So I've been talking on these forums about http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1284485-radiant-quest-system/page__view__findpost__p__19387623, and how they could improve the game beyond what little the Radiant Quest system does, and also on how game worlds can react dynamically to not just player interaction but also by the dynamic interaction of NPCs and even environmental effects, I want to start talking about a "Living Economy Mod", to try to get some ideas from other people on how to actually make a truly dynamic economy.

Now, I want to say that I know there are economy mods in the works already, but those deal mostly with just prices and possibly item availability. What I mean by a living economy is that the game world actually reacts to economic forces and has dynamic industries that hire on more people or lay them off as different areas become more or less economically prosperous, militarily dangerous, and have larger markets to sell their products to.

This means, at the basic level, adding a large number of more generic NPCs and "labor camps" or "laborer lodges" for them to live in. These extra NPCs will sit "off-map" as potential immigrants or just stay in the streets of cities that are too poor to have jobs for them until they can obtain a job.

Also at the basic level, each town will have its own "Economic Prosperity" rating, which will go up as the town gains more material wealth through trade (which the player can positively directly impact through selling to shops or investment and negatively directly impact through stealing) as well as through the industry of its work force.

Around each town will be an "economic zone" for the town that represents the area that is considered safe for workers to be dispatched out to. These start out fairly close to the cities, but can be expanded as the player clears out dungeons or completes quests around that city. When an area is cleared, its surroundings can become part of the potential economic zone of a city, provided the city can spare at least a couple guards to patrol the area.

Cities also have variable numbers of guards (and track losses of guards), where they focus upon protecting their town first, and then protecting the economic zone around their town second. When they have more than enough guards around their town and current economic zones, they may also try to expand their economic zone by clearing a dungeon themselves.

The economic zones will allow for hunting, woodcutting, farming, mining, and other potential economic activities. Because actually having buildable and destructable housing is a little much to ask from such a mod, it will probably mean that we put in some "miner's lodge" housing next to a mine that just gets locked up whenever the area has not been cleared, and gets unlocked when some laborers move in.

The actual impact of all this would then be that the player could actually see the dynamic impact of their actions upon the game world as they travel and perform actions. Further, the more economically prosperous a town becomes, the more goods will be available in those town's stores. The mod could potentially also remove the leveled lists for merchant inventories, and instead replace that with economic prosperity tables, so that in order to order in a suit of ebony mail, you have to find a particularly prosperous merchant.

Further, depending upon the economic industries available, different types of goods might have wildly different prices. Ebony mines being active might drop the price of ebony equipment and raise their availability, for example, while farms being productive decrease the cost of living, which drives up more general prosperity and reduces the prices of labor. I'll probably have to have a second post to go over the reasons why I don't particularly agree with how most people handle "supply and demand" (they always forget that "demand" part), but this post is for the basics.

If the civil war is still active, the mod could allow Imperial or Stormcloak forces to raid other the towns under the opposing side's land for resources, and to harm the enemy's access to resources. The soldier counts in each side's forces could be related to the relative economic prosperity of either side's holdings. Between advancement of the civil war plotlines, smaller scale skirmishes to reduce enemy troop strengths in the coming battle would become possible, and potentially even mandatory to reduce the difficulty of the attack, especially if your own side has to pay of its own economic prosperity to replace the losses in the field.

Further, monsters, dragons, and other factions may not sit quietly and let you expand in peace - you will have to drive off the wild animals that try to re-take their formerly cleared areas, and this can actually generate procedural quests for the player to fend off the attacking wildlife, lest the wilds reclaim a portion of the economic zone around a city.

The game could also be expanded in that you, as a player, could purchase and own and operate some of these economic ventures. Because the economic factors involved in these systems would not be static, you could have a much more deep and enjoyable experience owning property than to just get a weekly lump-sum 500 gold for your holdings.

So, I'm looking at reactions on this front, and suggestions on how to improve this idea... I actually have three or so other mods I'd rather make before tackling such a major project once the SDK comes out for Skyrim, but I think this is the most far-reaching of ideas that I have, and would like to see people try to pick it apart or come up with things I haven't considered about the idea.

