Royal Mint

[brohammed]

Suggestion: The lawspeaker should be able to assign a 3 character alphanumeric code to the village, which becomes unique to that village (no other village can use it). Any coin presses within village territory then produce coins with that code. Eg, "Bronze coin (HRE)" for a bronze coin minted in a village with the code HRE. Coin presses outside of a village produce current-style generic coins.

I know not a lot of people use coins at the moment but it would be a nice touch and would represent the variety of different coinage present in viking times.

[loftar]

They don't become useful just because you call them "coins" and make them look like coins. IRL, coins fill an actual need.

Traditionally, RL coins filled the need of guaranteeing a certain metal content. In Haven, that is simply unnecessary, because the quantity and quality of any amount of metal is always obvious to everyone.

Nowadays, RL coins are fiat coins and are, as such, mostly just stupid. If you wish to introduce a fiat currency into Haven, good luck! :)

[Winterbrass]

Nowadays, RL coins are fiat coins and are, as such, mostly just stupid. If you wish to introduce a fiat currency into Haven, good luck!

If the tooltip for a stack of coins contained the name of the village that created the coin (IE, 45 Silver Coins (Sodom)), then it would be relatively simple to introduce a fiat currency for the strongest villages, who could then set currency conversion rates between their coinage and the coinage of the other city.

[hron]

I would say there are few problems with coins that we have atm. Normaly in RPG will have gold, silver, copper coin, with 10 bronze = 1 silver etc. In H&H its litle bit pore complicated. First of all gold -> silver -> copper are not only metals, steel, iron, bronze can alos be used as coins, and for some ppl iron has more value than lets say bronze, for others its totaly oposite (eg. village with 2 iron mines). On top of all we have quality, my q 20 steel coin vs your q 70 bronze coin? One that would try to make exchange for most posible types of coins would prolly go crazy in few days, if not from making the chart then from ppl complaining on forums. Gold and Silver without quality are much better as coins, but still there is a problem, for 1 gold coin i can buy alot of things same goes for Silver.

IMO there are 2 ways to solve this problem:
Earlier when coins where made mostly from gold/silver ppl liked to cut fragments of them and things like that, there where loads of difrent types of coins that each city/country would vallue difrently. Its almost the same with what we have now in H&H, so i would suggest that coin press is only posible to make by Lawspeaker, and u have herb (name) of village on coin. Setting Exchange system betwen villages would be much easier than betwen all types of posible metals and qualities combinations. eg. Sodom uses for coins mostly q 50 bronze, and Codexia q 40 iron, so our Lawspeakers can negotiate and set lets say 2:3 exchange or whatever. They know that nobody can flood market with coins becouse only those 2 lawspeakers can produce them, and control the inflation.

2nd way would be adding new type of smelting item that alows to smelt few kinds of metals into mixed bar, lets say: gold with iron with tin, after all that mixing gold will lose alot on its value becouse process is not posible to revert, and value of coins made from that mix will only depend on players, eg. In Codexia u can buy 1 iron bar for 10 coins, and in Sodom u can buy 1 bar for 15 coins. All now depends on how far u want to travell.

Money system we use today in RL is way more complicated but still humanity is using money to exchange for goods for quite long time, so it would be stupid to not use that experience.

[jorb]

Money system we use today in RL is way more complicated

Indeed, but that is also what it is. The monetary system employed today is not therefore better, but in fact quite the contrary. The value of money stems from its scarcity, not from the fact that a government agency has determined that it should be valued. The government cannot set the value of money any more than it can set the price of bread, carrots, apartments or cars, the confusion of certain socialist politicians notwithstanding.

EDIT: Case in point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zimba ... _notes.jpg

[Potjeh]

Government can control the supply of money, unlike that of bread, carrots, apartments or cars.

[jorb]

Which is precisely the problem with fiat currencies.

Yes, the government can control the supply of money, but it cannot control the supply of other goods in which the value of that money can be comparatively measured. My point is precisely that the value of one good can only be estimated in terms of some other good. The beauty of using a natural standard -- such as gold -- is that the supply of gold increases at a steady, predictable pace not centrally determined at one single point of failure, and limited by facts of nature, rather than by human whim. Even if a pure gold asteroid were to be discovered tomorrow there would still be the issue of actually mining said gold -- a costly and time consuming process -- allowing holders of gold a significant amount of time to adjust to the new market price of gold as it develops in light of this new discovery. The increasing supply of gold is a process with a significant amount of inertia, something that cannot be said about the government's printing press.

But I digress. The real point here is that you do not need a government agency to have a monetarized economy.

[Potjeh]

It doesn't matter if supply of gold rises at a steady, predictable pace, or if it's a constant - it will still have zero connection to the supply of consumer goods and thus can't have a stable value expressed in these goods. If you want a stable currency, take a page from Hamurabi and use grain, because the value of a loaf of bread stems from it's utility, and is thus much slower to change. Or you can just use fiat currency, and have government adjust it's supply to reflect supply of consumer goods, thus making a relatively stable currency. I just can't fathom how could a currency that's backed by gold alone be more "real" than a currency backed by the national economy as a whole. The whole argument about government printing as much money as they want is about as relevant as arguing about government's capability to deprive it's people of freedom or life - sure, it's possible, but any government that dislikes guillotines will avoid reckless use of these powers.

But anyway, in H&H the real problem is that metal has steadily declining value and zero utility once you get a full tool set and a couple of chests. So nobody sane wants to store his wealth in metal. Gold and silver have a lower rate of value loss because the difference between supply and demand is greater, but if a world lasted for several RL years they too would become virtually worthless. God knows if this problem will ever be truly solved, so I don't see what's so wrong about a quick fix that lets villages create stable fiat currency.

[Retech]

There's one problem with using grain as currency.


Metals are much denser in value than grain, so even if you would lug around seedbags full of grain for trading, it would take a lot of inventory or time to trade for... a Battleaxe of the Twelfth Bay. Or you could trade the grain for something of "denser value" and keep progressing up, but then there wouldn't be a use for a currency in the first place.

The only solution would be to make grains stackable, but that probaly introduces a lot of balancing issues they don't want to get involved with. Maybe they'd have to change the coding a lot as well.

[niltrias]

I actually really like this idea, at least at a basic level.

My appreciation of this idea has nothing to do with fiat currency....a "Gold Coin (BN)" is not going to be a single bit more valuable than a "A Gold Coin (Sodom)" or anything else...they are both simply 1/100 of a gold bar. The interesting point to me would be watching the currency flow of the cash...finding out that I got paid in unknown currency, tracking the currency to its source, that sort of thing.

Although I suspect that at least for now, that sort of thing would be rare to non-existent. The velocity of currency in the current economical model appears to approach the limit of the lifespan of the currency itself....

Edit: Although, the stacking problems that might result may well not be worth the candle, so to speak.