Games where you can play as a travelling merchant making choices about what to buy or sell in a world with an in-depth simulated economy?

pic unrel
>the town right next to the swamp that grows drugs buy drugs for a huge markup because fuck you

Modded Mountain Blade.

>>2073067
I was thinking about posting this myself but then remembered not liking the trading in this game at all.

>>2072931 (OP)
I gotchu senpai:
patrican
port royale
x-series
high seas high profits
guild series
avorion
astrox imperium
eva online
east indies company

>>2072931 (OP)
Vagrus, maybe.

>>2072931 (OP)
Caravanner 1&2
Dust to the End
Dustland Delivery

>>2073075
Does it have a simulated economy? I thought about trying it out but it seems more like a CYOA.

>>2073252
I'm not sure, I have not tried it out yet.

>>2073257
>>2073252
it has a economy.
theres also battle brothers

None of these suggestions has actual simulated economy. They just have static markup modifiers.

You want real dynamic economy, you go for Starsector.

>>2073271
Starsector's economy is easy to game though

>>2073271
None of these suggestions has actual simulated economy. They just have static markup modifiers.
wow you might be a dummy. No offense, but how can you say x4 doesnt have a simulated economy?

>>2073271
>None of these suggestions has actual simulated economy. They just have static markup modifiers.
wow you might be a dummy. No offense, but how can you say x4 doesnt have a simulated economy?

>>2073294
because I have never played it and I was baiting your ass

>>2073296
>baiting your ass
>baiting
>BAITING
im going to castrate your balls. Come here

>>2073294
>how can you say x4 doesnt have a simulated economy?
starsector economy works with actually moving stuff around, so you can kill trade fleets to disrupt the economy and sell at a higher price or just take the shit for yourself
what other 4x games do it like this? I haven't played many but as I see it's mostly just spreadsheets

>>2073302
assuming you are not baiting.......that is literally x4. the rest of the x games have a fake economy, but x4 does simulate a lot of the economy. The only thing it doesnt simulate is money creation aka factions gain money through magic. But everything else (supply, demand, transportation and etc) is simulated

>>2073305
stellaris doesn't do that

>>2073318
what

>>2073319
you don't see anyone transporting and selling alloy in stellaris bro

Dunno about in-depth or strategy (not like Kenshi is a strategy) but the Tradewinds series have merchant protags.

>>2073326
we are talking about x4 tho bro.

>>2073340
what is bro implying

>>2073344
bro.....

>>2073260
>Battle brothers
>Economy
>Simulation
Anon pls

>>2073339

>>2072931 (OP)
Taipan!

>>2073344

>>2073439
huh

>>2073302
Distant Worlds, but it's more about simulating the logistics than the economy, so you can try to cripple your war opponents fuel supply

>>2073442
Idk, I never played the games myself. I just wanted to tell you it's a game's name and he wasn't talking about the 4x genre.

Bannerlord, you can play as a merchant buying and selling goods.

Patrician series, not only you can buy and sell but you can also set up automated trade routes and your own production chains. This one can be the best merchant game around as no other trader game i know allow you to expand your business beyond your own character.

Port Royale is just Patrician but set in Caribbean instead.

>>2073484
>Bannerlord
Economy is dead broken and busted in roachlord.

>>2073468
yeah he got me, but that was the first review steam showed me and it's complaining about the economy. he did say that factions "gain money through magic" though, but if you can't disrupt the AI's economy then I'm not sure it can be called "actual simulated economy", I think people using that term would be looking for something more like "game where the player and AI have the same economical rules and both can disrupt each other's economy by trying to fuck it up in various ways"

>>2073073
All of those are really good recommendations.

>>2073493
Its been a while since i played, smithing javelins was extremely busted and borderline cheating. But i enjoyed trading goods between cities buying and selling. I even had my own paper where i take notes of the prices.

>>2073063
even vanilla fits

albion online has economy
its pvp and everything in the game is based on crafts made by players
you can just be a craftsman who goes from one city, buys resources, goes to another to make specific thing or buy specific resource, on and on, decide where to sell for best mark up, or just fuck with the market by flooding it to lower prices
you'll be 100 rows deep on excel in no time
you might stumble across a gap in the market and its a race to meet demand before anyone else realises
you can lose all your shit if you go pvp areas, but the 'blackmarket' (selling to computer, still simulated economy of supply/demand) is one of the quickest ways to make money
so there is a lot of risk/reward analysis as well as supply/demand
its very retarded global chat can also be amusing

>>2073302
x4

>>2073442
someone already mentioned they do this, but npc factions represent large interstellar nation states that each have planets with billions of people on them, while you are the leader of your own organization (like a company or a pirate group or w/e you want). It wouldn't make sense that they could easily go bankrupt. If you get to be as big as them then you will also have a near limitless cash reserve as well.

