So, why not bring the basi idea to Factorio?
Instead of having Ores all round you would just start with nothing except a bit of money (some made-up currency, Credits (C) or something) and access to a market via a GUI
example, not exactly like this, but main idea
list of either raw resources (Ores, raw Liquids) or Products (circuits, power poles, basically crafted items)
clicking on an entry shows detail info on that item... in this case just a graph of prices and 2 numbers showing the current sell/buy Price of that item.
forgot to draw an otpion to manually buy/sell resources/products.
Resources should have lower base prices than crafting things, but prices don't stay the same as in Factory idle. They should fluxuate... basic economics, the more you buy something the more exepensive it will get, and the more you sell something the cheaper it will get. That plus some "random" fluxuations so prices won't get stuck and you got yourself a simulated economy.
but this is Factorio, so this need to be automated. some Entities should do the job.
1. The buyer, simply constantly buys a set item from the market at a fixed rate (for example 1 item/s), should be controlable via a circuit network.
2. The Seller, Sell items into the market at however fast items are going in, should also be controlable via circuit network.
3. Price reader, circuit network machine, reads the price from the market of a set Item and outputs the value as a number.
Buyer and Seller could also work with Liquids, so that you could buy Oil and sell the Heavy/Light Oil and Petroleum.
In case the whole "Supply and Demand" thing is way to complex to make things can just have a fixed price, but would need to get progressively more expensive, with some machines constantly drawing money as "maintance", maybe with research that can reduce upkeep costs too.
This is just a very raw Mod idea, but I thought i'd share it and someone is gonna pick it up and do something with it... because I can't program at all, So i'm sorry if this is to much to ask for, or a useless idea.
