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[TrashMan]

Honestly, why does a planetary market only hold a measly 1000 units of items.

This makes it a chore to supply a large fleet, as just to stock u on supplies and fuel for a long expedition, you need to visit several colonies.
It's also impossible to do bulk trading, because you can't really fill up your megafreighters. Whats' the point o them existing?

[CrashToDesktop]

As far as I can tell, having the Waystation facility increases the stockpile.  Putting an Alpha Core on that Waystation increases it even more.

[Linnis]

I like to bring back a few thousand units of loot from salvaging ruins and pirate/pather/redacted fleets. Tho trading prob is better without mega freighters as more pirates = more profits.

Though all stations should maybe have more trade stuffs to offer.

[TrashMan]

As far as I can tell, having the Waystation facility increases the stockpile.  Putting an Alpha Core on that Waystation increases it even more.

Perhaps for the player...what about the AI colonies?

The highest number of any item I've seen so far was 1400 fuel.

[Deshara]

if you up the amount of stock AI planets carry, then you're also upping the amount of market share AI planets have that the player must compete with for value. I think they got nerfed bc its the only way the economy system as-is works

[TrashMan]

if you up the amount of stock AI planets carry, then you're also upping the amount of market share AI planets have that the player must compete with for value. I think they got nerfed bc its the only way the economy system as-is works

So you are saying the economy is broken and needs heavy work?
Because how you described it is how it should work.

Established planets with population in the billions and heavy industries should have markets overflowing with items. You cannot compete in volume, but you might in other ways - like proximity. Or lover tarrifs.

It's insane to have a supertanker than can carry 3000 fuel, but no planet that can supply that much.

[intrinsic_parity]

There is a difference between what is available on the market at one given time and the production capability of the market. I doubt you can walk into a store (or even large number of stores) and buy 80000 water bottles, but Im sure many thousands of water bottles get produced daily and if you had the money and a legitimate demand, you could acquire that many water bottles on some time scale under contract etc. So basically the open market is a walmart with limited stock.

I agree it is a bit strange that the player has access to super freighters/tankers but not to that sort of bulk purchasing ability. Maybe in the future, the player can meet business owners in the bar or whatever to purchase large quantities of items at a discount or something. Or the player can increase rep with the local station commander, and gain access to a bulk goods market or something. I think it's reasonable that the open market has limited stock, but I also wouldn't mind the player being able to gain access to higher volume trade in some capacity. Maybe you can even gain a contract as a faction to do regular deliveries (your fleets will do this and increase monthly income) but you have to make sure the path they travel is safe (maybe a pirate base is spawned that you need to clear).

[nomadic_leader]

if you up the amount of stock AI planets carry, then you're also upping the amount of market share AI planets have that the player must compete with for value. I think they got nerfed bc its the only way the economy system as-is works

The established NPC markets should be much much bigger than a new player colony.

There is a difference between what is available on the market at one given time and the production capability of the market. I doubt you can walk into a store (or even large number of stores) and buy 80000 water bottles, but Im sure many thousands of water bottles get produced daily and if you had the money and a legitimate demand, you could acquire that many water bottles on some time scale under contract etc. So basically the open market is a walmart with limited stock.

But it's obviously not a store. It's a commodities market where you can buy likes 1000 tonnes of food to fill the hold of a giant starship. Walmart isn't even in the game. Walmart is not a wholesaler/distributer, it's a consumer retailer, like its for your crew. The economy doesn't match with ship cargo capacities and is somewhat broken/underdeveloped in general.

[TrashMan]

There is a difference between what is available on the market at one given time and the production capability of the market. I doubt you can walk into a store (or even large number of stores) and buy 80000 water bottles, but Im sure many thousands of water bottles get produced daily and if you had the money and a legitimate demand, you could acquire that many water bottles on some time scale under contract etc. So basically the open market is a walmart with limited stock.

I'm not walking into a store, I'm browsing the stockpiles and markets of AN ENTIRE... FRIGGIN.. PLANET.

And entire planet cannot supply one. ONE supertanker.
Do you realize how many supertankers are at the sea atm? Do you realize the pointlessness of such ships is the markets cannot provide the quantity?

I agree it is a bit strange that the player has access to super freighters/tankers but not to that sort of bulk purchasing ability. Maybe in the future, the player can meet business owners in the bar or whatever to purchase large quantities of items at a discount or something.

Bulk purchasing shouldn't require some special shady deals.
It happens all the time in the world.
A ship full of goods is nothing. A drop in the ocean. That is partially why the economy is so borked. A single ship relieves planetary shortages, the player has way too much influence on the economy, while at the same time having way too many relaistic options.

[nomadic_leader]

Bulk purchasing shouldn't require some special shady deals.
It happens all the time in the world.
A ship full of goods is nothing. A drop in the ocean. That is partially why the economy is so borked. A single ship relieves planetary shortages, the player has way too much influence on the economy, while at the same time having way too many relaistic options.

I like that you can mess up small planet economies with thousands or 10s of  thousands of people. This seems reasonable. The NPC factoins should also colonize little words that you can disturb the economy of. Bigger planets with millions/billions of people should be more or less untouchable by the player (unless we decide to go full grand strategy with starsector.)