This needs to be integrated with a mod like fallout's Real Time Settlers

I would imagine it would be quite complex but if you are able to pull it off I'd play it. I think unless you find a way to get NPC's to spend gold as they earn it, you'd be hard pressed to create such a "living economy". You'd have to mod the NPC's daily routine to include shopping. You could make food the number one gold producer for the nation. From hunting to farming, to brewing. I'm not sure brewing is possible as no mechanism exist to create "brew". Although, you could mod NPC to hunt all the bottle of mead/wine/ale to replicate "brewing" only for them to sell (earn a pay check) and buy food. Make the hunters want mead and the brewers want food. Respawns would certainly inflate the economy. Creating the demand would be the biggest challenge. You'd have to find ways to bring money into the economy with out inflating the currency which normally introduces "debt" and a whole another round of tech issue trying to incorporate it.


I'm not sure what you suggest is possible with out intensive research and understanding of economics, not to mention the tech problems you'd encounter. Love the idea, but not sure you have the time to incorporate this with out a lot of help.

Personally I loved the stock exchange / banking mods for Morrowind, but because of the lack of industry there, they weren't all that fully fleshed out.

Random ideas:
- Player directed investment (better security for Town A? More workers in mine B?) affects the game world, and moreover generates profits
- Simulation of regional trade - ebony to Cyrodiil, furs from Elsewyr, etc. Risk/profit events associated with such trading.
- Some sort of central commodity exchange system, again w/. direct player involvement (directly sell goods, buy/sell goods remotely like a market tycoon, or if you are feeling particularly adventurous, derivative securities (imagine being able to short 100 units of spot gold, long 100 units of 2nd month gold, and then go out into the game world and actually cause that to happen in your favor (by attacking a caravan carrying a ton of gold, for instance)).

You can kind of see I'm into economic simulator mods, since I have some experience w/ the real life stuff as well. Wish you luck on this one.

Wow you do realize most modders have a life and are modding just as a hobby? Modding something like this to make it actually work without thousands of bugs and not conflict with existing files would propably take months or years, mod as huge as this suggestion is never going to happen but a smaller version of it is propably going to be made.

You can actually abstract much of that.

Individual citizens don't need to track individual food consumption unless we actually want to go whole hog on the notion of creating individual personal wealth for players to steal from. (Which would be pretty incredible, but I worry that such incredible detail would actually wind up hurting performance unless we did it at something like a daily clock tick at midnight.)

Rather, you would track citizens as belonging to different economic groups, so that a poor laborer would buy X amount of bread and mead per day or week, and then you just multiply that by how many NPCs are in that area and are considered "poor laborer group" characters.

Brewing, meanwhile, can happen off-screen and functionally just remove units of grain or honey or whatever from the economic model to introduce beer and mead in its place. I can just make a sign that says "Distillery - absolutely no admittance" and a locked door, and just say it goes on behind that door if need be.

Limiting respawns would be the big challenge to doing this - since now, respawns would have to either cut into the town's supply, or else be actually stopped from occurring in the first place. That means I'll have to work out some sort of conditional in the scripting of how respawns work. Potentially, this means that if you steal enough crap from a given town or faction, they will just literally run out of things to steal.

Expanding on this, it means that you might have factions with their own economic bank accounts, and being arch-mage might mean you would have to worry about the entire college going bankrupt without proper stewardship.

Additionally, more factions could be added to represent competing merchants who could be the financiers of different business ventures into setting up more economic zones. You could potentially ally with some of these and try to drive competitors out of business.

Regional trade is something not only beyond player impact and control, but also beyond the player's ability to directly observe, which kind of misses the whole point, so I do believe it should have very limited impact, possibly only as an economic fountain and sink.

Rather than an exchange, however, I'm thinking getting factions more involved might actually be a decent idea. If you run the Thieves' Guild, for example, you could simply have a "steward" interface where you can play a game of management of your number of guild workers (which can go up or down as they get caught or killed or recruited) and their targets, as well as fences, and you could simply put your own stolen goods into the fence's inventories, functionally as if on consignment if they lack the money to pay you by simply taking money back out of guild coffers later on when it is sold.

The successes of a thieves' guild, of course, would actually negatively impact the overall economy as a whole, though, as they are a zero-sum trade at best.


It's worse than a request, it's something I'm considering taking up, myself, depending on what the SDK looks like when it is released.

What I am talking about, however, is high-level abstraction, and that is actually much easier to do than most mods. When I make a clothing mod, I have to get right down to the pixel, and it will impact nothing outside of who wears it. When I tie in already-existing game mechanics to an abstract model, however, I can basically take advantage of the fact that all I'm doing is tweaking already-existing code to get far more "bang for my buck" so far as coding time is concerned.

I obviously can't promise it won't be simplified or crap at this point, though, of course.

