main problem i've always noticed is longivity without boredom. i don't think any zorics have lasted more then 4 months, and usually by then thier economies are utter trash and people can get anything for near cost.
(now begions a lengthly post about money, vehicles, buildings, and players. describing the pro's and con's of many different methods of doing stuff)
vehicles could be made more expensive, but then you get to the problem of making them worthwhile. most of the time i've had vehicles rangining from a few hundred to a thousand or little over 1k to produce. even that though can be considered very cheap. unless money is somewhat easier to make to keep players from getting very bored, it woulden't make much sense to make vehicles really expensive (upto 10x more as matt put it) unless you can make all the supplied vehicles different enough to make it worth while. don't mean to sound rude or anything, matt, but have you play'd an economy island recently? if you have 5 to 10 vehicles on an island, and make them somewhat realistically speeded (so nothing goes over 150 maybe), realistic fuel usages, somewhat realistic capacity, it isen't worth buying a car for 5k when you can get one that is a bit worse for way less money. take the hover transport and stunt tractor on zion. one costs 25s to make, other over 100s to make. the hover transport goes approximatly 50, and it holds a bit more. stunt tractor, costing 100s more, holds less but goes over 70mph. stunt tractor is worth more and is faster, but rarly anybody uses it due to the cost, and the hover transport is nearly as good. when it comes down to cost vs usefulness, if you have them set up realistically, you have the fact that your mainly paying for a car that looks different but only is slightly different in stats and nearly 99% of the people could easily live with saving a few k and taking a few secs longer to do stuff.
on the other hand, you could make the differences great and have vehicles going over 500 or 1000 mph to help balence out a high cost. but then you get to the problem of island size. in the end its really the same situation. fast cars go places fast. on a slow island those places are close together and although the fastest car might go 2k mph, a vehicle that only goes 1k mph and costs much less would get you thier in nearly the same time. difference being less then a second.
then, on the other side of the scale, you have cheap vehicles and the whole issue of buying soon and fast. you could make the start money very low to prevent this, along with slow income. but then you have nearly a dead slow economy like zion has. although this is liked by some people for lack of need to be active, alot of the players who are really active find it incredibly boring due to lack of stuff to do. making start money some what realistic (who moves out to live on thier own with only $500 anyway?
) you can have cheap vehicles (you can easily buy a used piece of junk for a few hundred) and just make the cheap cars crappy. however, this leads to the first long paragraph, the vehicles probably wont be worth it in the end if nearly they all are similer or close to similer. of course, thiers no saying that a player HAS to buy each vehicle or go threw all vehicles, but then you might have a suffering vehicle market and only other industries are fuel, food and (possibly) weapons.
this brings up vehicle decay. haven't used it yet on zoric (duh, it just came out
) it will be in zoric 8 and vehicle decay will probably be set so that after 10-20 years you need a new vehicle. however, i'm thinking that this will bring up issues of poorness and lack of younger/poorer players being able to do much when it comes to vehicles. its obvious that the first into the vehicle market on an economy island will get a huge head start because when nobody has made vehicles on the whole island yet, people will pay WAY over cost to buy one. few 50s vehicle 2's for 200s profit later and the people are making faster vehicles, cutting the costs of the crappy ones, and now selling the new faster vehicles for way over cost, and after setting up the new place, still having lots of profits left over from the vehicle 2's. thus, the rich guys will end up barly suffering from the vehicle decay, as they can easily buy a new one, and go back to their established-from-the-start-of-the-island buildings for more money.
in the end you still have the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor. easy way to solve this would be taxes. high taxes on the rich, really high on the very rich. only trouble then is tax dodgeing, its easy to get around taxes, wont say it here though but i figure you know how. same goes for job retirement. its easy for a rich person to stay rich (with the side effect of not being on top wealth) and easy for those rich people to keep the poor ones poor. by having alot of long running businesses from the start of the island, most rich people can easily keep the poor people out of the business by having many set trade routes with other rich people and in the end selling for cheap to the poor people, preventing them from posing as good compitition.
so now you have the issue of building ownership. zion has the nice idea of a low building limit. but combined with the slow time and low start money makes a very slow island and bored players. make too many buildings allowed and it will be incredibly easy for a family to dominate an island. especially if thiers not many buildings in the first place. hopeing to have a good solution to this on zoric. max 10 buildings, 3 types, 5 of one type. so you have a house and 2 money making types, upto 9 of them. however, zoric also has 64 buildings, 16 of which make up several production lines which only the super rich could get into and make products that cost enough so that only the rich could afford, which gives the rich and super rich players something to spend money on and something to use as a goal. the other 48 buildings include 4 houses, town, and a school. this leaves 42 buildings to use in production of items.
42 buildings with only 10 max buildings not includeing a house leaves plenty of room for players to get into businesses. however, if bottem level stuff costs more then 1d to make, it'll be incredibly easy for players to not profit off it by setting prices really low. mit got around this on zion by having ore and oil less then 1d in fully employed buildings. have done the same on zoric, but to a grater scale. all the normal production buildings produce at 10per 1d. so even when others are buying product for only 1d the seller can make 1d profit per item, and make 10d profit off 1d investment. 1d profit is nothing new, by year 25 on most islands 1d profit is standard as people compete and lower end product prices and the manafactures lower product buy prices to compensate the lower sale price.
houses are something else that has fallen in desire. unless you make houses make something, they will all be exactly the same in usefullness. even if a 50s TP is ugly, 90% of people will buy it over a 150s house as thier first home. only way to solve this really is to make them all the same price, but have different houses to choose from. example would be zoric 8. 3 houses are the same house with a different texture, and thiers an expensive mansion for the rich to get.
jobs are another issue i've often seen. thiers always either not enough jobs for the people, or too many open jobs. personally, i'd rather see open jobs instead of unemployeed players. could make 1 job per building, but this often leads to not enough demand of each job skill, or easily lost jobs. zion once again has another good idea. having multiple jobs per a building. i had also attempted this in zoric 3 but with terrible results. turned out that the bonus's to employeeing more then 1 person diden't cover the cost of employing them, especially in an economy with many people competing for business. although employees effecting production cost works out fine on zion where thiers a small player base and only a few industries can provide for them, on an island with many players activly trying to make money, it doesen't work well due to compitition and profit reduction. hence the reason employees haven't effected product cost in zoric 6, 7, or current 8.
but, this brings up another issue. the playerbase itself.
doing each of the things above will have completly different outcomes on an island with a few players then it will on an island with many, many players. this is the hard part, and the unpredictable part too. you can work your butt off to make a good island, but if players don't play it, it will bomb out. an example is zoric 5. it was a pretty mountany, snowy island. thier was only a small amount of players though (they were all playing Eville
) so the economy never got populated and the island looked new and slow the whole time it ran. on the other hand, you could make a simple economy like the one zion has, if 20 different people logged into zion for several hours a day every day and competed in the economy trying to make money, i don't think it would work out well at all. first because thiers only 3 industries, and for the most part, thier small. vehicles, fuel, and weapons. none need many things, only bottem level stuff is ore, carbon-fibre, and oil. and from those 3 things comes all the vehicles, weapons, and fuel. although you can only own 5 buildings, its easy for the current facs to supply alot of people with vehicles etc. so if alot were to play it at once, and constantly, they'd probably have dead industries.
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