# Colony 44: the simulation of economics

Economics is a important part of colony 44. Ok, I know nothing about economics too. But we should try it to implement at least. Producing and consuming is the basics. Buying stuff that not exists for a money you don’t have is another thing. For proper economics simutation we need to divide time to time steps. Each time step is processed by server (counting current prices of all registered economics).

1) Basic trading

Lets have two interfaces for each object of interrest. A factory, and a consumer. Factory produces some product during consuming some resources at the same time step (or we can set a different time interval for consuming and producing). Sometimes factory needs to buy a resources from the market to fill its storage. Sometimes you need to rent a credit from a space bank (and space bank controls the interrest rate).

The asteroid refinery is a factory and consumer at the same time. So we register this factory and a consumer to current local economics to count the actual price. Each cluster of locations has own local economics. People are consumers. They have some needs for resources. They are registered to current local economics too.

2) Resource distribution

All depends on a distribution of resources. If you need to transport a rare element to distant location, the price of it will be high in their economics. It took several weeks to get there with a ship without jump drive (jumping to very distant locations is expensive too, also it is more dangerous). Or if you destroy some refineries or storage areas, the price of the product will be high too. The game should be ballanced with resource distribution (heatmap).

It is impossible to build a new refinery ship or huge space station. So you need to expand to another location and buy or steal or rent a “new” refinery from someone else. If you have nothing for making fuel, oxygen or water, you need to expand and risk a battle to get a resources (sometimes enemy has no ships available to patrol there (or get there fast)). Or sell something what you have (battle ships, another refinery, better equipment configurations). And then you need to transport that to the location you want.

The one of goals of this game is to use existing resources, recycling parts and modyfiing its parameters by researching (and taking an advantage from a progress). You can sell those knowledge to another players. If you have few smaller ships and some junk, you can build a bigger and stronger one (if you have a space docks around). It can be incredible boring to somebody. But it is not a game for all.

lb

Thursday, Mar 5, 2020