17-02-2026, 02:16 AM
Some thoughts:
Autarky in the real world is pretty difficult. Even those who claim to have achieved it OFTEN have external sponsors. This has been a problem thoughout history and has led to the rise in empires, as nations have struggled to find and acquire basic resources for themselves without having to rely on unfavorable or unreliable external trade relations with their neighbors. But also, the era where everyone just trades RATHER than conquers is relatively new: the whole "no changing national borders by force" norm is like at most 100 years old, and its not even very well maintained- In spirit, it is violated all the time. If I can just go in and steal a country's oil by putting in a friendly government, I don't have to change national borders.
So, I see it as a competing tension here. Real Autarky is relatively unrealistic, while it is impossible in this game to build empires that mean anything except on the outside chance that you have two or more players who are committed to unifying their two nations. So in practice, despite the pure consent, eliminating the possibility of autarky in PT will FORCE players to have to trade, and will necessarily give those with advantageous resources an advantage over those with poor resources. And without this force, there is no incentive for me, a lone player, to participate in the system if I have to rely on players I don't know and who don't care what happens to my country. This necessarily puts some PLAYERS (not just nations) at a disadvantage against other PLAYERS. If I happen to select a fully developed nation, and then just sit on it forever, I keep my advantage and only have to really publish an article every three months to keep that advantage and those who are forced to buy what I sell because its quite difficult for them to develop those things themselves just keep their disadvantage. I can easily see how that will be taken advantage of just like the election mechanic was in Classic.
All that consideration being a factor, I do in principle like the idea that there should be a way to do a number of economic things in this game:
1) Make our currencies actually worth something. We see all the time nations paying billions and billions for something and not even batting an eyelash. Unless their currency is absolutely worthless and they can just peel billions and billions off for something, that would have some economic dislocations both in the sending and in the receiving nations. Could you imagine if, for example, the US sent 1 trillion dollars to Rwanda, the effects that would have on both economies? But in this game I can agree that with you that something costs me 200 Billion and I just pay it like that 200 billion didn't exist and wasn't being used for something else before, and now it is being used for whatever I am sending it toward. Not saying everyone does this, but enough do for it to not be rare.
2) Make investments mean something. One of the reasons I, as a country, do not readily invest overseas, is because, for what? Why would I send aid? Assuming 1 ever happened, that would be like me throwing money down the toilet. I invest to signal closer relations to the receiving country, but investors expect a return on their investment. And yet, we almost never play any return on our investments. We just say "I invest" and then IG years later, its totally forgotten. Meanwhile, if I invested and then pull my money out, that should hurt, but others are currently free to absolutely ignore it. Well, you pulled out investments equivalent to 7% of my GDP, but anyway... moving on...
3) Make sanctions painful for the receiving nation and expensive for the sending nation. Sanctions are costly, as costly for the sending nation as the receiving nation: The calculation is that the change in policy that the sanction is supposed to inspire is worth the cost we're willing to pay for it. That's why it is credible. If it doesn't cost me anything to send sanctions, who cares? I can flout it, and know you aren't serious, because you don't have anything at stake. The only way short of war to keep pariah states in line is sanctions, and those don't even work very often, because either the sender doesn't have the ability to get others on board to increase the pain, all while bearing the burden themselves, or the payout does not justify the pain I am bearing. It would be very nice for us to develop sanctions regimes.
I don't necessarily like IOs. They allow some players to dominate, especially those who play as a group together. The History of PT was rife with groups of players who basically did everything together, and more or less ran the game how they liked. If you were on the inside of those little cliques, awesome. If you were on the outside, there was no way to get in and you were at other players' mercy at that point. I don't know if this particular community would do that, but its not to hard to imagine it happening in the future.
I DO like us deciding what resources we have, requiring players who want to improve their resources to have to RP to develop them, and then having moderation say yea or nay, just as a break on unlimited expansion. I would like some associated costs to go with development. I would like to see resource scarcity. We should be out of oil by now, just saying. Everyone burns oil like post industrial nations, very few develop new oil resources, and some places in the world are just assumed to have unlimited oil. Think of how polluted the environment would be after 3000 years of unregulated, unrestricted petroleum usage? We're only about 150 years into it in the Real world and like a half dozen countries are already melting the ice caps. yet 84 countries have unrestricted and limitless access to petroleum? What is the cost for that?
Perhaps one way to moderate this would be to think of economics like a CP, call it an EP. This is what you have, everyone else can check it. Moderation can approve it, and Greek's API can scrape it. We can use that to develop an algorithm that classifies an economy as high, mid or low, and the only changes that can come happen after fairly extensive RP, which does require an investment by the player in terms of time and effort. Just like changing a CP does. A player puts in for a change like they do with a CP, the Mods look at relevant RP like they do with a CP, changes are made conservatively as they are with CPs, and the EP is updated publicly so that everyone can look it right up, we can develop our maps and indicies about economic activity and resources which are based on canon (i.e. mod approved) EPs, the same way we do with CPs. If the CP model works for culture, it should be able to work well for economics too. This will give new players the option to look at states and decide what fits their strategy, like we do with CPs. If I want to play China, I play Indrala. If I want to play a developing nation, I have a list of countries that I can choose from which are right now classified as low or whatever. I know who has what, I can plan my trading based on that, and if I don't have trading in place, I just don't build the thing, or I have to buy it from someone who does. But to change that CP requires investment of time and effort to increase the story telling. Not ranking, just listing.
