The real problem with trade

Gold may be small but it weighs a lot......i value gold in favor of 2 to 1....i offer 6K of gold for 3K of resources...works for me as all my trades go...

Why do you think being able to transport more gold is going to help?  The very desire for such is only indication of how much gold's value has plummeted, and it needs value restored, not perpetually allowed to spiral further downward by moving ever greater quantities.

Gold is not small.  Gold the same size in units as every other resource, and being defined arbitrarily as a number like every other resource, does not need to complicate transportation systems.  It is however worthless, which makes us think of gold units as being some tiny quantity.  How small does a unit of gold have to be that it be deems worth less than a unit of wood?  Gold is normally worth far more whether compared by mass, volume, shininess, or the gleam in a gold digger's eye.

But how can gold be valuable at any relative size when we have so much of it?  The other basic resources are spent far more, yet gold is the resource we can gather the most by at least an order of magnitude.  It won't matter how much we can move or spend it unless the desirability of spending it actually exceeds our ability to harvest.  (Remember that by natural, intuitive cost-benefit analysis, as we gain more of the things for which we can spend gold, the price we are willing to pay for more decreases--and more so when currency supply dwindles.  Equilibrium is not reached until our strong appetites exceed our ability to sate them.  Income has to be matched by expense before we find the prices too steep.)  Given how much taxation can increase income, that would be one heck of a continuing long term expense.  Even the desire to hoard a resource dissipates when we realize it doesn't hold its value anyway.

No one is hording gold though--why would they?  I have a ton, and I'd gladly spend it on everything under the sun because I have so much and it is useful only as a means to an end.  But of course no one wants it because it's as worthless to them as it is to me.  At the quantities I'd have to spend to gain anything of worth, I might as well just keep it for upkeep buffer on a rainy day, like if I'm besieged and suffer a major population drop.  But that's not the same as hoarding.

Consider mercenaries as a spending option.  At ten times the gold upkeep, I wouldn't use them regularly.  At 20 times the gold upkeep, I wouldn't use them ever.  But after weeks of constant production, I could still easily double my army and handle the upkeep without a negative balance.  To me--one of the largest players (top population) in the largest alliance with the highest potential income--hiring mercenaries is the least necessary.  But you smaller players are welcome to halt your economic growth to fund a war against me while I continue to grow and match your armies with drastically lower taxation.  And if I do get in a pinch, maybe I'll hire 10 times as many mercenaries as you for a short-term operation.  I'll even take fewer losses having my force concentrated into a single attacking army.  If you want to lessen the imbalance between players, increased spending options will do the exact opposite.  Scaled income will do neither.

A self-balancing system like I propose is pretty well guaranteed to work (by which I mean set a slow-moving and very reliable value for gold, based whatever is defined as the per-unit population circulation) and does not alter the existing range of variance in player incomes, regardless of existing stockpiles.  A system based on increased opportunities to spend gold into circulation sinks might work on its own as well.  Possible side effects include breaking other balanced constraints, particularly turning military equipment into unlimited* resources for everyone developed enough to stop building a city and crank up taxation...that would kill trade like nothing else possibly could.

*by unlimited I mean able to be acquired faster than it can be spent on unit queues and without aid from other players or supporting towns, making every developed city fully self-sustaining without specialization.

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I should also note: scaled income as the balancing economic factor wouldn't have nearly so large an impact on current incomes as you seem to think, col.  In fact it would even increase incomes if the balance point isn't reached yet, and it quite possibly isn't.

Let me paint the picture a little differently.  Suppose everyone has upkeep and normalized production expenses equal to their income.  This is an unrealistic state of perfect balance, but my point is that at this state, with a current world population of 2,314,975, everyone can have their cut of the world's global supply of 231,497,500 gold as an operational buffer.  Assuming perfect distribution, that means a 6,000 population player has 600,000 gold to smooth out market fluctuations.  That's probably actually too much and perhaps the gold/population factor should be more like 20 instead of 100 (giving a 6k pop player 120k gold).

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that you cannot have a proper economy without a properly limited resource.  Until you know with reasonable accuracy and consistency how much gold is in the world, you don't know what a given portion of that gold is worth.  Anything else is just a perpetual arms race, and people don't trade during an arms race--unknowns aren't trade-able, and producing your own is always fastest.

"directly selling units and/or hiring units as mercenaries"

It may seem odd, but you don't know how much I've wanted something like this! Especially if you can "rent" them instead of just "selling" them (like actual mercenaries)

GlyphGryph wrote: I disagree - the problem with trade is simply that is hands down less effective than making your own items. Construction Infrastructure is cheap and relatively quick - trade is expensive and extremely long.

And why is it less effective?

I posit that it is because all of the previously identified issues with trade, and that those issues are symptoms of lacking a stable currency.

"cheap" and "relatively quick" are in fact both very relative, and constrained enough that a healthy market would change that tune.

