I'm going to play the Founders as a "necessary jobs at a premium" workforce. Whatever you gents don't figure out for yourselves in terms of basic needs, the Founders will pitch in and take care of if they're able, charging that District for the "service". (All role-played of course.) Looks like burrows are going to be more of a pain in the ass than a contribution to the game, so let's do away with them permanently.
This being the "blueprint" stage, specifying what wood is used for building should be alright - I can just count how many olive logs come from each chopped tree and when they make it to a nearby stockpile, select only olive logs up to the same number for building. It all comes down to careful book-keeping on some paper outside the game itself.
Coins will certainly soon become valuable as resources become more easily predictable in relation to each-other. The trick is to create a cycle of needs, coins are a good indication of where the economy hits a snag, because they'll flow along with transactions until there's more going in than coming out. Of course, this damming of currency is often freed up by trading them in large quantities for luxury goods which have no real use other than to be aesthetically pleasing and to confer some form of social legitimacy via "display of wealth". Personally, I see currency as a way to trade for resources not yet available - they're basically "IOU" notes and are only really useful when whomever is giving the implied promise to trade the resources the currency is standing in for is known with a certainty that they can do so. I believe that's called "strong currency". When things are a bit more risky, and there's a chance that inflation will devalue the amount of future resources that a coin will be able to be traded for in the future, then there's usually less trust that the currency is worth holding onto, and people will trade it immediately for whatever limited resources are available, often then driving the price of whatever's left sky high. With stuff that can rot or rust, its better to have coins that don't rot or rust in order to get them when you need them. Likewise bulky items like furniture, because not everyone will have the space to store them.
Most MMO's cheat by creating "gold generators" and "gold sinks" that create money and then destroy it via Player interaction. The amount of currency per person in a given game remains roughly the same, no matter how many people are playing it, and as a consequence, prices remain fixed. Our experiment here will be one where the only way to remove currency from the system will be to melt it down into bars once more. (Using labor, time and resources to do so.)
The Founders have already sold the anvil to the Lakecastle district, so it seems that until another anvil is bought from the caravan, that they are going to be the only ones capable of smithing coins. Considering they're also the ones who will be hiring themselves out as a mining team, I think the Founders will request that the price of the anvil be paid over the next 2 years in aluminum coins. However many Aluminum coins are created in that period will equal 5000DB, and that will create the worth of each coin in inter-district trade value. I think 10 stacks of coins will do nicely: 5000 coins will make each one worth 1DB in trade. Whenever a District wishes to trade using a resource they don't yet have, they'll be able to borrow the appropriate amount of currency from the Founder's Bank to cover the cost and the Founder's Bank will only charge a small fee to provide this service.
As the game progresses, I see other types of metal becoming different denominations of currency as needed for ease of trade. For instance, if someone is hoarding all the aluminum coins and as a result, there aren't enough coins to go around, then trading those hoarders a stack of 5DB or even 10DB coins might free up enough of the 1DB coins that there's enough to let trade flow freely again, but that will also mean that the sum total of DB able to be traded has increased past 5000, so the individual worth of each coin will be less. (Yay, inflation!) To deflate the number of DB in circulation, either those 5 and 10DB coins are removed from trade by exchanging them for goods then storing them away or destroying enough currency that only 5000DB of it remain (which means someone loses that wealth, which sucks unless you're an MMO "gold sink" NPC.)
We may find that we'll eventually need more money in circulation anyway, which might make the aluminum 1DB coin worth 1/100 of a DB after awhile, like what's happened to the American Penny.
Oh, this will be very interesting.
Author
Topic: "The City" (Multiplayer-ish Dwarven Economy) 42.05 LNP -Combined game phase- (Read 34820 times)