Of course, someone at Sindria is probably looking at a similar set of charts on their TriPad and fuming at the market share lost to an irritating upstart…
I was a little afraid we'd be losing more nuanced optimizing of our Colony economy, but it's just condensing everything further into a more easily accessible system.
So the old 3-tab Economy overview window is now this current window with no tabs?
On one level, I feel bad because the previous iteration seemed pretty interesting and well-developed (which means a lot of thought and effort went into it). On the other hand, this new system looks/feels pretty intuitive, so I'm happy you went through the process. It's cool to see the market share impact and I agree with your assessment that it gives you a general overview of the Sector as a whole.
I can't imagine playtesting and having that gnawing thought in the back of your head going "this isn't working..." Ugh. :-[
Nice work Alex, better to take time and get it right. As you know, with many things it's not possible to tell if they'll work/be fun until you try them.
Also thanks for the post, any and all are appreciated :)
Can we ban what we don't want from being traded? Similar to how other factions would ban, say, drugs.
This is the first economy take that didn't make my brain bluescreen, so it's definitely a positive change.
Single player Eve online! I approve!
I will say i was quietly worrying that I would be completely lost on the colony system and have to look up how to do things on the forum after release. This is much easier to follow and work with, I think.
Is the max global export just the export capacity of the largest supplier? I'm guessing yes (so it works the same as everything else, i.e. you can't have enough 5-fuel suppliers raise max global fuel exports from 7 to 8).
Should a Free Port condition increase accessibility? It sounds logical enough, and without it pirate/Pather markets look like they'd have a semi-permanent scarcity of most goods.
The "hostilities with other factions" percentage is calculated as (sum of market sizes of hostile factions) / (sum of market sizes of all factions in the Sector) or something along those lines, I take it?
My main concern about colonies is if they trivialize the rest of the game too quickly ie. really quickly very profitable, though I imagine that there is a lot more to spend our hard earned money on now.
I agree with the others: This is the best looking econ revamp so far
it seems like a good system. are you going to implement relationship changes based on increasing/decreasing competition? i could definitely see the impetus for wars in this handling of economics- if you can plunder, destroy or steal pieces of the pie with a limited war it could definitely be worth it.
personally i wouldn't see most factions taking that lying down- i expect for instance that the sindrian government and military especially is basically funded solely by their energy monopoly and you threatening the basis of the economy could easily inspire military action against you or another competitor.
anyway, i think it's an excellent system and i'm interested in where it's going to go in terms of implications for diplomacy.
To a degree - your colonies by default ban the usual set (drugs, organs) but setting a colony to "free port" makes these legal and allows for profit to be made from exports of these.
I did think about having more detailed per-commodity controls, but it seems more like a solution looking for a problem - complex and I wasn't coming up with anything particularly interesting as a result of it being an option. Especially not with the "Free Port" toggle covering much of the same ground.
Edit: One thing to consider is a strategic structure of making things illegal. You could make trade harder with places which don't have similar illegal goods structure. So you have to consider if you want to have a free port what that will cost you in general good product sales.
"Good news, we've fixed the drug problem but now food is banned. Seeya at work on Monday!"
I may or may not be coding something directly related to what you're talking about as we speak :) The Diktat certainly seem like the type that wouldn't mind getting their hands a little dirty with some plausibly-deniable bombardments out in the black.But I though bombardments were impossible to do stealthily. How can you hide a galactic war crime, especially from those that got bombed?
I may or may not be coding something directly related to what you're talking about as we speak :) The Diktat certainly seem like the type that wouldn't mind getting their hands a little dirty with some plausibly-deniable bombardments out in the black.But I though bombardments were impossible to do stealthily. How can you hide a galactic war crime, especially from those that got bombed?
But I though bombardments were impossible to do stealthily. How can you hide a galactic war crime, especially from those that got bombed?
Woah woah woah, hold on a minute! Are you saying that factions can attack and or bombard the player faction, all without the rep and other penalties that the player would receive?!But I though bombardments were impossible to do stealthily. How can you hide a galactic war crime, especially from those that got bombed?
Probably a combination of it not being in the core worlds and your faction being a newcomer that doesn't have the same importance in the collective consciousness of the Sector. Plus, you know, you expect this sort of thing from the Diktat, everyone knows they blew up Opis! What can you do? Gotta live with them somehow. But when some upstart like you does it, it's shocking and a war crime.
(I'm imagining the player's character saying the last line with air quotes, while complaining about the unfairness of life, at a bar somewhere, to a disinterested audience of half-drunk spacers.)
"Good news, we've fixed the drug problem but now food is banned. Seeya at work on Monday!"
"The Eridani Combine's 'war on food' initiative has met with limited success so far"
Are you saying that factions can attack and or bombard the player faction, all without the rep and other penalties that the player would receive?!
