Player guide:Economy

--Tom Droeshout 20:21, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

GM report turn 260 I've mentioned the GM report. Here it is from turn 260.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15708179/html.zip

check out nr 200

some snapshots :

Common magic: 0 0% Lead to gold: 0 0% Pots and baskets: 1,359 0% Opium: 0 0% Trade to cities: 343,282 95% Inn income: 1,426 0% Taxes: 11,558 3% Times press: 0 0% Combat with indeps: 135 0% Petty thievery: 248 0% Temple income: 1,400 0% Pillaging: 0 0% Ferry boarding: 0 0%

Total: 359,408

Trade with cities and tax income from castles are the main sources of income.

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The economy of Olympia (long post) Ah the economy! Warning : a very long post.

Economy in a multiplayer game is always a tricky issue. Both aspects of money have to be present in the game: there needs to be several ways to make it, and there needs to be several money sinks.

The economy in g2 or g3 is rather limited. Money sinks are studies and research (although limited sink: once you know all, what then?) and army maintenance. On the flip side, the only real way to make good money is through trade. I'll put a GM report online from turn 260 to demonstrate this.

To go into detail of the economy, I would like to explain the framework first.

In g3 we have made some small changes (the big changes are intended for g4), that hopefully will help the players.

1) The NP's went up to have more choices : a stack leader or castle sitter should be possible for everyone (oath 2 + asorb + use beasts), next to his normal scheme. If you want to develop a full mage faction (studying parallel and eating the brains), that should be possible too. Moreover with 18 NP's you can easily reach 20 nobles if you terrorize a lot, and with 20 nobles you'll have spend a lot of time into your orders. This reduces the threat of multi accounts. If you're short on time, and just want to make 9 beastmasters that breed centaurs, fine. Plenty of choices. Everyone happy.

2) The claim items want up. More gold, means you need to rush less and have an easy start. Not everyone has played g2, and probably everyone will have noticed that your claim gold is shrinking rapidly. We’ve added 5 claim horses. The goal was to have factions wide spread out, right from the beginning. We prefer not to have a game where everyone is cluttered near the safe haven. So racing to good spots should be an option. We have placed the isle of the ancients in the middle part of Albea, to make things interesting. To have a reason why anyone would venture into the deep wilds of the continent.

3) The fast study points went up. Same reason as nr2 : to speed up the intial start.

4) The NP’s and fast study are at the same level if someones joins later. The same advantages to everyone.

5) Increasing the number of pots/baskets purchased, and increasing the gold/day for stacking with a city garrison was a good idea. They make it easier for a beginning faction to get started without particularly unbalancing anything.

6) Some cities buy forageable goods too

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Returning to our main subject, the economy …

In retrospect, we seem to have tipped the scale. We have changed the garrison support money from 1g per day to 4g per day, and increased tax contribution from garrisons.

We admit the garrison gold/day should be cut to 2 rather than 4, since at 4 any number of nobles can passively earn enough to fund their studies indefinitely (i.e. more than 100gold per month). The players should be forced to do something more, even if it is just make pots.

However, we did not introduce any new money sinks. This is rather hard to do, we believe. Because apart from study, research and maintenance, not much else requires one to spend money. So just increasing the cost of these, seems like a cheesy way to handle this problem.

Anyway, we would like to see these money gains and sinks discussed as a whole.

Money making:

- trade: still the best profit, but requires quite a bit of effort. Trade is a pain in the butt to do well since you have to set up both ends as quickly as possible and then run it at 100% capacity until it suddenly shuts down leaving you with unsellable junk. Trade might be just a tad too lucrative, and should be toned down to 3/4 or 2/3 of its current profit.

- castle: good profit (50% tax forwarded), requires quite a bit of effort at first, none later (unless attacked and needing to regarrison etc). Garrisons are fire-and-forget until you're attacked and also give you unlimited storage space. The 50% garrison tax forward might be too much. Since building a castle is too easy, the amount of up-front investment needed to collect taxes is too small. This is basically the only way to get money without using noble-days (after the garrisons are in place).

- pillage: terrible money-making activity. See the post from Andrew Penney and some suggestions infra.

