McDuff wrote:It's a different scale of problem.

You imply that it's a problem which can't be solved unless money and interest rates are involved, or that the game can't be exciting. That isn't true.

MainDamage wrote:I didn't know Ogame, and now I have seen it. It's actually an interesting game.

Ogame is a text game, so it's quite easy to "control" millions of ships. Your economic summary is it in a nutshell, yes. Resources act like your currency. The economy is stable because no resource is ever valueless, never unobtainable, and has universal utility. Players conducting a trade negotiate the price between the min/max price for each resource. Trade works like this: if you were selling 10 crystal, the max you could get is 20 metal, or 10 deuterium.

• 10c = 20m OR 10d

If you were selling deuterium for crystals, the max price you can get is 20 crystals:

• 10d = 30m OR 20c

So notice, the trick with those exchange rates to buy 10 deuterium for 10 crystals, then sell 10 deuterium for 20 crystals to someone else (or back to the game sink known as the NPC "trader"). Rinse, wash, repeat. I've oversimplfied the economic workings so I can be brief here. If you wanted to read further, I can PM it to you. Suffice to say, it's definately worth your effort to find as many players as possible who are willing to sell you their deuterium. It must come from actual players who mine it. You can't buy 10d for 10c from the trader so the game can not make you a billionaire in a day. It takes years and the game never ends. Like I said, some servers have been running for 10yrs+ now.

You imply that it's a problem which can't be solved unless money and interest rates are involved, or that the game can't be exciting. That isn't true.

There won't be any interest rates because, unless something has changed, there's no system of debt and finance. So, I don't think that's what I'm claiming at all.

There is a currency because that's what's in the game, so, discussions about how the game could be exciting if it weren't going to be based around a universal currency are pretty meaningless.

Further, economies with only 3 or four resources in them may well function well and produce interesting effects. However, in LT there may well be thousands of commodities being traded in a system, and a potentially infinite number across the universe. The money commodity's use as a unit of account, a measure of value and a medium of exchange becomes very useful when you're dealing with an economy of this level of complexity. A pure barter system would be impractical here. Having some standard unit against which to measure commodities is much better than keeping a list of every possible permutation of exchange, especially when you want an AI to be able to play the game.