I had hopes for Victoria 3 but it didn't exactly stick the landing

It's not perfect, but they are investing a lot of time on improvements. Paradox games tend to get better over time. 1.5 introduces province-level prices, which make supply chains more interesting.

star citizen with its quantum economic simulator is close enough: https://www.boredgamer.co.uk/2020/04/24/star-citizens-quantu...

Tropico series is simple but fun.

The bulk of it is obvious Capitalism vs Communism political jokes though, so I wouldn't consider it a very serious economic simulator. But its better than most IMO.

Eve Online? They even used to employ an economist to monitor the state of the game.

Not really a "simulator" since it's driven by real humans interacting. I'd say it's just a virtual world with its own real economy.

An interesting thing you can do with a simulator is pause, rewind, make arbitrary experiments, run counterfactuals, etc -- all of which are prohibited in Eve since it needs to respect the users who are there to have fun, not be test subjects.

Thanks, and agreed. How ironic though, working on that fantasy is near certainly not economically viable. This blog post is merely procrastination that preempted job seeking.

Same. Dwarf fortress used to have an economy but they took it out. I tried to make something like this and burnt out, though I expect I'll pick it back up again at some point.

I believe that the economy aspect is going to be (eventually) re-worked entirely for a better simulation and to interact better with the existing game. The current development arc is going on several years at this point, so who knows when that might get addressed.

Workers and resources: Soviet Republic is a super fun economic and transportation logistics sim that shines in "Realistic mode". Highly recommended for fans of the genre. Tiny bit like a hardcore version of City Skylines.

There's Democracy:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710/Democracy_4/