Money and Economics

[AngleWyrm]

Over the course of each game year, how much silver will players consume as a resource? Just like gold or jade it has very little use. A colony has almost no need for silver, and so that is its value to a colony. Silver represents what it can be traded for. Nuts have value to a squirrel Bread crumbs have value to a pigeon Steel has value to a colony

[Hans Lemurson]

So are you proposing a scrap-metal based economy?

[AngleWyrm]

So are you proposing a scrap-metal based economy? I propose that need/demand is the primary value that moves things about. The list of needed things has some wide rivers like food & steel, and some narrow streams like clothing & medicine. That spread of what a colony needs reflects the current environment, changing with circumstance. Crops ripen, trees are deforested, animals breed, technology is researched. What the colony needed in the spring of 5500 is different from what the colony needed in the spring of 5501. And so the need/demand for specific materials is not a constant value, or even a steady rate.

[ymc]

Successful mega-corporations will just go ahead and get their own legal department instead of outsourcing to a law firm, thus conserving their precious currency. They don't then turn around and start selling their own legal services, even though in a narrow view it might make the most sense, at least currency-wise. As a whole, they want their operation to run smoothly, and that is more important to them than "silver", even though that's what started them down this road in the first place.

Oil companies realised long ago that if you're the one taking it out of the ground and transporting it to your production facilities, you no longer trade your currency for services rendered at a rate unacceptable to you. This, ironically, has devalued their precious "silver" they just went great lengths to keep. They will throw "silver" around like bread to ducks, because it means nothing to them and their true currency is their commodity they're producing. Somewhere a bean-counter says "hey guys, it would be cheaper if we had our own army", and then that stops until they find something new to throw their "excess silver" at for a while. They go though this cycle even though they could buy the entire planet seven times over with their "silver" alone (slight exaggeration.)

The Kraft Heinz Company will never buy anything from you at fair market "silver" value. They will instead find a way to make it themselves for cheaper. If they did somehow choose to buy raw goods from you, it's only because you were selling low enough, and they were pretty sure they could turn around and sell a more processed, more refined, and more expensive version of it to back you. They aren't interested in bartering tomatoes or poultry back and forth at the same market price, they spend a Ludeonicrous amount of "silver" on dedicated teams crunching numbers to find ways to make more of this "silver" because that's a clear numerical measurement of their chokehold on the world, not because of the goods they can buy with it.

A single legendary plasteel hospital bed sells for over 4000 in-game economic units, for the purpose of simplicity we'll call it silver. If you value your colonists' time, you can actually trade that item directly for enough material to make considerably more of those beds with said silver never even changing hands and still purchase some other supplies on the side. Be a patrician, not a pleb commoner! Once you get beyond exchanging handfuls of coins at a market, you become powerful enough to make your own currency of your choosing. Contrary to popular belief, and this is not just in RimWorld: time is not money, and they aren't even close to equal. My currency happens to be time if you can't tell, but yours could be something else and I won't judge (too harshly.)

If hospital beds are your export, and you're still obsessed with silver as a currency, you can always opt to keep scanning, constructing drills and hoping for plasteel below (or begging that the next raid is mechanoid), having your builders construct walls and power-hungry solar lamps to grow healroot for fear of cold or toxic fallout, assigning your growers to said healroot instead of more profitable plants, so you can have yet another worker make your own medicine, and then pull a miner off drilling to dig out another cave for you to stash all that silver you're saving "for later".

If, on the other hand, you're having trouble maintaining your accumulated wealth due to the dead-weight loss created by buying and selling back and forth at unfavourable rates, then I strongly suggest you use your muffalo wool for something other than T-shirts. Or, and this is not me telling you how to play (I swear), do yourself a favour and crunch muffalo numbers versus alpacas.


PS - You just have to be able to get your colony off the ground, something I'm failing hard at in 0.17.1530. I've yet to survive a winter, but it's not winter per se that gets me, it's the expensive downtime due to disease pre-winter. I'm ok with this, there's got to be a way, even if I haven't found it yet, haha.

