I've always been interested in deep economy games where the economy drives the gameplay to a degree. The main reason for that is in my mind it's a really easy starting point to the question, how do you provide a space where the player can change / shape the world, while still having the world push back, return to normal or if successful, converge on a new normal?
So for example take any zacklike, one thing I'd like to try is having something like those mechanisms drove the supply of goods in an in-game economy, which would then feed in as input into other systems.
Well any complex system as the input would do =)...
So I've spent a lot of times tinkering with economic simulation games, the tricky thing is making them fun / balanced. I'm still trying to work out nice ways of debugging them when they break / become unstable. A lot of it at the moment is plotting data over time to see where failure points occur.
Yes - something where you were the Jerome Powell and would be controlling the Fed funds rate, QE/QT cycle, MBS buying on the open market - would seem topical given current conditions.
In fact I'd even be interested in just a mod for an existing business sim like a SimCity/Anno1800 where you could get loans based rates and consumer demand was in response to central bank activities.
Actually just found that OpenTTD seems to have some of this but haven't played it yet as the graphics are a bit retro for my taste. But maybe I'll take look.
This is such a fascinating challenge I want to tackle!
I'm creating Archapolis, a city builder game. Handling the micro economy is a far off goal. But one aspect of the game I want to implement on the macro scale is charging ~30% more for utilities and goods imported into the city.
So one of the goals of the player is help grow the businesses they want. This helps the budget in three ways:
- Collecting corporate tax
- Collecting sales tax
- Higher margins on goods
For anything that is imported, they city loses potential income by not being able to tax corporate and lower profit margins
Really nice, I'm less focused on the transport question directly, instead abstracting that to a distance measure for now.
I'm more interested in trying to get economic behaviours modelled in a nice way where the system responds to shocks and responding to the varying behaviour of it's agents.
Inspired by a pun, I had an idea for a game where the players are doing currency trading, while in the background there's a non-player driven Civilization-style competition influencing (and influenced by) the markets.
Oh Factorio is excellent, but in my mind it's an entirely different game, for a start the whole game, even multiplayer isn't played out in the same terms. It's very much focused on logistics and production, but from the perspective that all players have access to this pipe output of a gigafactory that exists to produce useful stuff for them that they can all share / use together.
That's not the same as an economy, yes, you have logistics chains and production lines and yes, they affect each other. However, it's not a shared space and I think that leads to a very different gameplay experience.
But yes, Factorio is definitely the canonical example of the game in its space.
A very long time ago, it's not quite the same thing, but if you're a big fan, you might give [0] a look, it was inspired by the game developer asking the question, what if we made a game based on the Age of Empires marketplace?
So for example take any zacklike, one thing I'd like to try is having something like those mechanisms drove the supply of goods in an in-game economy, which would then feed in as input into other systems.
Well any complex system as the input would do =)...
So I've spent a lot of times tinkering with economic simulation games, the tricky thing is making them fun / balanced. I'm still trying to work out nice ways of debugging them when they break / become unstable. A lot of it at the moment is plotting data over time to see where failure points occur.