I'd like to hear more about the technical approach, though; it seems like this should all be pretty clean, fast spreadsheet shuffling and it's pretty weird to me that, when we start a game, it takes forever for those market "months" to execute.
Most of the two months at the start have little to do with the economy - it's actually advancing the campaign engine, in large steps, to populate the sector with a reasonable spread of fleets, events, etc.
If it was *just* the economy, it would take under 10 seconds, depending on CPU of course. Which is still a fair length of time, but the core of it is O(n^2), and there really isn't a good way to get below that, whether you're doing bids/contracts or something else.
That probably points at update frequencies more than anything else; it's really just not that important, from a player POV, if markets only update in major ways (as opposed to dynamic events from local fleets arriving) once a week or so, I'd think.
It's not important right now, but it will be important later - the higher the frequency, the faster it reaches a stable point, both because there are more updates and because the updates are finer-grained and find the equilibrium faster. And, well, it *is* important now in terms of producing proper prices for supplies and fuel, though that'd be massive overkill if that's all that was required. The update frequency in the new version is once every 3 days, btw, though it'll take longer (and update stockpiles in larger increments) if need be.
Re stock icons; if there are more than ~5 of them, I'd overlay a number too. (Like Colonisation did)
...
While the exact number might not be particularly relevant to the player, it does help quantify the relative scales of product.
Honestly, not a fan. It's necessary in that screenshot, because the number of icons is huge compared to the space they dedicate to displaying them. I think they would do better just showing a single icon and a number, at that point - the stacking really isn't doing anything useful there.
In our case, the icons are spread out more. Given what the screen does, a difference between say, 8 or 10 icons isn't very important. Anything more, you'll pick up on visually, and if you need a detailed quantity, you can mouse over.
Adding a bunch of numbers over everything would look super cluttered and would, imo, reduce the readability a *lot*.
Oooh this is relevant to my interests.
(That totally made me laugh.)
- Thank goodness markets can have realistic populations without causing massive supply/demand shocks. In fact I think 2^n is low enough to risk Fridge Logic thing from big markets not seeing much more traffic than small ones, could probably get away with 3^n or even 4^n.
I kind of like 2^p here - it produces results that "feel" right and are just in the player's grasp to influence on the high end. E.G. something like 8000 food/month needed by Chicomoztoc (size 8
), vs 500 by a size 4 market. And it does help keep the number of icons in a manageable range on the low and high end, where I'm fairly positive a base of 3 or 4 would get away from that. As you can see, for Chicomoztoc it's juuust barely manageable already.
- Is there now any built-in mechanism for correcting or at least compensating for Sector-wide
over/undersupply (i.e. too many or not enough market conditions)? EDIT: okay, I see it does dynamically scale back
Right - for oversupply, production drops off to 0 when local stockpiles reach 2x base supply. For undersupply, nothing right now, but I'm thinking about some ways to handle this on a higher level - we'll see how that pans out :)
Hopefully, just being robust against oversupply will help out some in any case.
- If the economy flow panel was scrollable the icons on that Chicomoztoc screenshot might not look so crowded. Though I think you really should do as TJJ suggests and use numbers instead of icon spam. Or use big icons that represent multiples of the small icons.
Don't want to make it scrollable, though, since it's supposed to be an "at a glance" thing.
(Yes, the commodity detail panel is scrollable too, but didn't see a way to avoid that. Might end up redoing its layout, though.)
- A couple of mods (Interstellar Imperium and Nexerelin) have events that cause one-off destruction of stockpiles. Will the new economy reflect such events? Can it handle such events without making things go Horribly Wrong? Or should we target supply or something instead?
Should just work. In fact, should work better than before - it'll influence prices, show local demand as being not met, will show a nice huge dip in the "stockpiles" graph, etc.
Btw: all the "average" stuff is gone, nuked from orbit. I.E. getAverageStockpile()/getAverageDemandMet()/etc. It just works off the stockpile, which it can do because it's a fairly stable value now. Further, player trade directly influences the stockpile, instead of modifying averages etc. It's all much more straightforward. The one thing to watch out for is making more stuff available on all the submarkets, total, than there is in the stockpile - to make sure it doesn't happen, submarkets talk to each other to figure out how much each wants/gets.
The big planets in the background of the new detail overview is a nice touch. This is cool, but I'm mostly excited about what upcoming features it paves way for... 
Hey, someone noticed! Have to admit, I'm very partial to those myself. Really helps give each market a more unique feel.
