Money and Economics

[SpaceDorf]

Addition to the above :

Known Examples :
Diablo X or other Games like this use the Devalue of Player Items and Moneysink solution, because they are a static environment to accomodate a single entity.
The entity produces stuff from nothing by existing and playing the game.
This stuff has to go somewhere .. thus Moneysinks

DF and Economy Simulators : Have Equal and/or Skill dependent prices.
It is possible to make a profit by just buying and selling. DF Economy
is based entirely on Trade, DwarfBucks are only needed for Adventure Mode.

So which of the above is Rimworld ?

[AngleWyrm]

If at any time the Rot Patrol shows up and demands that I give them less than ten steel for the note, then the coin is no longer worth ten steel. That iterates forever as a reverberating echo and the coin becomes worthless.

When they demand that you give them more than ten silver for the iron it either means that iron is more valuable to them or silver is less.

Try buying anything from anyone: You will not receive a balanced trade.
Can you buy back what you gave? Every exchange is a loss of prosperity for the player.
It is not a matter of supply or demand for goods, it is a built-in destruction of participation in trade.

As for models that reflect reality, it is an impossible scenario that everyone lose wealth during trades.

[minimurgle]

Thank you SpaceDorf and S1lverhair. That actually clears up quite a bit.

[JimmyAgnt007]

The thing to keep in mind is that generally people dont want something they sold you back.  Meaning they dont have the demand for it, regardless of its quality.  Depreciation is another thing, the old line about driving a car off the lot.  So if they actually do buy it back, why would they value it the same as you?  They dont need or want it.

The other side of things, buying up a raw material and converting it into a finished good will make it worth more.  (or at least it should)  So it goes both ways.

Rimworld is a balance between realistic and Moneysink.  It works well enough for now but will prolly evolve to meet the demands of the game as it goes.  Silver is simply a consistent value while everything else is subjective to outside factors.  Sure the system could be deeper but it makes enough sense for now. 

[AngleWyrm]

In Rimworld -- as in most games -- resources are infinite. Loot drops from raiders, growing crops, raising animals, making clothes, medicine, food, etc. And so we wind up with efforts to drag out gains by reducing them to a trickle, which distort markets. Shearing a muffalo produces enough wool for four T-shirts per year. 200 muffalo wool/year = 600 silver - transaction losses 4 T-shirts/year = 480 silver - transaction losses

[SpaceDorf]

The thing to keep in mind is that generally people dont want something they sold you back.  Meaning they dont have the demand for it, regardless of its quality.  Depreciation is another thing, the old line about driving a car off the lot.  So if they actually do buy it back, why would they value it the same as you?  They dont need or want it.

So .. same trader in Rimworld .. next Transaction.  Make it a gun, because the have the craziest of the dumb calculation modifiers.

( okay I have to make shit up, because the Wiki does not have the information I need and no trader around ingame .. )

You bought a shiny new Sniper Rifle. Base Price is 4500 S(ilver)
It is of Normal Quality and 100% to remove every other modifier.

Because the Trader is a dick, and reasons, you have to pay 5500 S
You bought it anyway.

Later that day your sniper dies and you think .. to hell with it .. lets get shotguns for the two other guys.

The Trader is still around.

He pays you   630S  ( 4500 x 0.7(game) x 0.2(because weapon) ) for the same Rifle. That is without Trader and other Modifiers.
Even your Cars Salesman would not try to cheat you out of that much money ..

The Baseprise of a Shotgun is 1250 S.

So another calculation starts .. I have 5 pawns left, the trader has two guards who only carry pistols .. the silver the trader drops will buy me about 50 goodwill ..

@AngleWyrm : I am thinking about a Proof of Concept mod.

