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[Mordgier]

Giving me basic market control on how I price my goods would also be interesting, for example saying "sell fuel at 10% under market" would result in more purchases - on the other hand if I notice that I dominate the market already I could push my prices up - you're going to buy it anyway if there is just not enough fuel.

That sounds like something where there's always a "correct" answer that maximizes income; if that's how it ends up, why make the player micromanage it?

I was thinking more in terms of killing the competition via massive undercutting.

This is a common business practice in the real world where you sell at a break even or even at a loss in order to cause your competitors to die off. A faction gives me a hard time? Screw them. I'm going to sell my food at 30% less than they are causing them to lose money.

Sure I will lose money or earn less - but that's fine with me as I can still make a sufficient income by other means. They may not be able to sustain the race to the bottom as long as I can.

Oversupply and shortfalls are possible. You just have to create them!

Starsector isn’t an economy simulator.. it’s a spaceship shooting semi-arcade game. The structure around the that is there to propel you organically into the combat and exploration content. Not to produce a number of spreadsheets as you attempt to optimize trade.

The only problem that the game probably has is that “good” planets can spawn too close to the core, which produces both high accessibility and possible production in multiple products

I get that - and yet we have quite a few RTS elements now - which I very much welcome.

I have never seen one of my colonies start to lose money. Once they turn positive, they just keep making more and more and more money. Once you have a single colony earning 200k a month while you do nothing, you just set up more, and more and more. At a certain point you're pulling 2m+ down a month for zero effort with zero risk. The only 'work' you end up having to do is squashing trivial pirate and path bases.

At that point you 'win' - but really you won the moment you founded a profitable colony as everything past that point is the start of the victory lap.

Yeah - it IS a game about spaceship shooting spaceships - but much of the magic in Starsector was the constant scarcity of 'resources' and this created a certain gravity when it came to combat.

I'm on my 5th or so play through and at this point I can reliably find an appealing world, take a 300k loan, colonize, mindlessly spam buildings and become wildly profitable. Then the only limiting factor to my rise to absurd levels of power is blueprint availability. Once you stop caring that you lost a ship because you can queue five up for construction - some of the magic is gone.

So my issue with the colony aspect is that it greatly trivializes the mid and late game - and you can't really just outright skip it entirely as for some reason in .9 the markets are extremely scarce so ignoring colonies entirely and trying to fit out a quality fleet is not really feasible via just buying ships.

What it comes down to - I want the economy to be harder to succeed in and there to be more economic rather than combat means to drive the player and the AI out of business in order to maintain the investment into your fleet and make the game remain rewarding in the long run.

[Schwartz]

I would be careful with determining what Starsector now 'is and isn't'. It's certainly not just a shooty arcade game anymore. Whatever the extra bits around the combat engine are, they exist. They're not just a vehicle for chain battles, but a part of the gameplay in itself. So there are in fact strategy and economy sim elements in the game. We're seeing a bit of emergent storytelling with events. And how deep or shallow it all is supposed to be is entirely up to Alex.

[Histidine]

One idea to make the economy model appear more authentic without altering colony balance*: scale global prices based on the global supply-demand balance.

Say the fuel market consists of four size 7 consumers, 20 smaller consumers, and one size 7 producer**. The producer can still supply the needs of all the consumers, but fuel prices at all markets Sector-wide rise by X% to account for this imbalance. Aside from the "makes sense" factor, the price signal also acts as a hint to the player on what industries they can profitably build and run (that's what price signals are for). I think the supply:demand ratio already affects export income, but this would make it more visible.

*The main risk is inflating fuel prices for players in the pre-colony stage, particularly depending on how mods add demand sources as well.

**Or rather, a size 8 producer. Taking a page from TJJ's post here, we could make it so a planet's maximum exports of a commodity is (production - 1).

This makes the handwaving of unlimited production scaling less in-your-face, since now a size X producer can fully supply exactly one size X consumer: itself. It also makes it potentially worthwhile to build full production chains on the same planet (currently all industry just goes on the lowest hazard planet available).

