Last time we talked about why The Long Century is built on a generalizable engine. This diary gets concrete: how the economy actually settles every tick.
Goods, not gold
Most of the simulation's depth comes from one stubborn rule: there is no magic gold that appears from nowhere. Wealth is goods — grain, iron, cloth, tools — produced somewhere, consumed somewhere else, and moved in between.
Production starts at resource-gathering operations (RGOs): mines pulling metal out of the ground, farms turning land and labour into food. Those outputs flow into a market, where they meet demand from populations and industry.
Clearing the market
Each tick, for each good, the market does something simple to describe and fascinating to watch:
- Collect everything offered for sale and everything demanded.
- Find the price where supply and demand meet.
- Execute the transactions at that price.
When a war cuts a trade route or a new mine comes online, you don't get a scripted event telling you prices changed — they just change, because the inputs to step 1 changed. Shortages ripple outward. So do gluts.
Why honesty matters
It would be easier to fake this — to nudge prices toward "interesting" values. We don't, because the emergent version is more interesting. A famine that you can see coming three ticks out in the grain price is a story the simulation told, not one we wrote.
Next diary: the other half of the economy — the people. How pops migrate, change occupation, and reshape a province over time. Questions in the meantime? The forum is open.