Is consumption and the like also modeled? If I used my dungeoneering profits to divert food away from a town and into my private storehouse, would there be starvation, and would I be able to gouge the good people for essential goods?
That's the plan. Right now every economic agent needs food to work, and won't work if they can't eat. Currently, a food shortage will drive up the price of food (that's the case with every resource) and any product which requires food to make, which is, well, everything. There's no starvation modeled yet, since I'm not sure how to do it. Since there will be a much bigger population in a city than there are economic agents participating in the economy, I'm not quite sure what to do. First off, I need to determine exactly what one unit of "food" is, and secondly, I need to map this onto the general population. I'm thinking there will be a granary where surplus food is automatically stored (maybe the government pays the farmers a little bit for it), and then other agents can draw from this for free when there's a food shortage. Once the granary runs out and there's no more food in the economy, then things can get interesting. Ideally there will be lots of people turning into bandits, emigration from the city, revolts, and anarchy. Sieging cities to starve them out will be a definite option and can lead to many interesting things.
The "Beliefs" column reflects this, where the format is <belief (uncertainty)>.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Is the number their believed cost of an item, and then the bracketed number how far they would deviate from that number when purchasing & selling?
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They believe that they can get the good if they offer somewhere in the range of belief+-uncertainty. As they make more successful trades, they adjust the price and lower the uncertainty, and vice versa for unsuccessful trades.
It's slightly confusing for 2 reasons:
1) an agent will never sell a good for less than it costs to make (so their belief may be pretty low, but they'll check what it cost them to make multiplied by a profit margin and won't go any lower than that)
2) When an agent makes a bid or an offer to sell, they are matched up with potential buyers/sellers and meet each other in the middle for price. The highest bidder is matched with the lowest seller, and so on, so a buyer's price belief is generally higher, and the seller's belief generally lower, than what the goods end up going for. It sounds weird, but it works.
As for a public release, I'm not too sure. This is definitely a hobby project, but I've had more time lately to work on it. There's one last major bug I can't track down with the economy and caravans. Once I fix that, I need to do some long-term testing to make sure the economies are sustainable (they are in my isolated testing, but I'm not sure about in the game world with goods going around in caravans and stuff). After that, I want to do more work on armies and governments, so that there will be a minimum of interesting things going on for a player. Once that's done I'd like to release a tech demo/alpha thing. I'm hoping to make the economy pretty easy to mod in, so I'd like to get people to play around with adding different resources and see how it results.
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Topic: Iron Testament - an ancient "open world roguelike" (pre-alpha) (Read 81891 times)