So I only have one other post on the forums in the “What interests you most” thread. I went on about economy and how it will affect our little… stonehearthians?
Anyways, I figured the collective knowledge of the forums would know if there has been any mention of a currency based economy system. What I mean is an actual mint that makes coins and once there is an appropriate amount of coinage for your town the money would be dispersed to a manager/overseer that would pay the workers for the type of work they did. They could then spend the money on food, clothes, rent, or whatever else they might need money for. While I would like to learn the programming to make this a reality via mod if it isn’t in the game I don’t have that kind of time.
I believe it will run similar to an (ideal) socialist society in which all the Stonehearthians share a pool of cash that’s used for trading ect. I don’t think it’ll go so deep as to have you actually minting money or having citizens on payroll. On the subject of crabs I’m not much of a seafood fan but a crab titan sounds interesting to me.
I like crabs. As a child I had one (it name was Ralph) and he always fought with the fish (and lost a lot of limps that grew back, fascinating creatures).
@ Topic: The economy is a big ? for me. And also depends on the resources how they are mined and refined. As far as I came reading in the forum this is not decided.
I personally believe if you have to full fill a lot of needs for your population, this resources have to be endless. Otherwise you get a distopian game, where you drain the hole world until everything collapses (that might be to much reality in an cuddly sandbox game).
On the other hand endless resources are much less satisfying. When you cut down a forest or dig an enormous hole for mining minerals it is just awesome. But you get into problems in the late game I suspect.
But may be you can prevent this partly by some kind of recycling (that could be great, I think I never played a game where you recycled resources … ok not true I played SupCom, but no building game!!!)
I agree with Crobo that your citizens probably wont make big decisions themselves, except within the tasks u give them.
As for your point on resources, when your city gets so big it can drain resources u can still:
Plant trees for wood
Breed animals for animal related stuff
Stone probably wont be renewable and neither will minerals, but if u mine deep enough u probably wont run out. Or maybe u can disassemble items into their crafting components.
Also if rare materials would be renewable, they would lose their rarity, and so their value.
the specifics of one, not that i’m aware of… but there is another thread that has been discussing the pros and cons of gold vs. bartering based economies over here…
@SteveAdamo Thanks for the link. It is an interesting discussion. I like that mostly everyone arrived at the conclusion that both a gold trading and bartering system almost seem necessary.
In general if a gold bartering system exists then gold exists and I might be able to mod some basic internal functions using currency.
On the topic of resource gathering, I’m sure there has to be some limit. It won’t really be fun if the resources are infinite, because they won’t really mean anything.
I’d try to create an stereo typical Amish, peasant society but with no religion with a agricultural based economy. And run Marxist inspired economic policies. Equal pay for all workers of the same occupation. Then institute government ownership of everything and have a huge army armed with modded muskets.
So I like economics. One of my favorite things about Dwarf Fortress was dwarven economy. To put it as simply as possible, dwarven economy was a system set up so that once you minted enough coins it would kick in. You would have a banker of some kind to handle the currency and pay dwarves based on their jobs. Living space would start to cost rent, and dwarves would have to pay for everything they needed including food and clothing.
While Stonehearth doesn’t seem to have the kind of crazy depth DF had (clothing deterioration mainly) it does have food and other requirements for an economy.
Based on what I know of Stonehearth it will use a job based system, like Timber and Stone. (Which I hadn’t played until very recently, Steve Adamo in the credits!)
So here’s the setup in my head:
I don’t want someone in charge of dispersing money. People will be paid based on how much they earn at their profession. Farmers sell food, carpenters sell furniture, tools, and building materials. Builders sell, well, buildings. Money will be distributed based on profession once enough coin is minted.
Currency should change hands efficiently. Specifically I mean to have each person decide how much their money is worth to them and whether or not it’s worth the price. If Jor Dirtyhands only makes 4 coins today and rent is two coins, he needs food with his other two coins and might not be able to afford a fancy new iron hoe.
So probably biting off more than I can chew but I know how currency and real economies work and have acceptable programming skills. I figured I would throw this up here to see if anyone else was interested and had helpful input or feedback.
Yes, though would this also make characters self proficient? Because that would be interesting, where at some point, your people decide what items they have.
Yea that’s where it does get… interesting. Eventually my villagers will have to decide what they “own”. They real problem is making sure that everything ends up as being owned. I’m not really sure yet how this will go as it kinda depends on how they plan to handle inventories.
This also leads to interesting things that probably will never happen because of the crazy comparison of depth to DF, but I have had dwarves murder each other over beer.
These were my thoughts exactly, it would certainly be one way to add “personality” to your settlers. Having their own individual inventory, going out to shop, potentially stealing, finding awesome loot and keeping it for themselves if they were somewhat greedy.
Having them walk around managing their own needs would be incredibly interesting (as well as incredibly hard I imagine) - it would be cool to be able to just zone an area off and let your settlers go to work on whatever they wanted.
right! well, we know they will do this to an extent already, in that we dont have to tell them to eat, sleep, etc. they’ll do that based on their own individual “needs” and external criteria…
seems like a plausible extension of this behavior to give units a potential “need” to acquire goods/spend currency… that would certainly add a new layer of detail to the world…
imagine establishing a unit as running a “store” of sorts, that the owner was capable of crafting the goods on display… other units could randomly have a need to purchase said goods, enter the store, and the transaction ensues…
of course you then have to contend with a host of new things to program for (unit inventory, cost of goods, etc.)… still, seems plausible…
