Money exchange is still a thing today, so, I don't see your point. Can't use Dollar in Europe (in general). Actually, the introduction of exchange rates based on economy power would be a cool feature.
Should Energy and Credits be different resources?
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Money exchange is still a thing today, so, I don't see your point. Can't use Dollar in Europe (in general). Actually, the introduction of exchange rates based on economy power would be a cool feature.
Being universally valuable isn't enough for a good to qualify as money. It also needs to be stable. Gold was a money standard because the quantitiy we extract each year is small compared to the existing stocks.
Oil isn't a money standard because the stocks vary wildly over the years. And neither were woods, or tar, or peat, or coal, even though people always "needed some to have things done".
Gameplay-wise, energy is now torn between being "that thing you have to have just enough to pay for your fleet and building maintenance" and "that thing you stockpile to trade on the market". It can't be both at the same time, because either the game is balanced so that getting your fleet off orbit will put you in the red (like in older verions of Stellaris), or it's balanced so that you always have an excess of it to buy goods on the market (like now).
Disjointing the two would give us back both those mechanics. It would also allow proper balancing of the machine empires without affecting the other civs since energy production wouldn't translate so well into buying power. And it would give a point for clerk jobs to exist instead of being wildly inferior technicians.
This is 100% wrong. Mid-game+ minerals never sell for less than 2 energy, even if you're suffering a 20% market markdown. Food rarely goes for less than 1 energy, and you can make a lot more food than energy (6 vs 4).
My last two games, I literally never built an Energy district.
The whole point is that energy is as volatile in value as any other resource both in game and in the real world. The point of fiat money is that it is relatively stable over time. You want a slight inflation to keep it going that you can rely on.
But fiat currency only work within an empire or between empires who have a mutual economic agreement and some sort of common banking system.
Outside of this the only trading you can do is a bartering system... this is just how it is... plain and simple.
Well, the interstellar community of Stellaris could establish a Galactic Market, so that is even a step farther than mutual economic agreements.
But those peoples energy (or labour) is always necessary, therefore always valueable, regardless of wether they were paid in gold or food. Gold is a modern standard with which to compare monetary value, which is used to pay people for their labour. Money isn't really valuable, it's the service or product people get out of spending it that has value.
But this is because you are thinking of energy as utility power, not as in labour. Labour is always valuable because people need things done, how you exchange for that labour is the question (either as the 'credits' part of energy credits AKA a monetary exchange, or with other products, which is bartering)
So EC are a universal exchange rate (AKA labour and services) and so the game doesn't need 35 different currencies with exchange rates
So perhaps its more an AI problem than a market design problem? I only play single player. (I'm amazed that you MP guys are able to coordinate the dozens of hours necessary for a game...)
I don't like that the economy "drifts back to normal" in general, but if it does work as advertised in a multiplayer game it may well be that the computer just isn't using this resource.
The whole Market which put supply/demand completely out of wack with infinity resources will unbalance the bartering nature of the games resources and the economy as a whole.
The problem with labour is that you can't STORE IT of later use... it is not energy in that sense it is a separate type of resource that is intimately connected with time. This means you can't equate labour with energy but rather that labour need energy to be performed.
Labour are more equatable with a production machine. Something that can transform one resource to another using energy and some minerals.
The problem with labour is that you can't STORE IT of later use... it is not energy in that sense it is a separate type of resource that is intimately connected with time. This means you can't equate labour with energy but rather that labour need energy to be performed.
Labour are more equatable with a production machine. Something that can transform one resource to another using energy and some minerals.
There are also theories that say Colonel Sanders will lead an army of lizardmen to take over the world. But... I'm gonna wait on learning the Anthem of Eleven Herbs and Spices.
The rest of this is a little dry, and way, way tl;dr:
Fiat currency can go wrong, but there's nothing inherently wrong with printing money. The question is how do you balance your supply of currency against the spending needs of consumers, the capacity of your economy to supply goods and services, the capacity for investment to expand the supply of goods and services, and the demand for global reserves. Or, put another way, can you keep your supply of money relatively stable against your supply of things to spend it on?