[AngleWyrm]

Successful mega-corporations...Oil companies...The Kraft Heinz Company...

Has anything resembling those examples been built in Rimworld with approximately 1~20 colonists?
Is that a goal a player may set for themselves?

Or does it seem possible that those entities exist in environments that already provide basic functionality of satisfying day-to-day living needs?

[JimmyAgnt007]

The reason the current economy is based on silver and not steel is exactly because there is little use to silver.  Steel is consumable, silver is generally not.  So its something you are more willing to part with.  Yet its rare enough that not everyone has an unlimited supply (imagine if wood was used as money) so its ideal. 

Ive got 55 colonists in my colony atm in my mountain fortress and it's still not really a 'mega-corp'.  Though I do seem to have 8 cook tables making simple meals non stop.  The issue with Rimworld is that trade doesnt happen on the scale needed for 'mega' anything.  I simply cant export fast enough.  Granted I dont like making carrivans and like to stay at home, but that might change soon.  But even with my large scale production, im always short of metal and components, even with breakdowns disabled.  Silver on the other hand, I generally can have lots of at any given time.  I'm trying to build a gold and jade vault to store it all in. 

@ymc:  In house legal departments are for security more than anything else, they dont want people holding such important jobs working for someone else.  That being said, a lot of them do actually still outsource to outside firms to handle jobs their own people lack the capacity for. 

[Razzoriel]

The reason the current economy is based on silver and not steel is exactly because there is little use to silver.

In history, the use of silver and gold for currencies is not due to their lack of uses; on the contrary, silver and gold have multitude of uses, like any other metal in a society. It is due to how they are "pure", as in, very difficult to melt together with other metals. This alone prevents a huge amount of falsification and forgery of coins. The fact that silver and gold are relatively rare compared to copper or iron are just the cherry on top of the cake.

It would not surprise me if in the dystopic lore of Rimworld colonies decide to use silver for the same reason; any attempt in metallurgy with those metals and it works, but silver and gold cannot be melted with other metals. Hm, this might be a "noble" metal, because it refuses to melt in with other more common metals. Im going to use this as a symbol of status.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Yes, but they were never really 'consumed'.  Silver bars or silver forks, its all the same.  The other reason was that gold never rusts, everything else did so it was still 'consumable'.  btw, if you had a gold paperclip and kept bending it, it wouldnt snap like a regular one would.  plus it was so soft that it was easy to work with. 

I just meant they lacked the extremely common uses like iron had.  Also, they can be mixed with other metals, gold commonly is because its so soft.  The metal they mix with determines the colour of gold.  Without putting in the entire wiki page (that we dont really need) its uses in the old world were all largely based on wealth (or the display of it) and it wasnt until modern times that it was used for electronics and such.

Of course, if im missing a technical use for gold in the old world id love to know about it.

[Razzoriel]

Yes, but they were never really 'consumed'.  Silver bars or silver forks, its all the same.  The other reason was that gold never rusts, everything else did so it was still 'consumable'.  btw, if you had a gold paperclip and kept bending it, it wouldnt snap like a regular one would.  plus it was so soft that it was easy to work with. 

I just meant they lacked the extremely common uses like iron had.  Also, they can be mixed with other metals, gold commonly is because its so soft.  The metal they mix with determines the colour of gold.  Without putting in the entire wiki page (that we dont really need) its uses in the old world were all largely based on wealth (or the display of it) and it wasnt until modern times that it was used for electronics and such.

Of course, if im missing a technical use for gold in the old world id love to know about it.

Gold is an extremely good conduit, and surpasses copper in use because of exactly of what you said (it doesn't rust).

Silver is very sterile (and it is why, maybe, you use it to make sterile tiles).

