It would certainly make for a more realistic economy if companies paid wages to workers instead of paying them in RAT and DW. You would need to add simulated retail shops as agents on the market, which would buy players’ products wholesale in order to sell them to the workers individually.
The demand from the retail agents would scale with the planet’s population, so the end result would be consumption of RAT/DW at roughly the same rate as currently. But of course there are pros and cons of this whole approach.
Advantages:
- You can fine tune demand for different food and luxury consumable tiers, independently of the level of the players. e.g. for every 100 workers on a planet, the retail agents try to buy 4 DW per day, 2 COF, 1 ALE, 1 GIN, etc. So demand for higher tier goods is decoupled from the actual player levels. This would solve the lack of demand at higher tiers problem, at least for consumables.
- Planets could tax wages instead of taxing production, which feels more natural.
- “Retail agent” could be a player career, if you let players build shops that to sell to workers. This means you wouldn’t have to write any code to make the retail agents adjust their prices according to demand - the players would do it for you.
- Players could compete for workers using wages. Workers would have inertia - in real life people don’t switch jobs every week for a 1% bump in salary, so if you’re the first player to employ Engineers on a planet, they will tend to stick with you. However another player can lure them away over time by setting a higher wage.
- Additional retail orientated products can be added - workers want smartphones and robot butlers. This would give higher tier players more things to produce, without the current lack of demand problem.
Disadvantages
- Currently the demand for RAT/DW is directly from players themselves. With a retail layer added, the demand would be indirect. If you’re setting prices you’d have to get them right, otherwise the economy just won’t work. However this problem is mitigated to a degree if you let players be the retail agents - then you’re only setting the demand levels, which you’re doing at the moment anyway with 4 RAT per 100 workers, etc.
- It adds more ways for players to go bankrupt. Currently, with the MMs as they are, it’s difficult to lose money as a beginner. But if players are selling goods at retail they could set their prices too low, because why would there be a price floor? If they have to pay wages they could set them too high, because why would there be a cap on wages? Keeping the game newbie friendly would be a challenge.
- Inflation could be a problem, as mentioned up thread. What is to stop an ever spiralling increase of worker wages and product prices?
There are a lot more possibilities to add features to the game if you start modelling workers more realistically. You could have space tourism, with planets competing to attract visitors. Planet governments would still buy some RAT/DW directly (this could replace the MM mechanism) in order to feed the unemployed workforce pool.
However, one thing to wach out for is that, even after all these changes, in some ways you’d end up with the same economy. Currently players demand goods, and players supply goods. This would change to players employing workers who proportionally demand the same goods, and players supplying goods. The underlying demand mechanism actually stays the same, so you could get most of the benefits listed above by tweaking the current worker demand accordingly. Certainly if you make this change and don’t take the opportunity to add lots of new higher tier goods and extra gameplay then it would be kind of pointless.