An economy of people, wages and prices

This was the biggest job of the last two weeks. I rebuilt the economy in stages, and it’s now a market where people, businesses and the state all buy and sell.

A small start

A new game starts small: a home world with its founding wards and buildings, and nothing else built for you. What you build next decides what your people can make and buy.

Wages and profit

Every business keeps its own accounts. It sells what it makes, pays wages out of what it earned, and lays people off slowly if it can’t pay. Workers go where the pay is best, people without a job do household work, and good pay draws migrants from other worlds.

No stockpile

Your empire no longer keeps a pile of every good. What’s made in a month is sold that month, and anything nobody buys is lost. A new game still starts with the founders’ stores, which only run down. When something runs short, outside traders will sell it to you at a premium.

Prices on every world

A good in short supply gets dearer and a glut gets cheap, and a good’s price also follows the prices of what goes into it. Each world has its own price, depending on how well it’s connected to markets. Businesses decide what to do from prices averaged over months. Before that change, a home’s makers would start and stop every month.

What people buy

Each class on each world has a wealth level from 1 to 30, and that sets what it buys across nine kinds of need, from food and household goods to luxuries and leisure. Within a kind, goods stand in for each other depending on what’s on sale. How well a class lives compared with what it expects is a big part of its Mood.

Jobs and production

There are twelve professions, each with its own pay and schooling, and each kind of building needs its own mix of them. Leave skilled jobs empty and the building makes less. Buildings can also be run in different ways (by hand, mechanised, automatic or advanced), each with its own output, energy use and upkeep.

The rest

You can tax up to three goods. There’s a reserve limit too: hold more than three months of Gross Product and some of it slips away. Trade houses carry goods between your markets and your neighbours’, with tariffs, subsidies and embargoes set per good. People move to the worlds that attract them, judged on room, work, pay, stability, needs met and danger. And every people now has five stages of life, from children to the old, and grows through births and deaths.

I’m still tuning the numbers, and I run long simulated games after every change to catch problems.