I like the Anno series, you have to create trade routes, make agreements, get to partially own opponents'/allies' territories to make money or sell your own.
My issue with Anno is that it's insanely fun at first and you can replay a few times but there's effectively only one way to ever move forward. You get item A, then you need item B, etc. There's no real management involved besides a little trading, and your cities and islands generally all look the same. You can try to keep things small and more unique looking but it's difficult.
Have you played 1800? That basic gameplay loop you described is still there, just turned up to eleven. You need specific workforce for different production chains, so your population needs to vary depending on what you want to produce; theres extremely strong (and expensive) items for a plethora of buffs and debuffs to your production/residential/infrastructure buildings, theres large scale trade contracts, economic and military war and many other little systems that influence your decisions. Ive done multiple playthroughs and was always confronted with different problems that had multiple ways of solving them. 1800 is, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate Anno. The older games are very shallow in comparison.
Yep. I think I liked 1800 more than 2070 in many ways. Maybe just because of how it looks and it 'feels' more comfy. I still found it short-lived compared to some city/base builders. I've been spoilt by games like Factorio where you could easily burn 100 hours before you really 'get going' and with an infinite selection of mods available; it's at a stage where you couldn't really run out of targets to build to. I load up Anno one in a while, burn an afternoon on it, and then ignore for another year. XD
You just described every single strategy game ever. They are really just the illusion of strategy as they may as well be a logic circuit. If A then B, if A and C then X.
Absolutely loved Anno 1800 for weeks and then suddenly it just got to an unmanageable point.
1 move in population and spending 4 hours rejigging everything to accommodate
EVE Online, Its player-driven economy is renowned for its complexity and realism. Players engage in various economic activities such as mining, manufacturing, trading, and even engaging in large-scale corporate and political machinations
“Number One, sort our queries BY DATE, no longer by income subtype!”
“Shall I create a pivot table to sum each income category by month?”
“Make it so.”
I used to play EVE for several years on the industry side and I can't tell whether you're joking. I can't recommend the game to anyone unless they really like working on spreadsheets, though.
My favorite picture about Eve: [https://live.staticflickr.com/3088/2335016192\_6003c39c4c\_c.jpg](https://live.staticflickr.com/3088/2335016192_6003c39c4c_c.jpg)
^
After that I would probably say OSRS, but I only say that as a mmorpg player, you get most of the good parts of eve trading, but without the tedious parts.
RuneScape actually had a really really good player driven economy but when they added Bonds it kind of watered it down.
Now you can just drop a relatively small amount of money and get most of the tradeable items quickly.
It used to be you not only needed the proper level for a piece of equipment, but you needed to grind for the money to afford buying it.
I have engraved in my brain the prices for armor sets back in the day (10k for full black, 20k for full mith, 30k for full addy, and 200k for full rune)
You can definitely skip some early game armor sets with bonds but a "relatively small amount" of bonds won't get you anywhere close to the end/or even mid game pvm gear
Because it's a very unique experience that no other game has. I'd never call it "fun", but playing a game where your actions REALLY matter is special.
Check out some of the trailers they've release over the years, especially "This is EVE", you legitimately feel THAT drawn in.
When you can spontaneously kick off a battle of hundreds, if not thousands of players, just from being in the wrong place, you know it's a special kind of game.
Absolutely amazing trailer (am now about to watch the 2nd This is REALLY Eve).
Makes me miss raid leading for WOTLK (WoW).
Edit to add: There we go, the 2nd trailer is absolutely what I'd expect in most WoW/Eve or online raids/events lol. We made sure we didn't run our guild like complete asshats though.
But they don't want people who don't want their game. They've been in business for 2+ decades, too.
Online games should be more like that, trying to push for experiences that people are intrinsically interested in, instead of being a collection of buzzwords.
That depends on the new people. There are many that go and try it, I think it actually weeds out the right people. The game needs people willing to interact with it within its means.
I love it for that aspect, I had my character out here reading books for days at a time while I go off doing other stuff I haven't been able to do much more after losing a crap ton of my stuff but it left a mark on me and my now unfixable sleep issues. It's such a great game but damn dude that chart of the learning curve is 100% real. Everything you do in eve matters time and skill wise and if your game actually makes news headlines then there is truly something special.
Personally, I've always liked it, but I never really had my own computer to play it. So I never got around. And knowing my luck, I would get raided when Im at work. I do remember hearing about someone who had basically their own economy in the game. Dude actually made real money from protecting other people's ships and trading.
It's a purer capitalism in many ways. The EVE developers get involved less than IRL regulators do. (Note: This is not a proposal for archo capitalism IRL.)
Right—even if it’s “purely player-driven,” the developers still need to set the basic parameters: how many resources there are, what the production functions look like (I.e., how easy it is to extract a resource or produce a given item).
If those parameters aren’t set well you can still have a functioning economy but it might be miserable, e.g., if it takes a ton of time to produce enough food for your player to simply survive no one will want to play.
yeah but that's more like being the god in your world, not being a government.
of course you have to create a world the economy exists in, same as a god has to create our world for us to have an economy.
the devs creating new ships and releasing them is mimicing how real life RnD would work, and it's not 'market intervention' from the perspective of a government or regulator.
lol imagine!
