[stcredzero]

One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than the economic issues themselves.

That bends the economy.

This is exactly what I've been thinking! (Actually, some of this thought fully coalesced in this very discussion!) It's a truism that mechanics tend to get deeper if the AIs have to play by the same rules as the players. I think this goes for the economy! The way to solve a lot of the silliness of MMO economies is to eliminate as much as possible the fake parts of it!

The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop

If you ground the economy in a simulated "nature" then this provides an inherent feedback loop. This also solidifies my thinking around how to coalesce everything that fosters emergence into one game! The point of Genetic Algorithms in my game shouldn't be to design new ships, or new content. The point should be to provide the substrate of an ever changing and evolving ecology to ground its economy.

The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.

Another thing I could do would be to make the economy mostly an information economy, with the physical economy being vastly simplified. (It will fundamentally have to be vastly simplified no matter what.) This also fits in with my notion of a procedurally generated tech tree.