5
« on: May 16, 2024, 09:25:31 am »
Ok so with that definition, PU does indeed have "dynamic currency". There is one mechanism by which currency gets "created" by players, and this is injected into the economy via two market effects.
The mechanism is: for a select few commodities in the market, the NPCs (governments) of each of the four "factions" have infinite buy orders at some fixed price. There are two general classes of commodities which have infinite buy orders: economy-starters and wealth-builders. Economy starters are like the NPC governments willing to buy an infinite amount of Hydrogen at one currency unit per unit of Hydrogen. Wealth-builders are the NPC governments willing to buy a commodity that is difficult to produce (requiring a lot of inputs and supply chain) for a high price; say, one unit of High Tech Widget for 50000 currency units.
So what happens is, when the universe is young, not enough people have cash to buy things, but they are making a lot of basic materials, so they sell those basic materials to the NPCs to get some cash. But as soon as people have enough cash, people are going to start buying commodities for higher prices than the NPC price: if I need Hydrogen to make my factory work, I want to buy the Hydrogen and so to get it instead of the NPC getting it, I have to offer something like 1.10 currency per unit of Hydrogen.
As the universe matures, people want more money, so they build more complex supply chains to be able to make the "wealth-builder" items. These items are not usually in demand by the players, so the people making them can sell to the NPC at the "low" NPC price.
On the flip side, there are a few currency sinks: any market transaction has a tax; if the NPCs take the tax, that is a currency sink. Renting NPC station space I think is also a sink. On the market side, if there is really too much currency floating around, if production from the player base is not high enough, the NPCs do have a few commodities they will sell an infinite amount of at very high prices. For example, the NPCs might sell 1 unit of hydrogen for 100 currency units. So if the players have such a high demand for Hydrogen, and enough currency in their bank accounts to afford it, they'll buy up all the player-produced Hydrogen and then have to pay 100 currency/unit to get it from the NPCs. But very quickly, people might start producing hydrogen, because they can sell it for 99 currency/unit, etc.
So this to me is dynamic currency - players control the money supply by making goods to increase the supply so much the price drops to the NPC "create money" price (players need money, not goods) and by buying goods at higher and higher prices until the prices rise to the NPC "destroy money" price (players need goods, not money).
It's also fascinating because there are four independent currencies, only linked by the forex market and through trading of actual commodities. So currency A might be 3 units per Hydrogen, but currency B might be 5 units per hydrogen. What's really fun is that the forex trade, though, might not be in that 3:5 ratio, which means there is significant opportunity for making profit off the differences.
