Money from Nothing or Gold in Farthest Frontier does not make sense

[Oerum]

I have noticed a curious thing concerning gold in Farthest Frontier - namely that it seems to appear out of nowhere.

“Wait, what?” I hear the reader ask. Allow me to explain. The economy of the player’s settlement is an almost completely closed system; everything within it ultimately derives from the map as raw materials are harvested or mined (or salvaged) and then refined into usable goods of some form or other. The only exception to this are the travelling merchants who will occasionally arrive with goods and gold to trade.

But there is another hole in the closed system: tax money. That gold seems to come completely out of thin air. What do I mean by this? Apart from a select few professions (Rat catchers, soldiers, guards and priests) everybody in your village works for room and board, yet at the same time they have money to pay taxes.

Furthermore the entire town is a perfect command economy, and there is no private enterprise among the citizens, so it is not possible that they would somehow come into money in other ways. So it really seems like that gold just appears out of nowhere.

Resolving this issue would of course require some reworking of the game - I think the simplest thing to do would be rework the usage of gold ingots.

I would propose that tax income from the citizens should simply be done away with - within the game world they simply do not have any means of acquiring cash to pay their taxes.

This in turn would mean that gold ingots would become a lot more scarce. I would then propose that gold ingots should only be used as a building material and quite possibly only for later buildings (I am mainly thinking of the odd fact that gold ingots are used somehow in the construction of garden trails and such) and that coins should be introduced along with a mint.

Coins would then be what would be used at the trading station, and for the early game that should be the main way of obtaining them (the other two ways should be salvaging and dispersing raider camps). Later in the game the mint would be able to refine gold ingots into coins.

This should lead to a situation where mining gold and refining it into money would actually be a worthwhile economic activity in the game.

Of course implementing this would require a lot of rebalancing of building and upgrade costs, and I am aware that at this point it’s probably too late for my ideas to have an impact on the game. Well, at least I got it off my chest.

[ForsakenChief]

the entire town is made up of settlers who left other towns though, while not listed in their inventory, it could be plausible that the refugees of said towns and cities opted not to leave what wealth they had behind.

[Oerum]

In theory that could be an explanation for the first few years - But I would say that explanation runs into an important issue; as a settlement matures, the percentage of people who moved there will decrease relative to the percentage of people who were born there. Yet tax income will continue to increase.

And even if we were to assume that the taxes were paid with money brought in by people moving to the settlement, there’s the fact that the people of the town have no discernable income, so for your explanation to work, it would require that the people who moved to the town had enough money to pay taxes for the rest of their lives without any monetary income.

[Olleus]

This is a game where it is literally impossible to make cheese in a building made out of anything but bricks, and where you can have mansions populated entirely by children, and where every single thing produced in the village goes to whoever grabs it from the market first, and where every villager unquestioningly obeys the orders of the omnipotent player without question.

When you consider all of those abstractions in the game economy that gold, as an abstract representation of the complexity and hence monetization of the village economy, appears “out of nowhere” is rather minor.

[sJEF]

The problem is that you are looking at history with modern conditions. In the past, you didn’t have employees in the standard way — most people were not “paid wages” as today. Instead, they were compensated in goods they produced themselves, or through direct exchange for services (as serfs did). Barter was the common way of payment, with occasional use of money. The townsman class had money because they owned land or workshops producing goods they could sell on the market. So the game is correct that you are not paying regular wages. What you did pay for were mercenaries, church fees, taxes, and a few other obligations. Even taxes were not collected only in coin, but also as a share of agricultural production, which was then stored in castle reserves or used to supply the lord’s household and army.

