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[Aeson]

There are tolls and tarifs at same time, just imagine that someone ask you payment in order to enter some a shop, still charge money for goods in shop and then ask payment for leaving shop with goods you just purchased.
Taking money 3 times for same item as result...logical - no, fun - no, allow different actions - single time per run, then you will be banned for smuggling....

Fun, perhaps not. Illogical, though? Not significantly more so than the real-world model it's based upon. The purchase of goods for export can be taxed at the point of origin and assessed import duties at the destination. Depending upon the way in which the goods are shipped, there may be tolls of one form or another applied, and there may be docking and loading or unloading fees assessed at the ports. Those goods can then potentially be taxed at least once more in the country of destination if they are sold by a retailer or in some other transaction. Property taxes are repeatedly assessed on the same item every year (common examples include houses and cars). Sales tax can be applied at the point of purchase and the purchaser may then be assessed a use tax in his or her state of residence if they bring the item(s) purchased back to their home state. Many localities are becoming interested in the way in which purchases made over the internet should be handled, and at least in the US there is proposed federal legislation making it legal for localities to apply the local tax code to purchases made by the residents of that locality over the internet. Some types of goods, such as tobacco and alcohol, may be subject to several different at the point of sale or at different stages in their production and distribution.

Your example of the shop which charges admittance and exit fees and requires payment for goods is also not entirely analogous to the game situation, which is a tax on the transaction. I can "enter the shop" and leave it without paying anything beyond what it cost me to get to the location (opening the trade menu, deciding I don't want anything, and closing it costs me nothing but real-world time and whatever fuel and supplies it cost me to visit the station). It's only when I buy or sell an item that payments have to be made, which makes the situation more analogous to some form of sales tax or customs duty (or a combination of taxes and duties). Furthermore, there are situations in the real world which are similar to your example of the shop which charges customers entry and exit fees and requires payment for goods purchased. Many toll bridges and roads charge people traveling in both directions, as do most public transit systems. If I need to travel on such a road or on such a public transit system in order to get to the grocery store or the shopping mall or the amusement park or wherever I am going, then I am effectively being charged for the services rendered or goods provided as well as for entering and exiting the shop. It's not the store owner who collected those fees, but I still had to pay. You can add at least one more real-world fee in that in many localities free parking is of limited availability, and so I might drive my car to a parking garage, pick up the ticket indicating my time of arrival or pay the fee, take the subway into the city, do whatever I need to do there, take the subway back to where I left my car, and make any payment necessary for recovering my car from the parking garage.

Another real-world example would be of an amusement park where the parking is not free, admittance is not necessarily free (i.e. it may charge admissions, or it may allow the customer to choose between purchasing various grades of admissions slips or paying for each ride individually), and concessions and perhaps some (though not most) of the rides are not free - you pay to enter the amusement park, you might buy lunch at the park or decide that that roller coaster you thought you wouldn't go on when you bought the basic admissions slip actually looks really fun and pay to get on that, and when you leave you have to pay the parking garage for leaving your car in their care for however long you were in the park.

[Doogie]

Perhaps there should be more shortages of varying level of severity, with lower level ones being more common (and less profitable). This way, its more like fulfilling a non-essential demand than to grind prices through "normal" trade, because what should be considered "normal" should be based around events of varying frequency, rather than grinding through set prices.

[Megas]

Another profitable trade opportunity I noticed:  Pirates (at Barad and Umbra) sell ore and volatiles very cheap (thanks to constant disruptions), and buying them from their Black Market (and open market) is not a problem since player is very likely hostile to pirates to begin with.  Player can buy as many commodities as he wants, and lose minimal (if any) reputation from other factions.  Then he can haul the commodities to Argeus (in Arcadia) or some other place that can get disruptions for ore and volatiles.

[friday]

Some of you talking about trade beeing boring, while i think, i should made a viable option.

There is still the 4th skill row unused, i think it will be industrial related stuff once it hits the game. Why not make trade skills? Some that influence price/demand/supply intel gathering, buying, selling, interacting with the blackmarkt? How usefull would it be if you could order stuff on the black markt for tremendous amounts of cash e.g. that one ship or the rack of weapons your looking for long while  now.