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Now then, I want to try actually playing the game instead of just thinking about it for a while - I want to actually finish this game before I get lost in modding it into another game entirely, the way I never really did everything in Oblivion.

You do realise that people DO spend months and years on certain mods?

Even if it's just a hobby, also this isn't that complex really, at first glance it sounds complex. But it would take more time to plan and find the best way to implement it then to actually do it. Well compared to some of the overhauls that have been done for Oblivion and Morrowind anyway.

I'm not knowledgeable on how mods are made. I just assumed it'd be a complex challenge. Like I said in my first post in this thread, I'd love to play such a mod and by what you are saying its possible. How long you think such a mod would take to develop?

Great idea. I would definitely enjoy a mod like this, since I have a tendency to try to figure out and then alter the economic bit of the games I play.



Personally I've given this area a bit of thought. I feel that investing in a business, and then taking responsibility for it, helps draw me into a game.

This could be done by allowing the player the choice of obtaining supplies for a business through dungeon crawling, or having the manager obtain goods through automated channels. The game Mount and Blade has a system like this. The player chooses a business in the town, and the player can acquire goods for the business through going to other towns and buying them, raiding an enemies city, etc. If the player did it themselves it would increase the profit for the store, at the expense of the player's time and effort. Along with this you could give the player the choice between fixing problems that come up with their business themselves, or hiring help. Say the bandits are starting to come back to the mine you cleared last month. You could personally go to the mine, hire some mercenaries, pay off the bandits, or make a donation to the local government to have them send a patrol that way. TES games are all about choice for me, and so making sure to offer different ways of resolving a problem is important(While making sure you don't go overboard at the same time ).

Also I agree that factions could have a big impact on how the player can interact with the economy. For the effort put into the faction quests it would be nice to have them affect the overall economy. Starting off it would likely be easiest to simply allow them to give you a passive boost to the economy, and then as time goes on more choices and options can be added. Say the Thieves Guild reduces the overall economy, while personally enriching you, completing the College of Magic increases the amount of enchanted items in the economy(overall bump), etc.

Your example with the Thieves guild does have several possibilities with it. After completing the Thieves Guild you might gain more options in the Criminal Underworld to affect your economic choices. You might gain a reduction in 'protection' payouts and theft. Also you could invest in pirates/bandits to attack rival businesses or Stormcloacks/Imperials, Skeever Fights(there is a dungeon where bandits are training skeevers), or other activities. Thieves as a rule aren't very nice, so there are plenty of oppurtunities. This faction could be used in more subtle ways as well. Say you need some more livestock for a stable. Instead of paying the stable to aquire one, you could steal a horse, but then have your Thieves Guild connections forge some documents to make it seem legit. The other factions offer many different options and approaches as well.


So there are a few of my thoughts. Overall I think this type of mod would be very enjoyable.

You will be adding a Ton of Indirection/Layers to the game to accomplish it but I actually plan on doing something similar for different goals/reasons (RTS). The grouping and transfer of elements between groups will the be main obstacle as that will have the most background resource usage and potential for bottlenecking.

That depends quite a bit on the way the creation kit works.

You see, the key part of this mod is the spawning tables.

I know that already in the game, you can clear out a bandit camp, and Imperials will move in and claim the camp themselves, and from then on, as long as they aren't cleared out, you can see them respawning in that camp. So that implies that we can actually have dynamic changes to the respawning of cells already, and hopefully, such tools will be in the creation kit.

What we have now is a game where cells respawn either based upon static types of creatures and items, or else they respawn with level-scaling types of creatures and items. What I want to do is make cells (and merchant inventories) respawn based upon completely outside factors based upon a handful of variables I can create.

Then, I can make it so that any time something is stolen from a merchant, it takes away from a simple variable that represents that merchant's total assets, while a purchase would give the merchant cash while simultaneously detracting the value of the item from their total assets. When it comes time to restock the merchant's store, they will restock their goods based upon the total asset variable of the store, rather than upon the level of the player.

The rest is just making up the tables or formulas to actually use. I'm not sure if I can use sliding formulas for the percentage chances of individual items in a merchant's inventory because, again, I haven't seen the creation kit. The more abstract the creation kit allows me to be, the more easily I can implement this idea.

