Alex, this could end up like the Rimworld attractive lesbians controversy if you're not careful. (An indy game that made lazy abstractions of how relationships work, and thereby incentivized players to kill lesbians in the game; google it if you wish).
Oh, hah! Just looked that up, yeah, that's definitely some "fun" emergent gameplay there.
Are you choosing mechanics like the range, log-scale, and ability to meet demand on multiple markets based on actual study of how economics works in the past or present? How trade and trade routes between city states, nations etc, actually work?
Or are you trying to find something that is computationally cheap and simple to understand? If only the latter, there may be unintended side effects that incentivize strange and repugnant behavior, that will become the narrative of the game.
Fast, simple to understand, makes enough sense if you want it to, and produces the dynamics I want. I think something more complex that's trying to be a more detailed simulation is more likely to produce unintended side effects. Of course, this may as well, but I'm very much keeping an eye out for this sort of thing - I'm glad you brought it up, and yeah, it's on my mind. I think it's down to what options you have to become the best supplier, and what consequences there are for exercising those options.
And, as you say, it's economics, so the bar for messing things up is... pretty low.
Don't any factions believe in free trade?
I think the 30% tariffs say just about all there is to say on that matter, don't they?
And AI factions do kinda have to make/capture their own outposts/colonies, or it will deny the mechanic the dynamic aspect it needs to be exciting. Otherwise you're just watching yourself spread across the map unopposed.
As you say. But factions don't have to make their own outposts for the player to encounter possibly forceful resistance, lots of ways to do that!
It seems kinda weird that planets would only go for a single primary importer for x good rather then taking excess available for import from other colonies, Unless I'm misunderstanding how the system works.
Mechanically, that's right. Conceptually, I'm sure there's some other trade going on too, just not on the level that would affect the "economic units" of commodities being available.
Also without something like this level of abstraction, competition is just difficult to understand and / or balance when playing, surely? Or worse, becomes effectively meaningless?
Yeah, I think the way it is now is on the upper end of "what level of complexity might be acceptable, from the pov of what the player has to work with"... we've got a *lot* of markets, right. So the level of detail in their interaction necessarily has to get zoomed out. If we had say 4 or 5 markets in the game total, then the nuances of just how food or whatever gets shipped around could be interesting
and comprehensible. But we've got over 50.