Archive / Systems

Maf's Economic & Spacecraft-Count Formulas

Type: Systems — Game Design Mechanics (Full Text) Status: Canon (confirmed by creator)

Source: conversations-001.json, conversation #92, "Maf Game Overview" — see RAW SOURCE. The formal, worked-out formulas underlying how many spacecraft a given MACOFS member state or star nation can field, derived from its economic and technological profile.

The Master Spacecraft-Count Formula

  1. PCI × BTL = A
  2. A ÷ 1000 = B
  3. Population ÷ 1,000,000 = C
  4. C × B = D
  5. D ÷ K = E, where K = 1000 − PR
  6. E × 13.36 = F, where F = Fleet Points (FP)

1 Fleet Point = 1,000 metric tons of ships. As a simple average estimate: F ÷ 1000 = approximate number of ships.

Component Formulas

PCI — Per Capita Income

PCI = GDP / Population. An emergent variable, not a directly tuned stat — it responds to the underlying economic inputs below rather than being set by fiat.

GDP

GDP = Population × IF × BTL × PR, where IF = Industrialization Factor.

PR — Productivity Rating

Computation chain: Step 1: √FL + √BTL = A. (Full remaining steps use Industrialization Factor and Business Freedom to complete the calculation.) PR ranges from 0 to a theoretical maximum of roughly 5,000, though the creator expects most societies to settle in the 400-2,500 range in practice.

BF — Business Freedom

BF = max(0, FL − T − Q), where T = Average Total Taxes (%) and Q = Bureaucracy Level (1-100). Floored at 0 to keep the system stable — business freedom cannot go negative regardless of how high taxes or bureaucracy climb.

FL & BF Ranges

Both Freedom Level (FL) and Business Freedom (BF) range from 1 to 100 (integer scale). FL reflects political/social freedom; BF reflects economic/business regulatory freedom and ease of doing business.

BTL — Base Tech Level

Range: 1-25. Not formula-derived — a qualitative/analytical classification resulting from interpretation of a society's technological sophistication, distinct from (though related in spirit to) the separate TL system documented in The Tech Level (TL) System.

IF — Industrialization Factor

Constrained to a specific discrete set of values: 1.xx, 3.xx, 5.xx, 7.xx, 10.xx, or 15.xx — not a continuous range.

Worked Test Case

Given GDP = $27,000,000,000,000 (27 trillion) and Population = 330,000,000: PCI is calculated from GDP/Population, and with IF = 9.8407, BTL = 18, PR = 545.6612 as a worked multiplication, the creator noted the resulting figures felt "much more believable" than an earlier, implausibly large test result (~96,590,750).

Open Questions

  • The full step-by-step PR computation chain (beyond Step 1) and its exact relationship to BF within the formula were discussed at length but not fully captured verbatim on this pass.
  • How BTL (1-25, this system) relates precisely to the separately-documented TL system (Base-20, sublevel notation) is not reconciled.