经济模拟和保真度

Economic Simulation And Fidelity

模拟现实市场的哪些部分很重要，哪些部分只会占用你的性能预算

What parts of real life markets are important to simulate and what only eat your performance budget

AXIOMS

2023年5月26日

简介

Introduction

无论是历史题材还是奇幻题材的策略游戏，经济运行方式都是其中的关键部分。当然，你可以使用金币、点数、护盾等简单4X游戏的东西。在这种情况下，你只是在做一些平衡测试。但如果你想要一些有意义的东西呢？一个有助于区分超过 4-5 个派系的系统？如果你关心历史性或真实性呢？那事情就变得复杂了。

An important part of both history and fantasy strategy games is how the economy works. Of course you can have simple 4X type stuff with gold, mana, and shields or w/e. At that point you are just doing some balance testing. But what if you want something meaningful? A system that can help differentiate more than 4-5 factions? What if you care about history or verisimilitude? Then things get more complicated.

当你希望经济管理成为详细策略游戏的核心部分时，你需要做出很多选择。你想要大量的材料和商品吗？建筑？这对战斗部队的招募有什么影响？你想要复杂的地理环境吗？如何让贸易变得有趣？ 除非你想要有限的资源需求和单纯控制贸易商品得到的抽象增益，否则拥有一个良好的贸易系统是很困难的。

When you want economic management to be a core part of a detailed strategy game you have a lot of choices to make. Do you want tons of materials and goods? Buildings? How does that play into combat unit recruitment? Do you want complex geography? How do you make trade interesting? Unless you want to have limited resource requirements and just provide abstract bonuses based on trade good access having a good trade system is tough.

对于一款规模庞大、代理众多的游戏来说，性能是一个重要限制因素。即使是许多大型工作室制作的游戏，也会因为次优的设计选择而严重影响性能。部分原因是 "设计者 "和实际 "执行者 "是不同的人。还有很大一部分原因是花哨的图形设计。这两件事 《Axioms Of Dominion》 都不需要处理。尽管如此，重要的是要考虑你能承担的性能预算分配。由于多线程潜力和对回合更新速度的期望，回合制游戏又是一大优势。小众回合制策略游戏玩家自然也会更有耐心，不过你也不能过于滥用这种宽容。

An important limitation in a game with a large scope and a lot of agents is performance. Many games even by major studios hit performance limits pretty hard because of sub-optimal design choices. Part of this is that the “designer” and the actual “exectutors” are different people. Another large part is fancy graphical stuff. Both things Axioms doesn’t have to deal with. Still, it is crucial to consider what part of your performance budget you can afford to assign. Being turnbased is a big asset yet again due to multithreading potential and expectations on turn update speed. Niche turnbased strategy gamers are also naturally more patient, though you can’t abuse that leniency too much.

核心设计选择

Core Design Choices

很多进行复杂经济模拟的游戏都选择完全专注于此。城市建设游戏、中世纪城镇模拟游戏、采矿游戏、经营游戏等等。这显然会带来一些优势，比如核心游戏循环紧凑、不需要争夺性能预算以及整体系统更简单。但在某种程度上，这也会牺牲游戏的完整性。这些游戏通常也会利用其大部分优势来实现实时性。

A lot of games that do complex economic simulation choose to focus entirely on that. City builders, medieval town simulators, mining games, shop games, and so on. This obviously provides some advantages as far as a tight core game loop, no competition for the performance budget, and a simpler overall system. But it costs you context, to some degree. These games also generally use much of their advantage to go real time.

就经济模型而言，《Axioms Of Dominion》 希望拥有一个与城市建造游戏大致相似的系统，但规模更大，并提供更多 "为什么"的背景解释。《Axioms Of Dominion》 还希望采用奇幻工艺机制和动态建筑类型，这就产生了一些问题，但由于采用回合制，很多问题又得到了改善。

Axioms wants to have a system generally similar to a city builder as far as economic model but it needs a larger scale and provides more context for “why”. Axioms also wants to engage with fantasy crafting mechanics and dynamic building types which creates some issues but a lot of this is again ameliorated by being turn based.

因此，众所周知，"后勤 "绝不是一个可以解决的问题。游戏中经常会出现商品过量和短缺的情况。当然，电子游戏模拟的数据要少得多，因此可以说比现实生活更难。许多由电脑玩家进行经济模拟的游戏都存在很大的问题。

So it is pretty well known that “logistics” is in no way a solved issue. You are going to have over and under runs all the time. And of course a videogame is simming far less data so it is arguably harder than real life. Many games with economic sims handled by computer player have huge issues.

这里有一个非常简单的捷径，那就是不要试图做到完全最优。这是一个相当不错的方法，因为在现实生活中，人们一般都不会做到最优，而且这实际上只会对玩家产生影响。其他参与交易的 NPC 不会轻易利用次优结果，因为他们的行为也是次优的。

A very simple shortcut here is to simply not try to be totally optimal. This is a pretty good method because in real life people generally aren’t optimal anyway and because it really only impacts the player. Other NPCs involved in trade won’t be able to easily exploit the sub optimal results since they’ll also be acting sub optimally.

