My biggest concern at this stage is how currency in individual towns will work. With currency laws not being able to be enforced globally and most currencies already existing as fiat currencies in the game.. how will currency be regulated between people. I presume a town will want to make and use its own currency, since otherwise it would need to build up its own treasury of another town's currency, which would probably create some issues for circulating the currency. So the alternative is to make currency exchanges, the obvious issue there is since all these different governments have total control over their currency laws and they are all fiat, you're going to want to have a lot of faith in whatever currency you're exchanging with that their government wont just inflate their currency like crazy and buy all your stuff while you're offline. My best idea for a solution to this issue is to allow us to make real mintable currencies where money can be exchanged back into material goods... it will be a hard but interesting issue to solve but I foresee a lot of chaos, a diplomatic solution will probably be really difficult without being able to say "if circulation of x currency increases, reduce value of x currency compared to y currency in exchange". I hope i'm making sense here, im not an econ expert. Also i think individual government or town rep for players might be helpful too. As in, a town's has some kind of either finite or infinite reputation bank and it can pay town rep through its own laws out to players to be basically acknowedged by that town. So like, someone might have a good reputation with Britain but a terrible reputation with France. To clarify this wouldn't pay universal reputation, but actually be a local reputation with a local town/country/etc. I don't know how useful this would be but it could definitely be a useful tool for writing specific laws. Whether or not that's actually worth the time to implement its hard to say until we see how people use update 10. An example could be, if a player has a terrible town rep, you could write an embargo law to prevent this player from using any shops in your town.
I think it's solved by the currency exchanges being restricted to only your own residents. So you have currency A and B with town A and B. A person from town A goes and sells some goods into town B for town B's currency. They'll have to return to their own town to exchange it. This way town B will not have to hold onto town A's currency. Town A's government will then work out the actual exchange rate with town B and manually do any currency swaps. In the meantime the person will use town A's currency exchange and "accept" the exchange rate stated on the currency exchange. Of course town B could debase its own currency, and at that point town A would stop exchanging for it. This means the players will have to spend their currency in the town they got the currency in.
Government controlling farm plots is borderline unmanageable. Fertilizers are a big problem for it. if you pay players to fertilize, they'll dump thousands of ferts in the field at once (which ruins the field?). It's something we proposed on our server but there are a few reasons why it wouldn't work (don't remember all of the details)
My biggest concern at this stage is how currency in individual towns will work. With currency laws not being able to be enforced globally and most currencies already existing as fiat currencies in the game.. how will currency be regulated between people. I presume a town will want to make and use its own currency, since otherwise it would need to build up its own treasury of another town's currency, which would probably create some issues for circulating the currency. So the alternative is to make currency exchanges, the obvious issue there is since all these different governments have total control over their currency laws and they are all fiat, you're going to want to have a lot of faith in whatever currency you're exchanging with that their government wont just inflate their currency like crazy and buy all your stuff while you're offline.
My best idea for a solution to this issue is to allow us to make real mintable currencies where money can be exchanged back into material goods... it will be a hard but interesting issue to solve but I foresee a lot of chaos, a diplomatic solution will probably be really difficult without being able to say "if circulation of x currency increases, reduce value of x currency compared to y currency in exchange".
I hope i'm making sense here, im not an econ expert.
Also i think individual government or town rep for players might be helpful too. As in, a town's has some kind of either finite or infinite reputation bank and it can pay town rep through its own laws out to players to be basically acknowedged by that town. So like, someone might have a good reputation with Britain but a terrible reputation with France. To clarify this wouldn't pay universal reputation, but actually be a local reputation with a local town/country/etc. I don't know how useful this would be but it could definitely be a useful tool for writing specific laws. Whether or not that's actually worth the time to implement its hard to say until we see how people use update 10.
An example could be, if a player has a terrible town rep, you could write an embargo law to prevent this player from using any shops in your town.
I think it's solved by the currency exchanges being restricted to only your own residents. So you have currency A and B with town A and B. A person from town A goes and sells some goods into town B for town B's currency. They'll have to return to their own town to exchange it. This way town B will not have to hold onto town A's currency. Town A's government will then work out the actual exchange rate with town B and manually do any currency swaps. In the meantime the person will use town A's currency exchange and "accept" the exchange rate stated on the currency exchange.
Of course town B could debase its own currency, and at that point town A would stop exchanging for it. This means the players will have to spend their currency in the town they got the currency in.
Government controlling farm plots is borderline unmanageable. Fertilizers are a big problem for it. if you pay players to fertilize, they'll dump thousands of ferts in the field at once (which ruins the field?). It's something we proposed on our server but there are a few reasons why it wouldn't work (don't remember all of the details)
Could you do it via a workparty? Then you can control how much is dumped.
The way I'd want to do it is government would actual rent out the farm land, could do it for a crazy low price if they wanted to subsidize farming.
Cool game idea. Looks ugly though.
This game really lacks a console release