Economy V2 - Involve Earth => Materials => Capital => (Economy, Pollution)

[gregziegan]

Context

The economy is a rudimentary pipeline at the moment. There's no discrete stages for turning materials on Earth into more advanced capital like metal, glass, etc. To properly account for pollution and alter its course - we need to model these economic processes.

Below is a rough engineering draft:

Terms

• Capital = any tangible item that holds value
  • ex: wood (material), glass (refined material), housing (combo of refined materials)
  • can be categorized via subsets (RawMaterials, RefinedMaterials, etc)
• Earth = forests, CO2, silica, ...
• Cultivators = subset of population that can harvest raw materials
• Refineries = contain a subset of population that work to turn raw materials into RefinedMaterials
• Builders = subset of population that can create housing and other "advanced" Capital
• ServiceWorkers = subset of population that can provide services
• Economy = a policy-affected record of available capital and services
  • initialization (allocation) is guided by policy decisions
  • efficiency (distribution) is also guided by policy decisions

APIs

Cultivators.harvest : Earth -> Cultivators -> (Earth, RawMaterials, Pollution)
Refineries.operate : RawMaterials -> Refineries -> (RefinedMaterials, Pollution)
Builders.produce : RefinedMaterials -> Builders -> (Capital, Pollution)
Economy.allocate : Capital -> ServiceWorkers -> Economy
Economy.distribute : Population -> Economy -> Efficiency

Psuedocode

let { earth, cultivators, builders, serviceWorkers, refineries } = model -- our game state

let (updatedEarth, materials, harvestPollution) = Cultivators.harvest earth cultivators

let (refinedMaterials, refinementPollution) = Refineries.operate materials refineries

let (capital, productionPollution) = Builders.produce materials builders

let economy = Economy.allocate capital serviceWorkers

let population = cultivators ++ builders ++ refineries.workers ++ serviceWorkers

let efficiency = Economy.distribute population economy

let totalPollution = Pollution.sum [ harvestPollution, refinementPollution, productionPollution ]

-- calculate score from efficiency & totalPollution. Record historical data for everything in scope here

Resources

Material Extraction visualization

[gregziegan]

We'll also need some accounting for pollution control