[AngleWyrm]

What a great idea! The scenario presented by JimmyAgnt007 and then elaborated on by SpaceDorf shows us an aspect of problematic design that might be changeable: That story treats all transactions as going to and coming from a single merchant/entity. The other side of that coin is treating the population of all players as a single entity. Why is that a problem? Because there is no room for the most primitive of motives for trade: The movement of goods from where they are plentiful to where they are scarce. That redistribution of resources is a form of gravity, distributing resources until an equilibrium of sea-level is reached. Other variants of plentiful/scarce are needed/extra and desirable/undesirable. For all three of those differences there is motive to sell from plentiful/extra/undesirable to scarce/needed/desirable, and so movement through sales until the pressure difference drops below profitable.

[17shadow]

I think everyone here is circling around the answer without anyone landing on it. The main problem is that the player evolve in a world where the economy is not stimulated. The infiniteness of ressources does not appear problematic to me, as the scale of the world, the playable timeframe and the world population makes ressources essentially infinites; but only the player pawns work is considered in the equation. The fix is then to simulate this work. More explicitely, its to essentially use Mount n Blade system. Gives each villages random ressources generation (that could even influence the random layout of its base). Weight that in with population, with larger pop also meaning more chances of refined product. Since most ressources are somewhat important in rimworld, makes the caravan deal in the surpluses for whats lacking. Make them favor places that will give them the best price, both on buying and selling, factoring faction relation, time to reach, distance and risks. The base dont have to actually work, that would make the game unplayable. But that would fix the economy and gives factions depths. Since it relies almost entirely on a relatively simple algorithm, once the base programation is done its quite simple to adds progressively more elements to complexify it. The real challenge of making this kind of system in MnB was balance, and most mode broke it completely, making trading completely unviable. Happily for us, balance is irrevelant in rimworld, at least at this level, and it shouldnt be. Are trade relations between the us and gabon balanced? probably not, so why should they be between 10 half dead colonists and an intersideral trader, or pretty much every factions that are all stronger on paper? Anyway, you solve the issue of infinite supply, and the value of is up to the market now (with their base value still determined to the silver one, but if a world produce a load of potatoe every 3 day, they never gonna have any real worth, so meh).

The economy is the mother of all conflict, and this algorithm could eventually even play a larger role in factions relation. Lets say that instead of our current weird faction generators we have a system that gives them an area of influences and a random number of more or less important settlements. I think a good distribution would be outlanders in more densely populated pockets, tribal more dispersed, and pirates always centered close to the border of another factions , with, nice twist there, most of their raiding camps inside those border or between two factions, which would make sense (I always hated isolated clusters of pirates). If you take such a system, add the new economy system, and factor in abilities for settlement to trade and raid, you should also give the ability to any given faction to calculate if its not more worthwhile to raid for the ressources they want from another settlement, or in the opposite to buy peace with it, so they can peacefully acquire them. it would also probably be better to weigh up the cost of war as an option to account for the human cost. raiders should simply have a strong malus to production, which would make them raid all the time, but should be befriendable (they can be pretty rich for a time after all). I wouldnt let a settlement be created by npcs or destroyed by anyone, but the option to conquer should be there for outlanders and tribals to access the base ressource gen. pop could be bought down to zero tho, and if not conquered it would just naturally rise up again from new immigrants. Food, clothes and pops should also be intermingled, and the first one especially overvalued if lacking (which would then make violence a lot more likely, which would make raid way more common and human meat way more profitable).

This would be very relatively simple, would flesh out the two must barebones systems of rimworlds, and would keep the so enjoyable spirit of epic randomness of doom that makes this game so awesome. It could lead to a situation where one tribe conquer another one using the advanced weapon it managed to barter with outlander because it happened to generate gold, but then in a twist of history use the new manpower to overpower the world. Think of the possibilities!

[SpaceDorf]

How could I forget about Mount and Blade .. thats a really good example.
Only downside : The Moneydump is still weapon and armor .. you can't make a profit with those.

Which Is bad .. because I want to be the one who supplied the tribals with
Charge Rifles.

