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Suggestions / Economy/Trading Overhaul [Long]
« on: March 16, 2015, 06:39:03 AM »
I think a lot of us have some problems with the way the economy and trading works. In short, it doesn't. A lot of the underlying systems for the economy exist, but I don't think the way they are utilized is as good as it could be. Based on Alex's blog posts (http://fractalsoftworks.com/2014/03/02/on-trade-design/ and http://fractalsoftworks.com/2014/08/25/trade-smuggling/), it's fairly clear that we all agree that hauling the same cargo on the same route over and over is boring, and a badly designed experience. I'm going to try to outline a system where basic trading is viable, and less a case of 'abuse the random event that pops up.'
The justification for making trading unprofitable from the blog follows:
But really, when you look at what this sector has to offer, there clearly aren't enough trade ships to go around, especially for the smaller worlds. Since you are able to piece together a sizeable fleet over the course of the game, why not be able to help move the 'rocks' around in a few cases? High tariffs would ensure that any private trader like yourself isn't going to go around causing market problems without first lining a government's pockets. In terms of the 'magnitude the player would be interested in', if each unit of cargo is 1 ton, a person (IRL) 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. If we take into account that this is the future, and processed food probably weighs less, it probably takes less food than that.
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.
Problems I have with the Market System
1: Stability Drives the Market.
To maximize profit, you want 1 market to be very stable (7 to 10 on stability), and all the others to be really unstable (0 to 2). 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 market will usually offer a higher price for a commodity, even if its demand is 100% met than a low stability market 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 market. Furthermore, as a stable market gets its demands met, its stability increases, driving up the prices. Therefore, it's even better to sell to that planet. Stability makes the entire market screen almost useless and misleading.
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 market 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 market 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 market. 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: Trade Disruptions/Food Shortages are Extremely Abuseable
Trade disruptions and food shortages don't make a lot of sense to me. 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 unless there actually was a very unexpected large natural disaster or similar on the planet. (based on how the game goes right now, I think Ashiru has a natural disaster every month...) 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. In effect, it means you are doing exactly what you don't want to do for a limited period of time - doing repeated cargo runs of a certain good to earn money.
3: There is No Risk in Trading
Pirates largely do a bad job chasing/catching trade fleets. 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, assuming you can find a route that makes 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 riskier trade routes to less safe planets.
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.
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 proposed suggestion:
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...) If a colony doesn't produce anything, why does it exist. Everyone there is unemployed? The exception I could see would be a pirate base, which could pick up goods from successful raids and such. It would still probably produce drugs and such, though.
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 suppose we could have slaves or something...). I'm not actually sure if this is the case currently in Starsector.
3: 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.
Things my solution needs to avoid:
1: There cannot be an easy way to abuse the system. This is pretty obvious, making infinity money is not great for gameplay.
2: There should not be much repetition in trading. I don't think anyone gets much enjoyment hauling the same cargo to the same planets for a small profit at no risk.
Proposed Solution
1: Make supply, demand, and the supply chain drive the economy instead of 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, and a low stability world is on the reverse of that. Prices should be based mostly off of simple demand for a good.
2: Make demand represent several cycles worth of demand. Colonies should not be nearsighted in their planning, instead setting themselves up for more production cycles before they occur. If a trader can provide enough resources, 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 into 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: Similar to 2, make lower stability colonies use their materials faster. In effect, low stability colonies should produce through their stored materials 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.
Rough idea of how 2 and 3 combine:
A stability 2 colony with population in the thousands (I'll call it Planet A) with an Ore Refinery might be able to process 1000 units of Ore per cycle. So Planet A decides that it's willing to store up to 3 cycles of production, so its demand for ore is 3000 units. When it comes to producing, suppose that 2 units of Ore get converted into 1 unit of Metal, and Planet A has 1200 units of Ore currently. While Planet A could process 1000 of the 1200 units of ore, it wants to make sure that people are employed next month and the situation will remain stable, so it only processes 400 units of Ore, producing 200 units of metals. Now Planet A has 200 units of metals, and 800 units of Ores. A high stability world of stability 8, with a higher population (10^5 or so?), also has an Ore Refinery. I'll call this Planet B. Planet B can process 10,000 units of Ore per cycle. However, the leaders of Planet B look fairly far ahead for production, and is willing to store up to 20 cycles of production. Therefore, Planet B's demand for Ore is 200,000 units. If we take the same proportion of the demand being filled on Planet B as it was on Planet A, Planet B has 80,000 units of Ore. When it produces, Planet B processes 4,000 units of Ore, producing 2,000 units of Metal. After this production, Planet A has significantly less of its demand filled (800/3000 is ~27%, versus 76,000/200,000 is 38%). This would mean that the Planet A will offer a higher price for Ore, until the proportions equal out (a mere 360 Ore to Planet A). This would make low stability worlds offer greater profit, but greatly limit how much profit could be made.
