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[Pushover]

The thing about a sandbox game like this is that the 'optimal' way to play this game isn't the way you need to play it. You don't rush to endgame content in Minecraft, although you might wish you could avoid the first ~30 minutes of a Minecraft survival game where you gather wood. If you look at a lot of speedruns of games, it just would not be fun to play the game through that way if speedrunning is not something that interests you. If the game isn't fun because you want to do things too optimally, impose some constraints on yourself. For example, make the rule where you never buy non fuel/supply/weapon/crew items. For very slow progression, make the rule where you never use a shipyard to build your fleet.


I think the problem isn't so much making trading through XP, so much as there is no limit to how much money you can make (or almost no limit). Trade disruptions are limited only by how much you can abuse them in the duration they are occurring. Food shortages are often on the same world, so it's easy to make a large profit on food.

Part of the 'don't interact' problem is also the Technology skill that increases burn, since as you gain levels, you get like 3-5 more burn than other fleets, so avoiding combat is easy when no pirate fleet is as fast as you. I'm pretty sure that it's just the 'best' skill in the game in that it allows you much more flexibility in picking fights and avoiding bad fights. Either enemy fleets need to have skills (not just mercenary fleets with combat skills) or some other solution needs to be found.

I can see linking burn level to amount of logistics used to provide a bonus to burn, as well as the way it is now, where if you are over your logistics cap, your max burn is lower. For example, if you only have used <10% of your logistics, then you could have +3 burn. <25% is +2, <50% is +1. Now if you build a large trading fleet, you will be slower, so pirates have an easier time catching up to you. Without the ability to dodge pirates so easily, hopefully trading becomes a little more interactive, and actually requires multiple escort ships. The obvious downside is that your fleets with capitals in the lategame will be amazingly slow, which could be balanced out by increasing the speed multiplier on shift, or something else. It doesn't really make sense that you know something more than Hegemony admirals, so your Onslaught goes 2.5 times faster through space.

[Megas]

I like to see combat XP gains raised.  Double XP gains from combat since 0.62 helped, but is not enough (when trade gives so much more), especially since characters now start with 2 AP instead of 3.  (3 SP at every tenth level instead of 2 offsets SP loss.)  Raising level soft cap matters little when player starts with less AP/SP.  There should be a better balance of sources of XP.  It is annoying when the best XP gains come from trade, when I want to fight and built my character for combat.

Money will roll in one way or another.

[Histidine]

@Argh: Just ask for trading rewards to be reduced (or combat ones scaled up) instead of something that, you know, breaks consistency and makes the game less fun.

[DatonKallandor]

SO WHY NO INCENTIVE TO FIGHT???

The incentive is that it's fun as hell and you still progress doing it. You can trade and progress. You can fight and progress. Both ways work and both are viable. Trading is going to be boring for most people but people that like it can still progress. Fighting is going to be fun for people and you make money and xp fighting - so what's the problem?

If the only way to get money and/or xp was boring trade there'd be a problem (there are certain games where you have to do a boring activity to pay your fun tax so you can do a fun activity that actively loses progression), but luckily that isn't the case.

Basically it seems that the "problem" is that trading is tuned so one or two trade runs will give you a significant chunk of xp and money. That's good - most people probably can't stomach more than one or two boring no-fight trade runs before they get bored and start fighting. It also means if that player needs a burst of money they can quickly grab it and get back to fighting.

If you straight up reduced trade income you wouldn't solve anything - you'd just force the player wanting some non-fighty money because he screwed up in a fight or made a bad choice somewhere to grind longer. Lower trade income just means people that need non-conflict money spend more time doing boring trade runs.

[xenoargh]

I think what people are pointing out is that currently combat kind of plateaus really early, in terms of XP gained. 

Why?  Well, it's largely because the XP values of high-level enemy fleets aren't correctly calculated atm, in terms of risk / reward.  So it's effectively a cap on leveling power at that point; blowing away multiple elite fleets simply isn't worth bothering with, if you want to level up at a reasonable pace, yet you really must, if you want to be able to fight, and that transition is really rough right now, in terms of the difficulty curve; just when a player is starting to get past the difficult first months of early-game play and is mastering Bounty hunting, it gets harder at a rate that's a bit much for most new players, I suspect.