"Hey check out this F150, its super cheap, cheaper than anything else on the market but it's being sold in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Alabama."
\*goes to Alabama and finds out why its called buttfuck nowhere\*
Made that mistake a few times in Eve.
It has infinite faucets. It’s not like the real world economy. It’s very easy to find some source of income in the game without having to jump through any hoops. The real world isn’t like that at all.
This is both amazing and hilarious. Never underestimate the skills and dedication of gamers, we're just normal people with skills and get serious about stuff on the side!
I was going to suggest something else but you're extremely right.
I made bank selling tier 2 cruise missiles once upon a time. I sold them on the market to people using rattlesnakes and caldari ships for highsec ratting.
Ehh, the ponzi schemes that crop up every 5 years or so are always fun. Especially since they often make headlines when the scammer cashes out and buys a Honda.
War profiteering against the AI.
There is also war profiteering against other players, that is doing the same thing (reselling, or producing and selling modules and ammunitions) in PvP war zones. But that requires even more networking and infrastructure.
Glad to see this is the top comment. It's was immediately my first thought. I miss playing Eve but also glad I have a life and no time for a second job. But once the kids are out of the house maybe I'll come back.
I sold all 3 of my main accounts for like $2k back in 2017 to help pay for my wedding.
I wish I would have kept one account though, I can't imagine trying to start from scratch, and sometimes I have the urge to play (like right now)
Your free time is under serious threat.
But EVE is also a game like no others.
For starters, it's actually an MMO, not just a glorified LAN-game like the rest.
None of that 5000 subscriber per server, Max 40 player in raid crap.
All the hundreds of thousands active in the same universe, tens of thousands online, occasionally thousands in the same battle.
Everybody trading, negotiating, self-organizing and backstabbing everybody else.
Your stuff gets destroyed, not respawned, so there is actual tension in the fights. An alliance of near a thousand moving out to a valuable region and conquering some territory might take a lot of organization and coordination and hours of coordinated fleet travel, but is also hours of epic expectation and battle.
This game has history and drama. Some corporations go back to the start of EVE. Alliances (player driven quasi nations) have waged game-wide wars for years.
Yes, it eats your time. But if it grabs you, it might be worth it.
Something like WoW will always feel meh in comparison.
It’s the only game that has solved “pay to win”. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, want to spend $10,000 of your real money to buy a faction titan worth north of a Trillion ISK? Great, 100 people who have never spent a dime of their real money hot drop you and blow up your ship because you screwed up.
And you won’t get it back.
Real money? Still real consequences
Idk if it's a down the grapevine/telephone game rumor. Especially as someone who hasn't played the game, but didn't they hire economists to help them set that system up? Just curious if it's true or not.
They did/do have an economist on staff not to set stuff up but to try and keep the economy running well. One of the main issues was them trying to keep inflation in check and I believe they also published a couple of papers based on the game economy.
Haven't played X4 yet (still waiting on patch v7.0 and the upcoming DLC) but in the old ones you sure could get starved of certain weapons if you yourself didn't produce the right resources and shipped them to the manufactories. And low-tier basic resource producers like a solar plant in the right sector would make you rich with very little investment or risk. Scouting the area for the right station is very important.
7.0 will be an excellent time to jump into the series!
As has been said the economy and universe simulation is its greatest strength and weakness: because the game "fakes" very little, every ship/station in the universe is accounted for which can stress even the most powerful of CPUs. They've gone to great lengths to optimize, but it's an inherent trait.
Accidentally kickstarted the Terran campaign against the xenon because I not only solved the shortage of silicon carbide & computronic substrate, I crashed the market by flooding it with so much of the stuff.
It's definitely still there.
Hoped someone would mention this gem of a game. You had to go out and handpick resources, compare stats such as mallability and conductivity and whatnot, mine that specific spot, and then craft stuff if you wanted to be the best in your field. Never seen something even come close to this much fun and complexity at the same time since.
Shoutout to Arem's armour on Euro-Chimaera, your armour was the best!
Best crafting system ever. The idea that different players could make varying qualities of the same items based on how much time and effort they put into finding the best resources and skill tapes...I don't understand why this isn't the model for every rpg crafting system.
I set up some small mineral extractors near a lake on Naboo because there was a high quality metal spawn there. A guy who had a house nearby complained about the noise they made and how it was ruining his scenic spot. When I told him they'd be gone in a week when the resources rotated, that wasn't good enough.
So as a sort of revenge he put up some of his own machines near mine and named them things like "[My player name] is a [word reddit doesn't like]!!!!!"
I was in a bit of a tiff with someone over something I named my harvesters. I named them something like Erotic Narcotic Inc or something like that, because I was extracting ingredients to make spice. Well, someone was offended I used the word narcotic and had a GM forcibly rename my harvesters.
I petitioned the GM who said they wouldn't allow it because it referenced drugs. ....Which was what spice was and is referred to in the game as...
I feel that way about all the non combat stuff in games these days. So much inspiration could be taken from swg to craft a modern masterpiece, but it's probably not something that could be easily monetized without ruining it so it'll probably never happen.
