If you like sim games you might want to try Galaxy. It's basically a turn based war game set in a large galaxy. However there is also a economic component. This is based on shipping cargo from planet to planet, in order to inhabit and develop uninhabited planets.

You can set-up automatic routes between planets that make ships, ship cargo back and forth. The routes can be seen as internet routes and the ships as network packets. It's quite a challenge to do the economic development well. There are different kinds of cargo, and you can design different kind of ships, speedy ones or one slow ones with a big cargo bay.

It's all in C but it should be fun to make something similar in Perl

Have Fun