On trade stuff.  Longish.

Spoiler

I don't see anything wrong with giving XP for trade, or even really see a huge XP nerf as being really necessary, given that it's supposed to be part of a later mechanic and it's too early to talk about the balance of trade in any meaningful sense. 

Right now... if there's a cap on the XP gain then there is no incentive to trade past an early point and it's better that it's a Monty Haul and gets tested a lot, frankly.

That said... I think that right now the trade system feels enormously complicated without really giving the player anything interesting to do yet. 

There is a fair amount of complexity under the hood, but it's not really adding Fun to the game, as there isn't any mini-game of attempting to time markets or anything like a consistent-reward vs. consistent-risk factor.  I agree that Food runs are basically just tedious grinding atm that is done because it's more efficient than fighting, which feels all kinds of wrong.

Whatever's going on with the Markets is also a bit screwy, in terms of goods balances and self-correcting behaviors; when I messed with the markets via modding a bit, there simply weren't reasonable opportunities created for a player to do trade runs of any sort, which, until there's some way to lower the tariff barriers to make it profitable, seems like a wasted opportunity; sitting around on huge stockpiles of stuff waiting for a Market Update, followed by the Market one has just rescued then promptly starting to head back to collapse again is pretty counter-intuitive.  Yet even if I made a given Market produce a very robust basket of goods, and had another in the same System that produced the other part of the basket, the two Markets behaved very oddly and still had problems from their negative traits that appeared to overshadow their combined strengths.  Rather than starting with handicaps but finding balance, they just went off the tracks in slightly-different ways.

So either every planet in the Sector is like Mogadishu IRL or the underlying systems aren't responding in rational ways. 

It just doesn't make much sense right now; if Food is a constant problem for a place, for example, one would expect emigration, starvation until the population matches the food supply, or for the market to get its act together, or for a Player's huge delivery of Food to cure that problem for so long that the Market stabilizes.  None of this happens right now; no matter how many Trade Fleets there are flying about, they apparently aren't delivering the required goods to the required places, even if there isn't a Pirate fleet in existence that would try and raid them.

There are also so many goofy situations in the economic simulation that break the continuity right now; there are planets that are described as being practically abandoned, with tiny populations and no Stability, yet they have hundreds of thousands of Credits available to buy food during a crisis. 

Anyhow, I think it's too early to judge these things in any final way, so please don't take any of this as a condemnation of the mechanics as they are, but I'd really like to see:

1.  Every viable Market should have goods it actually produces, even if that's something pretty marginal, like Raw Ore.  It literally doesn't make sense that people on airless, bombarded rocks with zero economic value haven't already died out, two centuries after the Collapse.

2.  Credits shouldn't appear out of nowhere, generally; a Faction should have a total Credit pool.  That said, if a Faction is running out of cash due to a series of events, it's probably necessary to stabilize them by pushing more Credits into their total coffers... but note "total"; a given Market is not the Faction, and a given Market failure is largely a problem for the Faction to solve at a macroeconomic level rather than just one-shot crisis management, that it should attempt to solve constructively, by purchasing, producing, capturing or stealing the goods that Market needs to become Stable.

3.  If a Market hits a Stability crash, that should slightly depress production, but not kill it (they need to trade so that they have Credits, yo).  What should happen, instead, is that the local product is way cheaper than usual and whatever they need to re-achieve Stability is both explained to the Player and is bought at rates that will be profitable for a player.  In short, if a Market needs more Marines, the local Board of Trade should say that and should say, "we're not charging tariffs on this product until the shortage is solved"- a clear indication to the player that this is a place where they can earn money.

4.  If a Market is Unstable and cannot afford to buy things, because the Faction's coffers are empty enough... then the Player shouldn't be able to earn money; they're being charitable.  That's surely worth much goodwill and reasonable amounts of XP, but not money.  However, that really shouldn't ever happen; instead, the Market should offer up barter that the player can then make money on elsewhere.