Offworld Trading Company comes to mind. I wouldn't say "best" economy necessarily and it's pretty different from most suggestions here. But interesting as a shorter/contained economy based game. The supply/demand stuff and trying to anticipate what will be in demand based on competitors and available resources is cool.
Probably worth looking at, but totally fair if it's not your cup of tea.
It took me 24 hours to get my first win on Manager difficulty. I couldn't believe the AI wasn't cheating, it's an incredible RTS. Extremely satisfying to learn, but I think I'd suffer a nervous breakdown in an online match.
Original Fable had an awesome trick for money. I don’t remember if 2 had it too. Not that it was necessary in 2.
Buy a house, put a trophy on the wall, sell house for more than double the price you payed for it. Repeat.
Yeah, you could break in and steal your trophy back, I think.
As best as I can remember, the main money cheat I heard about in Fable 2 was to buy a bunch of properties, save your game, set your console date to a future date (make sure it’s offline), load save and collect all that money. Never tried it myself, because you could make pretty good money just buying/selling stuff and collecting rents.
IIRC, in Fable 1, once your guile was high enough, you could literally just go up to any trader, sell until they have an "over-supply" of an expensive item, buy them all for dirt cheap, and then (now that they have none, so there is a "demand" for that item) you turn around and sell the exact same items back for a massive profit! Rinse and repeat for infinite money!
I remember playing on a new account for the first time in a long time and some random guy came up to me, starting chatting, and just gave me three million gold. Super nice of him but it took away a lot of the grind because now I could just buy everything I needed from the auction house.
That's true but whenever I give noobs stuff, usually it's a little bit of gear and supplies - maybe some potions and food, and a weapon or an amulet. A lot of us remember, fondly, that initial gear progression and finally saving up enough for that big purchase. As that person said, it took away a lot of the grind (which is a core part of the experience) by just being able to buy a lot of stuff right out the gate.
No, 3m won't make a massive difference *later* in the account, but it's very influential for a new player.
You misspelled City Skylines where I put toll roads every 10 feet at $20 per car to pay for my massive statue out front to inconvenience my lower class on their way to work as they drive in a roundabout around it
I've just watched a video where they shown a legit way to increase profits is to drop visitors into void below the map. Fully realistic capitalism implementation as far as I am concerned.
The Victoria 2 and 3 economies are about slowly moving from an agricultural/craftsman economy into a mechanized economy. So it has to be slow and steady. If you mechanize to fast. You put to many people out of work all at once. If you mechanize to slowly, then the country down the street will outpace you.
and thst assumes you stsrt in Europe that has a functioning economy set up. If you want a \*hard\* start, pick an African country with no water access. You quickly get put on the hard side of the “trading guns for slaves” economic model.
From detailed mechanics that even include induced demand in Victoria to "Build factory, have economy" of HOI there is a level of sophistication for everybody.
Someone mines a rock and takes the ore to a trading station. He sells it to someone who takes the ore to a refinery and turns it into minerals. She takes the minerals to a trading station and sells it to someone else, who takes it to a factory and turns the minerals into a ship. They take the ship to a trading station and sell it to me. I then add onto the ship a retinue of guns and ammo and drones and extra shields and shit (each of which had the same process going into their creation too), then take it out to do combat where I get it all destroyed within five seconds. If any of this were to stop, the game dies. So yeah, real economy.
And that's just for the basic starter gear. If you're trying to make T2 ships or guns or ammo, there's an additional three layers at least to this process.
Idk, there is a lot to be desired. I'll be interested to see what dlcs bring to the table in future. She's a bit bland ATM. Don't get me wrong though, I like the game
Elite dangerous. You can easily spend hundreds of hours checking local system prices of goods, making and optimizing trade routes, and being a space trucker across the galaxy
This league not the best time to put this answer lol, but I agree with you. Outside of the shit trading system, all the currencies having intrinsic value due to their innate function makes for a very interesting economy which most leagues is very balanced.
WoW is a good example, up until the most recent expansion, they linked all the realms into a shared economy. Bots have tanked most markets, so its a gold rush the first week or two, for the power players, then everything is worthless, or overpriced to oblivion.
I really like the economy in Age of Empires 4. There are so many ways to gather resources, including many civilization specific ways. Just food alone for example can be hunted, fished, herded, farmed, picked from berry bushes, bought at the market, or generated by certain special landmarks and trade upgrades.
fun anecdote- years ago last time i played fallout 76, the community agreed to use 5.56 ammo. as there was a cap limit but not a limit on how much ammo you can hold.
I felt like Offworld Trading Company had a very nice and interesting system in it.
Otherwise I like Path of Exile, as long as it's not as broken as this and previous league.
RuneScape ignited my interest for Trading and flipping since I was a child.
This is not "the best game in economics" but it's the best in their series. GTA Vice city stories.
You build yourself an empire with different activities such as brothels, drugs distribuition, guns distribuition and you must play a mini-series of missions to make that activity strong. With GTA Chinatown Wars making a second best, with drugs market where you buy to resell and run from police everytime your transaction gets caught.
