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1

General Discussion / Re: Economy of Nonsense

« on: November 26, 2018, 09:30:50 PM »

Giving me basic market control on how I price my goods would also be interesting, for example saying "sell fuel at 10% under market" would result in more purchases - on the other hand if I notice that I dominate the market already I could push my prices up - you're going to buy it anyway if there is just not enough fuel.

That sounds like something where there's always a "correct" answer that maximizes income; if that's how it ends up, why make the player micromanage it?

I was thinking more in terms of killing the competition via massive undercutting.

This is a common business practice in the real world where you sell at a break even or even at a loss in order to cause your competitors to die off. A faction gives me a hard time? Screw them. I'm going to sell my food at 30% less than they are causing them to lose money.

Sure I will lose money or earn less - but that's fine with me as I can still make a sufficient income by other means. They may not be able to sustain the race to the bottom as long as I can.

Oversupply and shortfalls are possible. You just have to create them!

Starsector isn’t an economy simulator.. it’s a spaceship shooting semi-arcade game. The structure around the that is there to propel you organically into the combat and exploration content. Not to produce a number of spreadsheets as you attempt to optimize trade.

The only problem that the game probably has is that “good” planets can spawn too close to the core, which produces both high accessibility and possible production in multiple products

I get that - and yet we have quite a few RTS elements now - which I very much welcome.

I have never seen one of my colonies start to lose money. Once they turn positive, they just keep making more and more and more money. Once you have a single colony earning 200k a month while you do nothing, you just set up more, and more and more. At a certain point you're pulling 2m+ down a month for zero effort with zero risk. The only 'work' you end up having to do is squashing trivial pirate and path bases.

At that point you 'win' - but really you won the moment you founded a profitable colony as everything past that point is the start of the victory lap.

Yeah - it IS a game about spaceship shooting spaceships - but much of the magic in Starsector was the constant scarcity of 'resources' and this created a certain gravity when it came to combat.

I'm on my 5th or so play through and at this point I can reliably find an appealing world, take a 300k loan, colonize, mindlessly spam buildings and become wildly profitable. Then the only limiting factor to my rise to absurd levels of power is blueprint availability. Once you stop caring that you lost a ship because you can queue five up for construction - some of the magic is gone.

So my issue with the colony aspect is that it greatly trivializes the mid and late game - and you can't really just outright skip it entirely as for some reason in .9 the markets are extremely scarce so ignoring colonies entirely and trying to fit out a quality fleet is not really feasible via just buying ships.

What it comes down to - I want the economy to be harder to succeed in and there to be more economic rather than combat means to drive the player and the AI out of business in order to maintain the investment into your fleet and make the game remain rewarding in the long run.

2

General Discussion / Re: Economy of Nonsense

« on: November 26, 2018, 07:55:20 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.

I think you are on the right path - I think standings should also play a factor. For example look at the real world where we have tariffs and trade embargoes.

Those would go a long way towards messing with the player economically rather than sending raids.

"Accessibility" is a weird way of setting up trading preferences, but really it should be standing. A faction that does not like me should try to avoid trading with me, and it can do so via tariffs that would lower the 'value' of my goods to them or an outright embargo.

What good is making all this fuel if nobody is willing to buy it from me? As is factions that dislike me, fund my war machines by buying my goods.

Giving me basic market control on how I price my goods would also be interesting, for example saying "sell fuel at 10% under market" would result in more purchases - on the other hand if I notice that I dominate the market already I could push my prices up - you're going to buy it anyway if there is just not enough fuel.

Sadly right now the goods and demand are highly abstracted with oversupply and shortfalls being impossible. I come into an existing market, build 7 colonies all with abundant farms, and yet there is demand for all of it! Was there a massive deficit before? Who is eating all my food?!

The end result is that right now we can build ALL the buildings we can every single time, max them out and make a fortune every single time. Demand is never saturated and production is always profitable. There are no market downswings. A peace treaty does not suddenly cause demand in ship parts to drastically drop nor does a war cause a spike in demand like it should.

3

Suggestions / Re: Raids are not legal grey areas

« on: November 26, 2018, 07:41:08 PM »

The player's commissioning faction sending expeditions against the player is going away in 0.9.1, at least.

Yeah - this is a good change.

Still - getting raided by a faction who has an actual trade convoy in my system at the same time as their raiding fleet is profoundly jarring.

I don't mind the raids at all. They absolutely need to exist - but the lore needs work.

I'm totally cool with Hedgemony sending "mercenary" fleets who are not flying their flag to raid me while they are busy pretending to be my friend while wishing I were dead.

It's the "Were friends, but I'm going to stab you in the back and get angry with you if you defend yourself!" that I find irritating.

Treat the raiders as an invasion fleet either with an association but no penalties, or no association. Or let the raiding fleets grant me a "casus belli" for 30 days or something to retaliate via a raid without a standing loss.

Finally in the late game the AI just keeps sending their hopelessly outmatched fleets into the meatgrinder with no real purpose.

4

Suggestions / Re: Raids are not legal grey areas

« on: November 26, 2018, 12:46:03 PM »

The rep hits yes I get that it sucks and it's annoying, but you can't expect to amass a bunch of goodies and not expect people to try to take it away. Its dog eat dog out there. It doesn't make sense though that it depends on whether you personally participate or not.

You can have a commission with a faction, positive standing, and they'll STILL stick try to raid your colonies.

It's a bit absurd.

It would make more sense if you dominating a market caused standing decay and THEN the raids started - but as is - it's terrible design.

5

Suggestions / Re: A couple of user interface suggestion

« on: November 26, 2018, 12:27:45 PM »

Please for the sake of my mouse give me a way to "Store All" just like we can "Take All" when looting.

When finding ruins on a planet, the "Colonize" option comes up, which can't be done, till ruins are looted. So really if ruins are found the next option should be to search the ruins.

Colony threat - Default actions. Please let us set default actions for colony threats. IE - Always bribe/resist AI inspections etc.

Build list - Allow for secondary sort. For example. Sorting by ship Class-> faction ->  price.

BluePrints/Mods - Icon change for learned BPs/Mods. I am finding myself right clicking stuff over and over to see if I already know something.

6

Mods / Re: [0.9.0a] Outer Rim Alliance v0.80rc4 (2018/11/22)

« on: November 23, 2018, 12:50:14 PM »

Been playing with this mod for over 12h - not a single blueprint - am I just unlucky? Is there something special I'm supposed to do?

7

Mods / Re: [0.9.0a] Diable Avionics 1.99rc4 (2018/11/22)

« on: November 23, 2018, 12:49:32 PM »

Been playing with this mod for over 12h - not a single blueprint - am I just unlucky?