No because then the player would PO everyone else in the sector because they retaliated against a planetary bombardment from another faction.Are you saying that factions can attack and or bombard the player faction, all without the rep and other penalties that the player would receive?!
Wouldn't the "AI penalty" be the fact that the player will be motivated to attack it? It's not like this is PVP in which everything needs to have the same rules.
Woah woah woah, hold on a minute! Are you saying that factions can attack and or bombard the player faction, all without the rep and other penalties that the player would receive?!Balance of power. Nothing personal, kiddo.
I suspect this is a consequence of all commodities being required for proper colony. If the choice to legalise drugs results in just "more money for less stability", there really isn't a point. Mods possibly could introduce optional commodities and would certainly use the option to ban them selectively, but the base game really doesn't.Can we ban what we don't want from being traded? Similar to how other factions would ban, say, drugs.
To a degree - your colonies by default ban the usual set (drugs, organs) but setting a colony to "free port" makes these legal and allows for profit to be made from exports of these.
I did think about having more detailed per-commodity controls, but it seems more like a solution looking for a problem - complex and I wasn't coming up with anything particularly interesting as a result of it being an option. Especially not with the "Free Port" toggle covering much of the same ground.
I really don't see the issue. If Diktat can do it without punishment then maybe it's because they have enough influence with other factions that they can pull it off. Maybe there are backdoor deals to stop new competitors from popping up. Maybe they are threatening others with military action. Maybe losing the access to the premier fuel source of the sector would be too much of a collateral. Etc, etc,I would like the player to acquire that kind of immunity, if the major factions have it, especially if player displaces Diktat out of the fuel business or something similar. Nothing theoretically stops the player's faction from becoming a major power, and other factions falling, if the game lasts a generation or two.
Speaking of pulse spam, if reputation between factions will no longer be static, I like to see them inflict a bunch of -1s to their reputation with other factions they ping, or if not, at least player gets no penalty when his fleets pulse spam in systems the player controls.
Accessibility increases both imports and exports, yes? I am a bit unsure how imports work now.
Checking for release on a daily basis :D
I'm so excited for this update! I've been looking forward to this sorta thing from this game for like 7 years and here we are!! My studies are going to suffer so much when it does come out hahah.
Just a quick thought - shouldn't "Global Market Value" be "Sector Market Value"?
The reason I think this is preferable is because you can make factions more unique if they can do things that the player can't do (at least not easily), and you'd have to consider the different points of each. "Oh, gotta be careful about competing with this faction, can't simply just make some fuel and get a quick buck without some severe consequences."
Edit: One thing to consider is a strategic structure of making things illegal. You could make trade harder with places which don't have similar illegal goods structure. So you have to consider if you want to have a free port what that will cost you in general good product sales.
Hmm - one of the things this simplification does away with almost entirely is the idea of trading with a specific location; you're just putting stuff on the market. Plus, this seems like it'd be a situation with one "right" choice, being the one that gives you more money.
Free port will have other downsides, though - it does have a stability penalty (which is indeed a reduction in income, with some additional effects), along hopefully with some that are more difficult to quantify."Good news, we've fixed the drug problem but now food is banned. Seeya at work on Monday!"
"The Eridani Combine's 'war on food' initiative has met with limited success so far"
If we are in full commodity fungibility mode(IE single spot market so you cannot discriminate against goods from a specific place) then it would make sense to have relationship penalties
Setting a Freeport would make pirates like you as an example. Setting strict limitations on tech could give you an in with the luddites
if i understand this right supply isn't unlimited, right?
so there is a finite amount of AM production (assuming no one bootstraps more production somehow)
is there a possibility that if you expand your colonies that it will literally not be enough and exporters will have to choose what to send where? likewise with food etc?
also i think it would be interesting to tie this to ship production- you could make dockyard capacity a "resource" tied into the economy and give ships a cost based on size / tech level and a time of construction and allow export / tracking of shipbuilding to fix sector ship production to a more concrete thing that the player could effect.
nicely ties up "infinite fleets" and "costless war" which i think should be a priority before 1.0 anyway. it feels to me like the factions' ability to spawn infinite fleets from nowhere is just a holdover of ye olde .50 but i don't know how you feel about it alex.
This this this. This is so perfect. It make sense and allows the player to influence results, ideally with multiple methods (i'm hoping we can engineer wars between two factions at some point). If you hook ship and weapon availability into resources available players will have a lot more agency over those aspects of the game, and in such a way that encourages more gameplay.
Awesome change.
So it sounds like:And it sounds like the AI can cheat.