5.  There are a lot of other ways to get players involved in trade that aren't awkward and stick to the core idea here, such as allowing them to join one of the cartels and run goods from A to B to make C. 

Continuing the central theme that trade isn't an activity for lone-wolf traders, this gives players a steady trade route but low per-unit profits, which is a lot less weird-feeling than having a base chock-full of Food and rushing out fleets only when it's economically sensible to descend on an unstable market, which, no matter what is done, will slide back into instability soon enough.

6.  This above all ties into a gripe:  the one thing about the current Market UI that I really don't care for, to be perfectly honest, is that there is very little meaningful data delivered to the player about why a Market is Unstable.  There are lots of words, but they aren't very helpful and it all feels like we're poking our hands into a black box that may contain Gummi Bears or rusty razors or a bit of both... without explanation or any way to really intervene at all.

For example, if what a Market really needs is Raw Ore, because their industrial output is starving due to lack of raw materials... we're not told that's why it's having problems producing processed Metals, which in turn is not giving it enough money to buy Food.  So all we know is that when it starves, there's an Event, we bomb it with Food... and the cycle restarts.

So the UI is giving us a lot of information, but none of it is terribly useful, especially if we want to play for stability, and worse yet, the player has every incentive atm to want all Markets to be Unstable so that they can cash in, rather than having clear guidance on how to keep the markets stable, so that they have the funds available to pay for bounty hunts, which should be the high-risk / high-reward activity.

Lastly, I really am looking forward to some kind of meaningful, constructive money-drain that players will have to deal with, if they want to progress.  I think that building the systems that do that and getting feedback sooner rather than later should probably be a priority, because getting them right is going to be hard.

The wealth gotten from trading that doesn't make much economic sense is huge, and without some form of time-based drain, it becomes pretty absurd. If the player is trading at all, past early game, then they are quickly at a wealth point where they are deploying so many DPs that enemy fleets won't attack them, ever, even when they could probably win in a straight-up fight, even when they could catch the player's fleet; it's kind of amusing watching the Pirates ever actually attack the Trade Fleets they should be raiding on a regular basis.  That's kind of a big deal to fix, but it's probably a thing that needs to be addressed later on; essentially right now the player has too many advantages that allow them to avoid meaningful risk in this area of play, imo.

[close]

[Pushover]

Regarding the trading stuff: I have a lot of problems with some mechanics in the trading system. While most of the system is fine, there are a few things in particular I don't like about how the economy works. I'm gonna try to outline my perceived problems, and what my attempted solutions will be. Giant wall of text follows. Short tl;dr at the bottom.

1: Stability Drives the Market.
To maximize profit, you want 1 market to be very stable (9/10 on stability), and all the others to be really unstable (0 or 1). Stability provides too big of a difference to the point where it covers up the more standard economic concept of supply and demand. Specifically, a high stability world will usually offer a higher price for a commodity, even if its demand is 100% met than a low stability world where the demand is 0% met. Trade fleets won't follow supply and demand if they want profit, they will just head to the high stability world. Furthermore, as a stable world gets its demands met, its stability increases, driving up the prices, meaning that it's even better to sell to that planet.

Side note: Stability Crashing
The fact that 'stability crashing' as I call it, is a somewhat viable option, shows that the stability system is pretty broken. Stability crashing is where I flood a black market on a moderate stability port with goods. The smuggling will soon make the stability hit 0, so prices become roughly 50% of normal, allowing you to buy every commodity for cheap. If the port produces enough stuff, you can get super cheap goods from that world for a while. This allows you to make good XP gains from trading from that port. I think you make enough money to just buy the goods you sold originally back for less than you sold it, but I could be wrong. The only downside is a smuggling investigation can seriously hurt your rep with whatever faction you abused this with.

2: Price Variance is Too Low
This is somewhat related to problem #1, but essentially it's almost impossible to make money on the open market without abusing shortages due to tariffs being larger than the price differences between 2 worlds. The supply of commodities generated on a low stability world would be fine to trade, if only  Tariffs being high somewhat masks this problem, as it's easy to blame the inability to trade via the open market on the high tariffs, but without the tariffs, or with reduced tariffs, you would just be better able to abuse what little price variance in commodities.