The Mod is in the works and it seems it will be a Story-Teller Mod .. thats where the main modifiers seem to be buried.
I am still waiting on a Trader to check out the complete calculation, so I know where I have to look for, or if I can counter it by Story-Teller Modification.

[AngleWyrm]

@17shadow, great post.

So here's a rough sketch of a schema for faction bases that could incorporate some of those concepts.

• population, which presents labor, which might eventually be subdivided into work categories.
• Inventory for a base, from which overage/shortage can be determined according to what they primarily work on
• Location bias, where mountains provide stone (tile can even tell which ones), plains give more agriculture/ranching and so on.

Inventory might also contain a group for work enhancement; work benches, improved work benches, tech research. Things that contribute to the rate of production.

[SpaceDorf]

@anglewyrm ..

I haven't seen the symbol for the connection between the objects yet.
My guess is it's a One to N connection, but I prefer to ask.

[AngleWyrm]

1..N is marked on the line going to Stuff, where N is represented as an infinity symbol. And yes, it should also appear over the line between faction and base, so that there are 1..unbounded bases associated with a faction. Probably no faction should exist with 0 bases, but that's debatable.

The symbol in (all) of the yellow circles shows which type of collection, either a sequence of things (location, population, inventory), or a choice of only one of the set of things, or the set of all the things. For this sketch it should probably be required that all of the set (location, population, inventory) exist.

Will update shortly...

Ok here's a less sketchy...sketch

• Included the arbitrary decision that a faction must have at least one base, as a way to mark the elimination of a faction. Could be changed if it seems limiting
• The three components of a base (location, population, inventory) are all expected to be present
• In a base, base/location doesn't necessarily have to have at least one resource, but could have many. What if there's a terrain type that doesn't offer some significant bonus? Maybe there's a general all-around type that's normal in all departments. So it seemed like a good idea to allow for the possibility that there aren't any significant resources in a given tile

So here's a question: Can a base have zero population? If everyone is exterminated, then does it still count as a base? Or should it be removed from play, marked as abandoned, or maybe to be replaced by ruins or some such?

Meanwhile, it seems like there may be an XML somewhere in the CORE mod that expresses these relationships so I'm going to go rooting around for truffles.

[AngleWyrm]

Roads and inter-faction business Additionally the more trade you make, the more likely dirt roads will be built leading to your colony. If you have enough materials or if you do enough business with another colony better brick roads can be built by either you or a colony that massively speeds up your travel time. This idea could also form a simulation for the road networks that informs the player from world-view on trade routes. A table is created with all bases listed in columns and in rows. The entries in the table contain the distance between the two. That distance is a cost in time and food for making the trip. Then we can compare the resource needs/productions, and if there is a compatible (profitable) pairing a light road forms from the traffic, reducing the distance cost for making that trip. If there are compatible trades going both ways, then a more developed road is created between them, further reducing the travel cost.

[AngleWyrm]

For the case of inventory, it might make more sense to track production potential rather than actual goods. Maybe the combination of local resources and population work is sufficient to create a model simulating output expectations across the various possible things colonies can produce. That could make need for supplies a simpler calculation as a target supply income for their potential production.

[AngleWyrm]

...add copper to the game; It's value would be possibly on-par with iron, but it's better for certain types of electronics (conduits, for sure) and it's another item, like silver, that is often traded in bulk.

I'm getting a sense there is some blending between IRL and... IGL(?) taking place, so I'd like to sort that out a bit:

• IRL: traded in bulk, usable for electrical equipment
• IGL: value would could be on par with iron

Steel is an ingredient in many items, and players are likely to build lots of those. So the result is the player has an ongoing demand for enough steel to produce 'lots of those' over the course of the game. That demand for steel can be envisioned as a river of steel, with a usage rate measured in steel/season.

Gold has very little use in the game; players are likely to build only a handful of things with it. So the result is the player has a small demand for gold to produce 'only a handful' of things during the game. That demand can be envisioned as a stream of gold, trickling through the game when compared to steel.