Trade goods, run mining operations, build industries — and defend your interestsHaving a base cost for any good is a bad idea. If you use logic like that, you can't simulate all kinds of interesting economic phenomena like monopolies, or depressions.
Supply | Demand | ||
Current | how much entities have it in supply? | VS | how much entities need it right now? |
Future | how much of it, and its prerequisites, are being manufactured? | how much manufacturing is being done with it as a prerequisite? |
That's why there are entire universities devoted to trying to understand exactly what logic does generate market behaviors.and you think those 4 rules will generate that behavior? It's auto-pricing, not an expert system.
Of course no system will produce that behavior. That's the point.Yah I agree it's a fudge.
My point is that its just another black box algorithm that you want to use to generate some values that could be generated in much simpler ways.
Its just abstracted at a different level.
Then there's a question of how often you update prices. If you don't do it with every unit of something sold by the player, you could have a situation where the player can buy/sell the same stack to the same planet over and over, with profit (costs X: players buys, there's less "current supply", it costs >X, player sells, repeat). That's not particularly hard to avoid (most likely with "hacks", whose effect on the overall economy may not be immediately apparent).
preferably i want something a bit more complex than X3. but not so complicated as EVE. at the very least i dont think items in game should have hard set max/min prices but instead prices dictated by a more complex algorithm than X3 where if a station has 50% of its max resources the demand price is 50% of said resources min/max price scale.You and me are on the same page.
A good example is say a station hasMy first answer to this was that the cost of having low supplies (or the discount of high supplies) should be passed on in the price. That was a good answer for an entity that both bought and sold.
100 units of X, being sold for 10credits per unit.
you purchase 50 units of X for 500credits.
All of the sudden the station only has 50 units of X so its price goes up to say 15credits per unit.
You just simply sell it back all your units of X for 50% profit.
...or not fun as everything becomes the same profit as everything else.Are you SURE that's what would happen? Is that in contrast to setting a base price for everything and only having specific things be profitable?
The real issue is if you make a very strong self regulated virtual econemy then the result would be every single item has the exact same profitabilty because the AI is so strong.