We can then, from there go on and create a model for developing currency values and GDP that can allow us to set budgets. You can also develop a model for debt, especially as you increase FDI in your country. These things can be fairly easily tracked. if I am spending 95% of my 250 Billion dollar budget on stuff I need for my own country, I will have whatever remains for foreign investment. I am sure once we actually start tracking what we have versus what we spend, foreign aid will dry up from much of the world as will investment. So you can see then realistic financial centers rise, and they actually mean something to play with.
The Credits thing is an interesting idea, sort of as an OOC currency, but my reservations about IOs is particularly about this. Blocs of players in cliques could theoretically team up every month, spend all their combined credits boosting one country up, do it again next month and so forth until they are all equally powerhouses. In game RP wouldn't really matter, because the agreement would be entirely OOC, and can, like some organizations and agreements between players, be built entirely in DM outside the view of others, without any RP whatsoever. I know that is frowned upon, but I believe it does still happen, and the RP then is very limited to keep others from knowing what the terms of the agreement behind the scenes are or to keep others from doing anything with it. I can say I know it happens, because I have, within the last year, been party to some of those arrangements. So if I do it, I can bet others do too. if you want to do a credit thing, you have to prevent sharing them or coordination, or else cliques will very quickly form which ignore or completely sidestep having to RP anything. Within a country where players cooperate is one thing. Between countries gives all those players an advantage that others don't get and can't even comment on IC. (I think of the Legion stuff, for example, where all Legion's support from other players was OOC and hardly RPd, much of Legion's RP was ABU, and nobody could comment on the activities of a pariah state IC, but I can think of other examples too.)
If there was a way to keep players themselves from abusing the system beyond just everyone's good will, I think that would be essential to the system. Because 5 countries that all agree to just help one another, to their own detriment for 40 out of 50 years, while trusting blindly that in the 50th year, it will be there turn is as unrealistic as absolute Autarky is.
I have other ideas but this is getting kind of long.
Autarky in the real world is pretty difficult. Even those who claim to have achieved it OFTEN have external sponsors. This has been a problem thoughout history and has led to the rise in empires, as nations have struggled to find and acquire basic resources for themselves without having to rely on unfavorable or unreliable external trade relations with their neighbors. But also, the era where everyone just trades RATHER than conquers is relatively new: the whole "no changing national borders by force" norm is like at most 100 years old, and its not even very well maintained- In spirit, it is violated all the time. If I can just go in and steal a country's oil by putting in a friendly government, I don't have to change national borders.
So, I see it as a competing tension here. Real Autarky is relatively unrealistic, while it is impossible in this game to build empires that mean anything except on the outside chance that you have two or more players who are committed to unifying their two nations. So in practice, despite the pure consent, eliminating the possibility of autarky in PT will FORCE players to have to trade, and will necessarily give those with advantageous resources an advantage over those with poor resources. And without this force, there is no incentive for me, a lone player, to participate in the system if I have to rely on players I don't know and who don't care what happens to my country. This necessarily puts some PLAYERS (not just nations) at a disadvantage against other PLAYERS. If I happen to select a fully developed nation, and then just sit on it forever, I keep my advantage and only have to really publish an article every three months to keep that advantage and those who are forced to buy what I sell because its quite difficult for them to develop those things themselves just keep their disadvantage. I can easily see how that will be taken advantage of just like the election mechanic was in Classic.
All that consideration being a factor, I do in principle like the idea that there should be a way to do a number of economic things in this game:
1) Make our currencies actually worth something. We see all the time nations paying billions and billions for something and not even batting an eyelash. Unless their currency is absolutely worthless and they can just peel billions and billions off for something, that would have some economic dislocations both in the sending and in the receiving nations. Could you imagine if, for example, the US sent 1 trillion dollars to Rwanda, the effects that would have on both economies? But in this game I can agree that with you that something costs me 200 Billion and I just pay it like that 200 billion didn't exist and wasn't being used for something else before, and now it is being used for whatever I am sending it toward. Not saying everyone does this, but enough do for it to not be rare.
2) Make investments mean something. One of the reasons I, as a country, do not readily invest overseas, is because, for what? Why would I send aid? Assuming 1 ever happened, that would be like me throwing money down the toilet. I invest to signal closer relations to the receiving country, but investors expect a return on their investment. And yet, we almost never play any return on our investments. We just say "I invest" and then IG years later, its totally forgotten. Meanwhile, if I invested and then pull my money out, that should hurt, but others are currently free to absolutely ignore it. Well, you pulled out investments equivalent to 7% of my GDP, but anyway... moving on...