《Axioms Of Dominion》一如既往地从这种选择中获得了独特的好处。游戏可以为那些有经济和贸易相关属性和技能较高的角色花费一些额外的时间，以找到略微更优的交易。游戏还可以根据这些数据对处理队列中的角色进行排序。

And Axioms, as always, receives a unique benefit from this choice. The game can expend a little extra time for Characters with high Attributes and Skills related to economics and trade to find slightly more optimal deals. The game can also order Characters in the processing queue based on this data.

此外，由于《Axioms Of Dominion》总体上是一个前工业时代的游戏，因此市场和贸易区并不是全球性的，这也降低了模拟的复杂性。很多人问我，《Axioms Of Dominion》在什么时期会在机制上 "终止"，即使你当然可以继续玩下去。答案大致相当于现实世界中的 1900 年，即使魔法会让事情变得有点复杂。这也有助于解决任何形式的工业革命都会造成的平衡问题。事实上，我也曾考虑过将时间拉长到20世纪40年代，但我认为这将是一项艰巨的工作，而且会引发大量问题，最好还是放弃。当然，公元前5000年到公元 1900年之间，经济会有无数高峰和低谷，但不会像工业革命真正开始后那样持续增长。

Additionally because Axioms is a pre-industrial setting in general the markets and trade zones are not global which reduces the complexity of the simulation. A lot of people ask me what period Axioms “stops” mechanically, even if you can of course keep playing. And the answer is roughly the equivalent of 1900 in the real world even if magic muddles things a bit. This also helps with balance issues that would be cause by any kind of industrial revolution. I actually considered going all the way to like the 1940s but I decided that would be a ton of work and cause a ton of issues that are best avoided. Sure there are peaks and valleys between ~5000BC and 1900AD but things don’t ramp up at a continuously increasing rate like they do following the industrial revolution truly kicking off.

设计上的小问题

Minor Design Concerns

由于《Axioms Of Dominion》存在于一个没有真正全球化问题的世界，特别是如果你在开始游戏之前没有模拟超过几千年的回合（这适用于游戏预加载的所有已公布世界），贸易和经济通常要简单得多。参与贸易、生产和物流的 "代理"之间需要建立关系，才能进行互动。

Since Axioms exists in a world prior to truly global concerns, especially if you haven’t simulated more than a few thousand years of turns before starting your game, which applies to all of the on release worlds the game is pre-loaded with, trade and economics are generally a lot simpler. Relations between “agents” involved in trade and production and logistics are required for them to interact.

每个 "代理 "只能与他们知道的其他 "代理 "建立联系。当然，有一些机制可以扩大你的互动范围，但你通常能互动的其它代理总数不超过200，大多数情况下甚至更少。

Each agent can only connect to other agents they are aware of. Of course there are mechanics for expanding your sphere of interaction but you’d generally be interacting with less than 200 other agents, and in most cases far fewer.

这其实也是最近一篇关于 "联系"的文章所适用的另一个领域。非贸易代理的人脉可以让你意识到新的机会。有些会是有意的交易，但在某些情况下，可能仅仅是他们在其他地方体验过并希望再次接触的一些关乎食物或商品的请求。由于《Axioms Of Dominion》中普遍存在的 "不完全信息"，他们不一定知道你是否能获得他们想要的东西。

This is actually another area the recent post about “Connections” applies. Non-trade agent connections can make you aware of new opportunities. Some would be intentional and transactions but in some cases it might merely be a request for some food or good they experienced elsewhere and would like to engage with again. And due to the “imperfect information” prevalent in Axioms they wouldn’t necessarily know if you could acquire the thing they wanted.

还有一种情况是，如果你是一个独立的贸易商，一些在政治上或军事上强大的代理可能需要战略物资，并资助你获得这些物资。这也为《Axioms Of Dominion》增添了一个有趣的潜力。在历史上，你经常会让商人（无论是否得到命令）、奴隶贩子和战利品买家伴随军事远征。在《Axioms Of Dominion》中，您可以作为商人角色这样做。或者雇佣其他角色来做这件事。这也是与不同社会领域的角色建立联系的一种方式，他们可以雇佣你来满足特殊要求。

You would also have cases where if you were an independent trade some politically or militarily powerful agent might be in need of strategic goods and fund you to acquire them. And this also brings up an interesting potential in Axioms. Historically you’d often have merchants, sanctioned or otherwise, and slave traders and loot buyers, accompany military expeditions. In Axioms you can do that as a merchant character. Or maybe hire another character to do so. And that is a way to build connections with characters in a different social sphere who could then hire you to fulfill special requests.

总结

Conclusion

《Axioms Of Dominion》有一些独特的优势，在性能上可以抵消游戏范围带来的成本，因为游戏积极地期望在包括经济、生产和贸易领域在内的许多情况下得到不完美的结果。当然，游戏在组织数据处理方面受益于回合制。并且游戏设计从一开始就深思熟虑，不会每年都随便添加一些预期之外的贪婪内容，然后导致难以解释的问题。

Axioms has some unique advantages that help offset the scope of the game when considering performance because it actively wants to have imperfect results in many situations including in economic, production, and trade spheres. Of course it also benefits from being turn based, as far as organizing data processing and it is built from the ground up with these kinds of considerations in mind. No random greedy content releases several times a year that weren’t anticipated and then cause problems that are difficult to account for.