Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: Agile on May 05, 2020, 09:30:02 PM
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I believe that Markets need a limit.
What do I mean by this? Right now, you can sell any item, any quantity of said item, to any market in any world with nothing to stop you. You could, figuratively speaking, flood an entire market with huge amounts of goods you don't need since you just blew up a pirate base, and that planet will accept the goods, no matter the volume.
This, I believe, is bad as it introduces "metagame" plays and bad design such as selling huge amounts of loot to planets / pirate stations then blowing them up when realistically they'd never take that much loot, or planets always printing out vast amounts of money in the form of shortages.
I believe that markets, in order to be more organic in the game, need "limits".
For example, a level 3 planet will have an X amount of cash it can spend in the market; lets say the cap is theoretically 1 million credits. When you sell to the market, it uses this limit to determine whether it can pay you, the player. For example, lets say the market on this level 3 planet has a shortage of 1000 recreational drugs; you fill that shortage and get 500k credits. Now this planet has a coffer of 500k credits left to give. If you do not buy anything from this planet, the coffer remains at a static 500k.
Lets say you then decide to sell a bunch of junk that is worth another 500k to this planet. Then you try to sell some more; you are unable to and all sell options are then removed because there is 0 credits in this market place. You must now either buy from the market to replenish the credits the planet has (for a total cap of 1 million credits since its a level 3 planet), or you must way for 1 ingame month.
Every ingame month, an X percentage of the markets full worth is regenerated. For example, lets say every month 10% of the total market comes back. In this case, every month 100k is brought back into THIS specific planets coffers. This prevents the abuse of low level / low stability planets constantly being money printers because now they have both a soft cap (percentage based being brought back every month) and hard cap (x amount of money per level of planet).
You can still make money but it is much harder as markets are less exploitable through raiding / infinite loops of cash due to level 3 pirates in the system constantly raiding and somehow said planets having infinite cash to pay off all the exorbitant prices you charge them to fix their shortages.
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At present selling many of a commodity drives its price down. Would simply accelerating that for smaller markets do the same thing?
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At present selling many of a commodity drives its price down. Would simply accelerating that for smaller markets do the same thing?
Yes and no. Then you can just sell x amount and go to another station then rinse and repeat.
I believe a more long lasting consequence to market manipulation like market limits would be a better idea, since this also covers the issue of market shortages being big money printers as well.
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That would just force players to visit multiple markets each time they want to sell a large quantity of something. It's busywork that wastes real time and doesn't offer interesting choices.
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I do not like this idea. It's too player-centric. What I mean, is that it's unlikely that the player is the only person that ever trades with a market, there's likely independent traders, traders from other factions, etc. So likely that when you sell too much of something, the market can figure out a way to sell it to another market that needs this excess stuff you just sold.
However, perhaps there could be some system that markets try to stockpile at least some amount of goods, if they have experienced shortages. E.g. if a market has experienced a food shortage multiple times in the past year, it should try to keep extra stockpile of food, if the player decides to sell an excessive amount of it, such that it would dampen the effect of the next shortage if it occurs.
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The short answer is: Why does it matter?
It's a single player game, so the player being able to "dump" a large quantity of a thing at a market is a useful convenience that affects no-one else.
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If there really is an issue with shortages being too profitable (which isn't a problem in my experience), then I think a better solution is to add more pirate fleets around the planet to make it more difficult to land and sell stuff, rather than just capping how much can be sold.
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Something like this would slow things down somewhat but could certainly help with the issue that you can just raid Epiphany's Starport and feed them drugs, weapons, and marines and make 1M+ credits per month early on till you tire of it. Otherwise, it's be annoying to offload all those weapons/metals gotten from combat though metals are usually pretty worthless, so you can just dump them out the window really.
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If there are issues with shortages being repeatably exploitable, then you could speed up the stability decay process so that the markets decivilize faster as a consequence for the players misdeeds.
I also vaguely recall not being able to trade with places after I raid them because they are reasonably *** at me. Is it not like that?
