Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????  (Read 6482 times)

Punisher30

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 5
    • View Profile

Lets start with our own colony products. I cant use any of the products for free. It always charges me at the end of the month for using them. It charges me the average pricing of the products. I have over 3.7k of supplies, between 5k-10k of fuel, and other products over 2k. I cant use not one of them without being charged. I get charged more at my own colony than I do with other factions colonies. This is weird and F*cked up at the same time.

Now for trading between factions. I sat and watch trade convoys come and go at my colony and other faction colonies. I watched one convoy at my planet and hover the cursor over it. It said unloading food and supplies. Then I watched my faction trade convoy return while it says returning with organics and crabs. after it landed, I checked my colony inventory. Nothing changed. Same amount of everything. also, there's no crabs. I watched these things amongst other colonies too. I came to realize that the economy in this game is a joke. There isn't actual trading among colonies with trade convoys. They're just there for players to raid and actually acquire those resource through raiding. It also has a cause and effect. Ex.) "This planet will be affected if the convoy doesn't make it to its destination, even though they don't actually trade." Same goes for raiding colonies. When you raid them, you don't actually raid the resources in their inventory. Its just randomly generated by the percentage chance of acquiring anything profitable and lowers their stability. There is actually no type of economy in this game.

What's up with this?
Logged

Igncom1

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1496
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #1 on: August 13, 2019, 09:38:04 AM »

The supplies in a colonies reserve cost you to use because you are effectively taking resources from the stockpile that need to be replaced, you don't pay a tariff on them and can get a very large amount if you have a waystation? at the port. At other colonies you do have to pay a tariff but if there is a local surplus then they can be very cheap.

Colony inventory is surplus that the player can access, but it isn't indicative of actual large scale trade. Because large scale trade is abstracted away due to the sheer volume of products that are being distributed. Rather then literal portions of a resource. A caravan might have a limited supply on them but that's mostly a for show and game play thing to represent the volume that is being shipped around, and can be interacted with in the only real way the game intends, being killed and thus disrupting the chain.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2019, 09:40:45 AM by Igncom1 »
Logged
Sunders are the best ship in the game.

Agile

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 190
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #2 on: August 13, 2019, 09:57:18 AM »

The issue is if the economy was fully simulated in the way you think it should be, the traffic of the game would be IMMENSE.

The supplies that are actually in the game is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions for certain goods (such as food, luxury goods, fuel), which would require at least 10 + trade convoys going to and from the massive core world colonies, and later your own colonies if you get them to that level.

This would require even more simulations of battlefleets (to protect convoys) and pirates / luddics / pathers / hostile factions (to attack convoys), which would probably slow the game to a crawl.

So instead the market is simulated "globally"; which you can check when you go to a colony and check the actual global market of goods by pressing on them and holding F1 I believe.
Logged

StormingKiwi

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 14
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #3 on: August 13, 2019, 04:02:06 PM »

Doesn't Distant Worlds: Universe do the same thing, and doesn't run into the performance problems you say it will?
Logged

Inventor Raccoon

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 451
  • Digging through trash for a hydroflux catalyst
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #4 on: August 13, 2019, 04:16:25 PM »

Old versions of SS did have a more in-depth economy, and it caused serious performance problems when you started adding more and more markets. Compare that to the current economy, which can handle any number of markets with no performance impact.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #5 on: August 13, 2019, 11:01:20 PM »

Doesn't Distant Worlds: Universe do the same thing, and doesn't run into the performance problems you say it will?
If Alex and DW guys cooperated on the matter, SS could perhaps have more simulated economy. As it is, I assume Alex just went with what was good enough and working. Economy is not the focus of the game.

xenoargh

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 5078
  • naively breaking things!
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #6 on: August 14, 2019, 01:30:17 AM »

<ahem>

This is (kind of) my fault, OP.

I told Alex, "keep the economy really simple" ... er, 3+ years ago. 

Why?  Because I'd had experience with (and re-coded, at one point) the Mount and Blade economy, that tries to simulate a lot of things pretty directly.  Like, for example, local farmers bring grain to a local city and trade it; it gets turned into bread. 