Meanwhile, the "out in the world" portions of the economic zones would require some work to get the NPCs built (provided I don't just use an inexhaustible supply of generics, which I probably will in the first version to save time), and I'd probably get lazy in early versions and just copy-paste the same laborer lodges in various zones, but considering how things like scripting places to be at different times and actions they would take worked in Oblivion, and assuming that I can pretty much just set NPCs down in different areas and they will just automatically start working, that part would be fairly easy - just tally up the number of workers there, assume a given rate of labor for each head counted, and have an invisible trade accounting take place on invisible ledgers, and it should be less difficult than it would look at first blush.

Of course, I already want to do a better marriage mod before this one, so I might not even get started immediately.


Yes, I played it, too. I was actually rather disappointed in how simple that game's economy was.

I reverse-engineered down how the system worked, and threw it up on the wiki, as well as discovered a pretty critical exploit that revolves around selling and purchasing the same trade good back and forth to drive the price down to the minimum value, at which point you could trade that item back and forth for as much cash as the market actually had. (http://mountandblade.wikia.com/wiki/Trade.)


Yeah, the guild stuff would probably be something more like a "stage three of my master plan" type of thing, after I can make sure I actually get something like this working, and the sort of things you are talking about are the sort of things I'd like to see happening.

I also think there isn't necessarily a reason to limit the way in which some of the guilds work to just specific roles, however. Mages might not necessarily just run on enchanting goods for money alone, for example, or even transmutation and alchemy, but might have more mundane holdings like simply being the landholder of a farm with tenant farmers, and have the ability to feed your college guild members with your in-kind "rent money".

Thieves might set up skooma dens and have to defend the smuggling routes, or else simply maintain some "hostesses" in some bars to provide some "comfort for pay" to customers in a relatively non-explicit manner.

Wow, that is an astoundingly technical article. Sort of like the stuff some people (including me) wrote for EVE online, among other things.

Not absolutely clear on the guilds idea, but it does tend to follow the general lack of centralization that I observe in Skyrim (as opposed to Oblivion, where the Imperial City was the center of the world, and such).

I think the vastly improved scripting engine (with support for loops and arrays, yay!) will make this a whole lot easier than trying to implement this for the previous games. Still, it's a big challenge.

I like this idea very much. I thought a similar economic model would have been perfect for Oblivion.

I would be willing to help out. However, my TES modding skills are pretty weak. I will make a few quick suggestion however. I like economic modeling games but they are riddled with absurdities.
One particular game I am thinking of is Victoria II. I couldn't even play the game because the economic model was so terrible. They violated so many obvious rules. A few examples from Vic2 which I think you must avoid are as follows:

In the game many of the prices were fixed within ranges. ~Stupid. So stupid. Don't force the economic units in your game to purchase or sell goods at non-equilibrium"ish" levels. If it is unproductive work they need to go out of business! If you wish to have price fixing the local Jarls could subsidize, but it should come out of their pocket.

In Victoria II, regions would not switch their production to goods which were in demand. Also, there was little mobility of the populations to obtain useful employment. ~allowing shops to fail and workers to change employment would alleviate this.

The biggest problem however was that items were produced regardless of whether worker, farmers, miners had their needs, wants, and luxuries met. ~ This lead to massive over-productions of goods. This lead to low prices. Which in-turn lead to workers unable purchase anything so svck up the massively overproduced goods. Prices need to adjust.

The last example I think is the most important. Make sure that the needs of workers, merchants, craftsmen, and owners must be met for productivity. Without their needs being met, people should have huge decreases in productivity people will effectively drop out of the economy. (If possible it could be coded so that people spend time hunting the wilds if hungry or stealing food from vendors). All luxuries that the workers spend their money on should increase their productivity. This way there will be more of a feedback mechanism so that huge overproduction doesn't happen.

Oh, on a side note.
A bank in every city would be awesome. These could keep track of the gold of each shop. If you sell a high priced item to a merchant without sufficient gold in store, they may write a check for you to withdraw from their bank.

At any rate prices need to adjust. I find it pretty inane that I can sell 50 iron daggers to the same merchant for the same price. I don't know what the heck that merchant plans to do with those daggers...

How would you adjust for the incoming gold to the player to keep it from being broken. I imagine the player could get wealthy with no real sense of use. Maybe prices could increase and you could incorporate or communicate with people who do house mods to let you use their work while changing the way the player obtains it then make the prices comparable to the revenue/economic conditions this system would create. Design ways for the player to lose money. Whether it be an entire inventory being robbed and sending then out to get more stuff or what ever.