I was thinking more in terms of killing the competition via massive undercutting.

This is a common business practice in the real world where you sell at a break even or even at a loss in order to cause your competitors to die off. A faction gives me a hard time? Screw them. I'm going to sell my food at 30% less than they are causing them to lose money.

Sure I will lose money or earn less - but that's fine with me as I can still make a sufficient income by other means. They may not be able to sustain the race to the bottom as long as I can.

You know, undercutting sounds more like something the big factions do to remove small-time competition from the player than the reverse...

...Actually, that's a good idea, a partial replacement for the endless punitive expedition fleets. The player could even take advantage of the situation by buying up the reduced-price commodities in bulk, for personal use or selling them when prices are restored.

[nathanebht]

...

I'm on my 5th or so play through and at this point I can reliably find an appealing world, take a 300k loan, colonize, mindlessly spam buildings and become wildly profitable. Then the only limiting factor to my rise to absurd levels of power is blueprint availability. Once you stop caring that you lost a ship because you can queue five up for construction - some of the magic is gone.

So my issue with the colony aspect is that it greatly trivializes the mid and late game - and you can't really just outright skip it entirely as for some reason in .9 the markets are extremely scarce so ignoring colonies entirely and trying to fit out a quality fleet is not really feasible via just buying ships.

What it comes down to - I want the economy to be harder to succeed in and there to be more economic rather than combat means to drive the player and the AI out of business in order to maintain the investment into your fleet and make the game remain rewarding in the long run.

The planets build industries way too quickly and require much too few resources. Population counts somehow increase at an astounding rate compared to the game time elapsing. It should take multiple lifetimes for a new planet to work up.

But then if you slow it all way down. Or make the profits much smaller. Why have colony building in the game?

In Civilization and other 4x games; the more cities I have, the better and bigger armies I can develop. Starsector is going more for being a simulation, not a 4x.

Remove the constant profit from colonies? You pay/provide stuff starting a colony and building industries on that colony. The citizens promise to pay you back over time in full with a 100% profit. They are doing all the hard work.

[nomadic_leader]

Is anyone an economist? Surely some of this stuff has already been successfully turned into algorithms and simulated for academic journals.

I am an economist and I suggested against doing that for computational, understanding, and functional reasons. You’re likely to get a better simulation for the player facing side by doing something incredibly simple (like this) than doing something complicated.

I'll take your word for it; I tried to look on Scopus and quickly realized I was out of my depth.

In any case, it seems regrettable that Starsector's limited development resources had to go to redesigning the economy four times already. But heck, I've never made a computer game. Lessons for starsector 2!

[Chaos Blade]

...

I'm on my 5th or so play through and at this point I can reliably find an appealing world, take a 300k loan, colonize, mindlessly spam buildings and become wildly profitable. Then the only limiting factor to my rise to absurd levels of power is blueprint availability. Once you stop caring that you lost a ship because you can queue five up for construction - some of the magic is gone.

So my issue with the colony aspect is that it greatly trivializes the mid and late game - and you can't really just outright skip it entirely as for some reason in .9 the markets are extremely scarce so ignoring colonies entirely and trying to fit out a quality fleet is not really feasible via just buying ships.

What it comes down to - I want the economy to be harder to succeed in and there to be more economic rather than combat means to drive the player and the AI out of business in order to maintain the investment into your fleet and make the game remain rewarding in the long run.

Pop growth is insane if you consider vegetative growth as the only factor, immigration should be considered.
I do think pop growth needs to be slower or be slowed by a develoment factor, so the faster the pop growth rate, the more affected development of the colony is, with some sweet spot growth based on planet prosperity and stability

But yeah, construction times need to be considerably larger (with the exception of starports and maybe some of the more functional ones, like defense batteries or platrol HQs)

The planets build industries way too quickly and require much too few resources. Population counts somehow increase at an astounding rate compared to the game time elapsing. It should take multiple lifetimes for a new planet to work up.

But then if you slow it all way down. Or make the profits much smaller. Why have colony building in the game?