3: Trade Disruptions/Food Shortages are Extremely Abuseable
Trade disruptions and food shortages don't make a lot of sense. It's like the governor of a colony checks the food supplies one day and finds out that he has none left, and promptly declares an emergency. Did the governor seriously not notice that the colony was running low on food? Food shortages should really be building over time (so that the price of food increases), such that trade fleets (and the player) have the chance to address them a little better. The price shouldn't suddenly jump. The notification of a food shortage could still happen when the price of food pops over a certain value, and the same for trade disruptions, but they don't make sense as spontaneous events that just occur, allowing for time-based abuse, rather than volume-based abuse.

4: There is No Risk in Trading
Pirates largely do a bad job chasing trade fleets around. The player, with his +burn skill, is able to avoid most fights, as larger pirate fleets are too slow to catch him, and smaller pirate fleets do not pose enough of a threat to the player. It doesn't help that the fleet AI for pirates will break off the chase even if they are faster, if they don't catch the fleet within a duration. As a result, trading is a practically risk free way to make money, unlike combat. I'd say that this last point is debatable as being a 'problem,' but risk-free trading should not be very profitable, compared with reaching planets in pirate-heavy areas.



Basic Economy Mechanics, AFAIK: Someone correct me if I am wrong. I'm getting a lot of this from Project Ironclads' economy, which I believe is quite similar to vanilla Starsector's economy, functioning off the same mechanics, but with different sets of numbers.

Spoiler

From how I can see, the way the economy generates goods is that every ~30 days, the market's conditions figure how much demand for whatever commodities it requires is met, and calculates how much of a commodity the condition in turn produces. For example, an Ore Refining Complex requires Ores, Rare Ores, and Heavy Machinery (and I think that's it, it might require Organics as fuel, or Crew to work there) and converts them into Metals, and Rare Metals. If there is no Heavy Machinery, nothing gets produced, even if everything else's demand is met. If only 50% of the demand for Heavy Machinery is met, only 50% of the goods are produced.
In some cases, the materials do not actually get consumed in the process (not all the crew is consumed in a mining operation, but some are lost due to mining accidents and such)

[close]

I think there's a few things in terms of economy/trading that everyone can agree on, and I will assume are true for my solution:

1: Every colony should produce things. I believe this is currently the case, not actually sure in a few cases (does Maxios' Decivilized tag produce anything? It might produce black market goods such as Organs or Drugs...)

2: Every produced good should provide a higher value than its components. If it takes 10 volatile, 10 organic, 5 rare metals, and 1 heavy machinery to produce 100 fuel, the value of 100 fuel must exceed the value of 10 volatiles, 10 organics, 5 rare metals, and 1 heavy machinery. This is basic industry, you put in labor, and come out with a more complex product that is worth more money. If it's not the case, then no one would get paid for doing the work, so no one would do that work. I'm not actually sure if this is the case currently in Starsector.

3: Certain colonies have requirements that don't produce anything. People need to eat, people consume Domestic and Luxury Goods, Drugs, Organs, etc.

4: Stability as a number, in some ways, makes sense. A smaller, less civilized world can be considered less stable than the capital of the Hegemony, for example.



My thoughts on a solution, and reasoning:
Why a major change to the economy?
I know that Alex aimed for an 'exploitation' based trading system, where you are supposedly taking advantage of logistical mistakes/natural disasters on planets. From the blog post here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/2014/03/02/on-trade-design/

Why does this make narrative sense? There’s a race-to-the-bottom in the profit margins for safely shipping rocks, and that’s before you factor in faction-affiliated cargo fleets that don’t even have to operate at a profit. Frankly, if you think about it, it *wouldn't* make sense for easy profit to be available for shipping food or some such, under normal circumstances. Not of the magnitude the player would be interested in.

But really, when you look at what this sector has to offer, there clearly aren't enough trade ships to go around. You are able to piece together a sizeable fleet. Why can't that fleet be good at 'shipping rocks' around? High tariffs would ensure that any private trader like yourself isn't going to go around causing huge market problems without first lining a government's pockets.