- stack with garrison: good for individual money making purposes (study, small stacks)

- quest: Mixed feelings. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes not. It depends on the location. The money ranges from hundreds into the thousands of gold. The control artifacts are the most valuable money-making items in the game. The savage/orc/undead NPC breaks the NP equality.

- skills (common tasks, petty thievery, lead to gold): pretty much the same as stacking with garrison now

- mining: still rather good money making, yielding up to 500 gold at some levels

- fishing: up to 200 gold per turn per city, not really a big gain, but always nice to have (in combination with sailing to a spot)

- ferry: We feel that the "ferry" rules should probably be deleted or revamped. Has anyone tried this one succesfully? Some factions focused on transporting might shed their light on this. Chris?

- baskest/pots: We’ve increased the number of pots/baskets a city buys to double the original amount. The idea was that in overcrowded cities (starting havens) this allows more people to make some money. On the other hand, established factions/alliances who have their own cities, where they are the only ones exploiting the resources, the need to make and sell these things is practically gone. So it doesn't influence these cities much.

- the opium trade. In theory it can make money. But it isn't particularly a good way to make money, and the whole thing should probably just be dropped to simplify the game a bit. We will keep track and see if anybody actually ever sells any as a serious ongoing activity.

- Taking other player's gold. Go to war and plunder! ;-)

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Money sinks:

- troops (quest, war, savages, etc). Troop support being the only significant money sink seemed to work out fine in g2 and in general that aspect of the economy doesn’t feel broken. It prohibits the game into an exponential speed (something you might notice in Atlantis).

- workers: when added to garrisons before the end of the turn, they cost very little, just deducting a little from the tax base

- studies: a bit faction-dependant, as some players like their nobles to know all skills. On average, a skill takes one to two turns to fully study (sometimes longer, but rare).

- research: after a while, this money sink disappears as the skills become known to factions or are recorded onto scrolls.

- skills: artifact construction has some spells that require money to be spent, however these spells are not used that often.

- paying to move armies down into Hades. Not everyone is fond of mapping Hades (it takes a lot of time), but those "hyperspace" connections are incredibly valuable for attacking without warning. This doesn’t need to be tweaked, since paying 100,000+ gold is already pretty hard, and not something you do lightly. And of course eventually you just use Teleport Item to avoid the cost anyway.

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Conclusion :

An economy in this sort of game is always difficult to balance. We think Olympia is rather balanced. One could make a very great deal of money, but only linearly, not exponentially, since everything required the use of noble-days. This is even more true in G2 and now G3, since noble points are more carefully rationed.

The exception is of course garrisons, but normally all the money makers have pretty similar gold per noble-day rates over the long run. Again some exceptions : Control artifacts give you 30 extra noble-days per turn and the NPC nobles are the perfect mules for your trade routes.

The "currency" that really matters is noble-days, not gold. But this is as it should be. As long as it is necessary for a noble to be actively involved in any scheme that makes money, that will prevent it from getting too out of hand, since noble-days are an inherently limited resource.

Thanks to Tim Whalen and Bron Nelson for shedding their lights upon this and helping Olympia even better. Highly appreciated. I’ve revamped the discussion in 1 big topic so everyone can have a look.

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Money..er... Gold. "How do I get it?" Lots of ways, some much more effective than others. 1) Running a trade route. Late in the game, finding a vacant route might be difficult. You also have to worry about crossing borders or entering a war zone by mistake. 2) Operating a mine. Once a mine reaches a certain depth, you can do well at mining gold (varies between 500 and 50 gold a turn depending on depth.) 3) A priest "owning" a temple at the end of a turn gains 100 gold. 4) A noble "owning" an Inn at the end of the turn gains a varying amount of gold. 5) Questing. A bit dangerous, but usually worth the risk and up front expenses. 6) Doing grunt work for an alliance. Many alliances would welcome the help. This does make you a target for any enemies that alliance might have. 7) Making baskets, just what every noble wanted to do when they grew up. 8) Stacking with a city garrison. Very useful if all you are doing is using the time to study. 9) A mage using the "802" spell can bring in a tidy sum each turn. Don't forget, multiple mages casting 802 end up competing for the same sum of gold. 10) build a castle and rack up the income while doing nothing

There are a couple things you can do to conserve cash. Only learn the skills at first that you need or are going to use soon.