3) Make sanctions painful for the receiving nation and expensive for the sending nation. Sanctions are costly, as costly for the sending nation as the receiving nation: The calculation is that the change in policy that the sanction is supposed to inspire is worth the cost we're willing to pay for it. That's why it is credible. If it doesn't cost me anything to send sanctions, who cares? I can flout it, and know you aren't serious, because you don't have anything at stake. The only way short of war to keep pariah states in line is sanctions, and those don't even work very often, because either the sender doesn't have the ability to get others on board to increase the pain, all while bearing the burden themselves, or the payout does not justify the pain I am bearing. It would be very nice for us to develop sanctions regimes.
I don't necessarily like IOs. They allow some players to dominate, especially those who play as a group together. The History of PT was rife with groups of players who basically did everything together, and more or less ran the game how they liked. If you were on the inside of those little cliques, awesome. If you were on the outside, there was no way to get in and you were at other players' mercy at that point. I don't know if this particular community would do that, but its not to hard to imagine it happening in the future.
I DO like us deciding what resources we have, requiring players who want to improve their resources to have to RP to develop them, and then having moderation say yea or nay, just as a break on unlimited expansion. I would like some associated costs to go with development. I would like to see resource scarcity. We should be out of oil by now, just saying. Everyone burns oil like post industrial nations, very few develop new oil resources, and some places in the world are just assumed to have unlimited oil. Think of how polluted the environment would be after 3000 years of unregulated, unrestricted petroleum usage? We're only about 150 years into it in the Real world and like a half dozen countries are already melting the ice caps. yet 84 countries have unrestricted and limitless access to petroleum? What is the cost for that?
Perhaps one way to moderate this would be to think of economics like a CP, call it an EP. This is what you have, everyone else can check it. Moderation can approve it, and Greek's API can scrape it. We can use that to develop an algorithm that classifies an economy as high, mid or low, and the only changes that can come happen after fairly extensive RP, which does require an investment by the player in terms of time and effort. Just like changing a CP does. A player puts in for a change like they do with a CP, the Mods look at relevant RP like they do with a CP, changes are made conservatively as they are with CPs, and the EP is updated publicly so that everyone can look it right up, we can develop our maps and indicies about economic activity and resources which are based on canon (i.e. mod approved) EPs, the same way we do with CPs. If the CP model works for culture, it should be able to work well for economics too. This will give new players the option to look at states and decide what fits their strategy, like we do with CPs. If I want to play China, I play Indrala. If I want to play a developing nation, I have a list of countries that I can choose from which are right now classified as low or whatever. I know who has what, I can plan my trading based on that, and if I don't have trading in place, I just don't build the thing, or I have to buy it from someone who does. But to change that CP requires investment of time and effort to increase the story telling. Not ranking, just listing.
We can then, from there go on and create a model for developing currency values and GDP that can allow us to set budgets. You can also develop a model for debt, especially as you increase FDI in your country. These things can be fairly easily tracked. if I am spending 95% of my 250 Billion dollar budget on stuff I need for my own country, I will have whatever remains for foreign investment. I am sure once we actually start tracking what we have versus what we spend, foreign aid will dry up from much of the world as will investment. So you can see then realistic financial centers rise, and they actually mean something to play with.
The Credits thing is an interesting idea, sort of as an OOC currency, but my reservations about IOs is particularly about this. Blocs of players in cliques could theoretically team up every month, spend all their combined credits boosting one country up, do it again next month and so forth until they are all equally powerhouses. In game RP wouldn't really matter, because the agreement would be entirely OOC, and can, like some organizations and agreements between players, be built entirely in DM outside the view of others, without any RP whatsoever. I know that is frowned upon, but I believe it does still happen, and the RP then is very limited to keep others from knowing what the terms of the agreement behind the scenes are or to keep others from doing anything with it. I can say I know it happens, because I have, within the last year, been party to some of those arrangements. So if I do it, I can bet others do too. if you want to do a credit thing, you have to prevent sharing them or coordination, or else cliques will very quickly form which ignore or completely sidestep having to RP anything. Within a country where players cooperate is one thing. Between countries gives all those players an advantage that others don't get and can't even comment on IC. (I think of the Legion stuff, for example, where all Legion's support from other players was OOC and hardly RPd, much of Legion's RP was ABU, and nobody could comment on the activities of a pariah state IC, but I can think of other examples too.)
If there was a way to keep players themselves from abusing the system beyond just everyone's good will, I think that would be essential to the system. Because 5 countries that all agree to just help one another, to their own detriment for 40 out of 50 years, while trusting blindly that in the 50th year, it will be there turn is as unrealistic as absolute Autarky is.
I have other ideas but this is getting kind of long.
Primary: Institutionalist Party of Kalistan (IPoK), 5146-
Inactive:
Socialist Party of Kalistan (SPoK), 2591-
Inactive:
Socialist Party of Kalistan (SPoK), 2591-