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Keybounce
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« on: February 21, 2010, 22:16 » |
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This is an odd question to consider. What is money in this game? Why do we have a limit?
What's happening here? Well, there's a valuable good in the ground -- Crysite. We're sending a colony of 4 miners, presumably their families, and some support in the form of a colony store.
But who is paying for all this? Not the miners. No, the miners are not in charge of the resources. No, the company that is funding this operation and trying to make money is.
So lets see how things work:
1. A company funds a development project. Gets a starter supply of stuff, and 4 victims workers.
2. Once a month, a trade ship arrives to purchase the crysite. Occasionally, the "trade ship" is a pirate that steals the crysite. This is where the company makes a profit -- they buy crysite from the miners at the colony store, and sell it to the trade ship.
So where is "money" in this?
Well, there are limited resources for the colony. Not everyone gets to do everything.
And, ultimately, the crysite produced has a real value.
But where is that money stored? The company's bank account is back in civilization. It's almost certain that your own bank accounts are there also -- not only is there no "bank" here, but money here has no value. We trade it electronically back there. Over here, food and energy, and smithore, have value. Crysite is just something we produce to earn a profit over the year. It's an export. Heck, even smithore is just a way to get a temporary bit of cash from the company (and they make the profit on the crysite trade). Sure, you might think that the smithore->mule route results in the company giving you money for smithore and then taking it back in the mules, but we all know that the two rounds of high-priced dumping yields money into the colony. I've experimented with trying to supply high-priced energy to the miners as a way to get some of that cash myself, but have concluded that it doesn't work -- too few people understand the value of high volume specialization, and produce some energy plants rather than more ore.
When you sell to the store, you don't actually get paper bills that you hold in your hand. You get credit in the electronic banking system of the day.
Alright, so what's the point then of saying that you only have $X, and cannot spend more than what you have?
What would really change if the company said "We're going to pretend you have $20,000 plus X rather than just X"?
Well, the colony still produces the same end product for profit -- crysite. The miners don't actually have more money, and can't cash it out for imperial credits -- it's only usable at the company store.
There's an artificial limit of available cash that affects the value of land at the beginning of the game, and restricts the ability of people to develop stuff. Economically, this makes no sense -- the company will get a better colony, and more profit from the crysite trade, by being less restrictive on development.
So what's the downside to just saying "Add 20K to everyone's starting level; add 90K to the target colony level goals"? There are two. First, it becomes possible for a badly managed colony to "spend itself broke" on land, resulting in a colony loss instead of a colony win. Players will learn and adjust.
Second, and serious, players can dump mules with complete ease. The price of mules -- and equivalently, the value of smithore within the colony -- becomes out of balance. A restriction, such as "you may not consume more than empty plots + 1 mule(s) on your turn" is needed. And by itself, some will object to that -- dumping mules to drive up smithore is a way to make money from company stupidity. So perhaps add "unless the supply of mules in the store is at least number of empty plots left to run plus the number of players left to run". Which means that you can dump mules if there aren't many left, or if you're late in the turn order.
But this combination -- more cash to start with, higher targets to win -- combined with a restricting on dumping mules -- will result in a bigger economic challenge and colony production.
In fact, lets go one step farther. You start with 20,000 company store bucks, and 1,000 imperial credits. When you spend money at the store, you spend company store bucks until it is gone, and imperial credits next. When you get money from the store, you get imperial credits. When you trade with people, you get whatever they spend -- and lets say that here imperial credits are traded before company store bucks.
At the end of the game, company store bucks have no value at all -- only the imperial credits count. Now see if you break 60,000 IC's or not.
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