Hi all,
I tried to recreate the Bagaluth spreadsheet, but without relying on approximate numbers.
I studied the ini and tried to reproduce the demand calculations.
It's pretty much a work in progress but here's a link:
(the spreadsheet is in a github repo)
Green cells are intended as modifiable, everything else is calculated.
It has only two tabs(attached images):
'Input' - this is where you enter your expected consumer count etc and get the financial and other reports, the inputs on this page have nothing to do with ini files, like for example your expected consumer count, or how much you want to fulfill a given product's demand (say you want 100% fulfillment of everything, but 10% fulfillment of clothing)
'Basedata' - this where you can modify the parameters which are found in the ini files. You can also change which product consumes which(green triangle of a matrix on the pic). Aka every green cell in this page is corresponding to a value in the ini file(tradesystem.ini).
There are some tiny caveats.
For example:
In the ini file you can set the worker count per workshop on a per product basis.
In the spreadsheet all products use a global number(defaults to 25).
But if you have a problem with this you can easily modify it: it is a simple spreadsheet.
...
Except for one thing.
The only critical/not-so-easy-peasy thing is the computation of industry demand for a given market demand.
By industry demand I mean things which are not needed directly by your population, but indirectly by industries which need them as ingredients.
(Aka you need more wood overall than the people need because you need wood too for, say, pitch.)
Also, this calculation must be done in a way to ensure that you can set the dependencies DYNAMICALLY.
I mean if you want the production of pelts to consume raw iron too, you just overwrite one cell and it will recalculate everything.
This is not as straightforward as elementary calculations, but it can be done.
But the good news is that this computation is done in the spreadsheet in a matrix multiplicationy way, so there's no magic, macros or anything just simple math that you can see too.
This is the only "weird" calculation.
All the other things are just multiplications, additions etc. so they are pretty easy to understand.
Last caveat:
The ini file uses kilograms, the game uses barrels.
To make the spreadsheet as clear as possible I tried to always give the unit of a quantity next to its name.
Like for example:
Market Demand [kg/pop]
or
Sum Demand [barrel/day]
And the last thing:
All the green cell values on the Base Data page must be set according to YOUR ini file.
The current values in the cells are based on mine but the whole point of this spreadsheet is to be able to compute demands for different ini files.
Aka don't forget to set the green cells on the Base Data page to the values from your ini file.
Hope someone finds this useful, or maybe comes up with a better/friendlier spreadsheet!
(I'd like to know if there's a better solution for the handling of the dependency graph calculations - aka the matrix representation and the matrix vector product which results in the industry demand factor - than the one presented in this spreadsheet.)
Bye,
rkeeves