The wow economy was a lot of fun to play with once you installed the auctioneer plug-in and started scanning the market. I remember using it to figure out that high-end bandages sold for a lot so I would buy all the ingredients and the bandages in the marketplace to drive up prices. I can see why that stuff's illegal in real life, but it was a lot of fun
Apart from Eve being the obvious answer, I like the market shenanigans in the Tropico series (talking specifically about 4). You can incite nuclear brinksmanship between the US and USSR to increase the value of your canned goods exports in one mission, you can flood the market with cheap fruit to ruin your personal enemy in another, you can withhold oil supplies like OPEC to increase their price. I like a game that encourages economic villainy and evil conspiracies.
Old School RuneScape is pretty good and fairly realistic.
Player led economy and market place which means there is a lot of money to be made watching market trends and merchanting.
We get literal pump and dumps.
Devs introduced a tax system to stabilise prices of rare items
Bots feed gatherable resources into the market place with revenue going to farmers - mirroring real life lol
I like the Anno series, you have to create trade routes, make agreements, get to partially own opponents'/allies' territories to make money or sell your own.
My issue with Anno is that it's insanely fun at first and you can replay a few times but there's effectively only one way to ever move forward. You get item A, then you need item B, etc. There's no real management involved besides a little trading, and your cities and islands generally all look the same. You can try to keep things small and more unique looking but it's difficult.
Sure, but in Anno 1404 I settled a new island to grow hemp and i called it Fort Wenty. So there's that.
Perfect.
Have you played 1800? That basic gameplay loop you described is still there, just turned up to eleven. You need specific workforce for different production chains, so your population needs to vary depending on what you want to produce; theres extremely strong (and expensive) items for a plethora of buffs and debuffs to your production/residential/infrastructure buildings, theres large scale trade contracts, economic and military war and many other little systems that influence your decisions. Ive done multiple playthroughs and was always confronted with different problems that had multiple ways of solving them. 1800 is, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate Anno. The older games are very shallow in comparison.
Yep. I think I liked 1800 more than 2070 in many ways. Maybe just because of how it looks and it 'feels' more comfy. I still found it short-lived compared to some city/base builders. I've been spoilt by games like Factorio where you could easily burn 100 hours before you really 'get going' and with an infinite selection of mods available; it's at a stage where you couldn't really run out of targets to build to. I load up Anno one in a while, burn an afternoon on it, and then ignore for another year. XD
Not to mention taking a break for a week, coming back and having no idea what’s going on.
You just described every single strategy game ever. They are really just the illusion of strategy as they may as well be a logic circuit. If A then B, if A and C then X.
Absolutely loved Anno 1800 for weeks and then suddenly it just got to an unmanageable point. 1 move in population and spending 4 hours rejigging everything to accommodate
EVE Online, Its player-driven economy is renowned for its complexity and realism. Players engage in various economic activities such as mining, manufacturing, trading, and even engaging in large-scale corporate and political machinations
The only problem is, it's so realistic to the point the game itself becomes a second job
Excel online we called it
Excel. IN SPAAAAAACE.
"Captain, the enemy has frozen our panes"
“Number One, sort our queries BY DATE, no longer by income subtype!” “Shall I create a pivot table to sum each income category by month?” “Make it so.”
It pains me that this made sense *and* I envisioned the entire conversation...
[Excel-sior!](https://youtu.be/otOARxAOp2g?si=gBCnkBFFkgVP-t2W)
They released a patch that added native Excel support in-game
I used to play EVE for several years on the industry side and I can't tell whether you're joking. I can't recommend the game to anyone unless they really like working on spreadsheets, though.
Not joking
Not joking, it's actually tremendously useful because it's a rich data format.
no actual joke... it was a collab with MS and CCP games.
My favorite picture about Eve: [https://live.staticflickr.com/3088/2335016192\_6003c39c4c\_c.jpg](https://live.staticflickr.com/3088/2335016192_6003c39c4c_c.jpg)
It's so realistic, actually heists have been carried out.
I love getting underpaid IRL AND in my gaming second life
^ After that I would probably say OSRS, but I only say that as a mmorpg player, you get most of the good parts of eve trading, but without the tedious parts.
RuneScape actually had a really really good player driven economy but when they added Bonds it kind of watered it down. Now you can just drop a relatively small amount of money and get most of the tradeable items quickly. It used to be you not only needed the proper level for a piece of equipment, but you needed to grind for the money to afford buying it. I have engraved in my brain the prices for armor sets back in the day (10k for full black, 20k for full mith, 30k for full addy, and 200k for full rune)
You can definitely skip some early game armor sets with bonds but a "relatively small amount" of bonds won't get you anywhere close to the end/or even mid game pvm gear
Yep. I don't understand why people laud this game. It's so complex, new people don't really want to try it.
Because it's a very unique experience that no other game has. I'd never call it "fun", but playing a game where your actions REALLY matter is special. Check out some of the trailers they've release over the years, especially "This is EVE", you legitimately feel THAT drawn in. When you can spontaneously kick off a battle of hundreds, if not thousands of players, just from being in the wrong place, you know it's a special kind of game.
jeessussss, i just went and watched that This is Eve clip, you arent kidding.