YES the AI will be able to bombard your planets without repercussions from other factions
YES, the player will still be HEAVILY penalized if they retaliate the same way
And YES, anything that disrupts that status flow is going to be putting a target on your back
-Will the info for bombardments and other urgent intel ignore the speed limit of information? Otherwise a player could come back from an expedition into the black and find out OH HEY, I missed those warning while out there and in turn just lost my best colony!
Alex, the reason why I'm so worried about this is that unlike IPulse and GankBurn, this is something that not only would cost alot of credits and effort to fix, but also real life time due to how it takes time for colonies to rebuild. IPulse is annoying but the effects are minor 99% of the time. GankBurn, while it CAN lead to a fleetwipe, still allows you to fight them off. And if you can't then at least you can reload an earlier save. With the ability to only control one fleet and the fact that once fleets reach their target, they can instantly complete their mission (versus something like the comm sniffer progress bar now), this will lead to alot of griefing and babysitting...
Pat yourself on the back for the Xth time Alex!
I too was dreading an over complicated trade system and I'm quite glad you're letting the invisible hyperspace jakalope diplomats deal with all the individual trade deals.
hey, any chance we could set our own faction procedural ship names? not just the suffix, but the names it draws from? even if it's just a text file we can add to manually, that'd be nice.
And it sounds like the AI can cheat.
I think where it gets gray is if the player is heavily aligned with a major faction and their colonies are a de facto extension of the faction. If the Diktat were to bombard your fully-commissioned, cooperative reputation-based colony aligned with the Hegemony, would the Hegemony respond in-kind? Their lack of response could be a bit jarring and undermine the player's incentive to cozy up to them. On the other hand, all the major factions are dystopian to a degree and their chucking you aside to protect their self-interests is again, par for the course.
I would prefer certain...arrangements...be made with the major factions if you align heavily with them. The independent player would have the luxury of not being beholden to them but getting into bed with one would also have its perks. Just another meaningful choice to make along your way.
Instead of a slow drip you could just have a one time cost. Then negate the one time cost when the policy is changed.
This means that both
A: customs doesn’t necessarily lead to war eventually
B: you can modify policy to push you over the top of where you want/need to be
And it sounds like the AI can cheat.
Too much of it could be bad, but a certain amount "fight stuff off to protect your colonies" is precisely the point. As long as there's some variety and the pacing is right (i.e. leaving you time to do other things as well), that's pretty much the goal.
hey, any chance we could set our own faction procedural ship names? not just the suffix, but the names it draws from? even if it's just a text file we can add to manually, that'd be nice.
Nothing in-game, but you could already edit the player.faction file to set where the names get drawn from.
And it sounds like the AI can cheat.
Cheating implies someone breaking rules that should apply to it. Here, we have two parties which *do not have parity* and have different rules apply to them and *it makes sense in-fiction*. You're absolutely entitled to an opinion on this, but calling it cheating is just factually incorrect.
Re: bombardments etc -Would scaling the rep penalty to planet population make sense? A few thousand dead is some ruffled feathers (and TBH, numerically equivalent to blowing up a large fleet), a million dead is a major diplomatic incident, hundreds of millions dead becomes casus belli. It means that if you do build up the population of your pet colony to the 10^8 level, then when it gets bombarded you may console yourself in the fact that Diktat fleets are getting ganked by Hegemony and Luddic patrols across the sector.
It's not a symmetrical situation, so mechanical symmetry as a default would be strange. Imagine if everyone became hostile to the Hegemony because they stamped out a slightly-bigger-than-usual nest of pirates somewhere out on the fringes.
It might make sense in some cases - say if it were possible for you to take over a core planet, and then *that* got bombarded - or if you became really well established, with a huge colony - but those seem like a good fit for special cases and not the base mechanics.
Would scaling the rep penalty to planet population make sense? A few thousand dead is some ruffled feathers (and TBH, numerically equivalent to blowing up a large fleet), a million dead is a major diplomatic incident, hundreds of millions dead becomes casus belli. It means that if you do build up the population of your pet colony to the 10^8 level, then when it gets bombarded you may console yourself in the fact that Diktat fleets are getting ganked by Hegemony and Luddic patrols across the sector.That got me thinking. Huge endgame fleets have a few thousand crew. You can smash few such fleets in a huge extended battle, and those not involved in the fighting do not care. You bombard a puny colony with no more people than all personnel in a large fleet and everyone who is not their enemy will blacklist you, but not if the AI factions do it? (What hypocrites!) In particular, why would all of the Independents care enough to blacklist if I bomb someone who is not them? (I guess you could be considered Independent, and they do not want to be lumped in, but you cease to be Independent after you establish a colony.)
the people on the planet are presumably civilians megas. though this line is not respected in every war, people usually give at least the pretense of caring about it.If they only care when I do it, but not when the AI does it, then that falls apart and exposes them as hypocrites, warmongers, and/or devious politicians we see all too often in real life. That or a cheap game balance patch between human and AI. I just hope that AI does not abuse their immunity like their other grief moves, or it would give off the "The computer is a cheater" trope, despite AI immunity permitted by game rules.
