Understanding Money

✦ Wealth Units (WU) System

All currency in the game is abstracted into Wealth Units (WU), which reflect both liquid funds and practical purchasing power. This is a logarithmic, tiered system that allows players to track finances with single or double digits rather than messy real-world denominations. This is based on the financial system from "Wild Blue", which we have modified in order to be easier to understand. WU, or ✦, represent the net worth of your personal and company assets in the form of currency, stocks, bonds, treasuries, etc held within legal banking institutions. Players can even "trade stocks" with a simple dice minigame. This means that entities with powerful market access, like O.C.I.S., can interfere with your possession or access to WU. Players can avoid this by converting WU into gold bullion, which can still be used for barter among criminals and mercenaries.

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Wealth Scale:

Tier Name	Abbreviation	Wealth Units	Relative Value Notes
✪ Trivial	TRV	1 ✦	One minor purchase (beer, food, small arms ammo)
✪ Modest	MOD	4 ✦	Minor gear, light weapon,
✪ Operational	OPS	16 ✦	Maintenance and resupply, jet fuel unit
✪ Tactical	TAC	64 ✦	Factory weapon systems, avionics, repairs
✪ Strategic	STR	256 ✦	Factory aircraft parts, heavy bribes
✪ Executive	EXE	1024 ✦	Factory jet fighter, radar station, hangar lease
✪ Capital	CAP	4096 ✦	Large facility, base construction
✪ Sovereign	SOV	16384 ✦	War chest, major installation, black ops
✪ Lavish	LAV	65536 ✦	1% of total wealth on the Isla

Each tier is worth 4x the one below it. If a player earns 16 WU (OPS), they could divide it as 1x TAC or 4x MOD or 16x TRV, etc. This saves time from having to track larger loose values, such as "I now have 3267✦" while also providing an easy sense of scale: "I have 12 strategic, 3 tactical, and some change." AI assistance has tried to match purchasing prices for items and services according to the tier names: for instance, many routine purchases such as fuel and rearming are measured in "Operational", while larger permanent investments in infrastructure are often "Strategic". If this still sounds like a lot to track, don't worry: it gets further broken down in the next section.

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Shared vs. Personal Wealth

• Shared Company Account is tracked in higher WU tiers (STR and above).
• Individual Player Accounts typically track from TRV to TAC, with STR representing larger savings (1–256 WU ✦).
• When a contract is completed, contract payment is awarded to the company, and individual shares are disbursed from it. This is always in the following ratio:
  50% of the payout goes to the Company, while 50% of the payout is divided equally between players.

Example: A contract awards 1024 ✦ (EXE) for successful completion. 50% of the wealth is retained, leaving 512 ✦ (2x STR) in the shared company pool. The four players each split the remaining 512 ✦, giving them 128 ✦ (2x TAC) for their personal wallets.

Due to the logarithmic nature of this scale, there should be consistent math for this regardless of level: a payout of one tier will result in two of the lesser tier in the company wallet, and two of the tier below that in each player's wallet.

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Trading Stocks

Once a day, players can put any amount of WU ✦ into the stock market. Players should specify to the GM what market they're investing in (mineral concerns, oil companies, tech firms, banks, etc) and how many WU ✦ into each. Every morning, players roll to see how each stock performs: the amount in that account will adjust accordingly. Players can only deposit or withdraw their money from a stock while the exchange is open (4AM-10AM) and while they have internet or telephone access.

Investment Outcome Chart (Roll 1d6)

Roll Result	Outcome	WU Gained or Lost
1	Bear Market	-50% of Investment
2	Miserable Performance	-25% of Investment
3	Poor Performance	-10% of Investment
4	Moderate Growth	+10% of Investment
5	Strong Growth	+25% of Investment
6	Bull Market	+50% of Investment

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Gold Bullion

Your WU ✦ are legal and traceable bank and portfolio assets, and as such can be embargoed and sanctioned by politically powerful parties. O.C.I.S. can trace your involvement to criminal activity through purchase records, and bloc spies can interfere with your account or find evidence of foreign collusion. Network outages can even render you simply unable to access the money still safely stored in your account. For this reason, many mercenaries also deal in gold bullion as a physical asset that holds its value well on both sides of the conflict. Larger PMCs may even distribute payroll in this way, and some pirates or syndicates exclusively trade using it. Purchases made using gold cannot be traced, however outside of the grey zones it will be seen as highly suspicious to unload pallets of gold bullion from a plane and hand them over to an official or military officer. For the sake of narration, 1 unit of gold bullion reflects a suitcase full of gold bullion bars.

WU ✦ can be converted to gold in units of 100, but when converting gold back into WU ✦ a 5% loss in value is incurred. This is because, realistically, you wouldn't be able to instantaneously liquidate a supply of a product: however, you could instead receive a loan using the gold as collateral. Due to the known habits of mercenaries on the island, various shady money lenders have cropped up who issue such loans with this in mind: immediate deposits in exchange for a delivery of gold. However, the 5% loss on your end reflects their own profit margins via surcharges. Additionally, bullion cannot be broken down into smaller units. It will cover purchases below its original value, but you will almost always suffer a small loss: the price you pay for anonymous access to black markets.

Example: A pilot decides to convert 600 WU ✦ into 6 gold bullion. They make a Strategic (256 WU ✦) purchase with it using 3 gold, and decide to convert their remaining bullion back into Wealth. After the 5% fee (15 WU ✦), they regain 285 WU ✦ (1 STR, 1 OPS, 2 MOD, 5 TRV).