Would love to see a resource-based-economy (RBE) in the game

I've never heard of RBE, but I always imagined what it would take to get a Star Trek-like society. #1 is practically unlimited and abundant energy, but really the absence of scarcity is more general. Well, is it really achievable? I would imagine in such a society population growth would outrageous, and eventually there would be scarcity of free space and privacy, so much so that people would be willing to pay to get it. Maybe we would self-govern our reproduction as more "enlightened" people?

Anyway, this sounds like it has potential to be a mod. You'd have to come up with game-changing mechanics for it to be worth development time. Otherwise it's really just backstory.

Hey, that's what games are for: living out pipe dreams. It doesn't make sense to me in the context of the game though. If you are positing a civilization where everyone is content and just pursuing their interests, why expand? why go to war? why engage in diplomacy? why compete for resources? The whole idea of a 4x strategy is competition for space, resources, etc. Scarcity is the engine that drives the game. It seems fundamentally incompatible with the underlying principals of RBE, which just seems like a repackaging of communism (in its pure theoretical form, not as executed by Russia and China.) 

Even Star Trek has a form of currency.

Space Empires 3, 4, 5 have exactly this.  There are 3 resources: mineral, food, radioactives.  Planets (and minable asteroids) provide variable quantities of each.  Buildables cost various amounts of each.  Normal races "spend" 95%+ mineral, but oddball races can tweak their ratios, e.g. races that have Organic components might spend 90%+ food instead.

It doesn't really change much.  You still colonize everything you can, fill all bins as efficiently as you can, and build as fast as you can.

RBEs have the flaw that they stray backward to the barter economy, which means all desirable quantities in your life form a huuuuuge clique (complete graph) of directed exchange-rate arcs (arcs are not even symmetric).  Then every transaction and interaction requires you and the other party to haggle peer-to-peer.  Money is a convenient lingua franca, or the hub in a hub-and-spoke topology (or the server in a server-client architecture).  Then you need only convert everything to and from money, which sure saves a bunch of people a bunch of work.

Ultimately, what you contribute to a society is your career-years of production.  With this, you accumulate all goods for your existence, plus maybe amass a surplus (or incur a deficit).  Bartering is a pretty inefficient way to manage all those transactions.

It gets (much) more complicated when we consider wealth creation.  In our (admittedly low-tech, Earth-biased) world, your worth is not merely the sum of Lego brick things you churn out on an assembly line, but also encompasses some great new idea you invent, or a new iphone you assemble consisting of a bunch of stock parts in a novel configuation, or an entertainment you participate in that draws vast attention.  What's really going on there?  The RBE aliens currently observing Earth are equally perplexed when they see us going gaga over Apple/Samsung/Google's latest gizmo.  To them, the resources haven't changed, they've just been packaged differently.  But to us, on an Earth-societal level, there is apparently an uber-quantity that we can roughly call collective human interest, and it is malleable: human consciousness produces finite quantities of it, and it gets distributed at human whim across every conceivable thing in the world.  Then value or worth is a consensus achieved by (insert cosmic punch-line here) something akin to Google's PageRank algorithm.  If 2 billion humans suddenly think it has value, then poof, it does.  If they lose confidence in Radio Shack, it falls, even though its tangible resources haven't changed.  Interest creates demand, demand creates value.

And I think this will always be true, so long as consciousness exists(!!).  Even when we cross the mythical sociological threshold of eliminating scarcity, I think there must still be some way to measure collective interest, and correlate that to value.  RBEs don't, by themselves, resolve conflicts among alternatives.  For example, a forest has value as a forest, or as timber, or you can clear-cut it for the arable soil, or strip-mine it for stuff a bit further down ... or sink it and grow radioactive kelp.  So it could provide several different resources, but only one at a time, and your choice tends to be permanent.  That decision can't be made at the resource level alone.  And even if you do have the resources and factories, there are choices of what to build.  Something other than resources must exist to drive those choices.

