Gluten,
Good job on making the game a little more alive, with more players and some artificial demand to supply some money.
However I'm still very much wondering how you're planning to create a stable economy.
The current ways of increasing the money flow to the economy have been:
- Good paying govt. jobs (disturbing job market)
- The exchange (causing jobs offered by players to be priced ~10-20% below the exchange price equivelent)
The current ways of generating demand has been:
- Increasing energy depletion
- Adding a random sickness
- Increasing costs (for example, construction, forcing higher rent soon)
Problems with both solutions is, it interveres with the market a lot.
Yet, if you stop supplying money the game clearly comes to a near immidiate halt, so you can't do that until there is a new way.
I have a few suggestions that might be in-line with your ideas and which should be easy to add using the current systems.
- Add products that don't depend on player demand (for example clothes, books or whatever),
- Add companies players can build to produce those goods,
- Make (govt.?) purchases only for products that don't depend on player demand (unlimited demand),
- Prices you (the govt. or whatever) pays can be based on anything, a fixed price for now would be fine, if you can add an algoritm to it then you can base it on anything for automated inflation, such as 50% of current avarage retail food costs per worker job for example.
- Require (a little like 500) cement for each company building,
- Require (a little like 10) electricity for each job offer,
- Allow players to either work a few more jobs (or lower the 24H cooldown) or add artificial workers.
Also:
- Add product line chains (i.e. raw products to consumer products, which increases trading on exchanges)
- If players are below ~10% energy, resupply their energy to 10% after 24 hours (so players who forgot to buy food still have a chance to play later rather than wait to restart).
These suggestions would:
- Disperse supply of products, thus reduce the over-supply of all player products.
- Increase demand for player products (cement/ electricity/ food)
- Allow players to progress (constant demand for non-player products, and only player demand for player-products)
- Allow for inflation (lower supply and a little increased demand of player products - increases prices, which should also end up in increased prices of non-player products which further increases money flow etc.).
Not saying these suggestions are the only solutions, but maybe some of them might help you create a booming economy.
Maybe some other players would like to add to this or share their views.
Also, if you have different plans on how you're going to create the economy in this game I would be very interested in hearing them.