Right now, the market system is an interesting system that amounts to nothing, since the player doesn't care about getting anything produced, he only cares about when trade gets disrupted. By pushing towards a more supply/demand oriented system, and forcing the player to look for profits in a more dangerous manner in trading, the market's production system gets brought to the light while hopefully adding an increased depth/risk to trading. Right now, instead of safely shipping rocks, you wait until a planet demands rocks so you can safely ship rocks to that colony.

In terms of scale, if each unit of cargo is 1 ton, a person eats roughly 1 ton of food per year, so 1 ton of food should be able to feed 10 people for a month. This means that in a colony of thousands, it will take at most 1000 units of food to feed them for the month. This is well within the scale of what the player is capable of providing.

So, my main points on my solution:
1: Make supply, demand, and production drive the economy more than stability. Make stability instead drive some parts of demand. A more stable world is one that is better prepared for the common issues such as a food shortage, lack of domestic goods, lack of materials to drive the economy, etc. A more stable world has a higher demand for Luxury Goods, and a lower demand for things such as Food or Domestic Goods. A low stability world is on the reverse of that. It does not make sense that a high stability world would buy Organics at a moderate price when it already produces Organics, especially if there is another world nearby that uses Organics to produce fuel. Multiplying prices across the board by a number based on stability doesn't make much economic sense, and leads to low stability colonies having all their resources sold to higher stability colonies. If a higher stability colony can produce whatever a lower stability colony can, why was the low stability world founded in the first place, other than as a forward military base or something?

2: Make demand represent several cycles worth of demand. Colonies should be a little less nearsighted in their planning, opting to set themselves up for several more production cycles. If a trader can provide that to a colony, perfect for both of them. The colony should be happy to pay for a few months of production. This is another place where stability can tie in to demand. A low stability colony is less inclined to pay for several cycles of productions in advance, opting to focus on setting themselves up cycle by cycle, or a few cycles at a time.

3: Make lower stability colonies run through their components faster. In effect, low stability colonies should produce through their stored components quicker than high stability colonies. At the same time, low stability colonies should generally be producing at a lower volume than high stability colonies, due to population and market volume. As a rough idea of how this would work, a stability 2 colony with an Ore Refinery might be able to process 1000 units of Ore per cycle. So the colony might decide that it's willing to store up to 3 cycles of production, so it will take up to 3000 units of Ore as demand. When it comes to producing, suppose that 2 units of Ore get converted into 1 unit of Metal, and the stability 2 colony has 1200 units of Ore currently. While the colony could process 1000 of the 1200 units of ore, it wants to make sure that people are employed next month, so it only processes 400 units of Ore, producing 200 units of metals. Now the colony has 200 units of metals, and 800 units of Ores. A high stability world, call it stability 8, with a higher population, can process 10,000 units of Ore per cycle. However, it is looking fairly far ahead, and is willing to store up to 20 cycles, or 200,000 units of Ore, so it will take up to 200,000 units of Ore. If we take the same proportion of the demand being filled as earlier, it has 80,000 units of Ore. When it produces, it will process 4,000 units of Ore, producing 2,000 units of Metal. After this production, the low stability world has significantly less of its demand filled (800/3000 is ~27%, versus 76,000/200,000 is 38%). This would mean that the low stability colony will offer a higher price for Ore, until the proportions equal out. Gameplay-wise, this would make low stability worlds offer greater profit, but at a lower volume per cycle.
The only issue is consumables such as food and domestic goods since it does not make sense for people to just 'eat less' when there is less food around. Food could just be on a longer storage plan (a low stability world would potentially want food for up to 6 cycles in advance for demand)

4: Remove trade disruptions/food shortages. These should happen automatically under supply and demand. If there is a lot of pirate activity around a world, its prices will be higher because trade fleets sent there tend to die. As a result, demand is less met around that world, so prices are higher. This means that more profitable worlds will tend to be the more dangerous ones. Food shortages could potentially occur if a colony actually runs out of food, but it should have been offering a very appealing price before it ran out of food, as demand met would have been almost 0%. Perhaps a notification will still pop up if the price is abnormally high, or if a produced good's price is abnormally low. This keeps information as important in trading. Naturally, though, an AI trade fleet might take advantage of this problem, and ship the goods before you get there, just like how a trade disruption might end before you get there.