[Oerum]

Money from Nothing or Gold in Farthest Frontier does not make sense

This is a game where it is literally impossible to make cheese in a building made out of anything but bricks, and where you can have mansions populated entirely by children, and where every single thing produced in the village goes to whoever grabs it from the market first, and where every villager unquestioningly obeys the orders of the omnipotent player without question. When you consider all of those abstractions in the game economy that gold, as an abstract representation of the complexity …

All the points you raise are of course perfectly valid - And it does seem a bit strange to take any issue with the representation of the economy in a game where every single person both can and will do whatever the town government - represented by the player - requires them to do. But I suppose this comes down to temperament. And in general I think the way FF handles gold is a little off - or more than a little.

Money from Nothing or Gold in Farthest Frontier does not make sense

The problem is that you are looking at history with modern conditions. In the past, you didn’t have employees in the standard way — most people were not “paid wages” as today. Instead, they were compensated in goods they produced themselves, or through direct exchange for services (as serfs did). Barter was the common way of payment, with occasional use of money. The townsman class had money because they owned land or workshops producing goods they could sell on the market. So the game is correc…

I am afraid you misunderstand the issue I have with the way Farthest Frontier handles gold. My issue isn’t that the workers aren’t paid, but rather that they are paying taxes in gold, when there’s no gold circulating. I would prefer the in-game economy to feature less gold, not more.

[ROBO]

And I thought I took things too far.

[NanoSeven]

I’m always entertained by these kinds of discussions, or even more entertaining is (in the case of my RL work) watching how hard it is for some players to wrap their head around medieval rule versus our current democracy.

[Bas]

@Oerum

And in general I think the way FF handles gold is a little off - or more than a little.

Don’t look out the window. The real world conjures up money out of nowhere all the time.

[Olleus]

@Oerum

I suppose this comes down to temperament.

Can’t say fairer than that. All I can say is that making your peace with the level of abstraction at which the game models some real-life concept is a necessary part of the suspense of disbelief that comes with all media. On this topic, I personally do it by thinking of “gold” not as physical gold bars, but as a broader measure of wealth, disposable income, and monetisation. [I know this might seem hypocritical from someone who has made as many changes to the game as myself, but issues of balance and choice are superficial compared to underlying abstractions.]

After all, no matter what changes are made, at some point it’s going to depart from real world logic. Either current day real world economics, or medieval economics.

[Oerum]

Money from Nothing or Gold in Farthest Frontier does not make sense

Don’t look out the window. The real world conjures up money out of nowhere all the time.

Ha! Good point! But that does requires a slightly more complicated system that what our townspeople have to work with - though I suppose there’s no telling what the grocers get up to in the marketplace when supposedly ‘gardening’

Money from Nothing or Gold in Farthest Frontier does not make sense

Can’t say fairer than that. All I can say is that making your peace with the level of abstraction at which the game models some real-life concept is a necessary part of the suspense of disbelief that comes with all media. On this topic, I personally do it by thinking of “gold” not as physical gold bars, but as a broader measure of wealth, disposable income, and monetisation. [I know this might seem hypocritical from someone who has made as many changes to the game as myself, but issues of balan…

I think my issues with the way the game handles gold, is that it seems so very inconsistent - A few jobs seem to be paid, but most aren’t, and a few buildings require a monthly gold fee to function, but most don’t. Most beautifications require gold to build, but so does deep mines and advanced industry.

I could see gold being used in building statues and temples, as a means of beautifying the structure - but where does the gold go when you build a deep mine or a garden trail? If it’s wages why only then?

And then there’s the fact that ‘gold’ seems to be both currency and raw material.

Compare this to the lack of families in the game - It’s simply completely abstracted.

[Olleus]

Yeah, I can’t really fault that, the abstraction of gold lacks consistency. Frankly, neither does the use of it in the first place. A bar of iron and a bar of gold are the same size (take up the same storage space), but iron is worth 10x more than gold going by trader prices?!?

[Oerum]

I think the best way to resolve this - though it’s pretty late to voice any suggestions on the matter - would be to have gold split into two separate resources - one representing gold ingots as used for manufacturing/building purposes and then one representing gold as used as currency - essentially what I outlined in my initial post.