this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2022
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Even the very rudimentary toy model of an economy present in Vicky lays bare all the contradictions of Capitalism. I think one thing that breaks strategy and sim gamer's brains is that there's not actually any economy in most games, and so the only thing they are familiar with is the kind of unitary accounting of basic input/output that is the "economy" of most games.
Well, games tend to have incredibly low barriers to economic entry and little in the way of maintenance or upkeep. Warcraft starts you out with five peons and a gold mine, right at your doorstep. Sim City starts you with abundant lucrative-to-develop free real estate and a bunch of low-interest loans, then extracts wealth continuously from the native terrain more-or-less indefinitely. Civilization and Age of Empires plop you down into a resource rich wilderness. Everything on the Monopoly board starts out as vacant, profitable, and for-sale.
Then the conflict is primarily between Player Commanders (or AI-controlled NPC Commanders). You're rarely struggling to "beat the board" or wrangle the restive unit tokens from whom you're trying to extract wealth. Your big threats are always adjacent and external. Nobody in Warcraft ever experiences a coup because their pig-farms pull in a bad harvest. But also, nobody plays these games once the board's resource pools have been exhausted. The game resolves. The End of History is reached. You win or you lose and then you start back from scratch again.
One of the "realistic" aspects of Paradox Games (and other historical 4X games) is that there is often an internal domestic struggle within your own board position. The games tend to be long and develop out over iterative cycles. Maxing out the board space comes relatively early and precipitates a higher degree of tension rather than a resolution. And players do eventually have to wrangle with soft ceilings on materials and manpower, the social ramifications of random historical changes, the politics of succession, etc.
Capitalism works great when history can just end and declare you the winner. Capitalism doesn't work when you're forced to keep talking about next cycle.
Monopoly should start with one player controlling 80% of the board and then be a competition between the remaining players paying rents to the one to buy one of the remaining 20%.
You could also add a mechanic where wages could be earned from a landowner by staying on one tile that equal to the rent of the tile plus $1 or something.
Honestly more in line with the original utopian socialist bent of the game where you play in reverse with progressive taxation after one player wins out and watch the redistribution of land.
The original socialist take on the game was cooperative, with the goal being to develop the board in as few turns as possible.
Even then, its just kinda a bad game. The co-op version is still heavily random. The competitive side has much of the outcome predicated on a handful of trades made halfway through, with RNG determining early position and everything after the big swap being functionally settled.
You could make it quicker and more pleasant to play by shrinking the border and offering players more decision-making agency apart from buy/sell/trade on wherever you land.