Re: Olympia - Free Market Economy

From: nicholso@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Melvin H. Nicholson YBH)

Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1992 18:59:16 +0000

What a lively discussion.  I'll use (">") to paraphrase comments I've
picked out and want to respond to.  Attributions vary too widely to
track exhaustively, sorry.

> The players are too small to develope a stable free-market economy.

I agree.  Without an NPC backdrop to provide some sort of stability, I
don't think the economy would work well enough to make the game
interesting.  As I mentioned before, I am working on solving exactly
that problem and generating a NPC backdrop for the market economy.  Of
course since I just came back from a two week trip to South America, and
haven't heard from Rich since, I'm not sure of my own status as an
Olympian developer, so take this (run on sentence) with a grain of salt.

> Help.  My turn report is going to be eight million line long.

No it isn't.  One line per transaction, with a maximum overhead of two
added lines to your orders, and about the same level of user simplicity.

> Help.  I'm going to have to use e-mail for everything and this'll take
> up all the free time in the universe.

No it isn't.  Market reports will be changed, but they'll tell you most
of what you need to know in about the same length.  The watchwords are
"expression without complexity" and Olympian Game Designers (especially
Rich) have generally done a good job at doing exactly that.

> Won't 25% of the population of Atnos Forest need to be guards?

Nope.  In general NPC's with something very valueable will not be in
Atnos Forest.  They'll go to more stable cities with existing
protection.  Also, I expect Merchant collectives for defense will be
rather efficient for defense.  Even in a unprotected place like Atnos
Forest, if the randon bearer of chaos wants to massacre some poor
impovrished merchants, then he'll win some meager earnings, and have the
wrath of the involved players/merchant collectives/guardman cooperatives
and the like to deal with.  Violent lifestyles lead to violent deaths,
and aren't always that profitable.  Also, if there is no stable area
for valueable things to be manufactured, then they WON'T BE
MANUFACTURED under my system.  Stability will have rewards other than
just allowing the local merchants to trade.  It will allow for taxation
of the merchants who benefit.  Providing stability will have impetus
just like pillaging, so on the fringes there will be danger and in the
interiors the chaos mongers won't be able to exist.  That sounds like
fun.  I just hope I can get the system to work right by the end of this
season.  (real world season, not Olympia season).  Then we'll see how
well I can adapt to Rich's coding style (as I said, I'm new on the
Olympia team, so Rich in his divine wisdom may decide all of this is not
the best way to go about things)

> No!  Attacking has little to no risk and will always be the dominant
> play style.  Nothig else could EVER be as profitable.

We'll see.  I hope to see the doomsayers proved wrong.

Mel

References

Re: Olympia - Free Market Economy
srt@aero.org (Scott "TCB" Turner)
Mon, 22 Jun 1992 04:04:11 +0000
Re: Olympia - Free Market Economy
gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 22 Jun 1992 02:37:47 +0000