published on February 19, 2024 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi explains why admin centers have to have a currency to work as intended.
Michi (molp)
This will only be a quick update on what I have been up to, because I had a few days off to work on the house.
I continued to work on making the admin centers ready to host the new politics features. Last week (#421) was all about initializing the admin centers. In order for them to work properly they need additional information. One of the most important bits is the currency they should operate with.
Why is it important? Every entity in the game that uses the accounting functionality has to do accounting in one of the four currencies. Of course, you can own foreign currency, but internally everything is handled in one currency. For a company that would be the currency of the faction that you joined during company setup. Corporations use the currency of their founding member.
Admin centers are no different in that regard. In fact, some of the existing admin centers have already been initialized with a currency. But, as I explained last week, once we release the current changes, we'll initialize all missing admin centers at once. What currency should these be initialized with? What if they are outside faction space?
Since we cannot manually set the currency of all those admin centers, we resort to a simple algorithm: We use the navigation system to determine the nearest starting location and use the currency of the respective faction. That way all admin centers have sensible default currencies. Right now, it is not possible to change the currency the accounting system works with, but it is not impossible from a technical point of view. So some day in the future we could have a motion that allows a government to switch from one currency to another.
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Happy trading!