And to spice it up, there need to be pirates that actually go after you! At the moment most of the time you can fly where ever you want, and it's the dreaded inspections that bores me. I mean, i just undocked from your super duper space station.. doesn't that thing have scanners to check if i am clean? It is different when i arrive in a new system, but 10 seconds after leaving? Even with good standings? Come on!

[TaLaR]

There is still the 4th skill row unused, i think it will be industrial related stuff once it hits the game. Why not make trade skills?

What i really wouldn't like to see would be skills effectively amounting to getting more money. I mean that's as boring as theoretically possible. Also useless in endgame situation, where money are non-factor anyway.

I think game needs more complex/evolved campaign layer gameplay before trade skills that are both useful and interesting in comparison to Combat/Leadership/Tech ones become possible.

[Intaka]

Let me start by saying that Starsector is an incredibly fun 2d space combat simulator. The gameplay for combat is fairly balanced, the ships have variety, building your own loadouts is a fun and engaging metagame.

The newest trade goods changes to the game leave me a bit cold though. The "market" prices across all worlds are not presented in a clear format, the market changes faster than you can possibly hope to travel between locations based on your timestamped departure information, and if it is not meant to be profitable... I can't help but wonder what is the point entirely?

If the goal is to have bloated low value, high cargo space dropped goods (aka metal, etc), then why not just adjust weapon cargo sizes and ditch "tradegoods" completely? If there was some quest system in place where planet X needed 3 units of harvested organs then I can see the flavor value of tradegoods perhaps, but in the current incarnation they provide too much obfuscation and not enough gameplay.

Again... if there are plans to use tradegoods to build your own base network, or as required materials to construct ships at your factory on some planet, etc. then perhaps they have a future yet. In my experiences playing v65a1...   the game seems to be geared towards collecting pirate bounty at the start, and "pick a faction to attack while allying with their enemy" play in midgame. None of which has a thing to do with trading.

I guess I just don't know what Alex's vision is for the completed game. As far as I know, you can't knock a faction out of the game currently and so the campaign is somewhat of a duck shooting gallery for the combat simulator. Which I find to be fairly engaging, once you mod the variety of fleet compositions to be more diverse, and use more variants.

[Tomn]

Trade is reasonably interesting once you work out that you're an ambulance chaser instead of a bulk hauler, but the trouble with trade at present is that food is the only serious shortage to take advantage of.  There's a whole supermarket shelf worth of goods that go completely ignored because they rarely, if ever, suffer shortages.  This will hopefully be fixed as the economy is further fleshed out and more events are added in so that you're dynamically responding to the needs of a shifting and unstable galactic economy as opposed to becoming Bread King of Eos each time, every time.

On a side note, the game really needs to make it clear during play that ambulance chasing is the preferred form of trade - I've seen a good number of complaints here and elsewhere about how "trading doesn't work", and it took me a while of bumbling around making a loss and experimenting with trade routes myself before the idea of pouring everything I had into hunting down shortages finally clicked.  An outright tutorial window explaining things, or possibly just an early event with a passing trader moaning about how hard it is for small trader to make a buck these days?

[Megas]

Recently, while stockpiling more ships at the abandoned station next to Asharu in Corvus, Asharu had a trade disruption for supplies.  I sold the 50,000 supplies I stockpiled at the abandoned station to the Asharu market, and I had time to haul about 60,000 more supplies before trade disruption expired.  Supplies initially sold for ~160 or ~170, then quickly decayed to 100 (which is more than 25 to 30 plus tariff credits I paid at Jangala).  Made a nice profit in credits and XP.  Even better was after the trade disruption expired, Ashura sold supplies for 1 credit.  I bought all of the supplies back.  I wait for the next time Ashura gets another trade disruption for supplies.  I want to see the XP I will get after an encore.

Tri-Tachyon stations in Magec (Tibicena and Tse #3) are also more places that get trade disruptions for supplies.  While traveling from Corvus to Eos, I often buy a load of supplies from Jangala and stop by Magec along the way to deposit supplies (often in Tibicena).

Occasionally, I will buy ore from pirate bases (Barad and Umbra) at 1 credit each and stockpile them at Argeus (in Arcadia) until it gets trade disruption and offers about ~120 credits for each ore.

[nomadic_leader]

On a side note, the game really needs to make it clear during play that ambulance chasing is the preferred form of trade - I've seen a good number of complaints here and elsewhere about how "trading doesn't work", and it took me a while of bumbling around making a loss and experimenting with trade routes myself before the idea of pouring everything I had into hunting down shortages finally clicked.  An outright tutorial window explaining things, or possibly just an early event with a passing trader moaning about how hard it is for small trader to make a buck these days?

