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Old 06-29-2009, 08:36 AM   #9
krem
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Join Date: May 2009
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Re: Creating an economy

I think most of the other posters hit on the main topics for limiting inflation. I personally don't like excess money in my games and often put together rules in which the creators need to limit the amount of gold circulating in the world.

These would be my steps in cutting down the money in the game
1) Put a hard limit on the amount of gold in the world. The tricky part is figuring out how much the hard limit would be. I would calculate how much all the players' current own and then increase it by a small percentage (say 15%). That is the total amount of money in your world and you should never pass that amount. That leads to the second step
2) Implement code that tracks the amount of money in your game. This Economy Daemon/Object/whatever is responsible for tracking the amount of money in the game. Whenever an NPC is created with a fixed amount of money, have it get the amount from the Economy Daemon. Once you hit the limit, sorry... no more money for the NPCs. If an NPC with money dies and the money isn't taken by someone, then return that amount back to the Economy Daemon
3) Clean up irrational sources of gold. For example, animals don't carry money so why do some games reward you with gold when you kill them? Also, force the carrying of money to always be stored in some sort of container/sack. This will make players have to store their money either on them in another container that will slow them down, deposit it into a back, or spend it.
4) Get money back from the players by tying your vendor-type NPCs to your Economy Daemon. Set up the initial roll-out in such a way that all your vendors have a loaned amount, say 5,000 gold coins, that they must pay back. As they make profits, those profits are returned back to the Economy Daemon until their loan is fulfilled. Also, don't forget to make the amount of money they current have to be persistent otherwise you will break rule 3. For example, if a vendor is created with a default of 2,000 gold and purchased stuff from a player, their balance would be lower than the 2,000 gold. If the vendor is unloaded and then reloaded, they are reset to 2,000 gold.

The biggest cause of the inflation is that there is money being produced with no control over it. That is the main idea behind having an Economy Daemon as it forces only so much gold to be available in the world. If the amount of money if fixed, inflation is non-existant.

The downside is that you could (and most likely will) encounter the problem of lack of enough money in the world. That could be resolved by slowly increasing the amount of currency in your world, thus causing a controlled inflation but makes the money available to everyone.
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