This works OK-ish when it's that simple, but... when you start adding a lot of resources and dependencies and then let the player directly manipulate the world's supply chains, it gets super-duper broken really easily, unlike real-world economies.

It sucked and was easily manipulated by players in un-fun ways, and it's almost impossible to fix that issue, frankly. 

Really! 

The problem with economic sims that actually attempt anything like real fidelity and include a lot of goods and services is that they really require a lot of AI-like gamecode trying to make it work out or weird rules or odd fiats (like, say, Mount and Blade's "tax penalty" where the player literally got less and less tax money for each new Fief they acquired- a pure hack to keep players from ever being able to win the game in a reasonable timeframe).

Problem is, that kind of code's bloody expensive per calculation run and it scales exponentially, not linearly, with additional markets to consider.  Which is why the Mount and Blade mega-mods that add lots of cities but don't fix the economy mainly run pretty sloooooowly, even on modern PCs.

Moreover, it doesn't add fun.  This isn't a game about being a masterful economics wizard.  This is a game where we build our ride-or-die fleet of sci-fi hotrods and blow everybody away, with pyrotechnics.  Trying to also simulate a realistic economy and interactions is kind of like strapping a nuclear reactor onto a LED... sure, it can be done, and Alex sure tried, despite my advice... but it was largely a waste of time and energy.

Alex wrote two major iterations with complex economics under the hood.  If you've bought the game, you can even play these earlier iterations; all of the older Alphas are available on the website.  I'd suggest trying them out to see why things got simplified.

But, if you're willing to hear out a total stranger on the Internet... neither system worked well.  They had all of the problems I'd predicted, no real benefits to gameplay, and the UIs were so complex that I had friends try the game out and walk away muttering about how Byzantine it was.  They just wanted to do some straightforward trade runs and make a profit, but it was well-nigh impossible to figure out how, exactly.  Not good. 

If you don't wanna take my word for it, download 0.6 / 0.7 and see for yourself.  Try, for example, cornering the market for Organics, by deliberately destabilizing all Organics production in the Sector other than yours (or in 0.6, just build out Organics in ideal locations... over and over).

So, did it add Fun?  Nope.  Just easy money for the player and a Sector whose overall economy thrashes and crashes, because disabling things was easy.  Also, like Mount and Blade, there were problems all over the place with initial conditions of supply / demand that spiraled if you played a few game-years in.  No dynamism and no really sophisticated AI make for treacherous conditions to build economic sims.

Now we're here, where it looks complex on the surface, but is actually quite simple, as you've partially discovered.  I'd vote that it's hugely better, too, because it's not such a mess and it's easy for newbies to understand while having some depth.

The player's economy is largely untied from the global; the rules are straightforward and creating synergies is easy, once you understand the rules.  The trade fleets aren't dealing in "real goods"; they're actually mainly window-dressing.  The real economy is the relationships you create between your worlds. 

So, it provides something to do, it looks like an economy and for all practical purposes, acts like one, except for the complex simulation bits and connection to the other empires, which really wasn't adding anything fun.  And, unlike the two earlier systems, it performs well.

Sorry if you want to play Space Accountant 2000; this just isn't it.  But, frankly, if that's what's actually bothering you... step back, play what's actually here.  The main game isn't economics; it's not even about money, really; that's a minor obstacle at worst.  You cannot solve your main problems with cash, either, which I think is how it ought to feel.
Logged
Please check out my SS projects :)
Xeno's Mod Pack

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12117
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #7 on: August 14, 2019, 05:34:46 AM »

I did not like old economy (other than powerleveling from food runs).  First was the infamous food runs of 0.6.5 that gave about four times more XP than combat, not to mention easy money.  Other economy stuff boiled down to storing stuff at markets prone to shortages until there was a shortage, then sell everything.  Just a simple buy low and sell high that had more annoying steps.  Later, few pirate worlds without Free Port had a money loop where you could sell everything to Black Market for profit, wait a few moments for stability to hit zero (worlds did not decivilize back then), then buy everything for less than you sold it for.  Then a version or so later, stuff broke and it was not worth trying to profit from trade, until the current 0.9.x series.
Logged

cerebus23

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 24
    • View Profile
Re: Whats up with own colony products and trading amongst factions????????
« Reply #8 on: August 14, 2019, 06:13:35 AM »

<ahem>

This is (kind of) my fault, OP.

