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[Pax_Empyrean]

Personally, it doesn't matter to me at all what the trade goods are. I'm more interested in how the economy actually works.

Are the prices set by supply and demand? Can I corner the market on a good by blowing up ships that are trying to sell it? Are planets affected in some way by having their trade cut off? Can I help a market grow by investing my own resources in it? Are safe trade routes worthless because they are programmed specifically to be such, or is it because the game automatically generates traders that saturate the safer routes?

I can totally help explain how all this stuff works. I'm an economist. This is basically all I'm good for.

[Aereto]

I must admit that until I can play out the version, I don't have a clear opinion on the market mechanics. I had the ship-ship and fleet combat/management down, but it's fair to deal with the economy as well. Those supplies scavenged can build up quickly, last I played. Had to stop playing when it comes to recording stuff, but that's a separate issue and needed space to plan for the future.

Spoiler

First comes combat, then comes economy, and I have a feeling that diplomacy might come around. But that's just me rambling.

[close]

[Histidine]

Hm, I might have missed it, but what does the green outline on the crew being imported mean?

[Gothars]

Hm, I might have missed it, but what does the green outline on the crew being imported mean?

I would suppose that crew is not imported but "homegrown", for the most part. So green crew surplus means that more people finish their spacefaring education (or are just coming of age, whatever the standards are) than the market needs to crew its own ships.

[Alex]

If it's on the import side, it means that more stuff is being brought in than is in demand locally, likely due to oversupply elsewhere. If the green is on the local side (to the left of the arrow), then it's a locally-generated surplus.

[Okim]

Hi, Alex.

Asking from modding perspective about the whole economy thing.

1. you said that there is a custom economy file that can be used to manipulate economy. What does it contain? Just a list of market conditions and their influence on production/consumption? Or the whole list of stations/planets with manually specified conditions? The line '28 markets' in the change list kinda tells me that economy file contains all the market places with everything being manually specified...

2. you said that there are fleets that ship commodities between systems. Are they automaticaly created (by using some kind of universal script) or do we need to call them the same way we do now through the spawn fleet scripts with some specific conditions (like 'spawn on demand' rather than 'per some days')?

3. open vs black market. It is said that some factions concider certaing goods as illegal while others not. How this one is specified per faction? In faction`s file or in economy file?

4. i suppose that these new goods are simple resources that are added to resource.csv file? Or these are part of the economy file?

5. how does this economy system interacts with station interaction plugin? Is it just an enchanced cargo/crew trading screen? I ask this because i`m afraid of the perspective of cutting out the 75% of Ironclads` station interaction file because of this

[Alex]

Hi, Alex.

Hey!

1. you said that there is a custom economy file that can be used to manipulate economy. What does it contain? Just a list of market conditions and their influence on production/consumption? Or the whole list of stations/planets with manually specified conditions? The line '28 markets' in the change list kinda tells me that economy file contains all the market places with everything being manually specified...

The economy definition (which spans a couple of files, with one master file pointing to the others) contains some economy parameters, and specific data (i.e. size/faction/conditions) for every market. The "market conditions" which are the building blocks for markets are defined in another file.

However, markets can also be created entirely through code, should random generation be necessary.

2. you said that there are fleets that ship commodities between systems. Are they automaticaly created (by using some kind of universal script) or do we need to call them the same way we do now through the spawn fleet scripts with some specific conditions (like 'spawn on demand' rather than 'per some days')?

That's not done yet, but the idea is that the economy runs behind the scenes, and a script - probably parametrized in some ways - runs to spawn some "representative" fleets, and then tracks them to feed what happened to them back into the economy. It's not entirely accurate to say that these fleets "ship" stuff; it's more like they pretend to ship stuff, both for the sake of the player, and the economy simulation

3. open vs black market. It is said that some factions concider certaing goods as illegal while others not. How this one is specified per faction? In faction`s file or in economy file?

It's specified in the .faction file, but each submarket plugin is what actually determines whether something is illegal. So, for example, the open (sub)market calls the FactionAPI method to check if something is legal, while the black (sub)market just says it's legal w/o checking.

4. i suppose that these new goods are simple resources that are added to resource.csv file? Or these are part of the economy file?

As mentioned elsewhere in the patch notes, resources.csv is now named commodities.csv, but aside from that, yeah, everything is in there. It has quite a few new columns, but aside from that, it's the same idea.

5. how does this economy system interacts with station interaction plugin? Is it just an enchanced cargo/crew trading screen? I ask this because i`m afraid of the perspective of cutting out the 75% of Ironclads` station interaction file because of this

Right, the screens from the previous blog post are the new trading screen. You might still have to do some tweaking to make sure everything hooks up properly, though.