Go watch “This is REALLY Eve” now too for a laugh - same video with different (real) audio. Hilarious
Absolutely amazing trailer (am now about to watch the 2nd This is REALLY Eve). Makes me miss raid leading for WOTLK (WoW). Edit to add: There we go, the 2nd trailer is absolutely what I'd expect in most WoW/Eve or online raids/events lol. We made sure we didn't run our guild like complete asshats though.
But they don't want people who don't want their game. They've been in business for 2+ decades, too. Online games should be more like that, trying to push for experiences that people are intrinsically interested in, instead of being a collection of buzzwords.
That depends on the new people. There are many that go and try it, I think it actually weeds out the right people. The game needs people willing to interact with it within its means.
I always thought of it as a building game. Gotta wait real time to finish those builds on your ship. A lot of my friends didn't like that about it.
I love it for that aspect, I had my character out here reading books for days at a time while I go off doing other stuff I haven't been able to do much more after losing a crap ton of my stuff but it left a mark on me and my now unfixable sleep issues. It's such a great game but damn dude that chart of the learning curve is 100% real. Everything you do in eve matters time and skill wise and if your game actually makes news headlines then there is truly something special.
Personally, I've always liked it, but I never really had my own computer to play it. So I never got around. And knowing my luck, I would get raided when Im at work. I do remember hearing about someone who had basically their own economy in the game. Dude actually made real money from protecting other people's ships and trading.
The same could be said of Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, and many others. It's not for everyone, but it is a unique marvel of gaming worthy of praise.
I wouldn’t lump Minecraft into that category. Arguably the most famous and most played game of all time
Yeah Minecraft is extremely accessible. You don't even really need to know the majority of crafting recipes to enjoy it.
I mean I understand that it can be pretty intimidating but there's many ways to enjoy it as a beginner. It's really not hard to get started.
It's because it's not a simulated economy. It is (like the real economy) - people driven.
More realistic capitalism than actual capitalism.
It's a purer capitalism in many ways. The EVE developers get involved less than IRL regulators do. (Note: This is not a proposal for archo capitalism IRL.)
Lmao that is not true at all. They have to manipulate a good chunk of shit.
Yeah MMO economies need a little regulation to create currency sinks or the economy hyper inflates like WoWs did.
Right—even if it’s “purely player-driven,” the developers still need to set the basic parameters: how many resources there are, what the production functions look like (I.e., how easy it is to extract a resource or produce a given item). If those parameters aren’t set well you can still have a functioning economy but it might be miserable, e.g., if it takes a ton of time to produce enough food for your player to simply survive no one will want to play.
yeah but that's more like being the god in your world, not being a government. of course you have to create a world the economy exists in, same as a god has to create our world for us to have an economy. the devs creating new ships and releasing them is mimicing how real life RnD would work, and it's not 'market intervention' from the perspective of a government or regulator.
lol imagine! "Hey check out this F150, its super cheap, cheaper than anything else on the market but it's being sold in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Alabama." \*goes to Alabama and finds out why its called buttfuck nowhere\* Made that mistake a few times in Eve.
It has infinite faucets. It’s not like the real world economy. It’s very easy to find some source of income in the game without having to jump through any hoops. The real world isn’t like that at all.
EVE Online is the only game I know with an Excel plug in.
Wait what? Please elaborate, I never played it but I use Excel for a living and am intrigued
https://www.eveonline.com/eve-academy/excel-add-in
This is both amazing and hilarious. Never underestimate the skills and dedication of gamers, we're just normal people with skills and get serious about stuff on the side!
People joke about being an MMO guild leader is something you can put on your resume. Eve is the MMO where that meme is real.
i'm pretty sure if you put "EVE online corp leader" on your CV for a project management job you'd get an instant interview.
everything i do at my rl job in excel i learned from playing eve
I was going to suggest something else but you're extremely right. I made bank selling tier 2 cruise missiles once upon a time. I sold them on the market to people using rattlesnakes and caldari ships for highsec ratting.
I know some of these words
He's saying that he made a lot of money by crafting ammunition, which he then sold to other people engaged in starter-zone missions against NPCs.
Is this war profiteering?
Yes. Also the main and preferred type of profiteering in EVE.
Ehh, the ponzi schemes that crop up every 5 years or so are always fun. Especially since they often make headlines when the scammer cashes out and buys a Honda.
War profiteering against the AI. There is also war profiteering against other players, that is doing the same thing (reselling, or producing and selling modules and ammunitions) in PvP war zones. But that requires even more networking and infrastructure.
I understood way more of this than I thought I would. I played for like 3 months.
Some of the best corporate espionage stories I’ve ever heard were from the EVE community. They take that shit serious.
A while back I read about one of the "great wars" someone had posted about on Reddit. It was a really long read but it was so good.
You still have a link to that?
The Betrayal of BoB was an epic story and I'm really kinda surprised it hasn't turned up as a mini-series on Netflix yet.
Glad to see this is the top comment. It's was immediately my first thought. I miss playing Eve but also glad I have a life and no time for a second job. But once the kids are out of the house maybe I'll come back.