>>2073773
>>2073442
Yeah what he doesn't realize is credits cease to have meaning once you've built your economy. They are purely in place to trade with other factions for goods and services.

>>2073497
you can disrupt the ai economy. Attacking factions economy supply chains, stations or etc affects that factions economy
heres some comments on how it affects the economy
https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/discussions/0/3176733459039029500/

>>2073727
Not OP, but talk me more about this game.

>koalageddon unlocks the class and i can even pick it right now form character creation

based looks like theyre not getting any shekels from me

>>2073260
>Battle Brothers

Possible but the meat of the game is combat

>>2073063
Unironically i agree with this one though, dare i say it's especially good with a modded Bannerlord because of how fucked economy is in that game

>>2075181
It's one of those "if you die you drop everything" games

>>2073442
Yea it's a huge flaw.

>>2075490
How? These entities effectively have quintillions of credits and credits only matter for interfaction trade. All in faction trade is just moving resources around. The only ones that should hypothetically run out of credits are the small factions like hatikvah and scale plate.

>>2075490
Not really, x4 factions represent the space presence of fully fledged planetary economies so of course they have functionally infinite money

>>2072931 (OP)
Mount and Blade

>>2073442
so same as starsector with little difference is AI don't even need to buy shit

>>2073578
well, its even more broken and trading just do not work

>>2072931 (OP)
endless sky? the economy isn't that complicated though

>>2072931 (OP)
The Elite space sim games?
And Privateer 1 +2.

>>2078476
Privateer 2 is a forgotten gem.
The original privateer, while a classic, is a lot more simplistic than nostalgia remembers.

>>2077127
>ai dont even need to buy shit
the ai needs to buy shit so to create their economy, ships or etc. Its just the ai has inf money supply.

>>2078621
All the money in the universe doesn't matter when the raw materials you buy keep getting blown up.

>>2078624
this

>>2072931 (OP)
age of pirates? (modded with gof for example)

>>2073164
wtf i found the other guy on planet earth who loved caravaneer and then bought dust to the end in desperation for more caravankino

>>2072931 (OP)
Pre Grand Exchange Runescape

>>2073271
This is an old screenshot from when the game actually had an economy though because Alex hadn't decided he wanted the game to be 100% combat yet. In current patch the economy isn't simulated at all; everywhere pretty much buys and sells shit at the same price, tariffs make legal trade impossible, and shortages/surpluses are only created by blowing up trade fleets yourself.

>>2077484
theres also star traders frontiers and helium rain

>>2079019
wtf they removed the economic simulation?

merchants of kaidan

>>2075601
>>2075785
But governments do have money. They have budgets, workers, etc.They are actually in constant debt. Maybe there should be a credit rating mechanic like Grand Tactician. But no, devs want to keep adding story DLCs and taking forever just to make a simple diplomacy mechanic. The whole infinite money makes money meaningless and only for the player, so I hesitant to call it an economic simulation. More like resource production simulator with war.

>>2079369
its weird because x4 was a massiv step up compared to x3. X3 and the previous x had a fake economy (in those games the ai gets a lot of stuff for free besides money). So why didnt they also implement money?
maybe they will implement money in x5

>>2079369
Even if all of the npc factions played by the same monetary rules as the player money would once again cease to have meaning because for the player money ceases to have meaning once you're built up adequately, to a fraction of what the starting npc economies are. At game start they would have trillions of credits and would never run out until you reduce them to singular systems outside of any planetary holding and interdict everything that enters or leaves. If you go so far as to introduce something like a credit rating that dictates their borrowing power they'll still have trillions because they are full multiplanetary economies. The game would have to model tax bases and planetary budgets in addition to all of their space assets.
It's an economic simulator precisely because the scale is above worrying about having enough in the bank. It's worrying about moving resources with worker ants to build armadas. And once any power loses that ability they cease to be relevant players regardless of how much they have in their bank account.

Tangentially related: what games let you control some kind of trade route or network but it's only a small component of the whole game?

For some reason I'm think of Endless Space 2 where you could create an interstellar trade and then can name it something funny. I like naming things.

>>2079378
It is a step up. But there are certain weird design choices that don't make sense to me. For instance, you can't automate piracy for your AI ships like the AI pirates, if you want to play as a pirate organisation preying on shipping lanes. You have to blow stuff up.

>>2079369
>.They are actually in constant debt.
not in the modern sense of debts and credit. they were all like private lenders or loans from other countries' royals.
not until Queen Liz 1, when she kind of invented the national bank and formalised stuff. or rather brought it back again, after her aunt Mary banned lending in the name of christian faggotry so only le juice can do lending.
https://diviningthevein.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-economics-of-elizabethan-england/

King Willy started the actal Bank of England much later.