Re: Production Values

Steve Chapin (sjc@cs.purdue.edu)
Wed, 22 Jul 92 19:50:01 EST

Rich writes:
>> Russell Wallace:
>> > Here's an idea for skill productivity values: how about each man has a
>> > productivity directly proportional to his skill level? Thus, suppose a city
>> > has 300 ENTERTAIN jobs. This would give employment to 300 people with level 1
>> > ENTERTAIN skill, 150 with level 2, 100 with level 3 and so on (but the total
>> > amount of money handed out to entertainers in each case would be the same). I
>> > don't think we need bother with productivity values per region, just have a
>> > max production for each region type, e.g. cities have 300 ENTERTAIN jobs,
>> > towns have 100 and everywhere else has none; plains have 100 horse-catching
>> > jobs, everywhere else has none, etc.
>>
>> This is what I have implemented now.

No, no, no, no, no! This violates the "no best method" approach.
Because study time for skill levels is super-linear, making the
productivity directly proportional to the skill level penalizes highly
skilled units.

Under this scheme, it is better to have 10 level 1 entertainers than
to have 1 level 10.

Consider (I leave out the 500 unit formation fee, and the 50 cost to
first learn entertainment):

10 lvl 1 1 lvl 10

men cost 450 0
study cost 300 1400
----- ------
750 1400

Thus, it costs about 2 times as much to make that 1 man level 10 unit.
Also, while it takes about 15 days to get to level 1, plus 3 weeks of
recruiting to get to 10 men (5 weeks total), it takes about 700 days
(100 weeks) to get to level 10. That's 95 weeks worth of income that
the level 1 entertainers can get, that the level 10 guy doesn't.

If those 10 entertainers make 100 gold in a week (a small sum,
definitely), then that's 9500 gold they've made before the level 10
guy even gets a chance to work.

Thus, production simply must be tied to study time, not skill level;
if it isn't, it is simply pointless to ever have highly skilled units,
except in certain very rare cases (Military Leadership under the
current system).

sc

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