Yes, I'm beginning to pick up on this myself.  You're a tramp freighter, you buy  low when you see it and then hope to sell it somewhere else for more. It's a form of economic dating to at least the Late Bronze Age.

As opposed to massive liners operating on a repeated, fixed schedule and itinerary, or those closely controlled/chartered by states on a large scale.

I'm glad that SS has implemented this form of trading, but as you say, it'll be nice when some of the other goods fluctuate a bit more.

I'd also like to see more chartered or 'quest style' cargo runs, where a faction, shipping company, or other party pays you a set fee to deliver a certain cargo to a certain place, perhaps by a certain date, just as an alternative to tramping. Since the risk is less than with tramping, the payoff would also be less than the big shortage scores, unless it were a rush delivery.

 Of course, you'd have the opportunity to sell the cargo off somewhere else if you think you could get a better price, though you'd then incur the charterer's wrath.

[Megas]

Update on Asharu:  It got hit by another trade disruption for supplies, and I sold the stockpile of 100,000 supplies I previously bought from them at 1 credit.  While I made a generous profit in credits, I did not get as much experience as before, only about 400,000 experience, less than what I got the first time around.  I wonder if the game remembers when the commodities are spawned and grants XP based on when they were first bought (but not re-bought).  Also sold about 100,000+ more supplies stockpiled at Jangala.  When it was over, I had about 200,000 supplies to buy back at 1 credit each.  While I do not expect huge experience rewards next time, it is a guaranteed cash cow that keeps getting bigger after each trade disruption.

Also, Tibicena was hit by supplies shortage, and I sold much, somewhere between 40,000 to 100,000.  Unlike Asharu, bottom price was 90 credits instead of 100, and when the disruption was over, Tibicena had much less supply overstock than in Asharu.  I bought back the overstock, but it was less than expected.

[Jonofwrath]

I would definitely prefer a legit (rather than gamed) economy which is designed to put people off trade when trade (both legal and illegal) should be available to players - legal trade should be lower profit and risk but still a decent way to make ISK (did I say ISK I meant generic money).

Some players will prefer the steadier (less risky) profits - some will prefer to have to dodge every blip on their radar - I appreciate Alex may prefer one or the other but he's making this game for others to enjoy.

[Auraknight]

I would definitely prefer a legit (rather than gamed) economy which is designed to put people off trade when trade (both legal and illegal) should be available to players - legal trade should be lower profit and risk but still a decent way to make ISK (did I say ISK I meant generic money).

Some players will prefer the steadier (less risky) profits - some will prefer to have to dodge every blip on their radar - I appreciate Alex may prefer one or the other but he's making this game for others to enjoy.

Holy Necromancy batman!

[Thaago]

I would definitely prefer a legit (rather than gamed) economy which is designed to put people off trade when trade (both legal and illegal) should be available to players - legal trade should be lower profit and risk but still a decent way to make ISK (did I say ISK I meant generic money).

Some players will prefer the steadier (less risky) profits - some will prefer to have to dodge every blip on their radar - I appreciate Alex may prefer one or the other but he's making this game for others to enjoy.

Holy Necromancy batman!

...

...

I can't believe I just spent half an hour writing out a reasoned post defending the current way trade works on a year old necropost. Thats what I get for not checking the timestamp.

Spoiler

My opinion: Easy, steady, low risk trade routes should not be in the game. They are boring, but people will do them because they are easy, rather than learning how to do more difficult things like fight or hunt down trade opportunities. Rather than playing an exciting game, they will be playing a boring game. (Closing paths to boring gameplay is good game design.)

At present there are almost always profitable trades to be found, sometimes for extreme profits, but its not a passive thing that can be ground endlessly, it requires active searching. Thats not even counting missions, which, if you see a good one, cuts out the looking and replaces it with sprinting. It leads to exciting situations: docking at a market and realizing that machinery here is going for 16 credits while I remember that in Janagala they are going for 240. But how long will that last? You bet if I'm trading I'm going to fill up my hold and take the risk, then fight/race my way across the sector.

[close]

[Alex]

@Thaago: ouch

Locking this, to avoid such future mishaps.