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Speed up decivilisation?! That's the last thing we need, the core worlds are already under a tsunami of pirate zombies in vanilla, most markets don't even have ground defences or a patrol hq and die of a mean stare.
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Strange how people have such different experiences. I think I've seen ~5-10 planets decivilize in all of the campaigns I've ever played. I guess an alternative is to make core colonies more resilient to raids so it's harder to create destabilization.
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If there are issues with shortages being repeatably exploitable, then you could speed up the stability decay process so that the markets decivilize faster as a consequence for the players misdeeds.
I also vaguely recall not being able to trade with places after I raid them because they are reasonably *** at me. Is it not like that?
They do get mad at you, but it doesn't matter too much since they're only mad for about a month when you break their spaceport for the better part of a year. Just go out and gather what they need and by the time you return they'll be ready to buy. Afterwards, you just begin the trade circle where you buy from cheaper places and sell at ludicrous shortage values.
Also I'm not sure if its vanilla or Nexerelin, but you can pay a pittance of money, supplies, and marines and remove the "recent unrest" that causes low stability, as long as a planet does not have zero stability then it won't decivilize and removing "recent unrest" penalty is usually enough to keep them afloat and lucrative even through the food shortage.
Strange how people have such different experiences. I think I've seen ~5-10 planets decivilize in all of the campaigns I've ever played. I guess an alternative is to make core colonies more resilient to raids so it's harder to create destabilization.
I'm not sure if you play Nexerelin or not but, as far as I can tell, deciv issues depend on whether you use it or not as factions in Nex will not only defend themselves from pirates but will regularly go out and smash pirate/pather stations harassing them and prevent them from dominating with penalties and raids. Whereas in vanilla factions will completely ignore pirate harassment save for putting out a bounty before rolling over and letting the pirates walk over them until stability hits zero for everyone.
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Also I'm not sure if its vanilla or Nexerelin, but you can pay a pittance of money, supplies, and marines and remove the "recent unrest" that causes low stability, as long as a planet does not have zero stability then it won't decivilize and removing "recent unrest" penalty is usually enough to keep them afloat and lucrative even through the food shortage.
That's a Nex addition.
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If you're playing with Nex, you're not playing the regular game. So any market opinions don't really apply.
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If markets had money limits, it would be nice to be able to sell remotely. Dump a stack of metals on the market, but you get only a fraction of that stack sold, at an optimal price. The stack then drains every month until it's empty. It would give a choice between gaining more money immediately, but less over time.
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If you're playing with Nex, you're not playing the regular game. So any market opinions don't really apply.
While I was fairly certain this strategy would still work in vanilla due to a couple factors that were still true, namely low accessibility due to hostilities and no other real production facilities due to Epiphany being the only Pather colony, I opted to test it out regardless. In summary, yes raiding Epiphany's starport and feeding them marines, drugs, weapons still gives about 600K - 1M per month.
Using only LazyLib and Console Command for an earlier start, I started with Nav 3 as my only skill, 500K credits, 2 colossus, 2 Phaeton, 1 Nebula, and 800 Marines along with the (unused) ships in the mercenary fast start.
First, I made sure to build them a comm relay so that they can capture it and gain +2 stability if they didn't already have one and placed a comm sniffer to grab the highly lucrative procurement contracts for the things I was picking up as they showed up. I avoided grabbing the ones for food and organics though due to contracts not helping with shortages.
Raiding their spaceport shut it down for about 300 days, or 10 months with 800 marines losing very few. Now, with the comm relay, the combination of food/organic shortage and recent unrest dropped them to exactly 0 stability. Using the following path, I grabbed the materials for cheap.