With a hard money standard the answer is no. While fiat currency lets you define your money supply based on the spending needs of your economy, hard money forces you to define your money supply based on some other, unrelated variable. There's no relationship between the supply of gold or number of kilowatt hours you have and the desired capacity for spending and investment across the economy.
So the U.S. prints a lot of currency because there is an enormous demand for it. Between the domestic need for dollars, as the biggest economy in the world, and the global need for dollars, as the world's reserve currency, you just need a ton of them. Indeed, there's a good argument that domestically the U.S. dollar is actually under-supplied right now, and that the country might benefit from just turning on the printing presses for a while.
Think about it like this: We have an economy with $5 in it and a bakery that sells bread for $1 a loaf. But that baker actually has the capacity to make twice as much bread as he does. In a hard money scenario we're stuck. The baker's capacity will go under-utilized. In a fiat money scenario we can print $5 more and introduce it to the economy. Now that consumers have the money to spend, the baker will respond by making more bread and everyone gets wealthier. It gets better, because our baker now has excess capital to spend and can either expand his business (growing the amount of bread in the world) or invest in someone else's (adding, perhaps, butter to our small economy).
Of course we do have to be careful. If we misjudged the situation and the baker actually didn't have extra capacity we will have doubled the money supply against a static supply of goods and services. We will have $2 circulating per loaf of bread and inflation will quickly set in. In this case we shut off the printing presses and turn on the shredders. Yep, that happens too, although like printing money it mostly takes place electronically these days. (Most currency in an advanced economy is created and destroyed through national treasury lending, not actually printing physical bills.)
This is the argument for why the U.S. should actually be printing more currency. Those economists believe that we currently have far more capacity to create goods and services than we're using, and that the chief bottleneck is lack of consumer spending power. We could be making much, much more bread if people had the money to buy it with. That the U.S. has excess capacity is pretty well accepted, the main counter-argument is that most of that consumer demand is being drained by high end rent seeking and debt, such as student loans for millennials, so extra money would risk creating a bubble and would likely only fuel debt service rather than additional spending.
It's a difficult problem to solve, but it also illustrates one of the key difference between fiat currency and hard money. Under a fiat currency system you can have this debate. If new money would create sustainable consumer spending power, as it often does, you have that option.
One of the biggest differences between fiat currency and hard money is that, while both can go wrong, you can't really do anything about the many problems that a hard money standard imposes. If your economy outgrows its money supply... well, you're just kind of stuck. You end up with people using things like counting sticks because there's simply not enough money to spend. Eventually deflation sets in. Worst case scenario you end up with the wild speculation swings of something like Bitcoin, which might be many things but it certainly is not a functional store of value.
It's no coincidence the world began collectively abandoning hard money right around the Industrial Revolution, when meaningful annual economic growth first began. The gold standard never really worked, people spent millennia working around the fact that they never had enough money to spend. That's why they invented counting sticks. But it didn't really become a huge problem until the annual growth in capacity to supply goods and services took off. Year after year people began inventing new machines, populations began exploding, there was so much more to spend money on... and the amount of money to spend? Well, that depended on tediously finding little hunks of shiny metal and pulling it out of the ground. It started falling apart pretty quickly.
Another thought experiment: We can radically, radically simplify the situation to say that a healthy economy needs a good ratio of Money Supply (M) / Capacity for Spending and Investment (C). If M grows too fast relative to C we get inflation. But if C grows too fast relative to M we get either stagnation (if that capacity goes unused) or deflation (if those products are actually made). Fiat currency lets us move our M up and down depending on current needs. Hard money does not, it only lets you reduce the money supply. Given that modern economies grow every year, the ability to increase M to keep pace with C is not just useful, it's essential.
There's nothing wrong with printing money. Sometimes what an economy needs most desperately is new capital in the system. It can go wrong, but everything about running a country can go wrong. That's not news. The key is that it is more responsive and less prone to systematic error than a commodity-backed currency. As to the U.S. dollar crashing... no. The dollar survives because the country has an enormous, stable economy and its economic policy has been relatively stable (despite recent political turmoil). Just like the pound, the renminbi and so many other currencies.
