No not ship costs. Not weapons either. I'm talking about macro economy shenaningans.
The thing about Starsector's economy, is that the system that Alex has devised is phenomenal. Seriously, it does better than most games that actually focus on economics, the only exceptions I can think of are hardcore economic sims. This is not because it's super realistic- it really isn't. Rather, it's because of the way everything is abstracted in just the right way to model Supply and Demand on a macro level in an abstracted manner, without having to get down and dirty with accurate micro. There's a level of emergence between micro and macro economics so most people go straight for trying to model micro economics until they see macroeconomic patterns emerge, which essentially requires modeling a whole bunch of actors making economic decisions- and this is all phenomenally computationally expensive and coding intensive. To the point that it's not really worth it to ever try, and because of this most devs just sort of half ass it into a usable, but easily exploitable mechanic and call it a day.
Not Alex. I consider Starsector's economy to be the gold standard of what a non-hardcore macroeconomic simulation's macroeconomic system should look like.
"So", you ask, "If this guy thinks Starsector's economy is so great, why did he label his topic 'Economic Rebalance' and put it in the Suggestions board? Cause to me it just looks like he's blow-" Ah ah, I'll stop you right there. To be clear, I think Starsector's economy is phenomenal in relation to like 99% of other game based economic systems I've seen. But most game based economic systems are trash, there's plenty of room for improvement.
That being said, I don't think modeling a financial system complete with monetary policy and credit is within the scope of Starsector, and I'm not a good enough programmer to make a mod for it myself. Hell, I'm not even a good enough economist to figure out what that would mean! (I'm not actually an economist at all you see, no college degree for me)
So the problem I see is as followed: the demand for goods is f*cked. Namely, domestic goods, luxury goods, supplies, heavy machinery, and basic ore basically aren't worth the effort, rare metals, food, organics, rare ores, Hulls, and heavy weapons to varying extents are, and fuel, recreational drugs, harvested organs, and to a lesser extent volatiles are king. This is exemplified by the chart linked to in this topic:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=14796.0 which demonstrates this.
What's more, the more mods you play with the worse this gets, with the greatest shift generally being that basically everything
but volatiles, metals, rare metals, drugs, and organs becomes near worthless.
If you're wondering why this is a problem, it's because 1. This means the economy isn't very dynamic and 2. consumer goods are at the literal core of modern economics for a very good reason, and any model that doesn't see this happen is by it's nature, cursed.
To put it simply, starsector calculates supply and demand weird. Market value irl is just the price you can expect any given good to fetch on the open market, in game it's the aggregate of the local demand (the highest demand value for a planet across all it's buildings) for any given good, times their price- which is only possible because starsector doesn't actually calculate dynamic prices except for on the micro level. This is decent. It is, at least, better than 99% of games on the market that flub this horribly. It does however, mean we don't have dynamic prices on the macro level and you have to be extremely careful about balancing the supply and demand for any individual good. To be clear, it is possible, it's just not worth the effort to do because the effort required would be great enough that you might as well just rebalance the economic system.
Hint hint.
Anyway, this is only one half of the problem. The second half is how supply is calculated and how these two systems together translate to income. Market Share irl is the amount of revenue any given business has from sales in a given industry relative to the other businesses in that industry, expressed as a percentage. So if I have a 10% market share, that means that 10% of all the revenue in this industry is going to my business.
In Starsector, it's more complicated. It's the amount of a good supplied by a single planet (calculated by multiplying that planet's highest production value by it's access value) relative to the amount of that good supplied by other planets, expressed as a percentage. So if I've got a 10% market share of ore, that means I'm selling 10% of all ore sold. The amount of money generated by a building is determined by market share times market value. So if the market for ore is 100,000 credits, and I'm supplying 10% of all the ore sold, then I get 10,000 credits a month.
These are not the same thing.
Now, this system does one thing really well, and a second thing sorta well: it ensures that the player can't just spam a single industry endlessly to make unlimited money by ensuring each additional industry has diminishing returns- even eating into the profits of the other industries. It also has a vaguely dynamic cap on that income- but to be honest this is irrelevant because the player's colonies do not add to aggregate demand (which is ridiculous) so we are dependent on AI planets to expand this income for us. And we all know how good the AI is at growing their planets.
So all of this combined with the fact that only the
highest demand or production value counts towards demand or supply, means that luxury goods will always be worthless because Chicomoztoc has the highest single demand of 5, and yet is also the highest supply of
7. To put it simply, the demand for luxury goods is just too damned low compared to the ease at which they can be supplied, so there's never a significant market for them.
Anyway, I was going to try to figure up a different system but... I guess I'm just too lazy. I'll just give a few general suggestions then.
1. Make the macro prices more dynamic, compare aggregate supply and aggregate demand against each other and go from there
2. Adjust the supply and demand for certain goods so it's easier to make an actual profit off of them
3. Make it so player colonies contribute to the Market Value calculations. Right now, we're forced into running a 17th century Mercantalist economy, but in space. Adam Smith proved this is ridiculous in 1776, get with the times old man.
4. Consider dividing luxury and domestic goods into a few more types so I can stop crying myself to sleep
5. Colony wealth levels that increase the aggregate demand of certain goods so we aren't so dependent on absolute population to determine all of supply and demand
Alright that's all I got. You may now Discuss
