IJBM: Recettear simulates single-actor microeconomics but nothing beyond that (economically)

glennmagusharvey

Recettear is a really fun game.

But it is not an economy sim.  It is a resource management under uncertainty sim.

See, after having played this game for a while, I noticed oddities such as this:
* customers' budgets seem to increase almost bottomlessly
* you never get competition even as you jack up your prices
* there are no old women or little boys (aside from Louie, Cailou, etc.) in Pensee
* there is clearly a larger economy out there because price ups and downs happen without your ever prompting them

... and I realized that this isn't an economics simulator.  What is it then?  It is actually a resource management simulator, where your resources are money, inventory, and time.  Specifically one with uncertainty, i.e. you can't simply plan out everything perfectly beforehand, because there are random events that you can't control (e.g. price ups/downs) and random events you have only limited control over (e.g. can you beat the dungeon boss?--and you can't practice either!).

This matters from a gameplay perspective because I've also asked myself, just how should I be playing this game?  Like, what would I consider to be "legit" or "not legit"?  Is it legit to know beforehand roughly what each customer's pin percentage is?  (It probably is since you can multi-loop the base game.)  Is it legit to know each customer's budget formula?  Is it legit to know how much crafting products sell for?  Is it legit to know from a guide what items belong in what categories?

Bee

Actually there is at least one macro effect: while booms and dips fluctuate on their own, they are affected somewhat by your own sales -- flooding the market causes a price drop, etc.  And if you WAY oversell something (say, in a vending machine) you collapse the company that makes it and cause a price crash considerably more severe than a regular low price.