Fade wrote:
Yes. I think the ruleset can be shared among any spaceopera game but the dataset is game specific. That's why the system you just described seems to be game sepecific.
The ruleset would have to be game specific as well. Each game has its own things that are being produced, transported and consumed, and each game is using its own rates for that.
The engine compute prices. Prices, including transport and work prices
Prices are game specific as well. There are games that don't even use/have prices --- see widelands, for example.
I think that any action that could be taken by player (now or in further game versions), like crafting, installing facilites, etc should be processed, of course, by a game dependent AI. So I don't see a problem.
It doesn't take an AI for that. And it's game specific as well.
Anyway, such things like creating new economic entity (factory, or other thing) could be human "GM" decisions. But that's only details about implementation.
So you won't only be playing the game but also be a game master who constantly analyses a dozen or so different economies (one for each faction) throughout hundreds or more systems and manages the creation of production places for them at the same time?
You need to consider details of the implementation when thinking about an idea like this. Still the questions I've been asking haven't been answered ...
What we want is that if a player comes to a system counting 1000 people with 10000T empty store, food price will be high, if it's full, food price will be low. What is the limit ? What is the real price ?
There is no limit or real price. Any currency is worth exactly as much as the people using it believe it's worth, that's all to it. Actual numbers to start the simulation with can be set as a relationship, like setting the price for something very basic (like water) to some number (like 1 water costs 1 credit). You need to do that once for all substantial (as in: not produced from other goods) goods, and the production costs of everything else can be calculated from that, including the production costs of water. Then you run the simulation, and prices will evolve. One thing you will have to do is keeping a reasonable limit on the total amount of money available.
All of this is game specific.
It depends about consumtion, available stock, future stock predictions, risk management, etc).
You can only deal with what you have.
You don't need to have game specific variables to describe it, only game specific data. What are the costs of energy ? What is the real price of transport (including costs of lost stocks, etc).
Can you give an example for that?
There are no stocks, no risk management and no currency, no energy costs, no transport costs in some games. Even if you have all that, it's all game specific. In vegastrike, the only thing you have is currency --- and none of the other things.
It's probably sufficient, maybe necessary, to keep the economy rather simple because the universe is huge and has or could have a great number of units that are interacting with each other. The outcome could be quite interesting, and due to the large number of units and a pretty large number of different goods, the implementation of a simple economy already strongly suggests to use a database (like mysql) to maintain all the data that would be involved. I would go as far as to keep track of every container, but I don't see that a good economy simulation will ever be implemented anyway.