Money and Economics

[Play2Jens]

[Making a realistic economy] will take a lot of time to develop it properly and in the end it doesn't add much to the existing gameplay
...
More moneysinks to spend silver on...
This should be easy enough to implement.

I'm not seeing a valid measurement taking place in the comparison of development effort.

A measurement of development time for a few new in-game items would be a couple of days. It doesn't add any new "features", just new graphics with adjusted variables.

Development time for a realistic economy would take a couple of weeks. Because:
- Different settlements would have different prices for items (mountain settlement = sells and buys metals for a lower price, dessert settlement would buy food for a high price)
- Mass producing and selling a certain item would drive the selling price down for settlements in your region. It wouldn't affect settlements far away.
- Prices of food would be affected by seasons
- programming all of this could cause bugs which wouldn't show straight away.
- It might cause some gameplay imbalances.

Just to sum up a few things why it would take some time develop this feature. I do agree that it's a nice thing to add to the game, but it just seems a lot of work which doesn't affect gameplay a lot.

I, personally, would see rather see more content like quests, events, factions and research added.

[Play2Jens]

Ooh, and on a moneysink being a finite solution? True, but what else is there to do (except for defending your base or attacking pirates) after getting everything you need? There is no economic solution for that. The game, at it current state, runs out of content  eventually. So it's okay to run out of moneysink around that time as well.

[AngleWyrm]

The game, at it current state, runs out of content  eventually. So it's okay to run out of money-sink around that time as well. I suggest that money-sink and content are the same thing; something that the player purchases. The primary difference is perspective, with content being oriented toward something the player wishes to buy and money-sink generally less concerned with the needs and desires of the player. If we can agree that the river of income mostly increases over time as measured in silver/season, then it becomes possible to consider the development of content that fits within income time-frames. Something that isn't beneficial to the early game, but becomes valuable only after some things are established, such as a wealth of excess food or many tamed animals. This might be called implementation of a prerequisite environment, rather than a generic progress-bar version.

[AngleWyrm]

Summarized quote from a recently closed thread Art may be slightly too profitable... Furniture may be way too profitable... making tuques is way more profitable... Just press the game pause button and walk away; that will slow down your profits until such a time as you wish to see more. Maybe make a mod to run the game at 1/10th speed, because that would be much more fun... It takes a vision of where we wish to be in order to move forward.