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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I struggle with both Civilization and Transport Tycoon in this way: the initial stages are so much more engaging than the management phase that comes afterwards. At least in Civilization I usually end up going to war with someone.

(but to be clear, Transport Tycoon/OpenTTD is an awesome, addictive game all the same)

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Stellaris (a space grand strategy game) has "fallen empires" which are powerful civilizations that you should absolutely not challenge early and "crisis" which are galaxy-wide threats that happen late-game to maintain engagement as you progress (it does have a ton of micro-management though).

It mirrors real life, if you believe Piketty. The more money you have, the higher RoR you get on average.

Consensus economics would have you believe that, unlike in any video game, businesses experience diminishing marginal returns on investment.

...A fact which has only tenuous relevance to a small part of Piketty's argument.

There are critiques of the work that make some reasonable points, but this is not how they start.

This is a reasonable forum in which to discuss how well video games' economics align with the real world.

I regret that it is a poor forum to discuss pop economics with a political agenda. If you would like resources which discuss and critique the various flaws of Piketty's work, I can refer you to the scholarly publications and the conferences associated with the American Economic Association, the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, the Cliometrics Society, and like academic organizations, as starting points.

In the meantime, I will continue to use this forum to discuss the realism of video games.

While I appreciate your enthusiasm to share your worldview, not to mention the unintentionally hilarious attempt at throwing shade, I'll continue to enjoy my own conversations with whomever I please, and would encourage you to take part in whatever might make you happy.

Dude, you’re in here throwing out Piketty to begin with while confusing basic concepts; I don’t think you’re the one who really gets to chide about funny attempts to inflict worldviews on people :P

First, RoR doesn't have anything to do with engagement or even difficulty of the game. Second, Picketty's argument is not even close to "RoR increases with money", it's that return on capital outpaces economic growth, that's it.

If that were to be manifested in a game, there would be no "management phase" at all. You would just buy stocks and collect returns from them faster than other players could get money from actual business ventures.

Already-Rich Tycoon

Maybe I meant ROI. He analyzed the average returns people get on their capital by how much capital they have.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe it was something like:

Normal people: 4.5%

Wealthy people: 7.5%

High net-worth individuals: 9%

Yes, iirc, towards the end of Capital in the 21th century, he takes universities investment funds as an example (as they can quite large and data is public). And there is a strong correlation between the size of the fund and it's return.

civ 5 can be different with the right settings: when I played on deity, half of the time it has been a struggle until a few rounds before victory (conquest).

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