Pick a lane

Most economy games hand you a job. This one hands you a map and a list of what the town is short of, and lets you decide. The feature is called picking a lane, and it only works because several smaller rules agree with each other. This page goes through them in the order a new player would meet them.

The wanted board

The town posts a board listing six markets (saw filing, freight, cedar shakes, seedlings, general goods, room and board), with how much the town wants, how many sellers there are, the going price and a status of Underserved, Balanced, Crowded or Locked. The board is the interface to the pillar. It converts “find an underserved market” into something a person can read in a second.

The reasoning behind the price curve is that an empty lane should pay well and a crowded one should not, so that nobody has to be told where to go. Demand grows with the number of settlers, supply is the sellers present plus you, and the price moves with the ratio between them, bounded so that neither extreme runs away. The exact exponent and clamps are in town and markets. What matters for design is that the curve is gentle on the downside: an over-served market gets cheap, not worthless, so someone who chose badly can still earn something while they change lanes.

Every lane serves another. The design pairs each trade with what it needs from others: a logger needs a mill and sharp saws, a sawyer needs logs, a shingle maker needs cedar, a merchant needs suppliers and foot traffic. This is what makes the choice interesting. A lane is a bet on what the other players will do, and the best-informed bet is the one the board shows.

Why some markets are locked

Markets open at town milestones: 15, 30 and 45 settlers in the prototype. The reasons are practical. A shared milestone gives lapsed players a reason to come back, because the town moved while they were away, and it rewards the first to fill each new market. It also keeps the early game small. A new player facing six open markets, a map, nine species and a mill would stall; facing two they can reason about, they act.

The prototype’s milestones are a clock: a new settler every forty minutes until sixty. That is a stand-in. The intended design uses a different set (claims proved up, board feet cut by the town together, a road reaching the steamboat landing, a rail spur toward the Silver Valley) and those are the ones that make a milestone something the players cause. In a shared game the stand-in has to go, because a clock cannot reward the people who did the work. This is one of the places where the prototype and the intended design differ, and the real build has to choose.

Outside buyers as the price floor

A young town has almost no customers, so a game that starts empty has nobody for the first logger to sell to. The answer is outside buyers: distant mills, arriving settlers, and later the mines. They set a floor, a price at which you can always sell, however slow the town is. In the prototype the three town mills play that part, with bids that rise and fall with how full their yards are and with a minimum bid per log, and the nearest mill is a general buyer while the two farther ones specialise by species.

The design treats the floor as scaffolding. As players fill each lane, their prices start to beat the outside buyers’ and the town increasingly runs on itself. That is the reverse of a game whose economy relied on constant new buyers. Here the outside buyers are the beginning, not the plan. The caution in Economy, sinks and one-way money applies: an outside buyer pays in lumber that no player gave up, so it is also an emission, and the amount of it needs watching.

Competitors entering and leaving

In the prototype every other seller is simulated. Every thirty minutes, a market with demand well above supply has a modest chance that one competitor opens, and a market with supply well above demand has a similar chance that one closes. This copies what real players would do and, just as importantly, makes the early lead temporary. The first player into an empty market has a window; as competitors arrive, the status moves from Underserved toward Balanced and then Crowded, and the profit falls. A lane is only worth entering because it is not worth entering forever.

Two details were learned the hard way in the simulation. The first run showed the entrepreneur bot, who opens whatever the board marks Underserved, finishing far ahead of everything else because opening a business was too cheap. The fix was costs, upkeep, a cost of goods and prerequisites (freight needs a barn, room and board needs a cabin), and each business was given a perk so that opening one changes how you play the rest of the game. A teamster stable halves your haul share, a filing shop gives free saw filing, a nursery gives free replanting. The second, in the latest run, is that one lane can still lose money: the entrepreneur’s shake shed finished at minus 5,881 board feet. The bot opens the shed when it has cedar in hand and the shed then burns cedar logs to make bundles, so the reasons are probably in how the input is priced, but nobody has investigated, and it is better treated as a flag than a finding.

Why the board is simulated now and must not be later

When the competitors become real players, the board stops being a model and becomes a record of what people did. The design for that is a price history feeding the wanted board, built from the real businesses in the town. Any simulated settlers left in a live world should be labelled as such. Labelling them is the honest thing to do. If a player enters a market because the board says it is empty and the other sellers it counts are not real, the pillar has turned into a trick.