Thanks for the detailed information, it helps a lot when I'm trying to figure out if a game qualifies for the list or not. With the way you described how coins work it sounds like this game may qualify as a result of having dynamic currency, which is very rare for games. Can you explain further about the deflationary spiral as a result of trade imbalance? What is the mechanism that creates this deflation? Do villagers just decided to lower prices because of the lack of coins or is it something else?
Also, could you elaborate on taxes, government, the church, and its relation to the game population. I'm assuming the player acts as the government. Do they control the church too, or is that done by NPCS? Also, is the entire population NPCs that act on their own as if they are individual players, how does that work?
I will be reading the manual too, but any information you can provide from a player's perspective will be appreciated.
The player acts as the "lord" and is responsible for zoning, choosing which families to accept into the village, setting taxes and trade policies, etc. So yes, they're the local government. The individual villagers are not agentic in the same way as the player: they autonomously work on their assigned plots, engage in commerce by visiting the market or storefronts, consume food, etc. The basic unit of organization is the "family" which is a group of related villagers who share assets. So you might accept a family of farmers, zone a farm for them, and assign them the farm (with one of the aforementioned types of feudal contract determining the manner in which they're taxed: fee-farm, stewardry, socage). As an example, you might set the farm's contract to "socage", and require they pay you and the church 10% of their produce seasonally. Notably, they don't "own" the land (you are the feudal lord and thus own all the land), they are simply authorized to use it according to the terms of their feudal contract. You can void these contracts and assign the zones to other families as you please. The player can also impose production limits, telling them which crops they're permitted to plant, etc. Feudal contracts are per plot and a family can be assigned multiple plots, each with different contracts (and thus obligations): you might zone residential areas under the "fee-farm" contract, requiring tax payments in coin (as residential plots don't produce goods).
Prices are set via a simulated order book where villagers place buy and sell orders based on their needs: for example, if a family has low food stores, then they'll be willing to pay more for bread. If their food stores are empty and they're starving, then their bid can rise up to the limit of their available wealth. I am not 100% sure of the exact implementation here, I'm just going off of what the tutorial states and what I've observed. The result is that prices are dynamic enough that if too much coinage has exited the village's economy (through, e.g., excess imports) the low supply of coins will exert downward pressure on all prices (villagers won't place buy orders they can't afford: there is no debt). The reverse, where there are excess exports (or too much minting) can lead to inflation of prices, but this is generally not a problem, as there are external money sinks, in the form of the King's Tax (which is the "challenge" element of the game: you must make tax payments yearly, either in coin or goods, and the amount he demands increases over time) and imports from travelling merchants.
The church is treated as, basically, a large "family" -- all their assets are shared amongst the clergy, who act autonomously, as any other villager. You cannot tax them, but they exist on the map and interact with your village's economy. Each "feudal contract" has a slider for how much tax they're required to pay you, and how much they owe to the church ("tithe"). The church will be unhappy if their tithes are too low, which can cause its own problems. In the case where the church is receiving tithes in kind rather than coin (for "socage" contracts), this might result in the church accumulating a surplus of goods it has no use for (jewelry, livestock, flour, etc), which, as it is agentic in the same manner as the villager families, it can then sell back to villagers or export. Villagers generally avoid selling goods for less than it cost them to produce, but the church has no such qualms when it comes to liquidating its tithes, which can apply undesirable downward pressure on prices. The clergy can also engage in their own specialized industries (bookbinding, medicine, winemaking, and some others) to help keep itself afloat, though in practice they're heavily reliant on tithes.
The player is represented on the map as a "noble family" made up of the lord, their immediate family, as well as servants and guards (recruited from the villagers: you can set their salary and they will remit a portion to the family they were originally from). They require food, clothes, a home with beds, etc, and are responsible for collecting taxes (and storing them, in the case of goods). They exist to answer the question of: what do you *do* with the taxes you receive. They don't engage in any form of production, so you can think of them as another resource sink, though you can, for instance, tell them to set up a market stall and sell back your taxed goods. You can set up buy/sell orders for each good, to establish price floors or ceilings (provided your treasury can absorb the costs). You can also ban villagers from transacting with travelling merchants and completely control all imports/exports manually. The local market and the external market are separate, so you can also profit via arbitrage, e.g., buying cheap foreign clothes and reselling them at a premium to your own villagers (though this might cause problems for your local tailors, if you have any).
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Topic: Seeking Dynamic Economic Games (Read 1170 times)