I told Alex, "keep the economy really simple" ... er, 3+ years ago. 

Why?  Because I'd had experience with (and re-coded, at one point) the Mount and Blade economy, that tries to simulate a lot of things pretty directly.  Like, for example, local farmers bring grain to a local city and trade it; it gets turned into bread. 

This works OK-ish when it's that simple, but... when you start adding a lot of resources and dependencies and then let the player directly manipulate the world's supply chains, it gets super-duper broken really easily, unlike real-world economies.

It sucked and was easily manipulated by players in un-fun ways, and it's almost impossible to fix that issue, frankly. 

Really! 

The problem with economic sims that actually attempt anything like real fidelity and include a lot of goods and services is that they really require a lot of AI-like gamecode trying to make it work out or weird rules or odd fiats (like, say, Mount and Blade's "tax penalty" where the player literally got less and less tax money for each new Fief they acquired- a pure hack to keep players from ever being able to win the game in a reasonable timeframe).

Problem is, that kind of code's bloody expensive per calculation run and it scales exponentially, not linearly, with additional markets to consider.  Which is why the Mount and Blade mega-mods that add lots of cities but don't fix the economy mainly run pretty sloooooowly, even on modern PCs.

Moreover, it doesn't add fun.  This isn't a game about being a masterful economics wizard.  This is a game where we build our ride-or-die fleet of sci-fi hotrods and blow everybody away, with pyrotechnics.  Trying to also simulate a realistic economy and interactions is kind of like strapping a nuclear reactor onto a LED... sure, it can be done, and Alex sure tried, despite my advice... but it was largely a waste of time and energy.

Alex wrote two major iterations with complex economics under the hood.  If you've bought the game, you can even play these earlier iterations; all of the older Alphas are available on the website.  I'd suggest trying them out to see why things got simplified.

But, if you're willing to hear out a total stranger on the Internet... neither system worked well.  They had all of the problems I'd predicted, no real benefits to gameplay, and the UIs were so complex that I had friends try the game out and walk away muttering about how Byzantine it was.  They just wanted to do some straightforward trade runs and make a profit, but it was well-nigh impossible to figure out how, exactly.  Not good. 

If you don't wanna take my word for it, download 0.6 / 0.7 and see for yourself.  Try, for example, cornering the market for Organics, by deliberately destabilizing all Organics production in the Sector other than yours (or in 0.6, just build out Organics in ideal locations... over and over).

So, did it add Fun?  Nope.  Just easy money for the player and a Sector whose overall economy thrashes and crashes, because disabling things was easy.  Also, like Mount and Blade, there were problems all over the place with initial conditions of supply / demand that spiraled if you played a few game-years in.  No dynamism and no really sophisticated AI make for treacherous conditions to build economic sims.

Now we're here, where it looks complex on the surface, but is actually quite simple, as you've partially discovered.  I'd vote that it's hugely better, too, because it's not such a mess and it's easy for newbies to understand while having some depth.

The player's economy is largely untied from the global; the rules are straightforward and creating synergies is easy, once you understand the rules.  The trade fleets aren't dealing in "real goods"; they're actually mainly window-dressing.  The real economy is the relationships you create between your worlds. 

So, it provides something to do, it looks like an economy and for all practical purposes, acts like one, except for the complex simulation bits and connection to the other empires, which really wasn't adding anything fun.  And, unlike the two earlier systems, it performs well.

Sorry if you want to play Space Accountant 2000; this just isn't it.  But, frankly, if that's what's actually bothering you... step back, play what's actually here.  The main game isn't economics; it's not even about money, really; that's a minor obstacle at worst.  You cannot solve your main problems with cash, either, which I think is how it ought to feel.

Interesting read and thank you for sharing an "expert" opinion. And no wonder i always felt i was getting skrewed in mount and blade, because i was lol.
Logged