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tl;dr - Hekter talks about macroeconomic policy and the general thoughts on whether or not Stuff or Gold is more valuable. He argues that Gold at this stage of the game is actually more valuable than Stuff due to long-term payoffs in the form of infrastructure investments.

Hello, fellow citizens. I hope you voted yesterday, no matter for what candidate--it’s important to vote and show that you are active, plus an experience point for the heck of it

Alright, so our current tax structure and overall philosophy is that Stuff is better than Gold. This is reflected in low import taxes and overall philosophy in regards to standard supplies given out, et-cetera, where we as a culture are maximizing our output in damage, since all of the ‘stuff’ in the game is geared towards doing damage. Instead of focusing on Gold to invest in infrastructure, we are geared towards a more market-reliant economy (which puts Gold into the hands of businessmen rather than political and military leaders) to increase our damage output.

This philosophy stems from the very good economist from ‘the other game’, One Eye. He has been long dead, but his espoused policy of Stuff > Gold has been critical in how government policy has developed over the years within the ‘other game’, but, the philosophy breaks down in e-Sim.

Namely, there is a huge difference between the two game economies’ infrastructure layout.

The Other Game at that period in time had the most efficient levels of production at 10 employees working in a company. In e-Sim, it is most efficient to have a single person in each company, thus raising the ‘maximum efficiency’ amount for an MU to roughly 10x the cost as in The Other, a goal that may be nominally impossible to reach. It would take 3,900 Gold to reach a level of maximum efficiency for just companies, or roughly the total amount of money spent by the entirety of Band of Brothers including their 3 MUs and all company quality investments thus far. For 10 people. And this isn’t even counting spending 500G on the MU to stick them in.

So you have a total maximum efficiency cost of 4,400 Gold to have a completely decked-out MU and reach the game’s limit on what you can do for 10 people. For the sake of this scenario, we’re going to assume that the only medals that this group is earning is their Hard Worker and Super Soldier medals, thus the income of the group would be about 100 Gold a month. 44 Months of constant, continual investment into the MU would be what it would take, or just shy of 4 years. Of course, with proper BH hunting and referrals, it would probably take less than half of that, but that’s still an incredibly long time.

Once you start expanding the numbers a bit, the math starts to get a bit mind-boggling. There are 95 people in the Band of Brothers MUs, 48 in the Army, about 25 in TOP GUN--this is just singling out the upper-tier MUs in forms of damage dealt. For maximum efficiency, you build a 390G company for each bloody worker, plus add on 50G for an Elite MU slot. The total money needed to get the USA in the best possible shape with current numbers is 168*440, or 73,920 Gold. Stop and think about that number for a minute.

In the Other Game, you only needed 39 Gold per person for maximum efficiency, thus your maximum-efficiency investment was a mere 6,552 Gold for the same number of people--no small amount, but entirely reachable. In fact, this point had been reached during One Eye’s time, thus there was little point in collecting gold, since it was inefficient--you could not use it for anything else except fighting, and that was the least efficient thing in the game that you could do, so it made perfect sense to instead focus on stuff and drive prices downwards in order to do the most per-capita damage.

However, we are years away from reaching that level of saturation, especially once you figure in population growth. It may never be reached in large scale, which is actually a good thing for the game, since there should always be stuff to work towards without having to constantly tweak the economy.

Additionally, at that time period of the Other, the world economy was suffering from a massive over-supply fueled glut of Stuff, making it very difficult to put a lot of money towards infrastructure since there was little to be had on the open market, and it made sense to focus on damage since efficiency saturation had been hit for a large portion of the population. Obviously, we do not have this problem yet.

Finally, the sUS is not in an active wartime economy. Yes, we fight every day all around the world, but the entire country is not going pedal-to-the-metal fighting over every region as it was for months at a time in the Other, covering several very large and heavily-US involved campaigns. We have a stable (if a bit subdued due to resources being what they are) economy as it stands, business are popping up, we’ve had a pretty decent slow-trickle babyboom with competent players coming in and getting active, et-cetera. There is no real need to focus on driving prices down lower--technically speaking--we don’t need the damage, as the only regions that are necessary for us to secure is Canada East Coast [CEC], which we have had no trouble holding onto. It’s certainly great to output more damage, but unless we’re fighting a long campaign that is highly important, economic policy should not be geared towards a wartime economy. This hurts businesses and MUs in the long term, while only providing short-term benefits of more damage, since infrastructure suffers for the sake of doing more damage now instead of later, when we really could be using it. Additionally, long campaigns are more rare in e-Sim, since there is a severe shortage of regions to fight over.

At the end of the day, however, there’s not a whole lot we can encourage the economy one way or another through taxation--higher imports can shut out foreign competitors and let prices rise, which is easily the most impactful way of handling the policy, thus favoring domestic businesses (and rising wages to boot) at the cost of short-term damage gains. In a preparation for a wartime economy (or a spike in prices correlating with a campaign which would indicate a strangled or insufficient supply) it would make sense to lower imports in order to flood the markets with cheap imported goods.

But the most important thing is to recognize as an sCulture that Gold is still > Stuff. At least for a few years, and educate the populace appropriately.

Of course, I could certainly be wrong, so if I am, feel free to yell at me in the comments or the thread for this topic on the National Forums .

Thanks for reading!

Hekter

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