[AngleWyrm]

	Quipus, sometimes known as khipus or talking knots, were recording devices historically used in a number of cultures and particularly in the region of Andean South America. Similar systems were used by the ancient Chinese and native Hawaiians. For the Inca, the system aided in collecting data and keeping records, ranging from monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and military organization. The cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or up to 2,000 cords.
	The largest form of currency in the ancient world was known as the "Rai Stone". These gargantuan stones were carved from a single piece of limestone. They each had a signature hole in the middle, measured up to 12 feet across, and weighed over 8 tons. Each Rai stone a story of its own that determined its value. Since the creation of each was such a massive undertaking, the difficulty experienced along the way would increase the value of the stone. The villagers risked their lives canoeing to a neighboring island where limestone could be found. Then the disks had to be carved and painstakingly carried back to the village (again, via canoe). One of the canoes sank once, and the stone that was lost was still a part of the economy. They just recognized the stone as being out in the ocean and "ownership" of it changed. None of the stones ever actually moved since they were so heavy. They just acquired a new owner and remained in the same location.
	While the value of salt cakes was such that one could received 80 moulds of them for one saggio of gold [at the saltworks], merchants could make large profits in distant, mountainous regions where salt was rare and highly appreciated, so that people gave 1 saggio of gold for 60, 50 or 40 pieces, or other goods of high value, especially musk. Some believe that being "worth your salt" may have started in ancient Rome, where salt 'salarium' has become the root of the word 'salary.'

[Hans Lemurson]

I'm still a little confused as to what the basic complaint and suggestion of this thread is.  I see a lot of philosophical arguments about the nature of value, but what is it that is specifically being objected to in the game?

The best I can piece together of the complaint is:

• Traders buy cheap and sell dear.  (If you sell 200 steel you'll make about enough money to buy 100-150 steel back from them)
  
• Prices are fixed regardless of the actual use or rarity of an item.
  
• Traders do not supply that which you desire despite repeatedly visiting your base and seeing your piles of silver.
  
  And the solutions(?) are:
  
• Replace a universally accepted silver-based currency with bronze-age commodity tokens.
  
• Simulate a planetary-scale economic system of production and consumption (from which to dynamically generate prices and availability from the laws of supply and demand) so that caravans will [hopefully] have a believable mixture of goods at reasonable prices.
  
  Am I missing anything here?

[AngleWyrm]

Traders do not supply that which you desire despite repeatedly visiting your base and seeing your piles of silver.
...
Am I missing something?

Add beneath that bullet

• Traders don't purchase from your supply that which they desire, and thus the model doesn't include mutually beneficial exchange

[Hans Lemurson]

Add beneath that bullet

• Traders don't purchase from your supply that which they desire, and thus the model doesn't include mutually beneficial exchange
  

Ah! That is a very good point.  Why exactly would they want pay silver for the privilege of hauling away my garbage?

Now some caravans won't buy certain goods, so this is modeled to an extent, but the general theme is to load up a caravan with as much mass-produced garbage as possible so that you can buy the only valuable things.

[Play2Jens]

After reading this thread, I wanted to give my two cents. Although it would be cool to have a realistic economy in the game, I don't think it's necessary. It will take a lot of time to develop it properly and in the end it doesn't add much to the existing gameplay... I do agree that there is a problem with having too much silver towards the endgame, which influences raids too much. Therefore I suggest two solutions:

1. Make raid strength depending on colony combat strength and not colony wealth. colony combat strength would be something like the total of each colonist, their shooting/melee ability, the best weapons your base has and the number of turrets. Then multiply by 80% - 120% for randomness.

2. More moneysinks to spend silver on (like advanced and expensive weapons only obtainable through trade, rare statues, ...)

This should be easy enough to implement.

[AngleWyrm]

[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.

On the subject of money sinks:

• sink starts as un-affordable, so any benefits of product are unavailable
• sink becomes an affordable addition
• increasing wealth overtakes sink and it becomes irrelevant
  
• new sink created to cover next range of income stream

So a series of money sinks would have to be designed to be appropriate to the needs and desires at each income level. It looks a bit like simulating product flow, whereas Rimworld already has a rich level of detail in products and needs.