Random thought:  what if an economic victory was affected by your LUXURY production?  What if just pumping dust production wasn't the answer and instead you could just focus on your luxuries per turn?  Luxuries don't inflate directly; it still takes the same amount of luxuries to buy system upgrades and boost populations (though pop growth is an inflation of its own kind.)

What would THAT es2 be like?

Daynen wrote:

Random thought:  what if an economic victory was affected by your LUXURY production?  What if just pumping dust production wasn't the answer and instead you could just focus on your luxuries per turn?  Luxuries don't inflate directly; it still takes the same amount of luxuries to buy system upgrades and boost populations (though pop growth is an inflation of its own kind.)

What would THAT es2 be like?

Lumeris would take the cake with their +3 Luxury per Deposit Empire Improvement

Abrasax wrote:

Lumeris would take the cake with their +3 Luxury per Deposit Empire Improvement

Aren't they supposed to be the premier economic powerhouses anyway?  Number tweaking notwithstanding, I don't see how this would be different, other than it would actually work FOR them instead of against them like inflation does...

Daynen wrote:

Abrasax wrote:

Lumeris would take the cake with their +3 Luxury per Deposit Empire Improvement

Aren't they supposed to be the premier economic powerhouses anyway?  Number tweaking notwithstanding, I don't see how this would be different, other than it would actually work FOR them instead of against them like inflation does...

If other people buying your Luxuries isn't needed, it makes no sense because Luxury production on its own does not represent a direct increase in your economic power, so it makes no sense how you're getting closer to victory- nobody is buying your product, so how is it helping you establish control?

If other people buying your Luxuries is needed, it still makes no sense because you've just added another element to discourage people from buying things on the market, and made Dust producing financial factions even weaker by punishing them for buying things.

End result is Empire Dust production goes from being "only good for Economic Victory," to "good for absolutely nothing."

Hmmmmm...It would change the way they use luxuries, to be sure, but it would also give real value to luxury-rich systems, even more than dust rich ones.  It would also give real incentives for other players to control such systems and wrest them from the Lumeris' hands.  Perhaps that does devalue dust even more, but it does change the nature of economic victory somewhat.

As for the counterplay of just not buying luxuries, the trick there is that there's not really a way to specifically buy from any faction--it's just on the market.  Where it came from becomes irrelevant once it's there, because not only do you not know who sold it (unless you control the trade center) but you couldn't tell it which luxuries to buy to avoid buying from Lumeris anyway.

Perhaps it's a zero sum solution in the long term; hard to say.  There must be SOMETHING that can be done though.

IceGremlin wrote:

Daynen wrote:

...

As for the counterplay of just not buying luxuries, the trick there is that there's not really a way to specifically buy from any faction--it's just on the market.  Where it came from becomes irrelevant once it's there, because not only do you not know who sold it (unless you control the trade center) but you couldn't tell it which luxuries to buy to avoid buying from Lumeris anyway.

...

That's kind of my point, though. Basing Economic Victory on your ability to produce a product only makes sense if that product is purchased by others. Normally, a lot of people don't buy stuff on the market, because inflation makes it very expensive and honestly you're just gonna use the Luxuries you have or gain new ones through conquest rather rely on the inherently unstable Marketplace to fulfil your needs. So either you don't need your Luxuries to be bought, in which case it doesn't make a lot of sense, or you do need your Luxuries to be bought, in which case people will continue to do as they have always done and just rely on conquest to take what they want instead of buying.

I really think Economic Victory and the Dust Economy would work fine if there was just a clear, simple way for Dust centric factions to reduce Inflation. Personally I say just get rid of it entirely, but if that's not on the table, then it should be something Dust factions specifically can bring to 0.

As I've mentioned elsewhere:

- Tie Inflation to the progress of the player closest to Economic Victory

- Tie Inflation reduction to each empires own progress towards Economic Victory

- Apply Inflation to Upkeep

This way, progress to Economic Victory stops whipping you with inflation, inflation actually fulfils its purpose of letting the Pacifist Dust factions harm everyone else by driving up their costs, encouraging those other factions to lay down arms and turn to peace and trade if they mismanage their Dust badly enough to make no progress towards Economic Victory, and thus no progress towards reducing their own inflation rate by trying to keep pace with the leaders.

I strongly agree with this assessment of how to properlyimplement a system of inflation and economic victory.

Yeah. I'm now looking to retool my unreleased Inflation mod to do something similar, allowing players to reduce their inflation by a certain amount based on their total Dust production over time. Not quite as elegant, but also not attached to a victory type.

IceGremlin wrote:

Yeah. I'm now looking to retool my unreleased Inflation mod to do something similar, allowing players to reduce their inflation by a certain amount based on their total Dust production over time. Not quite as elegant, but also not attached to a victory type.

Any plans to lower the floor for resources in the market to abide by the rules of supply and demand? Nobody should be able to get rich (or even just get by) selling resources nobody is buying. That's just not how markets work.