A Long Game Project labThe Long Game Project · How it works · Economy flow
Some games have a machine running between the moves
A bill comes due, a reserve runs down, a price drifts, whether anyone decides or not. We run wargames with AI players: rehearsals of a hard decision, with the working shown. The economy flow model is the machine inside them that keeps things moving between the players’ moves.
Here is the smallest one, a savings jar. Pay puts 10 in each year and spending takes 6 out. Interest adds 5% of whatever is in the jar, so the jar feeds the interest and the interest feeds the jar. Nobody decides anything. Around year 25, the interest earns more than the pay.
- A pool is an amount that rises and falls. The cyan bar shows how full it is.
- A flow is a solid line. It turns cyan when it moves something.
- A rule is a dashed line, such as “+5%”.
Press Play.
- We run wargames with AI players: rehearsals of a hard decision, with the working shown.
- Some decisions sit inside something that keeps moving. The economy flow model moves it, step by step.
- The numbers inside a model are our choices. A run shows the shape of a trade-off, not a forecast.
Switch to Normal to run a bakery where you make the choices.
Now one with choices: a bakery
Press Play and watch the cash. 16 orders come in each week, and one oven bakes for 6 of them. Rent is 8 a week, and every oven costs 1.5 in upkeep. Too few ovens and the rent wins. Too many and the upkeep does. How many keep the bakery open?
A move is a box with a shadow. Press Buy an oven, on the box or the button.
Press Play, or press a box with a shadow to make that move.
In a game, the players press the boxes
Each turn, each player picks a move. A player is a person, or an AI model playing a role such as the board or a rival. The model then runs the weeks and shows each player only what someone in that role could see. Here, New luck changes the chance: which weeks an oven breaks.
What it does not claim
The numbers inside a model are ours. Switch to Deep at the top of the page to see every one. A run shows the shape of a trade-off, such as how many ovens to run. It is not a forecast. Whether our games track the world is a question for the validation page.
The building blocks come from Machinations, which the game designer Joris Dormans published in 2012. We draw them our own way.
In a client’s game the bakery is the client’s own business: its bills, its reserve, its prices, and the moves its board can make.
The annex · Deep
The building blocks, after Dormans and the Machinations tool, and where the bakery uses each one.
| Block | What it does | In the bakery |
|---|---|---|
| Pool | An amount that rises and falls. | Orders, Cash, Ovens |
| Source | Adds an amount each week. | Customers |
| Drain | Removes an amount each week. | Walk out, Rent, Oven upkeep, Breakdowns |
| Converter | Takes from one pool and adds to another, all or nothing. | Buy an oven |
| Trader | Swaps what two sides give, such as cash one way and goods the other, all or nothing. | - |
| Delay | Holds what arrives for a set number of weeks. | Delivery |
| Queue | A delay that lets one item through at a time. | - |
| Gate | Splits what arrives between pools: by fixed shares, at random, or by a test such as a dice roll. | - |
| Formula | Works out a number from other numbers each week, such as a price from supply and demand. | - |
| Label modifier | Makes a flow, a wait or a condition bigger or smaller as a pool changes. | Each oven raises sales and upkeep |
| Node modifier | Moves one pool when another changes, with nothing flowing. | - |
| Trigger | Fires one block when another has done its whole job. | - |
| Reverse trigger | Fires one block when another falls short, such as a bill the cash cannot cover. | - |
| Activator | Switches a block off unless a condition holds. | Buy an oven needs cash |
| End | Stops the run, such as when the cash runs out. | - |
The numbers inside the bakery, read from its definition. Each one is our choice.
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Customers | 16 orders a week |
| Each oven | bakes for 6 orders a week, and the rest walk out |
| Rent | 8 cash a week |
| Oven upkeep | 1.5 cash a week for each oven |
| Buy an oven | 5 cash, and it arrives 1 week later |
| Breakdowns | a 4% chance each week that one oven breaks |
| Bankrupt | when the cash cannot cover a week of rent and upkeep |
| Start | 30 cash and 1 oven |
Seed 1, the number that fixes the chance. New luck moves to the next seed. A week reads every pool as it stood at the start of the week, and what moves lands at the end.