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[Pushover]

I'm guessing this will get fixed over a few patches, but there are some issues I have with the addition of a bunch of planet systems, as well as the changes to market conditions

1) Organics and volatiles are not in demand enough. I regularly see hundreds of thousands sitting on the open market on some planets.
2) Certain places slowly have their supply/machinery prices creep up to high levels, mostly on the edge systems.
3) Due to the low price of some goods (food, organics, etc), it never really makes sense to trade them if you can fill your cargo hold with stuff that makes a slightly higher profit per unit. Currently, I don't think we would notice if they did not exist. I suppose you can gain a little rep from them, but there are way more easy ways to make money.
4) There is not enough Lobster to do much of anything with, I don't see how someone can manage a procurement contract of 100 or so. Most definitely cannot fill the request for 10,000 lobster I saw (worth 3.3m).

[Histidine]

Oh good, I can post my list of "things that annoyed me about the economy while devving Nexerelin" here instead of making my own thread.

@Alex: A list of market condition / general economy changes I found odd:

Spoiler

1) Why was volatiles/organics production multiplied 50-100x? I mean, if you increased them 5-10x and a market needs 10x the output from each, you can add 10 of the same market condition (whereas you can't have half a market condition). This reduces the economic flexibility a lot (among other things, it's not often feasible to make a small market productive by giving it an organics or volatiles complex).

2) It seems the main reason volatiles/organics output was raised in the first place was to feed the demand of the new size 7-8 markets for domestic and luxury goods. In that case, why was the efficiency of Light Industrial Complex reduced 10x?
(you used to be able to get 10 DG and 1 LG from 1 O and 1 V, now it's 1 DG and 0.1 LG from 2 O and 1 V)
If this hadn't happened we probably wouldn't need such a large change volatiles/organics complexes.

3) Doubling or tripling farming food production seemed pretty steep. The organics production mult also went from 0.05 to 0.33 at the same time, which probably isn't helping the organics flood problem.

4) On that note, Hydroponics food output is flat instead of scaling with population. This is a perfectly valid decision, but I'm wondering why it was done when other things made to supply population-based demand (farming, domestic goods production) have a population-based supply.

5) Marines seem chronically undersupplied. Aside from raising the Military Base's marine supply a bit, there should probably be a market condition that makes them without being a full-fledged base (with its military submarket etc.)

You know, most of these things wouldn't be an issue at all if the logarithmic increases in market demand with size were fudged a bit while keeping the displayed population figures. Say, making a size 6 planet have 5x the demand of a size 5, instead of 10x (even though the size 6 claims to have 10x the population).
Dark.Revenant also proposed making market sizes be exponents of 8 instead of 10 (e.g. an 8^5 market instead of 10^4), to smooth out the size growth a bit. Might look a bit weird with the population display, but still.

6)

Organics and volatiles are not in demand enough. I regularly see hundreds of thousands sitting on the open market on some planets.

As I understand it, you can buy all the commodities on a market now, not just a fraction (20%?). This makes sense for smaller markets (where a single medium-sized magnate like the player should be able to corner the market), but on large markets it probably contributes a lot to the illusion of a supply glut. The player is never realistically going to buy all 1mn units of food from Tartessus anyway, is there any particular reason to show them?

[close]

[Pushover]

Ah, I didn't check to see what percentage of goods are on the market, but I'm guessing it's not quite 100% (or else buying ALL the supplies from a station would get somewhat expensive due to eating into their demand a bit)

I don't mind there being a huge stack of stuff, but it doesn't really make sense that it numbers in the 100,000s when the largest fleets have maybe 5000 cargo space. This is most commonly seen at any Siphon Station, which to my understanding are not large installations where millions of people live. Just revalue something like 20 units of Volatiles into 1 Volatile, increasing the price accordingly. Then it would make sense to ship Volatiles around, since they would cost ~200-600 per unit, and more easily have a profit margin of more than 10 per unit. After all, once you have a decent amount of capital, all you care about is the net price difference, not the percentage price difference. You would rather ship something you can buy for 100 and sell for 125 than ship something that you can buy for 20 and sell for 40. Cargo space is the limiting factor more often than not.

Haven't paid attention to Marines, but I only have really seen them at Military Bases, sold by factions.

[Alex]

(Moved to suggestions because it feels like a bit of a better fit.)

Yeah... in my mind, this is very much of a "doesn't matter right now" kind of thing, because at the moment the commodities don't really do anything useful in the first place. One thing I'd like to patch up is not having such huge piles of stuff on the open market, because that just feels wrong.

I mean, I generally agree with your guys' comments. And will probably need to address these things in the near-ish future. Just not for .7.1 or .7.2.

Pretty much the only goal when balancing the economy for the .7a release was making supply and demand more or less match up for most commodities. Everything else was secondary.

[StarSchulz]

If you are going to look at massive overstocking, The Black market in Chicomoztoc is something to look at. it has the "organized crime" trait and a population of 10 ^ 8, and compared to Volturn that has a population of 10 ^ 7, it has 10 times as much goods for sale. I guess that makes sense, it is ten times the population, after all. the number of goods just seems extreme, having 120k or more rec drugs for sale at all times.

[Pushover]

I would say the one thing that does matter right now is that it's really hard to find Marines anywhere, all of the places you can find them sell for ~1k per Marine. Not too much of an issue while the 33% marine death bug exists, but next release it will be.

[Megas]

The only commodities I am willing to touch in 0.7a are supplies, fuel, and organs.  (I may grab heavy machinery or others if there is an easy mission for it, but that is rare.)  Player always needs supplies and fuel, and sometimes you can find opportunities to buy low and sell high and earn a modest profit of credits and XP.  Organs are frequent and profitable mission fodder, at least for Hegemony and Independent stations.  Organ missions also tend to have raiders gunning for you, which is more fuel for my war machine.

Had I maxed the skill that increases crew experience, I would probably consider trading personnel, thanks to the addition of liner ships.  I would add liners to my fleet, train greens to elite, then sell elite crew.  With no points in the skill, I can grind enough elites to crew my ships and some spare to replace losses, but not enough of an excess that I can use as currency more than a few times.  With double elites (and reduced crew requirements), I am sure I can generate a surplus to sell.  Greens sell for about 20 or so credits.  Elites was worth much more.  Since personnel prices are relatively stable, this can be easy money in a pinch.