Sure, The player can't get all the money or the system would be busted. In a game like this, the player could conceivably steal all the loot and money. We just need to make sure the game has much more $ relative to how much you the player will have.
I robbed a Jarl and he had only like 200 gold... I would make a better Jarl then him I am loaded. It was pretty lame, I know the Jarl doesn't pay his guards in vanilla but in Live Economy mod he would!

We simply need to implement feedback mechanisms. As you be come more wealthy thieves and warlords will target you. You will need to hire guards to protect your wealth and properties.

I love the idea and have been wishing for something like it for a long time. Instead of creating generic NPCs why not try to use those already in the game? It's not like they all have busy schedules. There may still be a need for them but it would be more fun to see those in game to have more involved lives

If players really wanted to, there are a lot of ways to make money in Skyrim(Making lots of iron daggers + Banish enchant being my favorite) so having gold sinks is something that would need to be addressed. I do see the problem as more of a end-end game though. If players are going to be able to invest in businesses, that is going to be a massive gold cost right there. Seeing as the Solitude house costs about 35,000-ish gold, I would see a controlling share of a business in Skyrim to be much higher. So as players gain gold, there should be a lot of other ventures they can invest in or upgrade. The expenses of the businesses should also help keep the gold somewhat under control as well. Guards for the businesses, paying off officials, taxes(?) could all be ways to spend your spare septims.

Misfortune would definitely be a jarring way of having your wealth reduced. Though I would suggest having it be more focused on your investments or on your gold. These could be from losing a warehouse to a fire, being kidnapped and ransomed, or even embezzled from. I would say those are all fair things that could happen in the uncertain world of Skyrim. When it comes to equipment I'm a bit more squimish though. Mostly I don't want to come back to my home and find out the items I spent a long time organizing and displaying have been stolen. The thought makes me grimace a bit , but that might be that could still happen I guess.

All in all, those are more specific concerns, dealing with a small portion of this potential mod. Figuring out how the whole economy part would operate is still something I'm trying to wrap my brain around >.< So keep the ideas coming.

That is an awesome idea.



You have to adjust the cost of things as well relative to the amount of gold in the economy. If someone develops a food mod where it made it a must to eat for all NPC's and player, this could expand into a mod of this nature and really give life and make whats really the Skyrim cash crop come into much more immersion play.

Right, well, here comes the "Supply and Demand means paying attention to Demand, too" lecture...

OK, so as I said, when people talk about supply and demand, what they don't realize is that most people only grasp the concept of "supply". There are two major principles to this that they are neglecting - first, and foremost, the principle of "replacement goods", and the elasticity of demand because of that, and second, economies of scale.

Economies of scale, I will get out of the way quickly, because we are dealing with small, personal-scale industries in this medieval model, and absent the Industrial Revolution model of assembly lines and interchangeable parts, economies of scale are close to meaningless. For the record, however, economies of scale mean that when you design an assembly line, it winds up costing less per unit to make a good the more you make overall due to the overhead costs of the land, electricity, equipment, and administrative costs generally being fixed, and where labor can become more efficient when you are working at staffing and production levels the assembly line was designed for. The economy of scale is a reason why monopolies form, especially in high start-up cost industries, because it is almost impossible to compete with, for example, a car company on the price of a car without having a huge state-of-the-art assembly plant running.

Replacement goods, however, are a key aspect of modeling a proper economy. This is especially true when we are dealing with economies revolving largely around food.

Consider beef and pork. People prefer beef, but pork is cheaper and fills the same purpose - being meat. Hence, if you have plenty of money to spare, you'll buy beef. If you're cutting back, you'll buy pork.

However, this is the critical part of Supply and Demand - when the prices of beef and pork change, so does demand. Even if you're rich, odds are you won't buy beef if beef is so scarce you have to pay $40 a pound for beef. Not when pork is still $6 a pound. For people on leaner budgets, however, you might not be willing to pay more than $1 extra for beef than you would for pork, and even if pork prices go up, never more than $8 a pound for meat at all.

In fact, in real life, as China has grown richer, the average Chinese has gone from eating a traditional (cheaper) vegetable-rich diet with eggs and fish to eating much greater quantities of pork, causing pork prices around the world to shoot up. To them, pork is the superior product they are advancing up to as they become more wealthy.

The exact dividing line between how many people are willing to buy at a certain price is where that "Demand" side comes in, and the "slope" of that line is called the Elasticity of Demand. Goods are Elastic when people are highly sensitive to the price of a good when they are determining whether or not to buy something (like food, where when one type of food is expensive, there are many alternatives, or like jewelry, which is a luxury good few people need) whereas Inelastic Demand occurs on products that people are willing to pay almost price to obtain (such as a specific type of patented prescription medicine that they need to take to survive - which is why as soon as those patents expire and generic alternatives become available, prices of medicine drop to less than a tenth of what they were, without replacement goods, they could charge just about anything).