5: Add an employment modifier to stability. This is basically the 'demand met' modifier right now for the markets. Basically, if everyone is able to work, the stability of a market will go up. On the other hand, if a market has very little of its demand met, its stability will be lower, as people would need to resort to crime and such to pay their bills.

How would gameplay under this system be?
Ideally, high tariffs would force the player to not just ship rocks, the way EV Nova did trading. The best profit margins would be had on low stability worlds to other low stability worlds. However, these profit sources would dry up if the player heavily engages in trading due to the low size of the market. This means that these runs would not be "easily repeatable" runs, as markets would need several cycles to process what trade you provided. Information about markets would be important still, since AI fleets could be making the same trade runs that you want. The trade system would be enormously complicated, but logical, where the market screens' %demand met or %supply met actually give a good estimate of what the price is. There would not be huge XP gains, rather these gains would be acquired slowly, similar to combat.

As an example, many of the locations in Magec mine ore. So you head to Magec to pick up Ore from one of the small stations there. The best place to sell your new Ore would probably be somewhere with an Ore refinery. Ratatosk, Sindria, and Agreus all have refineries, so you try to find the one that has its demand least filled, and sell it there.


What are the problems with this system?
For one, there could be repeatable trade routes. Just the most profitable ones will only be available once per cycle, and quickly become less profitable. I suppose it's possible to end up in a circular route around the sector, but that will have a minimum profit at best. The AI for trade fleets might be able to fix some of this, by having some trade fleets fly on a schedule, especially from higher stability worlds. It would make sense for Jangala to ship Organics out every month, and it would have the infrastructure to handle shipping. As long as the AI cheats and doesn't have to deal with tariffs, it should reduce the ability of a player to make a profitable trade run.
This probably does not adequately add risk to the player. Part of the problem, as I covered above, are that pirates are bad at their job. Their AI should be improved so that they avoid a fair fight with a patrol/other fleet, but are a little more willing to engage a fleet comprised of cargo ships. Pirates aren't going to get rich by standing their ground against Hegemony patrols, they are going to get rich by avoiding them. The goals of a pirate fleet differ from the goals of a Tri-Tachyon invasion fleet, and should probably be reflected in their choice of engagements. Something as simple as having a pirate fleet take a very wide orbit around a patrolled planet would allow them to survive a little better.
Each world might need a small supply/demand of a good so that it gets things at a baseline price. I think that something like this already exists, but I'm not sure.


I might migrate this over to suggestions, depending on what people think. No, I don't expect this to really get implemented, but I think that at least some elements of it are sound. At the least, I hope that my statements about the problem are accurate.

tl;dr: I think moving to a supply/demand based economy makes more sense than the stability/disruption based economy we currently have. The current system feels irrational from an economic standpoint, and doesn't do a good job getting anything produced.

[Megas]

At endgame, it is usually possible to fight all bounty fleets and cash in on all trade events.  Even so, combat is only a small fraction of the XP gained.  In the uncommon times when I need to choose combat or trade, I choose trade.

Food runs are known, but Tibicena, the one place that sells high-tech ships (except Astral when I need it), gets shortage on supplies, fuel, and some other commodities periodically.  Exploiting those disruptions are almost as rewarding as food runs, and I can oversell as much as I want.

[Lucian Greymark]

I should probably make it clear that I'm not opposed to people being able to hit the end game with trading, that's all well and good, but honestly the fact that it's almost impossible to do it in a reasonable time frame via combat is a pain in the ass. I don't play starsector for the trading, and I probably never will, I play the game for the combat and I don't want to have to play the (optional) other side of the game just so that I don't stagnate.

[Linnis]

Trading should be part of the game, but the player should not be personally holding down shift for an hour hauling cargo around... There should be automated traders (like X games) where they do the trade for you, while you focus on non menial tasks.

[Megas]

...but the player should not be personally holding down shift for an hour hauling cargo around...