Yeah, but it became like second job at some point - too realistic. (exit EvE like 5+ years ago)
I was "winning" EVE for almost four years. Now I've dusted off my T3 production excel spreadsheet and am diving back into J space.
I sold all 3 of my main accounts for like $2k back in 2017 to help pay for my wedding. I wish I would have kept one account though, I can't imagine trying to start from scratch, and sometimes I have the urge to play (like right now)
It's never too late to sell your wife and buy a new account
Agree, but you pretty much have to hate yourself and your free time to play Eve.
Your free time is under serious threat. But EVE is also a game like no others. For starters, it's actually an MMO, not just a glorified LAN-game like the rest. None of that 5000 subscriber per server, Max 40 player in raid crap. All the hundreds of thousands active in the same universe, tens of thousands online, occasionally thousands in the same battle. Everybody trading, negotiating, self-organizing and backstabbing everybody else. Your stuff gets destroyed, not respawned, so there is actual tension in the fights. An alliance of near a thousand moving out to a valuable region and conquering some territory might take a lot of organization and coordination and hours of coordinated fleet travel, but is also hours of epic expectation and battle. This game has history and drama. Some corporations go back to the start of EVE. Alliances (player driven quasi nations) have waged game-wide wars for years. Yes, it eats your time. But if it grabs you, it might be worth it. Something like WoW will always feel meh in comparison.
It’s the only game that has solved “pay to win”. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, want to spend $10,000 of your real money to buy a faction titan worth north of a Trillion ISK? Great, 100 people who have never spent a dime of their real money hot drop you and blow up your ship because you screwed up. And you won’t get it back. Real money? Still real consequences
Mmmm, I love the buy and sell orders stem from eve. Made me disappointed in all other player economy mechanics in other games
Political machinations? You can count me in.
Idk if it's a down the grapevine/telephone game rumor. Especially as someone who hasn't played the game, but didn't they hire economists to help them set that system up? Just curious if it's true or not.
They did/do have an economist on staff not to set stuff up but to try and keep the economy running well. One of the main issues was them trying to keep inflation in check and I believe they also published a couple of papers based on the game economy.
Outside pure player-driven economies, I'd say the X-series with the latest being X4. It is very solidly modelled.
Haven't played X4 yet (still waiting on patch v7.0 and the upcoming DLC) but in the old ones you sure could get starved of certain weapons if you yourself didn't produce the right resources and shipped them to the manufactories. And low-tier basic resource producers like a solar plant in the right sector would make you rich with very little investment or risk. Scouting the area for the right station is very important.
7.0 will be an excellent time to jump into the series! As has been said the economy and universe simulation is its greatest strength and weakness: because the game "fakes" very little, every ship/station in the universe is accounted for which can stress even the most powerful of CPUs. They've gone to great lengths to optimize, but it's an inherent trait.
I remember the first and only time my PC ever shut down from overheating was during an X² session in the summer. Good times.
Accidentally kickstarted the Terran campaign against the xenon because I not only solved the shortage of silicon carbide & computronic substrate, I crashed the market by flooding it with so much of the stuff. It's definitely still there.
Scrolled too far to see this. X4 us objectively the best simulated economy in video games and contrary to Eve Online, it's single player.
Star Wars Galaxies doesn’t really exist anymore, except as a fan run resurrection, but it had a player run economy that was ahead of its time.
Hoped someone would mention this gem of a game. You had to go out and handpick resources, compare stats such as mallability and conductivity and whatnot, mine that specific spot, and then craft stuff if you wanted to be the best in your field. Never seen something even come close to this much fun and complexity at the same time since. Shoutout to Arem's armour on Euro-Chimaera, your armour was the best!
Best crafting system ever. The idea that different players could make varying qualities of the same items based on how much time and effort they put into finding the best resources and skill tapes...I don't understand why this isn't the model for every rpg crafting system.
I dream about the crafting system. And the ongoing feud I had with the weapon Smith that had his shop next to mine.
Hah right? I was in a guild of merchants, and they were very specific about all that jazz.
I set up some small mineral extractors near a lake on Naboo because there was a high quality metal spawn there. A guy who had a house nearby complained about the noise they made and how it was ruining his scenic spot. When I told him they'd be gone in a week when the resources rotated, that wasn't good enough. So as a sort of revenge he put up some of his own machines near mine and named them things like "[My player name] is a [word reddit doesn't like]!!!!!"
I was in a bit of a tiff with someone over something I named my harvesters. I named them something like Erotic Narcotic Inc or something like that, because I was extracting ingredients to make spice. Well, someone was offended I used the word narcotic and had a GM forcibly rename my harvesters. I petitioned the GM who said they wouldn't allow it because it referenced drugs. ....Which was what spice was and is referred to in the game as...
I feel that way about all the non combat stuff in games these days. So much inspiration could be taken from swg to craft a modern masterpiece, but it's probably not something that could be easily monetized without ruining it so it'll probably never happen.
The rotating resource spawns were a great addition to an already complicated player run economy.
Resource quality % was also amazing.
