Guys, take out money from the picture. It ain't relevant nor necessary for Economy to exists.
Understood in its broadest sense, Economy refers to the not-necessarily-social domain associated with the production, use, and management of resources. Those resources can be monetary or not, material or not. Economy encompasses anything related with resources, production and the management of all of it, which always implies the exchange of things (even if it is just energy and raw materials as inputs and some effect or material product and garbage as outputs). Ecology and sustainability, energy and raw materials production and distribution...
Communism is an economy system (as well as social). The entire functioning of a biosphere can be understood as an economic system even without intelligent actors (species) involved.
With your Empire's Economy (even the economy of a mass of centipetoids, as long as they do things like mining, building stuff or consuming energy of any sort) you support
- the upkeep of your army, both the "pilots" (whatever kind of upkeep: food for biological space monsters, money (i.e. debt) for human capitalists, whatever an Egassem wants for being the pilot of a space ship instead of swimming confortably in a lava lake) as well as the other kinds of maintenance (e.g. fuel: any kind of energy that move your ships).
- the energetic and material costs (if any) of keeping your population in shape, happy and healthy,
- the costs of your diplomatic actions (if spying is ever implemented, it doesn't matter if it is a human spy, some sort of infiltrated nanobots or a team of far away clairvoyants that only eats raw photons; the thing is that the costs would be supported by the Economy).
- your influence campaigns on the enemy planets (again).
Summing up, anything that needs resources (material and/or energy) and its management to achieve something.
I find Economy too narrow because the effects usually associated to social influence (propaganda, social appeal, any form of psychological manoeuvre, bureaucracy, culture traits, etc.; even if that makes no sense at all against different species) are studied in other fields and seems weird to use a single label for all this. But it seems even weirder to use "Influence" to talk about production and management, upkeep, etc. Again, I'm not talking about human money here.
Geoff wrote:Additionally, or perhaps more so, "economy", or even "money", presume a society that needs to exchange goods and services with itself in a way that may be totally irrelevant for some / many of the species (eg. Beige Goo, George).
If they don't exchange anything at all, as if everything they do is completely self-sustained, why they need a supply line or any kind of upkeep? I think we here are confusing money (or monetary economy) with the general term of economy.
Geoff wrote:The means by which an empire enacts its power to influence others may include them having a "good economy", a "bad economy", or no "economy", as appropriate.
No money ok, but no production and management of resources neither? Well, if you talking about the races that already got Transcendence, OK, otherwise I think you need production and management of resources (i.e. Economy) to put stuff in orbit.
Anyways, would we here talking about realism?
Summing up, I see as Economy what you describe as Influence (that wouldn't be based on money), but agree on everything else and I can easily live with that name for that concept.
My ideal solution right now (still didn't finished the old thread about Influence) for this non-existent problem would be to have Economy for the upkeeps of anything (not only military) using the PPs/RPs mechanics (i.e., it is something that the empire produces constantly and must be used; if short on in, you can choose what upkeeps don't get attention) and Influence similar to the detection mechanics (need to finish my homework for this).