Holding the speed button constantly is no fun.  Doom required this for running back in the early '90s, and successor games that had unlimited running inverted the controls so that running was default and walking required buttons (for those rare times you needed to walk for secrets).  Something like a speed toggle, like Transcendence's autopilot, would be nice.

[Unfolder]

Another way to look at the problem: combat is entertaining, but pointless, trading is terrible, but vital.

So ideally, combat's concrete rewards need to be raised, or given exclusivity in some manner, while trading just needs to be made more entertaining (or at least get more fluff), more logical and intuitive, more integrated with PLAYER combat, or failing all that, nerfed to drive people back into entertaining combat.

[Schwartz]

Uomoz made combat useful because you would get pieces of faction tech used in the construction of new ships via a blueprint system. This was a lot of fun.

[Megas]

Levels (and XP) is the most valuable resource in the game.  Levels give power to use everything else in the game.

[Solinarius]

I think this your post needs a "Suggestions" thread, Pushover. Definitely worth it and it's wasted in this thread.

4: There is No Risk in Trading
Pirates largely do a bad job chasing trade fleets around. The player, with his +burn skill, is able to avoid most fights, as larger pirate fleets are too slow to catch him, and smaller pirate fleets do not pose enough of a threat to the player. It doesn't help that the fleet AI for pirates will break off the chase even if they are faster, if they don't catch the fleet within a duration. As a result, trading is a practically risk free way to make money, unlike combat. I'd say that this last point is debatable as being a 'problem,' but risk-free trading should not be very profitable, compared with reaching planets in pirate-heavy areas.

This is my main problem with the trading. Although, if I'm brutally honest, the campaign map isn't terribly threatening to the player in the first place. Risk definitely makes trading a funner and more rewarding experience. I'll compare it to my typical experience in the early years of Ultima Online: anytime you left the protection of the guards (in town) you made yourself very vulnerable. Not necessarily to the AI, per se, but to other players that could ambush you because you don't know what's out there. The danger was always there and running away wasn't easy. Not without some kind of trump card. In the beginning, I chose the Blacksmith profession so that I could make gold by selling arms and armor to NPC traders. I started by mining at a particular mountain pass which had a smithing workshop (to make ingots and craft weapons/armor) for me to craft in. After I'd filled my packs with my crafted goods I'd run back to town. The entire process had dangers because unfriendly players were commonly on the prowl for some easy pocket change. I was often hunted or attacked during this trade route, but I made some pretty good money for a complete noob.

How could the above paragraph be translated to Starsector? By tying the player's market activity to random encounters/events. The event could trigger a special fleet spawn on the campaign map and would be unavoidable by burn speed alone. However, you could get away if a friendly fleet intervenes, you fly into a wormhole, or dock somewhere. If they catch you, you either give them the goods or you fight. As far as narrative goes, I'm sure the sector has its share of shady and opportunistic individuals who would sell your market dealings to other more dangerous, shady, and opportunistic individuals.

So, my main points on my solution:
1: Make supply, demand, and production drive the economy more than stability. Make stability instead drive some parts of demand. A more stable world is one that is better prepared for the common issues such as a food shortage, lack of domestic goods, lack of materials to drive the economy, etc. A more stable world has a higher demand for Luxury Goods, and a lower demand for things such as Food or Domestic Goods. A low stability world is on the reverse of that. It does not make sense that a high stability world would buy Organics at a moderate price when it already produces Organics, especially if there is another world nearby that uses Organics to produce fuel. Multiplying prices across the board by a number based on stability doesn't make much economic sense, and leads to low stability colonies having all their resources sold to higher stability colonies. If a higher stability colony can produce whatever a lower stability colony can, why was the low stability world founded in the first place, other than as a forward military base or something?

As demand for a product rises, the dangers of carrying it in bulk should rise too. The random encounters as mentioned above could have a higher chance of being triggered if you buy "high-demand" products.

[Linnis]

Maybe combat exp and skills should only be gotten if you did combat, trading if you did trade, navigation if you went trough different worlds not reapeating, logistics and commands for more ships under your care when you do other stuff.


Like, TES games leveling logic.