Just check whats high/low on the price map
The only time you actually make any profit is where there is trade embargo or famine. considering your goods price has to be able to take TWO 30% taxes. on a single unit of Supplies at 20 credits (around the lowest ive seen) thats 26 credits cost to you per unit. Then you take that to sell for '50' credits (highest non-alert price ive seen recently) Theyre actually paying you 35 credits per unit. you make a total of 9 credits profit. A run from Corvus to Magec runs me 880 credits in supplies and fuel for two Cerberus freighters, Max cargo load of 200 Resulting in a whopping 920 credit profit.
This does not take into account the diminishing price as i said before the price on most goods is only correct for the first unit, from there it starts going down pretty steep. even at 1 per unit;
200 Units of Supplies bought at 26 Credits each.
Units sold for; 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27... Thats a grand total of 45 credits of profit trading 9 Units. Minus your 880 credit travel fee. lets say you half that because for 9 units you would only need a single Cerberus. Thats 440 credit travel fee.
Leaving us, after meticulous planning;
-395 GGWPNORE
There shouldn't be large, profitable trade routes/triangles.
Well first of all, there should be static trade routes. simply by how supply and demand works, unless you introduce stations being destroyed. now you can add as many loops in as you want, make it a "static trade dodecahedron" if you fancy. The trick is to keep things interesting, leave options open. With this comes information. Each station should be either a) near production station or b) have its own production, meaning that you can go from Mine-Refine-Produce-Consume or even just Mine-refine-Mine-refine. depending on how the economy is looking and where the AI is. You should be able to go "well i could take X resource from here to there, or Y resource" and see what nets more money. Those values will change in an evolving economy, Perhaps you cant take the more profitable Y route because its a pirate base, then you settle for the X route. or perhaps the Y route has no ore available so you take the X route.
There is a lot more that could be done, saying that "trading station to station is not fun"
As it stands now either the Ai is ruthlessly effecient and willing to stay in one system and accept 1 credit margins shuttling goods from one station to another within a star or the AI has infinite money / GM fiat.
One thing I've gathered from Alex's blog posts is that he wants the game to be fun and one of the ways he does this is by completely removing elements that give in game benefits for unfun behavior. He considers static trade routes to be be this (I disagree a bit - I had great fun in OOlite finding them and mercilessly driving up profits), or at least that they don't fit in with the "after the end" tone of the game.
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Which in removing these "static trade routes" has implimented a system where trading is resorted to "wait for an event, run the 'temporary trade route' as many times as you can.
I just don't think an economy that you want would be that fun after a while. I really don't want to have to grind.
Actually all i want are lower tarriffs and less effecient AI merchants so there is an actual decent way to trade rather than "wait for an alert"
As for "i dont want to grind"
Its about options, you can go out and grind frigates, you can go out and grind buffalo, you can go out and grind trade lanes, some of us have fun with our economnomnomics.
Its about providing more options for making money rather than forcing people into one or two ways to grind.
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