Okay this is better than I was expecting for a new thread - you might want to make the "economics" title clearer. Dynamic value sounds more like just a simplistic browser game/MMO economy type thing.
By the way,
Nobody should bother to read the other thread. I found it personally useful for sharpening my understanding of some stuff I was rusty on to have a foil, but it really wouldn't be as helpful to others. I'll use it for personal notes and pull out good stuff if relevant here.
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Anyway, comments so far on this page
Currency: I think currency should be ignored
at first at least, or if anything, just treated as something dwarves keep a tiny stock of on hand in order to fill in small trade differences.
1) Currency in the 14th century isn't fiat currency anyway, it would all be just the raw value of the metal, and would realistically be treated just like a commodity regardless.
2) You need a system able to handle bartering anyway, because lots of times you wouldn't have coins on hand even if you wanted to, so non-coin needs to be a feature anyway.
Conclusion) might as well start with bartering first, without thinking of anything as special "currency"
Scale: We should probably be
focusing on "macro" (in DF terms) economics mostly, not within-fort stuff like rent and individual preferences and stuff. And we should be
focusing on NPC trading. NPCs trading with NPCs on a large fort-fort scale is going to be the
huge majority of trading in any world and the major determinant of markets. It also puts the most constraints on algorithms and rules. Once we figure out how to simulate a bunch of NPCs all trading with one another, slotting in a human fort should be easy -- the market will already be there, and it's mainly just removing some of the automation and putting it in the player's hands.
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Also, some of the most challenging decisions I ran into from the last thread, summarized briefly:
1) How to integrate special things like survival needs versus economic profit trades? You can't just act like a disembodied profit machine at all times, because a long term investment is not a good investment if you starve to death before you see the payout. So food seems like it needs to be treated a bit differently (and medicine and sometimes weapons) This is considered in classic economics, but is a bit beyond my expertise as to
exactly how.
2) Caravan pathing. The simplest way to think about it is to just send out a caravan to one trade partner and have it come back. But in real life this would be silly. You'd want to have it visit other intermediate stops along the way, and have "trade corridors" and things. But doing so massively increases the complexity and headache of figuring out how to code it.
3) Order of trade, even within just the "for profit" goods. Trickier than you might think. Let's say, for example, that you have the following possible trades, between party A and B:
A's surplus B's surplus
50 70
40 60
50 10
40 40
Do you go in order of the highest sum of surpluses each time? If so, you're sort of unfairly favoring B here, because all the trades that have highest totals happen to favor B.
Alternatively, do you try to keep the surpluses roughly equal between both parties as you go? So you might start with 50/70 as the highest total, but then 50/10 to compensate. But if so, that's overall inefficient for the whole market.
There's not a clear answer I can tell.
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And finally, a google docs rough outline of the whole process as far as I had it worked out so far, without too much algorithmic detail. Should be open for comments if this is a helpful format:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d3aLcs1g_zRbn9cXVAqsmLKkrpsyR4oNOg5DHLwLzJM/edit?usp=sharing