In Civilization and other 4x games; the more cities I have, the better and bigger armies I can develop. Starsector is going more for being a simulation, not a 4x.

Remove the constant profit from colonies? You pay/provide stuff starting a colony and building industries on that colony. The citizens promise to pay you back over time in full with a 100% profit. They are doing all the hard work.

[Eji1700]

Starsector isn’t an economy simulator..

Yes , it is.  Maybe not to the detail of something like offworld trading company, but basically any game that tries to have an economy that's supposed to serve an in game purpose is on some level and economy simulator.  Now I agree that we shouldn't be setting prices at individual colonies, but there probably should be some question of "what does the economy need to do?".  I think Alex keeps this in mind, but in some places it's missing the mark I feel, as the core purpose of it is mostly to limit player options early/mid game and force different play (rather than, build your uber fleet and storm the universe), but in order to do that you have to make sure that the solution to that system isn't always the same (thus encouraging super similar play and defeating the whole purpose of the economy in the first place).

It should also be a great way to feel progression, but numbers are a bit off right now.  Capitals still feel pretty amazing to get (outside of ship salvage, which now that the game has a real economy I think could be tweaked), but almost anything else after the first few hours of the game is "oh right another X".    This is in part because it's easy to be swimming in cash, and both ships and weapons are mostly limited by RNG scarcity (not super interesting, just check the shops on every planet and grab what you need when you can, some modification by knowing what ports to hit), and money (no longer much of a barrier). 

Further once you get a blueprint you've got that ship whenever you want it, in as many quantities as you want, with few meaningful barriers.

[nathanebht]

You could logically justify having your colonies grow quickly in the time you spend playing. Cryosleep.

Your the founder of a colony. They need protection but you can't just hang out with your fleet. Costs would eat you up. You put your fleet in cryosleep and it gets awakened when there is major trouble.

So the time in the game leaps forward in chunks. The colony can slowly grow. Colony profits are small and always reinvested. New ships can slowly be built. The galaxy can have interesting changes develop over many years.

Another option would be to have hyperspace cause time dilation. Time spent traveling between stars causes years to pass on all the planets.

[TaLaR]

Another option would be to have hyperspace cause time dilation. Time spent traveling between stars causes years to pass on all the planets.

But not for fleets in system? Nah, that's pushing it.

[nomadic_leader]

You could logically justify having your colonies grow quickly in the time you spend playing. Cryosleep.

Your the founder of a colony. They need protection but you can't just hang out with your fleet. Costs would eat you up. You put your fleet in cryosleep and it gets awakened when there is major trouble.

So the time in the game leaps forward in chunks. The colony can slowly grow. Colony profits are small and always reinvested. New ships can slowly be built. The galaxy can have interesting changes develop over many years.

Another option would be to have hyperspace cause time dilation. Time spent traveling between stars causes years to pass on all the planets.

I think there are definitely some actions or administrative stuff you do while docked in markets/planets that should increment time forward a bit, but the time dilation stuff sounds a bit complicated. It would make all the intel you get basically useless and be really confusing. "er so the convoy leaves in how many days... ok so I'm red shifting at .5 lightspeed so um, carry the 3..."

[TrashMan]

The planets build industries way too quickly and require much too few resources. Population counts somehow increase at an astounding rate compared to the game time elapsing. It should take multiple lifetimes for a new planet to work up.

But then if you slow it all way down. Or make the profits much smaller. Why have colony building in the game?

To have your own colony and faction and hopefully a small profit.
Becoming equal to the main factions seems like a wrong goal to have and makes little sense given the setting and time scale. Becoming a small, but sucessful mini-empire...now that seems workable.

[Goumindong]

Just popped back in here to say that yes, global shortages do happen

https://imgur.com/GFyCZdI

[SCC]

If you want a global shortage, check out Chicomoztoc's rare ore demand at the start of the game. Other than that, global shortages don't happen often, unless pather sabotage some industry or the player goes out of his way to cause some disturbances in the sector.