4: Remove trade disruptions/food shortages as events. 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 of a good is abnormally high or abnormally low.
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.
6: Slightly rework trade fleets. Since there should be less need for 'relief fleets,' the governments should focus on bulk shipments to other colonies in order to solve supply/demand problems. This ensures that prices on high stability worlds never climb too high or drop too low. In the meantime, independent traders should be trying to do the exact same thing the player is doing - namely find a good or several that is cheap and produced by one colony, and is in high demand by another colony, and get it there.
7: Scale tariffs by transaction size. If you are able to sell a bulk amount of material to a high stability world, it's a solid chunk of logistics that the industry leaders don't need to deal with anymore, so it makes sense to tax it a little less. If you are just barely adding a drop in the bucket, then it's natural that they would want to heavily tax you. This ensures the ability for trading to scale. Start the game as a little trader on the edges of the Sector, and gradually work your way in, becoming a larger and larger player in the economy of the sector as you are able to make bigger transactions. High tariffs for small transactions can also reduce the amount of money that trading on the edges of the sector can provide. The minimum tariff could still be around 10%, so it's not like trading is free of effort by the endgame.
8: Make players unable to store commodities (not Fuel, Crew, or Supplies). This prevents the abuse of taking huge chunks of materials out of the system over the course of a few months, artificially driving demand up, then cashing in on your work at a low tariff amount. It also prevents dodging the scaling tariffs by stacking a ton of materials, and then selling them all at once.
How would gameplay under this system be?
Ideally, high tariffs would force the player to not just ship 'rocks' safely. 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 prices would be important still, since AI fleets will 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. Under this system, there would not be massive XP gains like what we see from, rather these gains would be acquired slowly, similar to combat.
As an example, a player begins trading by purchasing Ore from a small mining world. He heads over to another small world with an Ore Refinery that is running short on Ore, where he sells the Ore for a modest profit, and buys Metals. He then heads over to a moderate sized planet with an Autofactory, selling the Metals for a tiny profit, and purchasing Heavy Machinery. He then brings the Heavy Machinery over to a small station with a Shipbreaking Center, and makes a good profit. He thinks to himself 'that was good, let me get more Machinery.' He goes and picks up more Machinery, but his second trade run is not worth nearly as much, since the profitable part of selling to the Shipbreaking Center has been removed by his last run.
How has this solution solved the problems?
Hopefully this makes trading significantly more possible as a full-time operation, and removed the high levels of abuse currently in the trading system caused by specific events. It's entirely possible that there's some easy way to abuse this that I did not think of. This should make trading more dynamic and make planets actually produce goods. Information should still be important to make sure that you are not shipping goods to a market that has its demands satisfied for a while. Repetition is avoided by making trade routes only runnable once or twice a month for profit. If you want to trade full time to maximize profit, you will need a long circuit around the sector, exposing yourself to the events of multiple systems. With enough balance, this system should be able to set up a reasonable economy.
However...
This does not adequately add risk to the player. Part of the problem is 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. The other problem is that the +burn skill in Technology makes a fleet too good at avoiding enemies. I'll leave this as another topic that needs to be tackled at some other point.
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 may already exist, but I'm not sure.
The economy will need a good amount of tweaking to get a system like this set up. Set tariffs too high and you can't trade. Too low, and trades are repeatable. Fortunately, goods can equalize their quantities a little, so if a ton of Ore always gets produced, the price of it will decrease over time to the point where Ore Refineries are working enough to produce at a rate equal to the rate that Ore is getting produced/destroyed (unless there is really THAT MUCH ore being produced).