Some goods actually sell very well when economies are bad - Campbell's Soup was the only Fortune 500 company to have its stock prices go up when the market crashed in 2008. It did this because it's cheap canned soup was a replacement good for more expensive types of food, like eating a steak dinner out at a restaurant, whose sales fell off a cliff when the economy went bad, and people had to cut back by buying cheaper replacement goods. Foods like the cheaper forms of fish, beans, soups, and especially cheap cereal grain foods like bread and rice sell much better in hard economic times, while beef and more expensive seafood like oysters and shrimp sell better when economic times are good enough that people can afford them.

So then, why do I take the time to tl;dr most people with all this? Because most economic models in games completely ignore all this!

Beef prices can skyrocket to 500% normal price while pork prices are at 70%... but people still buy beef! (Or at least, they still model people buying beef by having the price keep going up until a new shipment comes in.) Who buys $40 a pound beef when pork is sitting at $4 a pound? Except for maybe excessively wealthy people who will buy what they want completely regardless of price, almost nobody. That's the basic concept of Supply and Demand that helps balance out the market to prevent these insane prices from ever coming about in the first place - when the price of beef goes up because supply is low, then people buy replacement goods. As long as supply of replacement goods stays normal, prices of beef will then hover around the rate at which people will switch back over to buying beef again. If the sudden extra demand pushes pork prices up, as well, however, then you have to start looking further down the list for lower-scale goods, like eating beans.

This requires making up a table wherein the actual point of replacement is taken up for different levels of economic prosperity. Average consumers will probably save little, and try to gain the best goods available to them for the buying power they have. A hierarchical chain of if-then commands looking for the goods they can purchase you can go down would be sufficient to this purpose.

As for the other portion of your post, Sneak_Thief, yes, when dealing with economic activity being modeled, commercial enterprises will also choose how many jobs to hold onto based upon their expected supply and demand, and fire employees when economic conditions sour on them. Factions like merchant companies that are purchasing and working these economic zones would basically look at what funds they have to work with, whether they can hire or fire employees, and allocate work based upon opportunity cost to make the highest profit. These employees will then become jobless, and either sit in the streets and hunt in the wilds for food or go begging, or else they will emigrate in search of employment.

I would also try to model higher crime rates, and as such, higher recruiting rates for the Thieves' Guild when you have a very low economic prosperity.

I'm actually planning on this, although I consider it something of a "stage two" goal.

Basically, I'll take out some of the characters that aren't really related to quests or anything from being just average villagepeople, and make them some of these migrant worker people. Then, I'll add in a freak load of named potential immigrant or refugee NPCs to the game that are just hanging out in some other province when the game starts. As the economy of the game world expands, they will start immigrating to seek work in Skyrim.

These characters would then form a finite pool of potential workers, so that you could have a game where you actually run out of immigrants if you let too many get killed.

You have to do something about guards. As we all know we live in a bubble economy....i.e. good times and bad times...except in Skyrim during the bad times when people steal [censored], the gaurds will kill you. Although one less unemployed worker in the economy may be a good thing.

Umm... hopefully, guards should arrest criminals, rather than lay down the death penalty on a pickpocket.

Especially if you're doing Thieves' Guild stuff, you should have bailing out your underlings or bribing guards and magistrates as a standard cost of doing business.

In this aspect, I think you mean scalability. Player has assets (however determined) of 1000 gold? Make rewards on the order of hundreds. Player has 100000? Rewards should be in the thousands, or tens of thousands. Coding things on a percentage basis will help with this, though may require some exponential decay towards the really large numbers for balancing. Space Rangers 2 (if anyone knows what that is) does this by introducing game inflation - possibly level inflation or something could be introduced here.

That would be problematic.

I actually think it would be best just to make food more valuable in general, though, since it's kind of silly that the stuff adventurers deal in, like armor, can sell for thousands, but the stuff the rest of the economy deals in, like food or cast iron pots or the like, sells for between 0 and 15 septims. Yeah, sure, they're daily items, but it's a little silly that the buckskins I can get from hunting are worth 1/100th as much as even basic level equipment.

Also, farms and mines can just deal in quantities that the player him/herself would never really be able to - farms might produce several thousand wheat in a harvest, for example.