There's a reason that every significant economy on Earth uses fiat currency and not a single one has a gold-backed system anymore. It simply works better.
And again, being universally valuable isn't enough to qualify as money. Petrol is always valuable and we don't use it to index currencies. The cost of energy is volatile because the stocks are not stable, unlike gold.
Then please stop arguing that energy should be money just because it's valuable.
Debateable in the context of Stellaris. EC is both services and money (which money in itself is a service)
EC income is your energy income or as you say, it's 'the energy needed to be perform' a task. It's where your labour is being spent and how, through power or fuel for fleets, or maintenance and facilitation of districts or buildings.
EC storage is raw credit power, which is spent to scout, recruit and hire leaders, with a recurring cost for their labour, or its to pay to enact certain edicts where there would be a significant upfront expense. However 'credit power' could be anything from a monetary currency, to actual stored energy, or accrued benefit of labour over time, depending on whatever headcanon you pick.
The trouble I have with having 'energy' and 'money' is that money doesn't mean anything, it's what money can offer that has value, and that is often work for a product or service which has value to the one spending money.
That work requires energy, either for the motivation of the individual to provide the service, or to literally power machinery in order to achieve that end, be it creation of a product, or to maintain or power construction that provides a benefit. That's a much more universal acceptance of what 'money' is rather than a literal physical currency, of which there are many.
I'm an economist IRL, and I agree that it makes little sense to use energy as money, with one exception.
I would expect interstellar empires to use fiat currencies, as these allow a government to match the supply of money to the productive capacity of an economy - this allows smoother business cycles i.e. fewer and less severe recessions. Actually modelling a fiat currency in game would be pointless though - every empire would have it own (with the possible exception of federations and vassals), and managing inflation and exchange rates would be computationally expensive to little benefit.
Instead, I suggest changing the "currency" resource from energy to consumer goods. After all, what are your workers buying with their wages? Sure some of it is food, but in post-agrarian economies food is a relatively small part of your budget. As such I would have trade value produce consumer goods instead of energy, and I would have events whose premise is that you have obtained currency or something you're going to sell provide consumer goods instead of energy. Also non-gestalt leader should be upkept and hired with consumer goods. I would also let gestalts get the benefits of trade value - they would just have to sell the consumer goods to get any benefit from them.
The one place energy probably makes sense as a currency is the galactic market. I can see a market that has to deal with dozens of different currencies just issuing its own trading currency pegged to energy. This make sense because A) market participants don't need to trust that the exchange won't just inflate the currency later, B) energy is probably the most fungible common resource the market trades in, making it a good thing to peg prices to and C) since the trading currency isn't being used to run a country's economy the unstable money supply won't matter.
As an aside, it appears to me that the galactic market has some kind of mean-reversion in it, where prices keep trying to return to some set point. This isn't how real markets work. If everyone's buying and no one's selling I'd expect prices to keep rising until it becomes prohibitively expense to buy, and very lucrative to sell. Conversely, a good that everyone overproduces should fall in price until it becomes worthless.
I would expect interstellar empires to use fiat currencies, as these allow a government to match the supply of money to the productive capacity of an economy - this allows smoother business cycles i.e. fewer and less severe recessions. Actually modelling a fiat currency in game would be pointless though - every empire would have it own (with the possible exception of federations and vassals), and managing inflation and exchange rates would be computationally expensive to little benefit.
Instead, I suggest changing the "currency" resource from energy to consumer goods. After all, what are your workers buying with their wages? Sure some of it is food, but in post-agrarian economies food is a relatively small part of your budget. As such I would have trade value produce consumer goods instead of energy, and I would have events whose premise is that you have obtained currency or something you're going to sell provide consumer goods instead of energy. Also non-gestalt leader should be upkept and hired with consumer goods. I would also let gestalts get the benefits of trade value - they would just have to sell the consumer goods to get any benefit from them.