One thing to consider is that markets can be attached to planets, so the interaction dialog needs to handle both stations and planets (which should be a trivial change). A potentially tricky part is that multiple entities can share a single market - for example, a planet and a station orbiting it will generally share the same market. This might come up if you're storing data in memory for a specific station; you'd now probably want to key it on the market instead.

... that said, stations/planets will probably get more involved interactions than just "trade", at which point you'd probably run into some trouble and might have to put your stuff on a sub-menu, or some such. Or, since you're making a TC, you could do away with those interactions altogether and just use your stuff.

[xenoargh]

A potentially tricky part is that multiple entities can share a single market

OK, I'm confused about this already, lol.   

We're able to generate the markets by code, yes? 

Markets are objects we can associate with a given SectorEntityToken via <some procedure or void>, yes?

So, if we want a station to have its own unique Market, we can do that? 

And if we want 5 Stations to all have different Factions' <whatever they can do to markets> but they're all reflecting the planet's base Market otherwise, we can do that, too?

For that matter, if we want a Market that's applied to every single SectorEntityToken a Faction owns, we could even do that, right?

Can we destroy Markets we've created via code?  That's important; if we destroy a planet or station or whatnot, we don't want the Market sitting around eating up memory.

Is CargoAPI a dead letter, in terms of how we're supposed to support changes in Station / Planet availability-of-stuff or are we OK with all of the scripts we're running to prune things, specialize inventories and all that? 

I get the impression that CargoAPI's still there under all the new stuff, so we can continue to manipulate things directly if we want, but it'd be good to know what's happening there.

Do weapons, ships, and other items now have a Faction tag or field where multiple Factions can be named, so that Markets for a given Faction can restrict access to these things, just like Harvested Organs and all that?

[Alex]

A potentially tricky part is that multiple entities can share a single market

OK, I'm confused about this already, lol.   

We're able to generate the markets by code, yes? 

Markets are objects we can associate with a given SectorEntityToken via <some procedure or void>, yes?

So, if we want a station to have its own unique Market, we can do that? 

And if we want 5 Stations to all have different Factions' <whatever they can do to markets> but they're all reflecting the planet's base Market otherwise, we can do that, too?

For that matter, if we want a Market that's applied to every single SectorEntityToken a Faction owns, we could even do that, right?

Can we destroy Markets we've created via code?  That's important; if we destroy a planet or station or whatnot, we don't want the Market sitting around eating up memory.

Yes.

Is CargoAPI a dead letter, in terms of how we're supposed to support changes in Station / Planet availability-of-stuff or are we OK with all of the scripts we're running to prune things, specialize inventories and all that? 

I get the impression that CargoAPI's still there under all the new stuff, so we can continue to manipulate things directly if we want, but it'd be good to know what's happening there.

Do weapons, ships, and other items now have a Faction tag or field where multiple Factions can be named, so that Markets for a given Faction can restrict access to these things, just like Harvested Organs and all that?

Basically: you can do whatever you want in terms of what gets presented to the player as buyable - the submarket plugin gets a callback before the submarked is opened by the player.

[xenoargh]

Very cool!  That's sounding very reasonable, in terms of transitioning

[Dratai]

One thought is to add in escort work.
building up a reputation for being successful unlocks bigger rewards/convoys.
It would also perhaps take you from point A to point B out of your control after a series of battles (between which you may not be regaining much CR or do many repairs on account of being on alert/guarding the important (maybe higher priority than normal) shipment)

Essentially, this way it's no longer just "guard ship X" (though it could also be) or "transport Y" to "point Z".
That and I notice with how enemies avoid stronger fleets it might seem prudent that actual pirate assaults on a player's "trade run" would be against some kind of high value target. Maybe even construct a specific battle map/type for this purpose?

(which also means you could later add in scouting battles where you have to traverse a map and get harrassed/assaulted at key points)

Because when you hit big enough fleetsize, most enemies will automatically flee, avoid you and be too weak to fight back.
This whole suggestion could mean that a player would have to hold back part of their fleet/fighting force in light of unknown enemy numbers and battles. (also allowing for players who keep a varied force on hand to maybe split into two or more task groups for the "campaign"/engagement)

but this is just a thought that struck me seeing how you want to avoid trading be simply moving from A->B

[moontan]

hopefully the prices of goods and equipment fluctuate depending on market conditions and other events.

so you don't have to the the 'milk run' between the same 2-3 stars until the end of times. 

[Gothars]

The events based economy system is specifically designed to make milk run style trading obsolete.