All this stuff is entirely outside the scope for what I'm looking at for 0.9a. There are also a lot of assumptions that don't hold up - which, fair enough, I haven't really talked about the details here because I haven't really talked about this much to begin with. But I also don't really want to, since it's 1) still something I'm working on and 2) content I don't want to entirely spoil.
Like, I'm just adding a "factions may occasionally get mad at you and it may possibly escalate to a bombardment" event, because this seems like it'll be fun. In that context, it's "fair" if the player can deal with it well, not if some minor element of it is entirely symmetrical to what the player can do, you know? The whole thing is already so asymmetrical.
Would scaling the rep penalty to planet population make sense? A few thousand dead is some ruffled feathers (and TBH, numerically equivalent to blowing up a large fleet), a million dead is a major diplomatic incident, hundreds of millions dead becomes casus belli. It means that if you do build up the population of your pet colony to the 10^8 level, then when it gets bombarded you may console yourself in the fact that Diktat fleets are getting ganked by Hegemony and Luddic patrols across the sector.That got me thinking. Huge endgame fleets have a few thousand crew. You can smash few such fleets in a huge extended battle, and those not involved in the fighting do not care. You bombard a puny colony with no more people than all personnel in a large fleet and everyone who is not their enemy will blacklist you, but not if the AI factions do it? (What hypocrites!) In particular, why would all of the Independents care enough to blacklist if I bomb someone who is not them? (I guess you could be considered Independent, and they do not want to be lumped in, but you cease to be Independent after you establish a colony.)
One thing that would make me less worried about bombardments is if the AI could not do total/ wipe out bombardments. IE They can hurt select industries but they can't just "glass the upstart's world because he had the balls to muscle in on our industry"From the August blog, there are raids (smash-and-grab), tactical bombing (hits military infrastructure), and saturation bombing (targets everything, considered an atrocity).
that isn't necessarily what you will be (and indeed, if you found a colony far enough out it may be that the vast majority of the sector won't even know that it exists) but make yourself a nuisance to somebody and it seems to me that you could very easily end up on one or more blackops kill lists just for being a thing that they have no influence over. you are an ant, and unless you are being very useful to somebody at the moment nobody's going to shed a ton of tears over it.I would imagine nuisance would be something like player acting pirate and farming the faction somehow, not player making a few more space bucks in legitimate trade and the faction will nonchalantly launch a planet killer because they are only making five billion instead of six billion.
Now the only thing needed to close the asymmetry
There is no need to do this in the first place. Or, in better words, this shouldn't be the driving force behind the design. All the ideas suggested here related to diplomacy are very good in order to give the player more options in the late game and all (also great for roleplaying), but they should be added in the future if they turn out to be fun options that solve an specific problem, not because the AI can do something that the player can't.
That's my view anyway, I don't think parity is necessary for good game design unless it's a multiplayer game.
I just remembered bits about ships and stuff. At the beginning (or maybe longer), the player has to import SH&W (hmm) from other factions. Does it have some modifier, making it less efficient to import them from other factions, or is there some other mechanic to steer the player towards getting his own manufacturing? It's less important, but thematically similar, so does this apply to military hardware as well?
Do normal ports get an export/import penalty and open ones don't? I think the final question I'd also like to know is if there are (or will be in future) different penalties for shortages of different resources. It would be nice if there was some choice, whether to deal with shortage of one resources, or the other.
Obviously the Diktat super-fleet was a bug.
Obviously the Diktat super-fleet was a bug.I would hope so, but I would not put it past Alex to add that intentionally (or liked the bug enough to promote it as an ascended glitch) as a "take that" to hardcore players, despite previous comments regarding ship availability.
Obviously the Diktat super-fleet was a bug.And here I was thinking that the Dickersons were going to integrated in the vanilla...
But I though bombardments were impossible to do stealthily. How can you hide a galactic war crime, especially from those that got bombed?
Probably a combination of it not being in the core worlds and your faction being a newcomer that doesn't have the same importance in the collective consciousness of the Sector. Plus, you know, you expect this sort of thing from the Diktat, everyone knows they blew up Opis! What can you do? Gotta live with them somehow. But when some upstart like you does it, it's shocking and a war crime.
(I'm imagining the player's character saying the last line with air quotes, while complaining about the unfairness of life, at a bar somewhere, to a disinterested audience of half-drunk spacers.)
A question: why does the sum of the income of all markets surpass the total market value significantly? I'd think the total value were supposed to be equivalent to the sum.