The one place energy probably makes sense as a currency is the galactic market. I can see a market that has to deal with dozens of different currencies just issuing its own trading currency pegged to energy. This make sense because A) market participants don't need to trust that the exchange won't just inflate the currency later, B) energy is probably the most fungible common resource the market trades in, making it a good thing to peg prices to and C) since the trading currency isn't being used to run a country's economy the unstable money supply won't matter.
As an aside, it appears to me that the galactic market has some kind of mean-reversion in it, where prices keep trying to return to some set point. This isn't how real markets work. If everyone's buying and no one's selling I'd expect prices to keep rising until it becomes prohibitively expense to buy, and very lucrative to sell. Conversely, a good that everyone overproduces should fall in price until it becomes worthless.
This is perhaps the biggest thing I would like to see change about 2.2. I intensely dislike that the market works as a timer mechanism back toward a set central price.
Still you conflate energy with labour... the energy simply allow empires in Stellaris to get things done. Which basically mean you plug energy into a machine that does something. It does not matter if it is an Edict or a "leader" which is an abstract concept to get bonuses of different kinds and the organization to do them which require energy. So basically an engine you plug energy into one end and get something else out in the other.
Energy in the game are as subjected to inflation as any other resource based on the amount around. The galactic market is a joke since it contain an infinite amount of resources and prizes normalize over time if no one is using it. The reason why prices generally are so high on the Galactic market is because the AI apparently do not even pay for their purchases properly. If this is a bug or intentional we don't know.
This distort the value of resources in the game and it distort the overall economy. You can still barter with individual empires so as a player you can seriously abuse the current system quite badly. The AI are just completely oblivious to how it all ties together.
I'm not advocating for a fiat system to be added to the game but the current economic system are badly tied together as a whole right now.
I would also say that Consumer Goods would work much better as general "money" or wealth.
Also, policies (or similar bonuses) that give you +% that and -% that are pathetically imbalanced and stupid. They should impact the actual production capacities... such as civilian economy would make Alloy industry produce say 1.5 Alloys and 2 consumer goods and military economy your civilian factories produce say 3 Consumer Goods and 1 Alloy or something. But on the whole this does not matter as long as the markets in the game are not driven by actual supply and demand. I don't understand how they think when making this shit up sometimes.
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I think this would resolve 99% of my issues with the energy credits as money.
I am putting all my previous opinion behind this as a solution to the issues in the energy credit system.
What this means is that the consumption vs availability of energy is itself unbalanced. However, this doesn't undermine my point that you save on market fees by specialising in energy, compared to other resources. In practice, given the current state of the game, my point is, perhaps, moot. But in terms of designing the most balanced system, it should be taken into account.
Simulating exchange rates is far beyond what the game's economy can deal with as there are factors that can't be simulated, like agreements between countries on the price of certain goods, etc. They have to draw the line somewhere.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Consumer goods are not universal to all cultures in Stellaris. You forget that robots cannot even produce them. Yet they can trade with other cultures. As such I would have to say that energy is the clear choice even for them.
I am playing single player too like this.
Perhaps you need to play with more computer players? I don't know. Before I stopped last night IIRC, minerals were ~5, food was ~3.5, Consumer Goods were ~9, and alloys were ~22 credits a unit. Even the rare materials had risen in price if you wanted to make some cash (note: it never makes sense to buy the 3 basic rares from the market if you aren't already trading for them from the merchant factions.)
Edit: Just a thought, are you playing on a different difficulty than Captain? Perhaps with their improved resources on higher difficulty, they use the market less.
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Nope...energy is just a resource as any other... you should just be able to barter with any resource for any other resource. Minerals are as universally used as energy for example. Market fees is also a strange beast with resources that just vanish into a black hole...while they on the other hand pull resources from black holes when they need them.
How do you value anything in such a system??
Why should you pay market fees two times changing minerals for consumer goods for example?
Why can you still barter with empires... often favourably so?
It would not be terribly difficult to come up with a supply demand system that works, other similar games have managed to have them.
Except that Gestalt empires (including machines) do not use trade value, so this is a moot point. I do agree their leader should use energy and not consumer goods though.