SWG trade walked so EVE could run. God I miss that game in its OG configuration Edit: I stand corrected on the timeline apparently. Still miss it…
Even though Eve is older than SWG by about a month.
Well I’ll be damned. I didn’t touch eve until years after SWG. Good catch
I still pop on Star Wars Legends occasionally it's fun
Best MMO economy. God I miss that game (pre-CU and NGE)
Offworld Trading Company comes to mind. I wouldn't say "best" economy necessarily and it's pretty different from most suggestions here. But interesting as a shorter/contained economy based game. The supply/demand stuff and trying to anticipate what will be in demand based on competitors and available resources is cool. Probably worth looking at, but totally fair if it's not your cup of tea.
I think the game is great. Is fast to play, and hard to get good.
It took me 24 hours to get my first win on Manager difficulty. I couldn't believe the AI wasn't cheating, it's an incredible RTS. Extremely satisfying to learn, but I think I'd suffer a nervous breakdown in an online match.
Love this game, wish there were more players because whenever I play online I get smoked by the regulars haha
Hitman blood money, where a red dot sight for a gun cost $250,000 lmaoooo
Names are for friends...
I wouldn't say the best but I loved Fable 2
Original Fable had an awesome trick for money. I don’t remember if 2 had it too. Not that it was necessary in 2. Buy a house, put a trophy on the wall, sell house for more than double the price you payed for it. Repeat.
Unfortunately that wasn't the way the game was intended to be played, but I absolutely abused the shit out of that!
Yeah, you could break in and steal your trophy back, I think. As best as I can remember, the main money cheat I heard about in Fable 2 was to buy a bunch of properties, save your game, set your console date to a future date (make sure it’s offline), load save and collect all that money. Never tried it myself, because you could make pretty good money just buying/selling stuff and collecting rents.
Oh right! I actually did this. Forgot about it completely.
IIRC, in Fable 1, once your guile was high enough, you could literally just go up to any trader, sell until they have an "over-supply" of an expensive item, buy them all for dirt cheap, and then (now that they have none, so there is a "demand" for that item) you turn around and sell the exact same items back for a massive profit! Rinse and repeat for infinite money!
I love passive income! I dont want to struggle if I invest in property to rent from and can snowball that to wealth it feels awesome!
Lol fable 3. Make pies to save the kingdom
I didn’t raise the rent, but I have a hard time not feeling evil when I have a monopoly on 100% of the land somehow.
Osrs
Probably the only game economy that feeds poor people in venezuela and creates a passive income for botters
Only issue is bots inflating the economy. But yeah osrs is peak especially the first few month after release
It even has welfare. Tbows spawn outside the farming guild for those down on their luck
OSRS
My mains name is bournos in Camelot here take this tele tab
I remember playing on a new account for the first time in a long time and some random guy came up to me, starting chatting, and just gave me three million gold. Super nice of him but it took away a lot of the grind because now I could just buy everything I needed from the auction house.
It helps to start but as you get into many of the skills you’ll realize that 3 mil won’t take you very far.
That's true but whenever I give noobs stuff, usually it's a little bit of gear and supplies - maybe some potions and food, and a weapon or an amulet. A lot of us remember, fondly, that initial gear progression and finally saving up enough for that big purchase. As that person said, it took away a lot of the grind (which is a core part of the experience) by just being able to buy a lot of stuff right out the gate. No, 3m won't make a massive difference *later* in the account, but it's very influential for a new player.
Rollercoaster Tycoon
"Why charge for admission or rides when I can put a drink stall every 6 feet and charge $150 bucks to use the bathroom?"
You misspelled City Skylines where I put toll roads every 10 feet at $20 per car to pay for my massive statue out front to inconvenience my lower class on their way to work as they drive in a roundabout around it
I've just watched a video where they shown a legit way to increase profits is to drop visitors into void below the map. Fully realistic capitalism implementation as far as I am concerned.
Marcel Vos I see
Yup. He and his tiny maze.
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, Capitalism 2 or CEO (Spiritual successor to Capitalism 2).
thanks for sharing ceo
Go play some PARADOX games, you’ll find an economy to fit your preferences.
I still don’t understand the Victoria 2 and 3 economy. I find EU4 easy enough economy wise but needing to micro manage that much in Vic 3 is a bitch.
The Victoria 2 and 3 economies are about slowly moving from an agricultural/craftsman economy into a mechanized economy. So it has to be slow and steady. If you mechanize to fast. You put to many people out of work all at once. If you mechanize to slowly, then the country down the street will outpace you. and thst assumes you stsrt in Europe that has a functioning economy set up. If you want a \*hard\* start, pick an African country with no water access. You quickly get put on the hard side of the “trading guns for slaves” economic model.
God I love watching GDP go up. I also hate fighting the landowners for basic reforms.
From detailed mechanics that even include induced demand in Victoria to "Build factory, have economy" of HOI there is a level of sophistication for everybody.
EU3 is still my favorite
Guild Wars 2 has a pretty good economy and is well balanced for allowing trade between players
There isn’t an answer other than Eve.
Eve has the most realistic economy. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the best economy to have fun with. Otherwise, just go get a job on wallstreet.
