Games for May

Thought it might be useful to have a place to discuss current pricing and balance. (Please feel free to add!)

Currency:
100 denari = 1 sheckle

Passage of time:
1 day = ~10 minutes (not tested, according to school learning times)
1 month = 5hrs
1 year = 60hrs (2.5 days)

Starting cash: 5s
Alpha bonus: 25s

*updated year length

Housing:
Build house skill = 5s
House cost = 25s
Additional materials = 15 lumber

Not counting skill & materials, renting a house at 10d/mo would require 250 in-game months, or 20 years (aprox 52 days realtime) to break even on fixed construction cost at current rates. (.4% value of construction cost per month)

At 1% of home value (decent expectation) rent should be closer to 25d/mo (non-gov subsidized) creating approximate 100mo break-even in ~20 days realtime. However current average salary is 25d/mo, which would allocate 100% of monthly budget to housing.

General recommendation is to spend ~30% gross income on housing, which should put wages closer to 75-80d/mo using those figures.

At current home construction costs and average wages we will be on the government dole for a while!

Ah, good thread.
There is plenty of balancing to be done on everything and this is an excellent place to start.

I'll reply with specific thoughts later but just one note : The price for home construction is determined (partly) by the town tax rate, which is set by the town mayor. Lanbury has been set with a deliberately high tax rate (so that, when we get there, a new player-created town will potentially be significantly cheaper to construct in).

Figures for time are : 1 gameday = 10 mins, 1 month is approx 5 hours (30 x 10 mins).. 1 game year is about 2 and a half real-time days.

Housing update...

I had ZyrVox construct a small house for me to test the recent price/resource changes.

Skill: 5s (not included in total)
Construction: 10s
Tax: 2s50d
Materials: 25 wood (25 x 36d = 9s)
TOTAL: 21s50d

The shift toward materials makes sense, but I think actual average income per capita is too low for the economy to afford. Wood currently makes up almost half the cost of a house (No idea if it's competitively priced.)

Using my rough pricing guideline above, rent should be about 22d/mo for 1% value.

In my above post I mistook daily salary for monthly.... Average salary is currently 25d/day (7s50d/mo) which would be more than sufficient (only 2.9% rental cost monthly) to afford, but I think the bigger issue is many (most?) establishments are not paying regular wages.

For example, at my butcher job I don't think I have been paid a wage in over a year. We seem to be producing more than enough food to support the population to not require regular production. (Farmers & chef at bistro may be exception to this.)

That sounds a little better in general, and I agree that the low demand for produced goods is an issue atm. (That said - the demand for tea is pretty high right now :] ). The demand issue wasn't helped by having so much 'free' stuff around initially, and I think maybe ppl will start paying wages a bit more once that is flushed out of the system * over the next few days.

Longer-term, assuming increases in population and an expansion of the range of production chains available (i.e. assuming things like vehicle production lines start getting added on) the proportion of players involved in the food line should lessen, and the level of demand would become more sustainable for those who remain in the business - but those are assumptions

I added some more stats from the server yesterday, which will start producing meaningful graphs in the near future, but one surprising insight so far was the very low input of employer wage grant cash into the system - only 19d in the past 6 game-months. (~10s in wages were paid, which is also low, and i guess most of it is from jehovah buildings...). For that reason, I've bumped the grant up a notch so its now 2d.

I'll also be looking to make the first viable exports available soon.

(* Now there's an image that works on at least 2 levels..)

I've started a lil' wiki. It's not much yet but it's start.. At some point i'll export that wiki to my own website once i get a new website running (Free website hosters ain't as good as they used to be eh) Any idea to good but cheap website hosting? I was looking at Bluehost and thought it looked pretty good for my needs. Any help appreciated

http://wikialpha.wikidot.com