Post by Eskay on Jan 8, 2012 6:18:02 GMT -5
Hey folks,
Any good pirate (or Totally Legitimate Businessman) needs a big pile of treasure. But a pile of all one thing, even gold, gets boring fast. You need to diversify. You need multiple currencies.
Imagine being a young pilot, in a brand shiny new Tier 3 plane, flying for the first time beyond your nation’s borders. You carry a load of fish across to the neighboring land, and instead of gold coins, they pay you in gemstones. Puzzled, you ask around — and you’re told that of course they can convert it back into, ugh, your little coins, but they’ll sadly have to take a cut, and most people around here want to be paid in gemstones... so as long as you’re sticking around anyway, why not keep them?
In my proposed system, each player has three money piles, corresponding to the three nations. Your starting money is in your own nation’s currency, and your two empty piles are invisible until they have something.
When you sell goods within a nation, they pay you in the national currency. When you buy goods, if you don’t have any of the national currency, you’ll automatically change money from one of your other piles -- but there’s a currency-changing fee of (say) 10%, so your route is about one color worse than if you could pay in the local currency.
This mechanism encourages traders seeking maximum profit to choose trade routes that don’t cross national boundaries, or to choose two-way routes even when the return is at a tiny loss. It also helps distinguish routes -- if there are two blue-to-red steel, maybe the shorter one runs internationally, so you have to decide on the trade-off.
If the national coffers get a percentage of trade within their borders, then this makes it matter which territories you fight for. You want to build a big continuous nation, so that people want to trade within it. You also want to plant flags on territories with valuable resources, or powerful factories, or big demand sinks.
And, of course, you get a big pile of loot that shows you where you’ve been. I’m picturing a treasure screen, with a big ol’ heap of three colors of money, plus unique-mission treasures on the sides.
To kick off discussion: what currencies do you think each of our nations would use?
Any good pirate (or Totally Legitimate Businessman) needs a big pile of treasure. But a pile of all one thing, even gold, gets boring fast. You need to diversify. You need multiple currencies.
Imagine being a young pilot, in a brand shiny new Tier 3 plane, flying for the first time beyond your nation’s borders. You carry a load of fish across to the neighboring land, and instead of gold coins, they pay you in gemstones. Puzzled, you ask around — and you’re told that of course they can convert it back into, ugh, your little coins, but they’ll sadly have to take a cut, and most people around here want to be paid in gemstones... so as long as you’re sticking around anyway, why not keep them?
In my proposed system, each player has three money piles, corresponding to the three nations. Your starting money is in your own nation’s currency, and your two empty piles are invisible until they have something.
When you sell goods within a nation, they pay you in the national currency. When you buy goods, if you don’t have any of the national currency, you’ll automatically change money from one of your other piles -- but there’s a currency-changing fee of (say) 10%, so your route is about one color worse than if you could pay in the local currency.
This mechanism encourages traders seeking maximum profit to choose trade routes that don’t cross national boundaries, or to choose two-way routes even when the return is at a tiny loss. It also helps distinguish routes -- if there are two blue-to-red steel, maybe the shorter one runs internationally, so you have to decide on the trade-off.
If the national coffers get a percentage of trade within their borders, then this makes it matter which territories you fight for. You want to build a big continuous nation, so that people want to trade within it. You also want to plant flags on territories with valuable resources, or powerful factories, or big demand sinks.
And, of course, you get a big pile of loot that shows you where you’ve been. I’m picturing a treasure screen, with a big ol’ heap of three colors of money, plus unique-mission treasures on the sides.
To kick off discussion: what currencies do you think each of our nations would use?