of the population of that faction as well as whether or not you are passing/rejecting the policies they support/oppose. And if too many factions hit 0 approval then you lose.
The problem I've run into is that I can't tune the simulation in such a way that there is any strategy at all -- either there's too much slack in the system and you can do whatever you want and everyone's happy, or there's not enough money to go around and you basically must do whatever the faction with the lowest approval rating wants you to do or else it's your head. I also have it set up where you don't get to propose your own policies e.g. you can't just mandate that minimum wage is $X (because this would be a totally different UI and type of game than balancing the desires of competing factions, and imo too easy), but rather at certain intervals policies are semi-randomly generated and proposed to you and you can either approve or deny them. This can feel fun to weigh the policies while you play, but too often I'll get into a situation where e.g. the working class will eventually be driven to bankruptcy/revolt by the high costs of food + rent + goods, but the farmers, landowners, and business owners strongly oppose any policies that would alleviate this burden and may even go insolvent themselves if e.g. minimum wage is raised.
These problems do amuse me though because it feels like maybe our own politicians are in similar binds.
I've been thinking about more ways to introduce ideology into the game instead of just pure numerical strategy -- could the goals be shifted to let you play it out as a worker's champion, or an educated aristocrat, or a technocratic fascist, and express that ideology through the decisions you make in the simulation? Do you have any thoughts about how to better represent ideology in these kinds of economic simulations?
The code is here if anyone is curious: https://github.com/BenEskilstark/ClassWar/blob/main/js/config.js
I can understand the tagline will attract people to the game, most of my issue did come down to that.
I think the issue at hand is that if life worked like a video game, then everyone probably would be happy and everything would just work.
The reason the soviet union was able to function at all was that they imprisoned all the unhappy people, which is the other side of that coin. Capitalism has been effective up until this point because of how it's removed democracy from the economy, the people at the top have the power and we've seen the violent effects of that, but real life people also have things to lose, even if they want to rise up and chop heads off, there's a lot of resistance in the status quo.
Maybe you need some sort of buffer to simulate how poverty works in western capitalist systems, people have enough resources to not die from a lack of food and water, but maybe poverty just decreases their quality of life compared to others, and societal collapse only comes from real food shortages and other aspects.
Great way to show the failure of Stalinism
I LOVED this!, though I would prefer to have a colored triangle for increasing/decreasing inventory for commodities
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...
the margins are zero if you dont want any unrest you have to make it to were you have 0 profit
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.
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!
Yes. They usually take home less of it, because companies need to turn a profit. All the excess food is either wasted or goes to the development of the obesity epidemic.
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.
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
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.