FreeOrion

lets set up an example three worlds

LotsofFood wants production and is willing to give up food has no need of minerals
lotsofproduction wants minerals and is willing to give up production has no need for food
lotsofminerals wants food and is willing to give up minerals has no need for production

in this example cash can make this work very simply. lotsofproduction can sell product to lotsoffood for cash lotsoffood can then buy minerals from lotsofminerals. This is a simplistic example and of course the more complexes system will give you more flexibility. In my opinion money will conform to the kiss concept a little better, everyone is familiar with the use and exchange of cash and in the midst of a trading situation you do not have to search out a combination of trades to get what you want.

Now the problem is it's been quite a while since I last played EU and I'm not sure I remember correctly. The output is fixed IIRC. I think the price did depend on the quantity of the resource being traded at the same trade center. Also, if I'm not terribly wrong, provinces automatically got assigned to the trade center where you'd get the most money, considering the two factors, distance and availability of the commodity. Monopoly effects, I'm not sure about provider monopoly, but you could have trade monopoly, like you could control 100% of the trade at a given trade center, and I persume it was harder to be outcompeted when you control a larger part of the trade. Nothing stops US from having provider monopoly or anything, though. After all, this is a different game

We blithely convert stuff to money rather than sorting out the trades and get A sells food buys minerals, B sells food buys production, C sells production buys minerals. This works in terms of money, but of course we've just invented the minerals from nowhere, and sold more food than anyone wanted to buy! (this is a danger in any setup that isn't precisely balanced, i.e. every combination)

One alternative, properly netting off the surplusses and deficits and then trading them between planets rapidly leads you into headaches trying to model the correct prices of commodities when modelling the market economy, just ask Krikkitone, he and EntropyAvatar bashed their heads against this one for ages.

The other, hamstringing the conversion process with strange rules, limits and ad-hoc arrangements, makes the players life so complicated you'd be much better off just keeping the resources completely separate and handling the surplus and shortfalls by independant allocation rules.

I am not sure I agree with you here you are not really creating minerals out of nothing you are just short circuiting the process by making a direct trade instead a more convoluted sneer that you would probably have to go through in order to get the minerals. Again in a real system you could probably be able to find a direct trade situation.

I have been thinking about a 'no money' solution as well, but it leaves some significant gaps.

Your proposed method seems designed to solve the problem of 'how can you get a new colony off the ground fastest,' or, more generally, 'how can you direct outside production to a new location.'

Personally, I don't think this is a problem that needs solving.

In terms of 'what does money allow us to do' - it means we have a metric to handle transactions, really, and nothing else. So we can have events that cost money, trade money for other things in other empires, have one Empire pay tribute to another, have a cost associated with fleet maintenance, and so on.

Some of these things we could do with a 'national PP stockpile' as well, though; fleet maintenance could be measured in terms of PPs required, and this is intuitive in the sense that you pay PPs and not cash to build a ship, so why not also to maintain them.

So long as we keep the monetary system fairly straightforward (maybe even less complicated than EU2's) then I'm still on the side of having one, but I guess that's the discussion I was hoping to have here, rather than the 'how can we design a really interesting and complex economic model.' In MOO2 it is an interesting resource that differentiates some races from others; but we already have strategic resources MOO2 doesn't. I guess the question is, is it worth the trouble to design a system for it? EU2 does have other strategic resources, of course; grain, gold, cotton, naval supplies, et cetera, but they aren't really central to the game (except maybe grain) like food and minerals are to the MOO universe; most of those resources are just money pits, and few of them have an effect on anything else.

So - I'm not totally sure we need money either. I think we can make a case for not having it, but then we have to kludge PPs or something else to fill the two or three necessary functions that a money system was supposed to provide. I guess the question that I'd want to see answered is: if it's really that unnecessary, can we think of some games that don't use it for the reasons emrys suggests not using it?

Off the top of my head, I can think of only HoI, but that's really more of a military simulator than an Empire-simulator.

We blithely convert stuff to money rather than sorting out the trades and get A sells food buys minerals, B sells food buys production, C sells production buys minerals. This works in terms of money, but of course we've just invented the minerals from nowhere, and sold more food than anyone wanted to buy! (this is a danger in any setup that isn't precisely balanced, i.e. every combination)

One alternative, properly netting off the surplusses and deficits and then trading them between planets rapidly leads you into headaches trying to model the correct prices of commodities when modelling the market economy, just ask Krikkitone, he and EntropyAvatar bashed their heads against this one for ages.

The other, hamstringing the conversion process with strange rules, limits and ad-hoc arrangements, makes the players life so complicated you'd be much better off just keeping the resources completely separate and handling the surplus and shortfalls by independant allocation rules.

However, this is a 4x game - the player is going to be focusing on diplomacy, warfare, exploration, etc, etc... Making the player spend this amount of attention on trade mechanics seems a little excessive.

in my opinion, PP can not be used for everything money can be (you cant pay people in a factory with parts, can you?) Trade is also very good example. you cant effctively trade RP (thoughts basically) so that would fall down to minerals and PP. but what if thats what you want? then money can be used.

I think the problem we've had in this discussion so far is really an inability to agree upon the parameters of an economic model. For example, if this game were a market simulater (any of the Tycoon type games or games like Machiavelli, Merchant Prince, etc...) then the level of focus on the mechanics of trade mentioned above would be welcome, necassary and appropriate. However, this is a 4x game - the player is going to be focusing on diplomacy, warfare, exploration, etc, etc... Making the player spend this amount of attention on trade mechanics seems a little excessive.

I don't have a problem with you buying a superdreadnought in one turn, as long as you actually buy it from someone and it doesn't just magically pop out of nothingness.

I don't know if we really need money; they could be just an unnessesary complication of the resource system. Trade would work fine without them, only with RP and PP. What money seem to be basically is a stockpile for stuff. The game could feel more dynamic without them; I think we should think twice before including them; in a way it can spoil the game if a player accumulates a large amount of money and mess up things... remember, KISS. Money is only needed if there is something really important that can't be done by something more simple, IMHO.