Economy system for medieval BBG

[Chris]

I need it for Europe1300, but feel free to discuss it in a general way

There are kingdoms (predefined), players join these as citizens, they elect one player as their king. There are also cities (predefined, belongs to a kingdom), each player is a resident of one city (home city).

Players have action points/energy/whatever and they spend it on producing various things (there is a specialization), anyway, in the end they have various goods for sale also they might need to buy some resources (materials to make their products). Generally, players are (usually) mostly selling stuff and NPCs are buying it (but sometimes other players will want to buy something too). So, players are primarily producers.


Now, how to make the economy system for the goods exchange/selling? Note that I want to avoid multiaccount incentives, so direct free trade between players is out of question.

Generally, there are two notions. On the one hand I want a standard market model (which means prices are stable and represent supply and demand) on the other I want speculation/merchanting (which require big fluctuation of prices).

So, I thought of two ways of selling goods.
First, there is a market. Everyone sell and buy in the merket for a given market price (the merket want to make a profit too, so the selling and buying prices are a bit different). Depending on the volume of transactions the market decide to change the price for next day/hour. It is a nice system for selling and buying things that players need.
Second, there are player owned shops in each city. Only NPCs can buy from shops (not players), each city is considered a separate closed economy system, only shops in that city determine the "market price" (actually here the more appropriate name would be a "shop price"). If you are the only player that has a shop that is selling bread, you are local monopolist and you can set the prices quite high. NPCs are customers and they buy things, the price they are willing to pay (or to be more prices, how much they are willing to buy at a given price) is based on some simple algorithm.

What you think? Weak points of this? Other ideas?

[hiigara]

Allowing trade between users is a good feature. It adds to the social aspect of the game
I thought about 2 ways of allowing direct trade:
1) You can always allow direct trading between premium users. This can also be one more reason to make your players buy premium.
2) Have a way of veryfing that 2 players are 2 different persons. At the time of the trade they must both be online and the IP must be different. Of course a player can use multiple internet connections and proxies, but there is limit on how many IP's he will be able to operate at the same time.

Wadda you think?

[Nox]

Auctions? They can trade, but with enough people it's a gamble if it ends up with their main or not

[Chris]

No.... I don't want to even touch direct trading I simply hate it

As for actions these are seriously flawed. Works only with many players, don't allow instant buying of things and of course allow some cheating (much easier to protect than direct trade, but still), are not very good for selling higher volume of unified goods (like bricks, imagine auction for bricks? )

[hiigara]

Auctions? They can trade, but with enough people it's a gamble if it ends up with their main or not

The hour or day of the auction must be random otherwise a seller with multiple accounts will start the auction when there is few people online. Alternatively the auction must last a few days, so everyone can see what's in offer.

But there is still one problem with auctions:
Let's say I have two accounts, 1 and 2.
On account 1 I have item A worth $50. On account 2 I have item B worth $1,000,000.
Account 2 puts item B on auction for $5,000,000.
Nobody is going to bid because it's overpriced. With my account 1 I bid the $5,000,000 and get item B.
Since I control both accounts it's easy to recover the $4,000,000 I payed extra. I just put item A on sale for $4,000,000.
Again nobody else is going to bid because it's overpriced. So I bid with my account 2.

So you see it's easy to subvert auctions and swap items between accounts.

[hiigara]

No.... I don't want to even touch direct trading I simply hate it

As for actions these are seriously flawed. Works only with many players, don't allow instant buying of things and of course allow some cheating (much easier to protect than direct trade, but still), are not very good for selling higher volume of unified goods (like bricks, imagine auction for bricks? )

In real life business there are auctions for all sorts of raw materials and commodities, including bricks. Garbage collectors here in Portugal auction batches of garbage to recycling companies!!!

