Why is Money Energy?

[praftd]

Pretty sure the main reason is just so that our buildings and stations and etc. only have one resource to pay upkeep in. Energy and money would work about the same if they were separate currencies, so instead of having two, we have one instead. Sure, it doesn't make sense if you think about it too hard, but that's true about a lot of Stellaris.

This is exactly the reason. Energy credits represents both money and energy as abstact concepts. Thats why we have energy credits as a single entity rather than two seperate entities for energy and credits.

Seperating the two adds nothing tobthe game at this point. Maybe in a future expansion, but not at this time.

Energy credits are an abstraction. It doesn't literally represent money or energy.

 

[nestorius]

I am not entirely sure if it is such a bad idea.

1. Some kind of universal valuable thing needs to be used as a currency energy isn't so bad
2. Using a galactic currency really doesn't make much sense probably less
3. there are already various methods to trade energy, power markets, gas markets, coal oil refined fuels etc.
4. scifi civs can have better energy storage
5. while energy is almost limitless accessible energy is limited
6. overall you just need something to change and think power isn't a bad idea though I think it needs to be seen in a more abstract way.

If you have a future economy where there is little or no difference between baseload and peakload power or months of the year due to storage I think the idea that power is a currency really starts to work because at that point power is just the economic output of the state and at that point its much the same as all currencies.

 

[Less2]

Right now money is energy. It's called the petrodollar.

 

[safe-keeper]

Trade districts on ring world generate energy. Stock exchanges generate energy. Services from artisans and curators need to be bought with energy. Trade enclaves trade with energy.

I don't get why they didn't just call energy what it is, which is money. How would an energy based economy even work, would we all carry batteries around?

They don't trade with energy, they trade with money, same as us. That money is energy-backed, which is a different thing entirely.

Same way humans can, or could, trade with paper money that was backed by gold.

Extra History recently had a nice series on the history of paper money that should help you understand the difference .

Empires in Stellaris operate on the energy standard, where each unit of currency is redeemable for a certain amount of energy.

Said "energy" quite possibly either being in the form of things like uranium that produce power, power plants themselves, or possibly both. What do I know.

But why would stock exchanges increase your energy stockpiles?

Why should selling my bike give me some weird rectangular pieces of paper?

Ducats are money.

Says who? If I had some ducats, could I go to my local supermarket and buy myself a bottle of coke?

Money is whatever we say it is, as parodied in Fallout where they used bottle caps.

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

More economic activity means more to tax, which means you can buy energy with that money (or pay troops with it, whatever, energy and currency can be swapped for one another as needed).

The part that doesn't actually make sense is where this private, taxed economic activity comes if the government builds, owns, and directs Pops to operate all of the economic buildings. (Also, how am I expected to believe that a species that can travel the stars can only manage to make on its initial colonies a hydroponics farm so inefficient that it not only requires the farming efforts of everyone it feeds, it also requires additional upkeep from outside of the colony? One Pop eats one unit of food, and that's all a basic farm produces unless it's on an especially fertile tile.)

I like to make sense of this by saying that the mines and power plants and farms the government creates does not represent the full economic activity of the planet, just a fraction of it. I mean, where are the shopping malls, the service industries, the leisure activities? Surely it's not a planet of people only working 24/7 in the mines and living in power plants.

And all that other activity uses up minerals and power too. Minerals and power that you don't ever see.

So, yes, for some reason the people don't make their own farms, and you have to handle that completely. But your little 2 pop colony, a fraction of the people are farming. The rest are working in non-government mines and powerplants (or maybe you do own all of those too, but your income is just the surplus) building houses and roads and grocery stores and living their lives.

 

[safe-keeper]

Because if the game had fiat currencies, 90% of its computing code would relate to making those currencies interact with one another and having economically sane prices.

You could tie it to minerals, but I prefer having currency tied to energy. I can tolerate that abstraction, as everyone needs it in the game.

Possible end-game crisis: a sudden emergence of populists and reality show stars cause a cascade of empires to exit the Energy-Backed Currency Union. Afflicted empires each develop their own currencies. Gameplay devolves into horrible micro-managemnt as you try to keep track of fluctuating currency values and have to do time-consuming calculations whenever you try to do trade with anyone.

 

[Secret Master]

Gameplay devolves into horrible micro-managemnt as you try to keep track of fluctuating currency values and have to do time-consuming calculations whenever you try to do trade with anyone.

Or your democratically elected leader argues that you should have taken the energy credits in the last liberation war you fought, and if you had done so, the fanatical purifiers wouldn't have decided to be fanatical purifiers.

 

[Strager]

I agree it's odd and confusing, I'd rather have a separate Credits resource.