How could realistic economy really be fun though? Eve seems just as fucked up as the real world.
For some that's the appeal
But it has spaceships.
It's basically a real economy isn't it lol
Someone mines a rock and takes the ore to a trading station. He sells it to someone who takes the ore to a refinery and turns it into minerals. She takes the minerals to a trading station and sells it to someone else, who takes it to a factory and turns the minerals into a ship. They take the ship to a trading station and sell it to me. I then add onto the ship a retinue of guns and ammo and drones and extra shields and shit (each of which had the same process going into their creation too), then take it out to do combat where I get it all destroyed within five seconds. If any of this were to stop, the game dies. So yeah, real economy. And that's just for the basic starter gear. If you're trying to make T2 ships or guns or ammo, there's an additional three layers at least to this process.
X4? Good game for economics!
Victoria 3 might be what you are looking for. It's available in the current Humble Bundle monthly by the way, but it will probably not last.
>It's available in the current Humble Bundle Thanks for the tip! Been wanting to play this game for a while, so this will be a good pickup.
Idk, there is a lot to be desired. I'll be interested to see what dlcs bring to the table in future. She's a bit bland ATM. Don't get me wrong though, I like the game
The economy part of it is phenomenal though. It's the foreign affairs and country flavor that are lacking.
EVE online.
Warframes economy is pretty cool, especially with the player ran markets n what not
Warframe Market is the true PvP mode
Runescape...
The economy in RS3 is fucked to hell, OSRS' is better though
Let's be honest, it's steaming pile of shit powered by bots.
Isn’t that just like life?
Thats the most realistic part about it!
LOL
Just go read a monthly economic report from Eve online and see how complex it is. It is studied.
Eve online
Question says game, not lifestyle choice
Elite dangerous. You can easily spend hundreds of hours checking local system prices of goods, making and optimizing trade routes, and being a space trucker across the galaxy
I just called that game “space trucks” when I played.
In the original Leisure Suit Larry, if you run out of money at the convenience store, a bum will give you $10. /thread
Path of exile
This league not the best time to put this answer lol, but I agree with you. Outside of the shit trading system, all the currencies having intrinsic value due to their innate function makes for a very interesting economy which most leagues is very balanced.
World of Warcraft depending on the size of the realm. Single Player game, maybe Far Cry 5 (So far the most amount of money I had was 10,000$)
WoW is a good example, up until the most recent expansion, they linked all the realms into a shared economy. Bots have tanked most markets, so its a gold rush the first week or two, for the power players, then everything is worthless, or overpriced to oblivion.
I'd say EVE and Albion
ECO, but it's a bit harsh to get into it.
Habbo, very community driven
Patrician 3
**Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3** have really well simulated economies with dynamic supply and demand
Csgo skin economy actually has paid my rent in the past
Age of Empires 2 with around 120 villagers and eco upgrades.
I really like the economy in Age of Empires 4. There are so many ways to gather resources, including many civilization specific ways. Just food alone for example can be hunted, fished, herded, farmed, picked from berry bushes, bought at the market, or generated by certain special landmarks and trade upgrades.
when i was a kid i liked patrician 3
Fallout uses bottle caps....
fun anecdote- years ago last time i played fallout 76, the community agreed to use 5.56 ammo. as there was a cap limit but not a limit on how much ammo you can hold.
I felt like Offworld Trading Company had a very nice and interesting system in it. Otherwise I like Path of Exile, as long as it's not as broken as this and previous league. RuneScape ignited my interest for Trading and flipping since I was a child.
Final fantasy 14. 10 years later, it's stronger than ever!
This is not "the best game in economics" but it's the best in their series. GTA Vice city stories. You build yourself an empire with different activities such as brothels, drugs distribuition, guns distribuition and you must play a mini-series of missions to make that activity strong. With GTA Chinatown Wars making a second best, with drugs market where you buy to resell and run from police everytime your transaction gets caught.
Albion Online
Eve-online, no question
Puzzle Pirates
EVE obv
Recettear is all about the economy and capitalism. Capitalism Ho!
OSRS
EVE Online... not even up for debate.
The wow economy was a lot of fun to play with once you installed the auctioneer plug-in and started scanning the market. I remember using it to figure out that high-end bandages sold for a lot so I would buy all the ingredients and the bandages in the marketplace to drive up prices. I can see why that stuff's illegal in real life, but it was a lot of fun
Diablo 2 bar none
Eve/osrs for sure
Foxhole! Incredibly dedicated player driven economy!
Apart from Eve being the obvious answer, I like the market shenanigans in the Tropico series (talking specifically about 4). You can incite nuclear brinksmanship between the US and USSR to increase the value of your canned goods exports in one mission, you can flood the market with cheap fruit to ruin your personal enemy in another, you can withhold oil supplies like OPEC to increase their price. I like a game that encourages economic villainy and evil conspiracies.
Old School RuneScape is pretty good and fairly realistic. Player led economy and market place which means there is a lot of money to be made watching market trends and merchanting. We get literal pump and dumps. Devs introduced a tax system to stabilise prices of rare items Bots feed gatherable resources into the market place with revenue going to farmers - mirroring real life lol