It usually does not take me a hundred hours to fully understand whether a game is recommendable or not. This is a rare case of deceptively functioning mechanics that mesh against one another on a deeper level. The game basically contradicts itself at each step and it has become increasingly frustrating.
Now, I am not one to play spreadsheat games, I don't like the level of granularity and I like to play around my playground... I mean city. Obviously I love Against the Storm, for example, or Mind Over Magic, which have the perfect balance of sandboxing with deep planning/balancing mechanics without going too deep into one or another. What I mean to say: if you are into that kind of game, like me, you might be into Ratopia initially.
A perfect argument for I am trying to say here:
- You have dozens of resources and dozens of products that consume these resources to be made (or you can use up those resources as a product, most of them anyway).
- Your rats buy the resources to use them immediately, to build (and after that they get paid for the building) or to produce, in which case they sell the produce back to you and you sell that produce back. This happens automatically.
- Economy is rotates around rats buying stuff from you, selling it back to you and buying more stuff again, which you will inherently witness as money (pias) changing hands. The money you have will be slowly but surely transferred to the populace and you make it back by imposing taxes, fees and adjusting market prices. New money is only slowly created (in a few gameplay hours you might notice like 5-10 percent money quantity increase basing off the initial treasury amounts).
- The economy says that you have near finite amount of money circulating the market at any time and any money you give is not coming back unless you actively tax your populace.
- Now imagine this: You have a rat that gets fat on using cheap wood and selling planks for 4x price, obviously, that's a little busted scheme (and it happens a lot! Default service and resource prices are busted and you will notice some jobs getting skipping ahead of the curve immediately just because of the sell/buy high discrepancy).
Luckily you can build a Stone Codex in order to assert the law, in this instance -- to adjust plank/wood prices by either bumping the price for planks down or price for wood up. Great! The only problem is you have about 1-5 or so law slots per category (basically tax, welfare and adjustment categories) well into the mid game, which can take up to dozen of real-time hours. Imagine having about 40 commodities and being able to adjust prices for 5 of them and that is only after you gradually grow the settlement.
Another problem is that adjusting wood prices might have a butterfly effect creating more disparity between rats as it might tank other jobs. Adjusting the final produce is therefore always the safer option.
The game tries to simulate economy in such a manner, but consider this - when a rat does an odd job of gathering wood and sells it to you, why can't you resell the resource with a slight increase? Because that's every product-rat is doing by default - buying a cheaper resource and selling a final product with, not a slight, but huge margin. When you order a rat to do an odd job, you always only lose - you pay the rat for the resource, another rat buys that resource for the same price and then sells it back into your stock as a product with a higher value.
You are not allowed to adjust more than a handful of prices across the market and therefore you might want to do a lot of gathering jobs yourself, well prepare for a treat - each mining/gathering action takes some animation time, and advanced resources take a lot of time even if you have high strength, and then you have to move it into a chest, which also takes some time and considering how much resources a simple 3x6 tiles clearing can create you can literally spend 20 minutes doing just that little patch of screen mining, running back and forth. But you obviously love it, therefore there is no speed up button, you just watch this unfold in real time.
So doing stuff yourself in order to save up the near finite amount of money in your treasury becomes a frustrating chore after a while, and you can only have a handful of market adjusting laws active at a time and each law takes quite a lot of UI navigation to get activated.
The game is a very, very weird hybrid of granular mechanics and surface level or perhaps casual-looking mechanics and most of them have a weird real-time implementation where you shouldn't be required to micromanage once you set it up, but you have to, and it's mind-boggling -- hunters won't stop hunting on low life, so unless you notice they will get themselves killed (this is probably to "simulate" hunters getting "randomly" injured? I don't know, feels like lazy AI coding (as in behavior, not machine made, just to clarify in this day and age)).
Rats will randomly panic and run into enemies, rats will get stuck under new building blocks or mine the floor under their fellow's feet (there was some update, but they still do it, especially to me, but hey - I should know better, I am the sentient one here).
Due to how ranges and daytime cycle works, you will not be able to build a part of the "city" dedicated to entertainment or sleeping quarters, because it is much more efficient to just bundle up the basic needs stations and workstations together in a lump so your rats don't have walk further than a few steps at a time, which much makes any "pretty" or segmented city planning pointless -- you always build to minimize walking distance and maximize yields otherwise nothing will get done and you will bleed money till the rats riot.
You have a simulated economy, but you can't really create wages for your rats or manipulate the services fees and commodity prices globally, only individually through limited number of laws through a few UI panels and only in time it gets a little better while you continue to bleed value. The whole system is cursed like that, I fear, it would be better to partially scrape it -- in this setup every rat is basically your kid whom you order to do stuff, they buy resources from you and sell it to you, and only to you, and only from you they buy. It's like when my dad wanted to show me the value of moni. Cute.
You have two options: instead of sell/buy start giving them wages (yes, a part-time communism, where a rat will get happy as long as the wage is high enough for what they use and produce) OR have the rats sell their own stock to other rats -- if a rat needs a shirt, they will get it from a local tailor's stock, if the tailor makes a profit and the buyer isn't ruined everyone is happy. In such an instance, doing only few individual changes to market prices makes sense. It doesn't make sense when there are literally dozens of commodities with direct influence on you, your rats and settlements well-being.
The whole game feels like it started as an avatar-based colony simulator with a focus on the avatar and it acting in the real world while the rats sort of accumulate, live and die, but soon more mechanics were stacked on top of that, mechanics which go against the avatar-based gameplay and this is the result. A game which could have been really, really good, but the longer you play the more it becomes obvious.
Also, some late game people commented on the fact that later you can just print the money and the whole economy becomes pointless, because you are not really punished by inflation, lol.