I have 7 cities (one of which at max possible food production and unable to grow further) and I can tell you there is actually great need for trade, but everyone is a buyer and not a seller.  Population is limited by food upkeep, which in turn limits advanced resource production well below what one city can consume in unit production.  It takes around 2 cities to supply one for constant war production, and needs change with unit queues (diplo/military/siege).  Every powerful player would love that second support city to be someone else's so that as many barracks as possible can be kept in constant production.

But one of the symptomatic problems is that everyone is interested only in advanced resources, unwilling to trade away the ones they have as they need all they can produce and more besides.  Level 20 buildings still don't bring a city to within self-supplying that resource, let alone overage for trade.  Population limits prevent having level 20 buildings for resources outside of the city's specialization, except maybe on the 7-food-plot tiles.  Merchant players can't ask for gold because they can't use gold to re-stock when it's not a valued resource, especially for the smaller players who are more likely to be willing to produce equipment for others.

If gold held value, militaristic players would spend it even long distance for equipment, and possibly trade resources locally for gold to fund that spending and upkeep instead of supplying growth to new cities, but there's currently way too much variance between resources and equipment for players on both sides to believe they're getting a fair deal.  Currently no one will trade base resources for equipment until they cannot expand their empire any more, and that's a long way off for everyone.

waylander69 wrote: I think this one might prove hard to put out to everyone, for instance what happens if some people just hoard the gold, this would create a shortage therefore would increase its value, people who have 2 accounts running with a large number of cities would not need gold as much for trade as they would just trade between their own cities for the resources.

I'm pretty sure hoarding gold cannot be a problem for several reasons:
 - No matter now much gold is hoarded, every city gets its cut of the steady flow back into the system from military and diplomatic upkeep (and gold cost of resource/unit production should also go back into the global stockpile).  Growing famine hits the hoarder harder than the spender, who must keep reducing his upkeep to maintain positive income else allow the system to re-distribute some of his wealth.  The spender on the other hand built his army when gold was worth less, and though he has fewer liquid assets, he has greater wealth in military assets.
 - Hoarders will find that gold sitting in stockpiles only increases military cost.  The longer and harder you hoard gold, even without attracting attacks, the further behind you will find yourself against those who invested it wisely in either business ventures or putting troops in the field to earn their upkeep.
 - When gold becomes truly valuable, hoarding it and the requisite limits put upon upkeep makes you a juicy target, as that big gold stockpile is now worth the costly effort to thoroughly plunder.  Military spenders gain the advantage but by upkeep are the biggest re-distributors of wealth, and their exploits of opportunity will limit the ability for gold to stockpile.
 - High taxation for hoarding means low resource production which should also limit equipment production.  If it does not, the solution is to start increasing secondary resource production time according to taxation, further forcing the tradeoff between military and economics.  Thus handled, gathering more gold requires spending more gold to build a protecting army and the value of equipment also stabilizes and forces the hoarder to spend.
 - Trade score can switch to measuring wealth/income like real economic markets, rather than focusing entirely on the somewhat meaningless metrics it follows now.  As a result it will help identify player stockpiles and targets of opportunity.


Bottom line, if it's a zero-sum game, it works precisely like all the real-world currency does, and must by necessity actually work like real-world economics which are well established and understood.  Wealth will not distribute evenly, but it will continue to redistribute and no one is safe from losing it by military OR economic means.  Everyone's income comes out of everyone's expense, and on a global scale that's actually a very hard balance to tip.  He who succeeds only makes an enemy of the entire impoverished world, but he really CAN'T succeed.  His ability to gain and maintain a lead is constrained by his GDP (gross domestic product, in this case population) and every other player in the game can eventually match that, especially as players start hitting practical growth limits.

waylander69 wrote: A base system needs to be put in place where people cant ask for thousands of resources by offering just 1 gold as we see almost every day. Not an easy one to work out by any means.....

Except as a mechanism for asking mates for a handout, I find this behavior reprehensible, but not problematic.  It has no impact if people don't fill the requests, and if they do so accidentally, they can recover their losses in blood...a fair risk to the people using this to exploit carelessness and therefore unwilling to return the resources.

A very interesting post, HM.

Here's what we're thinking, currently:

Illyriad's Economy Needs To Be Monetised
Illyriad's Economy is currently a barter system.

We're looking to monetise the economy, where everything is bought and sold (for Gold) at Trade Hubs spaced around the kingdom, replacing the current barter system entirely - which will cease to be supported via ingame mechanisms (though players can always trade directly with one another, ofc).

We're examining all sorts of additional options around this; from crafting (bonus-giving items to equip commanders, divisions, armies and possibly even towns with) to directly selling units and/or hiring units as mercenaries - all to be conducted at these hubs.

There will be *many* new skills, new caravans, new caravan upgrades, new units and all manner of wonderments including new items (and item classes), including crafting components.

We believe there will be considerable price differentials between the hubs, and we will therefore provide various mechanisms for players to take up the lifestyle of being a trader/hauler/market manipulator.

We also believe that NPC Factions will have a strong role to play in these Trade Hubs.

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Just thought I should mention the above as it will have some serious ramifications on, well, the whole game; and it'd be wrong to look at Trade as it currently is without some forewarning of where we're going to take it.

Regards,

SC