Epiphany -> Jangala, Corvus (2000 Organics) -> Eventide, Samarra (1500 Food) -> Nachiketa (Fuel to full, 800 Marines) -> Chicomoztoc, Aztlan (200 Hvy Weapons (Optional), 200 Organs (optional), 100 Hvy Machinery, Supplies to full on complete run before sell) -> Eochu Bres, Hybrasil (800 Drugs, 200 Organs (if not already)) -> Culann, Hybrasil (200 Weapons (if not already)) -> Epiphany
I made sure to sell food and organics on the open market to resolve their shortage for the month so they wouldn't decivilize. Also, when smuggling the illegal stuff from Hegemony, I let the patrols scan me before entering the port at Chicomoztoc, I didn't have anything illegal by that point and they never scanned me when I left with the weapons/organs. Doing this I made about 1M on the first run, and about 600K on the next two. Including three colossus purchases which I picked up en route as I needed them. I made the full circle in just shy of a month's time so had to wait in front of Epiphany for a few days after turning in the procurements for the shortages/surpluses to come back. After three months their stability climbed up to 1 so I had the choice to drop providing food and organics, keep providing them for money, or swap over to domestic/luxury goods.
After 3 months I could stop doing this at any time and Epiphany would have stuck around since AFAIK pirates never raid their system so their colony would never go down to 0 stability until I showed up again. And then I can choose to do this again whenever I wanted so long as I had enough starting credits to purchase all that they needed again and continue making 600K - 1M per month for something routine or not requiring too much effort in execution.
Now while its not as lucrative and easy as the food shortage days of 0.7, I figure this is something that should be changed as Alex has stated multiple times that they want to avoid having things like a player feeling like they have to do a trade route to make faster money and buy things to get to the "real content". And this is literally a circle that you do month after month to make a bunch of easy money far faster, though less exciting IMO, than something like bounty hunting.
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The best solution to me is to have some more serious reputation based consequences and/or military consequences (increasing each time you raid), but that gets into all the issues with the reputation system (reputation penalties mean the entire faction is angry at you, rep penalties encourages grinding a bunch of easy missions to get rep back up which is boring etc.). Tbh, I think this is an excellent example of a situation where a better reputation system could be used to create much more interesting consequences for player actions.
The first time you raid someone, you would expect some anonymity if your sensors are off (maybe suspicion but not outright hostility), but if you keep doing it, people are going to recognize you and refuse to trade with you/attack you. It would be cool if that happened locally so that you weren't torpedoing your relationship with a whole faction, but you also weren't getting away with making millions for free.
It would also be cool if there was some military build-up at colonies that have been recently raided (which would also help with pirate raid issues).
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If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately. The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.
Of course, if player waits until he is powerful enough to kill them all, just eat the hostility and raid them to the ground.
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Now while its not as lucrative and easy as the food shortage days of 0.7, I figure this is something that should be changed as Alex has stated multiple times that they want to avoid having things like a player feeling like they have to do a trade route to make faster money and buy things to get to the "real content". And this is literally a circle that you do month after month to make a bunch of easy money far faster, though less exciting IMO, than something like bounty hunting.
I'm potentially going off rails a bit, but I guess bounty hunting could become a bit better if there were some more variety to it. I mean that if something like Vayra's bounty system made its way to Vanilla with special bounties popping up from time to time. I guess the difficult part would be to come up with ships, but I guess that some kind of pseudo-randomizer could work to occasionally create a ship with bonus built in hullmods/rare paintjobs and what not.
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If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately. The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.
Of course, if player waits until he is powerful enough to kill them all, just eat the hostility and raid them to the ground.
This is the problem with the rep system. There is no way to make the planet super mad at you without making the faction super mad at you. There needs to be more reputation consequences for raiding IMO but there just isn't the granularity with the current rep system for it.
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If they recognize you (try raiding with transponder on), they would become hostile immediately. The reason player can keep doing it without bad relations is they do not know for sure who is raiding.
Its pathers so they start hostile with you right away. Though since you never need to enter with transponder on, because they're pathers and don't have any patrols you need to shoot down, its a moot point. Honestly, having decently sized patrols that were strong enough to attack a stronger mid-game player, or at least something more frightening might help make it more difficult since attacking fleets in the same system of a planet prevents you from being able to trade with that planet for an amount of time requiring you to put in effort to sneak into the colony which can help discourage this.