Those posts explain so much. I wonder why Alex did that... I mean... why should the economy be stable in the Sector.
Hope it gives some feedback to the base game.
Because until the game can actually construct facilities to fill gaps in the economy, it will always spiral to death unless it's either stable or overproducing everything.
So that was why the supply prices skyrocketed all at once when I changed the settings huh?
There are two important factors in this:
First factor, not only the game don't add or remove production facilities, but also they work non-stop, the way a light factory is implemented in vanilla for example means it will keep making "domestic goods" no matter what, including if there are too much of it (and because the way prices are intended to be stable, they will reach a mininum value and never decrease, thus exports from that planet don't actually increase, resulting in a supply spiral), and also if there are not enough raw materials, a planet with light industry has a demand for metals and volatiles, and will buy it, and decrease it from the stockpile if present, but if noone sell those products to that planet, it will keep making domestic goods like there is no tomorrow, resulting not only in a oversupply spiral of domestic goods, but also a spiral of price for the demanded products, that will get higher and higher (until a sort of hardcoded limit).
Note this also has another consequence: the economy allow all business to operate at losses. example: the ore refinery currently uses 5000 ore (default price: 10) to make 2500 metal sheets (default price: 30). suppose that someone is attacking all fleets near the mining places, and cause the trade disruption event to jack ore prices to 50 (I've seen it happen many times). Planets with refinery will happily pay 50*5000 (250000) to produce goods in the value of 2500*30 (75000) resulting in a loss of 175000.
Second factor: The economy as a whole was designed in a way that the stock of products actually don't matter, although stations track their stocks, and stock is teleported around when the economy is updated, this is only used to make a miriad of other calculations in layers above, the "actual stock" number is used only to update other numbers ("rolling average" of stock, cargo on submarkets, cargo on trading fleets, prices, etc...). This mean the economy, even if Alex implemented the "industry", won't ever make sense.
Also this is why Alex wasn't understanding why people were upset with too much stock on stations, he knows how the game works, and players don't, he don't realized that to most people, seeing 7 digits of good stocks mean something is wrong, because he knows that his economy engine don't give a *** to that, the only thing that matters is the final price, and if there is enough stuff to the players complete missions and events, thus he kept writing that the economy wasn't broken, because prices were still behaving as he intended.
His fix was to make less stuff show up on the actual cargo of stations that the player can see, but since ever started making my mod I could see the actual stock numbers, and it is absolutely apeshit (example: food exporting planets frequently export 1 BILLION units of food, there is NOWHERE in the game enough ships to trade that, a single exporting planet would need 500.000 atlas ships to make one shipping!!!), and now sometims this is still bad for the player (in my testing I saw stations trading 2 million atlas ships worth of cargo, but the player-facing stock can fill maybe 3 ships at most...)
This mean that to balance the economy (specially on Nexerelin) the only way is to manually sum up all the supply values, and all the demand values, and keep adding and removing market conditions until those are balanced, the economy just can't handle oversupply, overdemand, out of whack prices, profits, losses, and so on.
Also by the way: lobsters generate 300 of supply each update (default is 1 month), thus why lobsters procurement contracts are ludicrous: in vanilla you have billions of food flowing around in a month, and to the player this means about 50.000 food available in total, lobsters are 300 a month (thus if it is reduced in the same way as food it would be available about 1 per month to the player, the black market is a workaround, having always a mininum amount available), thus no surprise a procurement contract for 1000 lobsters is impossible (you would need to wait something like 1000 months to accumulate the needed stock).
No wonder I am seeing some bizarre results regarding market cargo with my mod on, and why tweaking some settings that should affect the market made no effect.