In fact, maybe RBEs simply don't go far enough.  They're correct that money shall vanish, but they're wrong that resources would take their place.  Gilmoy's counter-claim: It's not resources, but conscious interest.  If you're interested in building ringworlds, then those two gas giants become part of your resources.  If you're not, they aren't.  Resources aren't the bottom line; interest will drive you to find new resources.  We do that today when we frack.  Niven's Pak do that with the rest of the solar system.

I rather enjoy GC3's use of wealth because it drags in economic concepts and terminology, which is a literal gold mine for running gags and in-jokes.  They're funny because they're familiar.  (It would be even more hilarious if Drengin wealth suffers from workers who play games when they should be working -- we all whistle innocently and claim not to understand)  As a game mechanism, wealth gives flexibility because it's totally different from mp and rp.

Perhaps when GC3 matures, we can already roll our own RBEs by modding a custom race.

• Tweak its tech tree and buildables to de-emphasize or eliminate wealth as a consideration.  They don't produce it, they don't suffer its ills (add Approval mods to compensate), nor benefit from its abilities (can't rush queues, no black(hole) market).
• Flaw: GC3's UI has wealth deeply-woven into it, e.g. 1/3 of the wheel, 1/3 of the Planet Manage columns, rush builds, etc.  So a wealth-less race deliberately eviscerates a fraction of the UI, which is an asymmetry you can't just mod away ...
• ... unless we can.  If modding is sufficiently expressive, we might replace wealth with a completely different concept, which is a drop-in replacement for all wealth UI, but has different effects.  For example:
• Asimov Terminus Atomics, and you produce atom-piety instead of bc.
• Asimov Gaia Allthink, producing harmony -- which Gaia really did use as a societal replacement for money.
• Flaw: if it quacks like bc, then it can probably rush-build and trade like bc ... which defeats the purpose, if the goal is to make this race really different from other races.  So we'd also want the modding-facility to be rich enough that we could define moats between disparate quantities, e.g. to say "this is not wealth, don't equate it to wealth".  A simple Boolean-flag would suffice

RBEs are a neat thought-experiment, but they've been done in 4X, and they don't really stand out.  GC3 surely has bigger issues to grapple with.  Anyways, I think it's too late at this stage to rip wealth out of GC3's engine + UI.

Resource based economy does not exclude currency. Humanity had a resource based economy before currency was invented (two sheep for a cow...) but currency made it so much simpler that there is no going back. It would be just incredibly impractical.

What currencies need to prevent speculation and value fluctuations is a resource that backs them. "Real value". Currencies went haywire when banks started to dish out money with no backing, a system that functions on trust alone. Basically, In God We Trust should be replaced by In Gold We Trust in some form or another. Preferably to In Sheep We Trust.

If every coin and every banknote had real backing, the currency would not lose real value and it would serve as basis for resource based economy.

The only things you need, are the will, a charismatic figure head to lead the movement, and a logistical support team of computers and people that handles and documents every resource and person. Or so I believe that's how to get to a Sovereign utopia.

DARCA

Exactly! Or at least not one I'm thinking of. You need a value for items and a allowance for citizens to buy luxury goods. Of course one would expect no matter what that healthcare food and housing would be free...but every qualifying person has to do monthly work assignment.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to try and create a mod for this if possible. I've got some experience in programing, we'll see if I can pull it off.

One comment about RBE:

There is no bartering or required work assignments. Both of those are forms of money in a sense (RBE sees bartering and money as the same thing and pushes to eliminate both). The idea is that (1) everything is so abundant thanks to tech that the mechanisms to deal with scarcity (barter, coins, lines of credit, etc) are obsolete, and (2) we need the human brain to be creative, not do remedial jobs, and money kills creativity (this is scientifically known/measured). An RBE would have never worked 100 years ago (we needed humans to turn screws which is a boring job), but it has a chance of working for advanced civilizations.

