So, You Want to Rule the World...

In My Humble Opinion
1

This may sound an odd, even macabre question, but…well, perhaps I best explain.

A friend and I both harbour ambitions of supervillain-like world domination. Lacking the means to pursue our goals in real life, we are instead developing a tabletop strategy game that we may enact our fantasies in a Risk or Diplomacy-like manner (yes, we are gigantic geeks. Thanks for playing). We’ve got most of the rules worked out, and plan to make up the rest on the fly, but we are stuck for one of the most vital rules-based issues- that being, how do we determine what any particular country, once conquered, adds to our cause in the way of resources (without going into ridiculous micro-management).

Basically, we wanted some simple measurement of what each country’s production facility for, say, food, fuel, raw materials and processed goods would be, and what each country’s import needs are. That way, when a nation falls beneath the grip of one player or another, we can determine how many Space Dirigbles he can build with the resources he harvests from his new domain, and also how much food he needs to divert there lest his new subjects starve to death.* We don’t particuarly care if the answer arrived at is unrepresentative and scientific, as long as it “sounds right” and is fairly applied across the board.

Originally I thought we could measure the imports/exports of each country in dollars and rough guidelines of fuel/food requirements (as taken from the excellent CIA World Factbook) to arrive at a rough “guesstimate” of what each nation would contribute. However, doing this for America results in having to divert approximately 1 trillion dollars worth of imports from the rest of your empire to that country, lest the populace (apparently) starve. Where did I go wrong? Under this system, conquering America results in a massive drain on your resources, with no benefit accrued whatsoever. Obviously, this should not be.

So, my question is: How can we measure the rough contribution that each country would make to the industry/resources of any supervillain who conquered it, without going into cumbersome detail?

[If this is in the wrong forum, please move.]
*To repeat: macabre geeks.

2

Would using the GNP instead of import/export figures help any?

3

On the same note, what about GDP?

Maybe a ratio of profit to debt?

Average salary per person times the amount of people?

4

Sounds like you are after some moderate degree of realism in this, in which case the answer is: hardly anything. In modern times conquering another country removes its military opposition to your plans, but their contribution to your economy will be minimal. Germany and Japan in WWII are perfect examples. Slave labour is not productive labour; and between low productivity, sullen sabotage and security costs you don’t end up with much profit.

Maybe a one-time looting bonus would be about it.

5

Do these Space Dirigibles come equipped with 1920’s Style Death Rays?

These small details are important, you know!

BTW–I’ve got a few used Killer Robots I can let you have, cheap.

They can also chop firewood.

:cool:

6

Get a kids’ geography textbook and combine the data from that with the CIA stuff. I recall yawning in class about the agricultural production of each country - you know, the little icons of grain and tractors or people in rice paddies. Boring as shit, which is why we should have had your game in school instead.

7

Thanks for the advice, guys. I can see now that my ambitions of calculating what a country actually produces in terms of fuel/goods/food were grossly opitmistic if we want to keep this relatively uncomplicated.

The suggestion about using GNP or GDP (what’s the difference?) sounds interesting- but is there any way to tell how much of GNP is used up in the industries a country needs to be self-sufficient, and how much is “surplus” that could be used to produce Space Dirigbles, killer bees etc? (as you may have gathered, I know jack-shit about economics).

The point about looting is reasonable, but while this is supposed to be semi-realisitc, it is also intended to be fun- and what fun is conquering America unless it makes you rich?

8

In theoretical terms, salary is directly related to productivity. That is to say, if a farmer in the US is making twice as much money per hour as a guy in China, the American farmer is twice as productive. “Productive” of course involves such things as tarifs, shipping costs, roboticized aid (allowing a single person to cover more land), likelihood of the crops all being destroyed by rebel forces, etc. But in the end, it does pretty much work out that the American farmer will have been able to have been able to have put twice the amount of food on sale at a competitive price as the Chinese guy.

So if you know the average salary for the country and you know the population of the country, then you will be able to say how much goods that country can turn out to be sold.

GDP, as I recall it just happens to be Average Salary X Population. :slight_smile:

9

Fantastic! So, in other words, GDP is a reasonably accurate measurement of the value of a given country’s output?

10

Until someone more knowledgable than me says otherwise (which is perfectly possible as I tend to pick up on such topics in snippets.)

11

(Doh, didn’t mean to hit submit.) I would suggest verifying with the Wikipedia.

12

Which one of you is Pinky?

13

Ummm … what happens if you just let them starve? Does the nation lose all its productivity so that you can’t get any war materials from it any more? What are the consequences in your game of not diverting resources to conquered nations? Depending on how you write the rules, it might be politically or militarily advantagous simply to let them eat cake … that is, if you’re a Stalinist kind of guy …

14

Well, that’s why I wanted to have the import/export system work out- if you divert resources away from supplying the nation’s wants, we planned to have the nation’s stability decrease, and your revenue go down. However, if we use the GDP system, we could have the population go down if you fail to meet food requirements, meaning a (measurable) decrease in the money the nation supplies to your cause.

This would, however, require us to workout how much food each country imports…sigh, decisions, decisions.

15

A fairly decent version of what you’re talking about exists in the form of Earth: 2025. Attacking other countries, need for population to make your GDP go up, needing to feed your people to make sure they don’t die.

Feel free to explore them, and attempt to rip off their system. :slight_smile:

16

Earth: 2025 is aiming for the wrong type of system to be used as a guide here. In Earth you only control your one country, so the acquisition of land and building, research, and production are far too micromanagement-intensive to be scaled up to a game in which you control many such countries. I think what the OP is looking for is more like a game of Risk that isn’t so brainless. While such a game would be somewhere on a spectrum between Risk and Earth: 2025, I think it would be a lot closer to the Risk end.

As for GNP/GDP, there’s no way you could apply all or even most of such a number to your Space Dirigible Fleet. These are designed to measure the total production of the entire economy of a nation. Sure, they in a way are useful for comparing production capacities between countries, but your average butcher’s and baker’s and candlestick maker’s sales, while perhaps vital to the survival of your population, won’t help you so much with invading all your neighbors. Any spending you put toward building your armies is going to be a drain on the rest of the economy, much like our military spending is in real life. The only problem there is that the amount a country spends on military now isn’t a very good indicator of what spending they could sustain if necessary. For example, if you go by military spending numbers, Japan would be pretty worthless to add to your empire, but in reality they could probably gear up for war pretty well if someone sold them on the idea of Space Dirigibles.

Now, if you consider that in a time of war the government will put more of the funds it has available toward buying tanks and planes and bombs and things, perhaps you could look at how much tax revenue a country has and use that as a rough guideline for how militarily useful they would be. While this wouldn’t accurately reflect the fact that some countries don’t really have factories set up to pump out weapons of war and some countries, like the US, spend lots of money to have very advanced military technology, I think the wealth gap between the rich and poor nations probably already puts the poorer ones at enough of a disadvantage. Wouldn’t want the game to be all about controlling the ten or so most industrialized nations or you might as well just make it sci-fi and play for the planets of the solar system.

Anyway, on account of being profoundly lazy and it being so late at night that it’s now the next morning, I haven’t bothered to see if numbers for tax revenues are even available for most countries let alone checked if the numbers seem workable. Just thought I’d throw some ideas out, hope they help.