Actually one idea here might be to have each empire start on it's own currency. At some point someone will research the Galactic Energy Credit and nations that adopt it would use energy to trade with. You could go a level deeper and have multiple currencies - perhaps "backed" by other rare resources, but I think one or a small number would be best.

Nations on the same currency could do more advanced trades than nations on different currencies.

Conquered nations (Tribs, Vassals, etc.) would go on your currency.

 

[Jean-Luc]

What's going on in this thread?

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

Wouldn't money backed up by energy be devalued drastically every time you upgrade your power production abilities or build new power plants?

 

[Strager]

Wouldn't money backed up by energy be devalued drastically every time you upgrade your power production abilities or build new power plants?

That's why it's an abstraction.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

"Abstraction" is becoming my second least favorite word on the forums right after "arbitrary".

 

[Secret Master]

Wouldn't money backed up by energy be devalued drastically every time you upgrade your power production abilities or build new power plants?

It does.

There are times when, despite good relations, I simply can't buy any minerals (or anything else) with energy credits thanks to excessive production throughout the galaxy.

So, I either play the Jevon's Paradox game and spam ships, or (far less likely) convert some plants to some other resource I need (happiness or minerals or whatever).

 

[Less2]

Wouldn't money backed up by energy be devalued drastically every time you upgrade your power production abilities or build new power plants?

The supply of money would go up. If $1 = 1 ounce of gold, finding more gold means you can print more dollars. Similarly increasing the supply of energy means you print more energy-dollars.

This is different from energy actually being a currency though. Because theoretically there would be energy-inflation, but we're also talking a sci-fi universe where energy is, along with minerals, something with an intrinsic value that is used for a purpose. This is different from any other currency that has been tried, like gold (valuable because its rare and hard to get) or money (valuable because it can be exchanged for things), both of whose values fluctuate over time. If 50 watts and a pound of minerals is enough to synthesize your morning coffee, doubling the energy supply doesn't mean you get half as much coffee per energy.

 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I think its less about making sense of an empire's internal economy and more about something that is theoretically universally valuable and tradeable with anyone. It makes far less sense that gold would be a universally valued resource, for example.

Endless Space got around this with its nanobot-currency of Dust, which was both available in limited quantities and could be substituted for literally anything since nano-magic.

However, the conundrums with energy currency have been layed out very well in this thread, inarguably so imo. Perhaps a vague Credits would have made more sense in the end - though what structure would you build? I suppose Cities.

 

[praftd]

"Abstraction" is becoming my second least favorite word on the forums right after "arbitrary".

Whether or not you like a word doesn't change the fact it is true. Many of Stellaris systems, such as how much population one "pop" represents, are abstracted away for the sake of ease of implementation and flexibility.

When it comes to game like this, abstraction is vital for actually making the game playable. If every single aspect of the game were made as literal as possible, the game would be a complicated mess. And likely, it wouldn't exist. This goes for all games, some more than others.

The developers chose to combine energy and credits simply for gameplay's sake. There is zero reason to separate energy and money at this point in time. Splitting the two creates needless complexity and doesn't add anything to the game. All trade is already done through a barter system. Money would have no purpose. You would have to completely redo Stellaris's building, upgrading, trade design from the ground up in order to make a monetary system work.

Energy credits as they exist are reduced to their barest functional form. There is no reason to make it more complicated.

 

[Ziddix]

Empires in Stellaris operate on the energy standard, where each unit of currency is redeemable for a certain amount of energy.

Sorry to just barge in here like this and call you out on this but could you just explain how this is supposed to work? That's really the main issue I have with energy based currency. It simply doesn't really work unless we assume that empires can magically transfer batteries to one another (which I realise we might as well do)

 

[Rip Off Productions]

within any given empire there are no doubt many forms of currency and trade goods, but the use of "energy" as "cash" at the galactic governing/politics level is because energy is a critical resource; your empire needs it to function, so does everybody else's, therefore it is traded for other things.

 

[SacremPyrobolum]

I'd like people to keep in mind that I never said every empire should have its own unique currency just that the energy resource which behaves like currency should be called currency.

I guess its just a symptom of a larger problem with Stellaris' economy, where they entirety of your supposedly advanced Space Empire is made up of basic industries like mines, farms, and energy plants. A sacrifice on the alter of abstraction I suppose.

 

[Arcvalons]

Actually one idea here might be to have each empire start on it's own currency. At some point someone will research the Galactic Energy Credit and nations that adopt it would use energy to trade with. You could go a level deeper and have multiple currencies - perhaps "backed" by other rare resources, but I think one or a small number would be best.

Nations on the same currency could do more advanced trades than nations on different currencies.

Conquered nations (Tribs, Vassals, etc.) would go on your currency.

Honestly, we don't even need a currency, most strategy games don't actually have a "money" resource. What bothers me is that in the events and the lore, energy is currency, when they could simply have it so energy is energy and production is production.