Economics

[Greep]

Someone mentioned in another mod I'm working on, strategy mode, that they'd like to see supply and demand economics.

Looks like I might actually be able do this.  So here's my brain dump if anyone wants to join in:

Current goals:

-Eliminate all item sell factors/taintedness

-Have a "supply level" for things, where both it's label and general category has a supply level and modify it's market value.  With neutral being a 5% multiplier in player's favor, with high supply/low supply being, say, 40%/-40% at a very flooded/bought out level.

-Supply is dealt with in raw silver value.  So if you sell 500 flake @14, it will add "500x14" to the "supply"

-End of season the supply levels "normalize a bit": supply goes towards 0 from either positive or negative, with further away from 0 going faster to 0.  Bad IRL logic, good game logic I'm thinking.  I'm thinking either game ticks or colony wealth will also alter the rate of neutralizing, with high wealth colonies able to supply/buy lots of a given item.  Wealth would be bad for vanilla, good for strategy mode.

Example:  Selling craptons of flake will flood both the drug category supply and the item "flake" supply.  Selling all raider drops will rapidly flood weapons, though maybe you could make some money crafting in the beginning.  that said, the flooding of weapons will make weapons cheaper for you to buy.  I like this

The way this is currently working in code is that it won't alter your wealth, just your trade prices, so it might lead to some odd behavior with players doing wealth shenanigans.  Since this is mostly for strategy mode, that won't matter, although this is definitely going to be a separate mod.

Other possible addons:

-Recessions/Booms
-Supply by faction?  Worth the additional work?  Sounds like it would be confusing and not good.

[username2]

This is super interesting. Would love this mod.

If effect could start "earlier" and mod could do below would be fantastic

1) allocate resources (stones/crops) to map regions at random
2) disallow none native crops from player
3) overwrite meals and create more meal types to require more/difference resources
4) overwrite stone defs to differentiate their value more clearly

[Greep]

Yeah I've been thinking about that sort of thing, wondering if its outside of the scope of the mod, though.  In order to change crops, I'd have to make it meaningful:  All of the foods more or less are the same, so limiting a map to, say "corn+cloth" isn't much different than "corn+rice+potatoes+cloth".  Which I guess is why you made the 3rd suggestion.  And not allowing a food type feels a bit too punishing.