There are a lot of variables involved in an economy like this, and there might be some repeatable trade runs early in the game if a very low volume run (20 or less cargo) becomes profitable. Hopefully the AI trade fleets would exploit this and fix it.
tl;dr: I think moving to a supply/demand based economy where a trader would naturally follow the supply chain 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.
The justification for making trading unprofitable from the blog follows:
Quote
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, especially for the smaller worlds. Since you are able to piece together a sizeable fleet over the course of the game, why not be able to help move the 'rocks' around in a few cases? High tariffs would ensure that any private trader like yourself isn't going to go around causing market problems without first lining a government's pockets. In terms of the 'magnitude the player would be interested in', if each unit of cargo is 1 ton, a person (IRL) 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. If we take into account that this is the future, and processed food probably weighs less, it probably takes less food than that.
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.
Problems I have with the Market System
1: Stability Drives the Market.
To maximize profit, you want 1 market to be very stable (7 to 10 on stability), and all the others to be really unstable (0 to 2). 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 market will usually offer a higher price for a commodity, even if its demand is 100% met than a low stability market 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 market. Furthermore, as a stable market gets its demands met, its stability increases, driving up the prices. Therefore, it's even better to sell to that planet. Stability makes the entire market screen almost useless and misleading.
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 market 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 market 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 market. 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: Trade Disruptions/Food Shortages are Extremely Abuseable
Trade disruptions and food shortages don't make a lot of sense to me. 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 unless there actually was a very unexpected large natural disaster or similar on the planet. (based on how the game goes right now, I think Ashiru has a natural disaster every month...) 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. In effect, it means you are doing exactly what you don't want to do for a limited period of time - doing repeated cargo runs of a certain good to earn money.
3: There is No Risk in Trading
Pirates largely do a bad job chasing/catching trade fleets. 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, assuming you can find a route that makes 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 riskier trade routes to less safe planets.
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)
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 proposed suggestion:
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...) If a colony doesn't produce anything, why does it exist. Everyone there is unemployed? The exception I could see would be a pirate base, which could pick up goods from successful raids and such. It would still probably produce drugs and such, though.
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 suppose we could have slaves or something...). I'm not actually sure if this is the case currently in Starsector.
3: 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.
Things my solution needs to avoid:
1: There cannot be an easy way to abuse the system. This is pretty obvious, making infinity money is not great for gameplay.
2: There should not be much repetition in trading. I don't think anyone gets much enjoyment hauling the same cargo to the same planets for a small profit at no risk.
Proposed Solution
1: Make supply, demand, and the supply chain drive the economy instead of 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, and a low stability world is on the reverse of that. Prices should be based mostly off of simple demand for a good.
2: Make demand represent several cycles worth of demand. Colonies should not be nearsighted in their planning, instead setting themselves up for more production cycles before they occur. If a trader can provide enough resources, 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 into 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: Similar to 2, make lower stability colonies use their materials faster. In effect, low stability colonies should produce through their stored materials 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.
Rough idea of how 2 and 3 combine:
Spoiler
A stability 2 colony with population in the thousands (I'll call it Planet A) with an Ore Refinery might be able to process 1000 units of Ore per cycle. So Planet A decides that it's willing to store up to 3 cycles of production, so its demand for ore is 3000 units. When it comes to producing, suppose that 2 units of Ore get converted into 1 unit of Metal, and Planet A has 1200 units of Ore currently. While Planet A could process 1000 of the 1200 units of ore, it wants to make sure that people are employed next month and the situation will remain stable, so it only processes 400 units of Ore, producing 200 units of metals. Now Planet A has 200 units of metals, and 800 units of Ores. A high stability world of stability 8, with a higher population (10^5 or so?), also has an Ore Refinery. I'll call this Planet B. Planet B can process 10,000 units of Ore per cycle. However, the leaders of Planet B look fairly far ahead for production, and is willing to store up to 20 cycles of production. Therefore, Planet B's demand for Ore is 200,000 units. If we take the same proportion of the demand being filled on Planet B as it was on Planet A, Planet B has 80,000 units of Ore. When it produces, Planet B processes 4,000 units of Ore, producing 2,000 units of Metal. After this production, Planet A has significantly less of its demand filled (800/3000 is ~27%, versus 76,000/200,000 is 38%). This would mean that the Planet A will offer a higher price for Ore, until the proportions equal out (a mere 360 Ore to Planet A). This would make low stability worlds offer greater profit, but greatly limit how much profit could be made.
