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« on: November 26, 2018, 03:43:27 PM »
I've always thought Alex's designs were generally always perfect, but the economy is the first time that it seems he's really missed the mark. Even in the blog posts early on I never felt like he was tackling this from the right mindset. His attempts to abstract the economy to such an extreme degree ends up complicating it and making it extremely unintuitive.
I'd rather the resource production and consumption of buildings be real pooled numbers with stockpiles being shipped off and sold based on demand. If I produce 5 food, I'm producing 5 food and can supply 5 food worth of demand, not an infinite number of >5 demand markets. Basic understandable supply and demand. If I build a 2nd farm world, I'm increasing my production by that amount and it adds together, nothing unintuitive about highest-only. I know we can't have a literal agent-level simulated market where trade fleets physically have to move all the resources around and figure out where to sell them, but there's got to be something a little more understandable and realistic than this.
Then again look at Railroad Tycoon 3, I think that's a great potential model for industries and shipping. In RRT3 it's a game mostly about trains and moving products around to make a profit, but what that game did that many other similar games didn't was fairly realistically model prices and shipping costs. Every building in the game produced and or demanded something and would pay a price for their demands. If they didn't meet their demands, the price for that good would tick up a little bit for that particular building/town. If it was over-supplied, the price would tick down. If a town with a steel mill demanded 5 units of ore and 5 units of coal, you could build a railway to supply those goods, but the value of that coal and ore would go down quickly as its demand was met. If that steel mill also didn'thave customers for its steel, its demands would drop, and thus price. The whole economy needed to keep moving to keep your trains profitable. But, you could also directly own and build industries as well, making money not just from transport but also the profits from the industry. Sometimes it was well worth it to run a train barely breaking even if it meant providing fast cheap shipping for a very profitable industry. But the most interesting factor was that the whole system automatically balanced its self. Goods could move around on their own to a degree, and high demands/prices acted like gravity pulling products towards them, automatically sending goods to where they were needed/demanded.
So imagine we have 3 cities, or in Starsector's case, planets. Sindria produces tons of fuel, but how does the game know how to distribute that fuel? Well, every planet would have a demand for fuel and if not met, the price and thus "attraction" for fuel would increase. An AI merchant fleet loads up 500 fuel from Sindria and takes it to Corvis to sell, Corvis only has a demand for 300 fuel though so the price of fuel in Corvis goes down, making it unattractive for future deliveries. But that 200 extra fuel is still there, and a neighbouring system has a highprice for it, so a merchant spawns to move that fuel over to the system where its demanded once the prices are different enough to make it "worth it" to transport.
Goods would be zipping all over the sector, automatically going from where there is an excess to where there is a demand minus shipping costs. There could be a bunch of pre-set trade routes working like a railway in RRT3, plus random traders to make up for any slack. As a player our planets would get hooked up to these trade routes, which would calculate the shipping costs and hook us into the system just like everyone else. We won't really need to know that our ore we mined ended up going from our planet to Corvis and then from Corvis to Sindria and then from Sindria to the Luddites, as long as someone's buying our ore it doesn't really matter. What would matter though is that we're not over-supplying a product, and if we are, to make sure we can eat that reduced global price or even handle the fact that our over-supplied local good might not even be worth transporting until prices go up.
This could also open up the ability for player-owned trade routes. Build a fleet of cargo ships, assign them to a user-created route, and they'll automatically buy low and sell high as they ply their route. Ore is $50 at your colony and the next destination in the route is paying $55? The trade fleet fills up on ore then. It sells all the ore at the next colony, the price goes down to $54, but the next colony over is paying $65 for ore so it essentially re-buys the remainder that wasn't grabbed by local industries and sells it onto the next market again. Every stop in the route is only compares the prices of goods between its current stop and the next, filling up its cargo holds in order of profitability. This system works perfectly because even if a mid-point system doesn't need that ore, the next system over does, increasing the price and thus increasing the "pull" for that good down the chain.
It's hard to fully explain but it's not at all theoretical. Railroad Tycoon 3 came out in 2003 and could handle massive maps with this simple but extremely robust (and fun to work with) system.