Core Economy and Trade Design

The economy needs specialization, otherwise everything gets optimized into one equilibrium.

Player archetypes (v1)

• Landlord: focuses on stable licences + maintenance yield
• Miner: prioritizes rare resource discovery
• Trader: arbitrages maintenance basket and production gaps
• Generalist: broad mixed strategy
• Warlord: controls choke points and protects routes
• Mercenary: owns no land; sells army capability (raids, protection, territorial pressure) to other players for fees

Trade drivers

1. Local resource bonus (2-ring radius) makes the same resource more maintenance-efficient when used near its origin — creating persistent geographic price differentials.
2. Rarer resources carry higher declared value, making them more valuable both for maintenance payment and stream share.
3. Remote fallback is always valid at base rate, so no hard lock-in — but the efficiency gap creates real arbitrage.
4. Auctions and Harberger reassessments continuously churn land value and create demand spikes.
5. Faction-controlled frontier access turns logistics into a strategic permission surface rather than a pure routing optimization problem.

Geographic arbitrage

Because the same resource has a different effective maintenance value depending on where it is used, regional price imbalances are structural, not accidental.

A trader who moves Resource X from a region where it has no local bonus to one where it does captures the spread. These routes are persistent but not permanent — if a region becomes overly profitable, military pressure or Harberger acquisitions will erode the monopoly.

Good market behavior target

• active secondary markets on low/medium resources
• occasional scarcity spikes for rare drops
• no complete lock-in (fallback channels always exist)

Anti-lockdown guard

Never design single-source forced inputs. If a local monopoly exists, keep optional alternatives:

• reduced discount instead of hard requirement
• regional substitutes for fallback
• temporary mitigation mechanics
• void-seam adjacency as a permanent anti-veto expansion path

Reasoning trace

• “Factions control routes” is only fun if logistics can still be contested.
• The economy should feel politically constrained, not administratively frozen.
• Void seams are the release valve that stops trade geography from becoming a total placement veto.