[close]
4: Remove trade disruptions/food shortages as events. 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 of a good is abnormally high or abnormally low.
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.
6: Slightly rework trade fleets. Since there should be less need for 'relief fleets,' the governments should focus on bulk shipments to other colonies in order to solve supply/demand problems. This ensures that prices on high stability worlds never climb too high or drop too low. In the meantime, independent traders should be trying to do the exact same thing the player is doing - namely find a good or several that is cheap and produced by one colony, and is in high demand by another colony, and get it there.
7: Scale tariffs by transaction size. If you are able to sell a bulk amount of material to a high stability world, it's a solid chunk of logistics that the industry leaders don't need to deal with anymore, so it makes sense to tax it a little less. If you are just barely adding a drop in the bucket, then it's natural that they would want to heavily tax you. This ensures the ability for trading to scale. Start the game as a little trader on the edges of the Sector, and gradually work your way in, becoming a larger and larger player in the economy of the sector as you are able to make bigger transactions. High tariffs for small transactions can also reduce the amount of money that trading on the edges of the sector can provide. The minimum tariff could still be around 10%, so it's not like trading is free of effort by the endgame.
8: Make players unable to store commodities (not Fuel, Crew, or Supplies). This prevents the abuse of taking huge chunks of materials out of the system over the course of a few months, artificially driving demand up, then cashing in on your work at a low tariff amount. It also prevents dodging the scaling tariffs by stacking a ton of materials, and then selling them all at once.
How would gameplay under this system be?
Ideally, high tariffs would force the player to not just ship 'rocks' safely. 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 prices would be important still, since AI fleets will 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. Under this system, there would not be massive XP gains like what we see from, rather these gains would be acquired slowly, similar to combat.
As an example, a player begins trading by purchasing Ore from a small mining world. He heads over to another small world with an Ore Refinery that is running short on Ore, where he sells the Ore for a modest profit, and buys Metals. He then heads over to a moderate sized planet with an Autofactory, selling the Metals for a tiny profit, and purchasing Heavy Machinery. He then brings the Heavy Machinery over to a small station with a Shipbreaking Center, and makes a good profit. He thinks to himself 'that was good, let me get more Machinery.' He goes and picks up more Machinery, but his second trade run is not worth nearly as much, since the profitable part of selling to the Shipbreaking Center has been removed by his last run.
How has this solution solved the problems?
Hopefully this makes trading significantly more possible as a full-time operation, and removed the high levels of abuse currently in the trading system caused by specific events. It's entirely possible that there's some easy way to abuse this that I did not think of. This should make trading more dynamic and make planets actually produce goods. Information should still be important to make sure that you are not shipping goods to a market that has its demands satisfied for a while. Repetition is avoided by making trade routes only runnable once or twice a month for profit. If you want to trade full time to maximize profit, you will need a long circuit around the sector, exposing yourself to the events of multiple systems. With enough balance, this system should be able to set up a reasonable economy.
However...
This does not adequately add risk to the player. Part of the problem is 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. The other problem is that the +burn skill in Technology makes a fleet too good at avoiding enemies. I'll leave this as another topic that needs to be tackled at some other point.
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 may already exist, but I'm not sure.
The economy will need a good amount of tweaking to get a system like this set up. Set tariffs too high and you can't trade. Too low, and trades are repeatable. Fortunately, goods can equalize their quantities a little, so if a ton of Ore always gets produced, the price of it will decrease over time to the point where Ore Refineries are working enough to produce at a rate equal to the rate that Ore is getting produced/destroyed (unless there is really THAT MUCH ore being produced).
There are a lot of variables involved in an economy like this, and there might be some repeatable trade runs early in the game if a very low volume run (20 or less cargo) becomes profitable. Hopefully the AI trade fleets would exploit this and fix it.
tl;dr: I think moving to a supply/demand based economy where a trader would naturally follow the supply chain 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.