Category

Category:Economics

From Rise: The Vieneo Province

Rise is a prime example of a free market economy. The economy in Rise is player-driven.

In Rise there are four (4) forms money can take...

  1. Cash-in-hand
  2. Balance in the Banking
  3. Options in the Futures Market
  4. Cash in the colony tills


Green Marble Theory

Of the three mine-able resources, fuel ore makes up 21% of the global market... However, compared to rare grade A material, it only makes up 4.5% of the available natural resources. Hence, for fuel ore to be as cheap as we have it (74 CR per MT) we would have to increase the abundance of fuel ore on the planet's surface by 366% unless fuel (fuel ore and/or refined fuel) is brought in regularly from outside our system and then transported to the surface cities

If grade A was constant (as in the above example) then grade C has to be decreased by 27% globally (not much in comparison to the 366%).

The problem is that I set out to make the ore maps and then developed a cost basis in line with present day Earth markets. But Earth markets are driven by supply (crude oil has been a topic of great concern lately). Vieneo markets should also be driven by supply but the natural resources are disproportionate to that of Earth's.

An example of how brilliant this method is can be seen here...

Natural resource Start basis Inverse cost Price influence City has 800 MT but say we had new price would be
Grade A 3636 CR/MT 0.0002750275 0.431% 3.4 MT 10 MT 1236.24 CR/MT
Grade C 20 CR/MT 0.05 78.38% 627.1 MT 60 MT 209 CR/MT
Grade D 74 CR/MT 0.0135135135 21.18% 169.5 MT 170 MT 73.78 CR/MT

In addition to the natural resource abundance adjustments, we would need to stockpile (as we discussed previously) the cities with proportionate amounts of these materials to make this cost structure keep in line with the amount of each commodity in storage globally. This is partly because users have been able to mine for many months from soil that yields disproportionate amounts of these materials.

Once all this is set up properly, the economy will take on a life of it's own... it will be fairly stable in the short term because of the global commodity stockpiles. However, users will directly impact pricing based on the decisions they make. I have conceived of several scenarios that will work perfectly with this "green marble" system...

1. An alliance of users coordinates a large number of mines that are on high concentrations of fuel ore. In all they control about 8% of the global production of fuel ore (and thus refined fuel). They can set exorbitant prices at their facilities and control export of this commodity to the cities and out-of-alliance colonies. This will cause the global commodity market to remain unchanged, but cities thirst for fuel ore will drive prices slowly up until it reaches a point where it is cheaper for out-of-alliance colonies to step-up their own fuel ore production or it will cause out-of-alliance players to attack this alliances strongholds of fuel ore and remove the material forcefully.

2. Based on the current problem, food is becoming scarce. Players are relying on the cities to make up for shortages of food at their colonies until the city can not meet it's own demands. Prices increase to the point where players focus their expenditure on developing new farms to supply the cities and make up for their own shortcomings. Some players/alliances will become dominant and reliable suppliers of food so that new players will neglect this issue and the problem comes full circle. I imagine food to be the most volatile, and that is without any spoilage over time (which we could add later to spice things up even more!).

3. A player (Bob) has created a mega-cluster of townships all producing quality consumer goods. He has a network of other players that drive huge transports of consumer goods to the cities each day. He is visited by players far and wide for small purchases for their own colonies. Bob's feed of consumer goods is so efficient it causes cities to cease production of goods internally and shifts all of it's efforts to fabricated materials and refining. Bob's profit margin is terrific, but it slowly narrows as global prices for consumer goods drop as a surplus builds. Bob gets bored with goods production and sells it to someone that is not quite so efficient. The market re-stabilizes. Bob dies in a fiery crash due to inexperience with atmospheric reentries.

Amendments

Since the economy was initialized almost 20 years ago we have made some tweaks to this system. We got away from the "inverse" law and instead we take the total number of buy, sell, and horded tonnage. Horded tonnage is always weighted at the target price for market stability.

  • 03/24/2006 - We started recording the global and Deois pricing for historical graphing and analysis
  • 05/27/2017 - Commodity futures are included in the market derivation to add stability
  • 01/07/2019 - Now using "positions" which take into account total money on hand and space available (for demand)
  • 10/19/2020 - Demand is now scaled by the deviation from the global price (for example, Bill is willing to buy 30000 MT of Consumer Goods at 1 CR/MT which previously would drive the weighted price down but since Consumer Goods are globally valued at 9082 CR/MT it is like he is only willing to buy 3 MT now) and elasticity was introduced by using the old global price (instead of a "desired" value that was established in the beginning which is now reserved as a "target" for adjustments like those recently done to mining output and fabricated production).
  • 10/22/2020 - No longer taking the "buy" position amount off the total amount in "storage" to compute the "hording" value
  • 11/13/2021 - Introduction of the off-world Zygus markets commodity futures and FTZ status for Easydock

Subcategories

This category has the following 2 subcategories, out of 2 total.

Pages in category "Economics"

The following 5 pages are in this category, out of 5 total.