By the way item (2) above is why companies such as google and visionaries such as Richard Branson are testing new policies such as unlimited vacation and work-days free of the usual corporate structure: they are trying to get the creative juices going and it is known that forcing folks to work for a living does not accomplish that. Working for a living does make people complete non-creative tasks (accounting, airline schedules, etc), but we've figured out how to make computers do these remedial jobs for us.

Once a player moves to an RBE, money disappears as a resource. Also, wars cannot be started. There would be a big boost to tech and culture. It would be a way to go for a cultural conquest. Or it could be used to ramp up technology and then going back to a different social structure to start wars taking advantage of the tech developed by creative citizens doing science in an RBE (a pretty develish strategy to eliminate money so people can be fully creative, then add money back so you can swell the military by offering money to people who now need it to feed their families and pay a mortgage - all the time having the tech to easily provide food and shelter for all). Ha! I think I'm starting to understand how those who control the financial system feel...

From the 1800s to now we humans have moved through a series of economic paradigms. First was subsistence farming and artisanal production, next came workshops and plantation agriculture, then mass production and mass-production agriculture (fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical reapers and sowers). We are now passing from a situation where we had more demand for products than people to make them to one where we have vast production capacity but fewer and fewer people need to be employed to run the systems. The problem of what to do with a large and increasing pool of the permanently unemployed and unemployable is apparently no soluble by capitalism. Recent evidence of socialist/communist systems indicates they don't work very well at production or at satisfying the workers.

 The abandonment of money in my opinion won't work - humans need a means of keeping score, they need satisfying work and there are a lot of necessary jobs that people won't do unless they are well compensated. The challenge ahead of us can be illustrated by this joke:

The president of Ford Motors took the UAW brass on a tour of a new automated factory. When it was over the Ford man sang the praises of the robots: they needed no breaks, no lunch hour, no vacation and no pay other than electricity and parts. The UAW man replied that was all true; the robots could do anything a man could do - except buy a car.

What will we do when we have vast amounts of stuff but no-one can afford to buy any of it because they have no jobs?

I'm really confused about what you're talking about.

If you look "Resource Based Economy" up on wikipedia (which I did, because I've never heard of this specific definition of the term) the definition is, it states: "A resource-based economy is the economy of a country whose gross national product or gross domestic product to a large extent comes from natural resources"  Ie, it is the same as what's termed an "extraction economy," "carbon economy" etc.  Which is well characterized by the literature (modern economic thought, and concepts of state development) as not being what you've described.  (a carbon economy is one where the principle economic activity revolves solely from extracting a natural resource and exporting it (think Saudi Arabia)).

You've described a currency-less economy, which have existed in various forms in the past.  You're also referring (in a round-about way) to a Marxist critique of capitalism, and a decidedly non-Marxist end of capital accumulation that Keynes famously predicted (which appears not be turning out to be true, unfortunately). 

Controversies over the above schools of thought, aside, I suggest that you read Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" for a better tact to take on what you're describing.  In short, money-less systems appear to be far less common than even modern economists tend to think (and modern economists don't like the idea of money-less societies), because money is based upon the idea of debt/indebtedness, which seems to be deeply engrained in the human psyche - the jury's out on aliens tho...

As it relates to GC3, one could have an extraction economy if a natural resource were rare/expensive enough and one player were able to corner the market.  Similar to real carbon economies, the problem arises in that all state/civ development would tend to gravitate toward extraction technologies/industries crowding out other cap ex or investments and, eventually, when the resource runs out - or someone comes along and takes away your iron mines (or whatever it is), then you're fucked.  And all of the citizens that you allowed to "do nothing" because there was more than enough money flowing in from selling iron to your enemies, are equally fucked because they simply lack the skills to compete in the real brutal marketplace.

Allowing players to do this could be as simple as including resource sliders for rarity and intensity (for lack of a better term on my part - ie the amount of resources required for routine production).  Ie if resources are rare, and economies/technologies are very resource intensive, a player/ai that finds one of the few resource lodes on the map would/could, by default become an extraction economy...

cheers,

-tid242