Economy and Demographics

MOO2 followed a very basic economic model that simplified the population into farmers, miners, and scientists. Whilst it was very easy to understand and control, I do think that the extreme abstraction led to some slightly absurd scenarios, like picking up ten million farmers and telling them they were fully qualified research scientists overnight (or, for that matter, simply *having* tens of millions of scientists on the payroll in order to do more science, which isn’t really how science works).


There are some other basic tropes in 4x game economies which I personally hope that this game avoids:

1) Linking population growth to food (i.e. the old Civilization ‘filling up the granary’ model). Being a centre of farming should NOT make everyone in the area somehow reproduce faster. An empire’s breadbaskets are rarely, if ever, the same as its population centres. Admittedly, this was one trope that MOO2 avoided, by having ‘natural’ population growth. I think this is vital to keep for immersion – population growth is a product of societal choices so should be linked to government policies. Food supply is simply something that needs to keep pace.

2) Treating mining and production as the same thing. You don’t just glue coal and iron together to make spaceships. The supply of raw materials, and the factories putting those materials together, should be two distinct steps in the game economy. That way, you can have resource-rich mining worlds on the fringes, while keeping your military factory worlds nearer strategically important population centres.


However, I did like the way that MOO2 at least had distinct jobs for each unit of population – it was interesting to make, say, a multi-racial empire with Psilon scientists and Meklar workers, to see if the inherent advantages overcame the multi-racial penalties. Personally I think this could go slightly further with a few more job types (this is inspired by the Victoria 2 POP system, though I am not proposing anything like as complicated as that).

I also think that planets should have a limited number of ‘districts’ in the Civ-6 mould, to reduce micromanagement and encourage specialisation. Not being able to build everything everywhere means that freighter fleets and the merchant sector of the economy becomes more important to keep everything moving. I also propose that, along with food, each population unit needs to consume at least one factory-produced ‘Trade Good’ each turn to stay happy (and also needs somewhere to ‘buy’ that Trade Good, such as a Commercial Hub).

With the above, this means that the old farmers / miners / scientists system is expanded into:

Farmers – extracting food from rural districts.

Miners – extracting raw materials from mining districts.

Engineers – working in Military Factories to produce units / army supplies, or working in Civilian Factories to produce Trade Goods. Reasonably educated, so produce some research points.

Merchants – working in Spaceport districts to ship food / materials / goods around, or working in Commercial districts to sell Trade Goods to everyone. Reasonably educated, so produce some research points.


Hopefully that is a reasonably straightforward basic model, but complex enough to allow for some interesting strategies. E.g. signing a free trade deal with another empire which allows you to rely on *their* merchants and trade goods. Also, expanding the number of population jobs means you can start to include more interesting specialists and game rules. For example:


Academics – working in University districts to generate education points (which are required to support the upper-tier job roles) or Hospital districts to improve health / happiness. Highest education, produce a huge amount of your research.

Bureaucrats – maybe they could generate ‘Government’ points which represent the social / legal / admin functions an empire needs to run. If your economy was communist, they could take the place of Merchants in the Commercial districts.

Oligarchs – certain government choices could produce oligarchs – hyper-wealthy Merchants – who function similarly, but also produce government points (to represent their corporations taking over).

Aristocrats – do nothing but produce government points (maybe some military functions also) to represent hugely stratified societies, such as the Elerian feudal system or the Klackon hive queens.


I think that splitting the population into more detailed groupings would lead to more interesting empire building and some difficult choices. E.g. do you allow the wealthy trading hub planets to dictate the course of your development, offering tax breaks to those groupings, at the risk of angering the rural or industrial areas? Do you try and seal off your Bureaucrats and Aristocrats onto a fortress world to ensure the status quo against unrest?

I’m sure there are lots of possibilities if you start to play around with these types of social and economic supply chains. It would definitely add to immersion if you could make a ruling warrior caste or a society governed by benevolent priests, and see how those changes played out when managing your empire.