Is there a site/tutorial/anything that can get me on the right track for simulating a small economy. For example; I''d like to simulate 5 towns and 10 products that these towns trade in. Town 1 for example is (theoretically) on the coast so if product 1 was fish this would cost less in town 1 than in town 5 (which is near a desert far inland). If town 3 had a good price for product 7 then a lot would come into the town but after a while the price would drop as the market became saturated. I''d like to be able to monitor the town''s prices for each product if say for example 5 traders were in operation buying,selling and moving goods around. I don''t want any AI suggestions to control the traders. That''s not important ATM the price fluctuations are.

Sounds interesting. I would start by working out the relationships between supply and demand - the curves. Then you need to express these relationships in terms of formulae. Other things you will want to factor in are the cost of travel (related to distance) there may be more.
Next, you will want to determine the rates of usage and production of each of your commodities.

Once you have that lot clear in your head - maybe model 2 towns and 1 or 2 products using your rules on paper. Then design some funky data structures and get coding.

Oh yeah, make sure you use lots of variables for the rates etc - no magic numbers, that way, you can tune your economies so that the behaviour is to your liking.

hope it helps,
DeVore