[AltarofScience]

this is totally unworkable. firstly what if there are no bread sellers in a town. do npcs die? if they don't die, what is there motivation to buy bread? same for all other things. removing direct trade between players ruins the social aspect of the game. i mean i guess they can still fight? where is the community? players will compete within cities to sell the most goods to npcs with your system. that does not make for social fun when players in the same city are allies.

the market sounds like an auction house imo. why cant a multi sell an item there and buy it with his other account?

this system seems like loads of work to dodge multies and it still don't matter. i can think of many ways to abuse monopoly system with multies in lowly populated cities.

now, you are trying to make a merhcanting system, buy low sell high, how is that going to work? is there an amount of time it takes to travel to another city? do players actions affect prices, like if i sell alot does the price lower?

i still cant get passed the npc thing just not making sense.

[Chris]

No, NPCs don't die without bread, why would they? Their purpose in life is only to buy things from the player, that's the only meaning of their existence When there is no bread they simply eat worms they dig from the earth or go hunting in near forests, or eat some roots so they can survive till the happy day when the *player* comes. There is plenty ways to rationalize how they survive without player's bread. I guees the best one would be a merchant guild that is selling all goods for a high price, when the player comes he sells at a lower price (so NPCs are happy because now they can buy it cheaper).

removing direct trade between players ruins the social aspect of the game.

I completely disagree. None of my games have direct trading, also most BBGs don't have any form of trading at all. These still work perfectly.

First of all, I plan two completely separate systems.
* Market (it is slightly similar to auction house as you mentioned, but only slightly). Players sell to the market and buy from the market. The market is global (one in the game or one per kingdom, definitely not one per city). So, the prices are quite stable.
* Shops, in each city a player can setup a shop, they can setup it in any city (althrough they pay lower taxes if it is a city in their kingdom, also they will have a limit of shops). The shop can only sell goods, no buying possible. This is local ecosystem (per city). The prices can, and will, vary greatly.

now, you are trying to make a merhcanting system, buy low sell high, how is that going to work?

No, merchanting does not always mean buy low sell high, there are more options In this game it's more like player is the producer and is selling his production in various cities.

players will compete within cities to sell the most goods to npcs with your system.

That's precisely correct (for the shop system), there is also market system which is aimed mostly at player to player trading.

i can think of many ways to abuse monopoly system with multies in lowly populated cities.

I forgotten to add that you can sell in several cities and you don't have to sell in your home city. Therefore, there won't be lowly populated cities Also, you can't abuse it via multies (shops, not market) since you can only sell. So you can't make multies to buy your products.

that does not make for social fun when players in the same city are allies.

Well... I'm not sure about this one. Being an ally does not mean you have to be an ally in all aspects and all the time I guess... Also, they can just "divide" cities so they don't sell the same goods in the same cities and therefore they don't compete with each other.

[Chris]

No.... I don't want to even touch direct trading I simply hate it

As for actions these are seriously flawed. Works only with many players, don't allow instant buying of things and of course allow some cheating (much easier to protect than direct trade, but still), are not very good for selling higher volume of unified goods (like bricks, imagine auction for bricks? )

In real life business there are auctions for all sorts of raw materials and commodities, including bricks. Garbage collectors here in Portugal auction batches of garbage to recycling companies!!!

But that's one company selling it to few other companies and they do it like once per year or something.

Imagine 1000 brickmakers making an auction to sell bricks to 1000 builders 10 times a day? Auction is not viable for high transaction volume trading of unified goods. For things like that there must be some market price "today the market price for bricks is $1.50, which is +$0.01 than yesterday".

[AltarofScience]

No.... I don't want to even touch direct trading I simply hate it

As for actions these are seriously flawed. Works only with many players, don't allow instant buying of things and of course allow some cheating (much easier to protect than direct trade, but still), are not very good for selling higher volume of unified goods (like bricks, imagine auction for bricks? )

In real life business there are auctions for all sorts of raw materials and commodities, including bricks. Garbage collectors here in Portugal auction batches of garbage to recycling companies!!!

But that's one company selling it to few other companies and they do it like once per year or something.

Imagine 1000 brickmakers making an auction to sell bricks to 1000 builders 10 times a day? Auction is not viable for high transaction volume trading of unified goods. For things like that there must be some market price "today the market price for bricks is $1.50, which is +$0.01 than yesterday".

you say it doesnt work buy dont explain why. they do auctions in travian all the time. works fine.