[intrinsic_parity]

There is a difference between what is available on the market at one given time and the production capability of the market. I doubt you can walk into a store (or even large number of stores) and buy 80000 water bottles, but Im sure many thousands of water bottles get produced daily and if you had the money and a legitimate demand, you could acquire that many water bottles on some time scale under contract etc. So basically the open market is a walmart with limited stock.

I'm not walking into a store, I'm browsing the stockpiles and markets of AN ENTIRE... FRIGGIN.. PLANET.

And entire planet cannot supply one. ONE supertanker.
Do you realize how many supertankers are at the sea atm? Do you realize the pointlessness of such ships is the markets cannot provide the quantity?

I agree it is a bit strange that the player has access to super freighters/tankers but not to that sort of bulk purchasing ability. Maybe in the future, the player can meet business owners in the bar or whatever to purchase large quantities of items at a discount or something.

Bulk purchasing shouldn't require some special shady deals.
It happens all the time in the world.
A ship full of goods is nothing. A drop in the ocean. That is partially why the economy is so borked. A single ship relieves planetary shortages, the player has way too much influence on the economy, while at the same time having way too many relaistic options.

You definitely can't just buy goods in bulk. You couldn't walk into a gas station and buy 8000 gallons of gas or a microchip factory and buy 20000 microchips. You would have to contact BP or exxon or whoever the supplier is and explain that you need some amount of their product and then you would give them a contract to deliver that amount where you need it at some time etc. As things scale up to planetary levels this would become even more true.

There is also a bunch of scale stuff going on, a full atlas could very well be more than the entire export quantity of a smaller colony. Anything less than size 7 is still on the scale of large city on earth or smaller. The population of earth is in the billions which is size 9.

[Cik]

put a real production system in the game and then just allow earmarking portions of it on some sort of escalating price scheme. once you have jangala producing 30,000 supplies daily and the hegemony monopolizing 25,000 of those, you can have the player compete over the scraps.

likewise with ships.

this should of course require a high faction standing etc.

[TrashMan]

You definitely can't just buy goods in bulk. You couldn't walk into a gas station and buy 8000 gallons of gas or a microchip factory and buy 20000 microchips. You would have to contact BP or exxon or whoever the supplier is and explain that you need some amount of their product and then you would give them a contract to deliver that amount where you need it at some time etc. As things scale up to planetary levels this would become even more true.

You're not gonna buy bulk gas off a gas station, you're buying it off a big supplier. I'm not talking just bout fuel, but about any commodities. Billions of tonns of goods are shipped every day.
What do you think happens when you land on a planet? The purchase process is abstracted, but given that bulk traders exist, so do bulk markets.
"landing on a planet" is not you going into Space Wallmart. It's an abstraction of you doing trade all over the planet.

There is also a bunch of scale stuff going on, a full atlas could very well be more than the entire export quantity of a smaller colony. Anything less than size 7 is still on the scale of large city on earth or smaller. The population of earth is in the billions which is size 9.

Are you kidding me? Atlases aren't that big.
Perhaps for REALLY small colonies, but when populations is in the tens of millions?

[Baxter]

Part of the reason I have all my colonies spread around the galaxy is so I can easily restock. Either by taking stuff directly out of stockpiles, or by using a glitch where if you close the trading window and reopen it the inventory resets.

But as to why things work the way they do currently, I think part of the reason is that the game doesn't calculate price per unit of a good, but instead just sets the price for all units you purchase at the initial price (total cost=Amount of goodXcurrent price). For example if I use the aforementioned glitch to reset shop inventory as I'm buying fuel (and I'll be purchasing it in batches of 3k units), the price increases from ~$24 a unit to $30 and eventually $35 as the total planetary stockpile is gradually depleted from my sales. The way price calculation works currently, if the total planetary stockpile was available for sale in the open market (Not from the stockpile, that works differently), then I could purchase all 9k units of fuel for ~$24 a unit, which doesn't really work. If you allowed players access to a planet's entire stock of an item then the buying calculation would need to calculate how much something costs as you buy or sell more units, which is doable but probably annoying to work out the programming logic for.
The current surplus/demand system allows for higher/lower price for an amount of units (example 500) but to do changing costs depending on how much you're buying versus the planet's stocks the game would need to calculate the breakpoints at which buying one additional unit causes the price to increase by at least 1 credit, and then work out your total cost to buy based on these brackets of unit prices.

(As an aside, this kind of limitation allowed for an infinite money exploit in fable. You could purchase a merchant's entire stock of an item at its lowest price, which would cause the price to skyrocket due to low supply, and then sell the item back to them at its highest price, causing a surplus and crashing the price. You could do this back and forth as much as you wanted with no issues (in starsector tariffs prevent this in addition to the limit on how much of a good you can purchase.))

[intrinsic_parity]

New york city has a population of 8.9 million, tens of millions is like a couple large cities, it's really not that many people compared to a size 9 or 10 world. Most of the planets in the game have population on the order of a large earth city. Size 8 is where it really gets to be more than that. If atlases are large enough to supply size 9-10 worlds with a reasonable number of them, then they are large enough that only 1-2 would be required to supply a colony of size 6 completely.

If one atlas his required to supply a size 6 world, then the means 10000 atlases are required to supply a size 10 world. There certainly don't seem to be 10000 atlases flying in and out of size 10 worlds so it's reasonable to assume that one atlas is more than enough for a size 6 colony.

Also, sure lots of goods are moved around, but they aren't all sitting in storage somewhere waiting for someone to buy them. Goods already have a buyer when they are made, because the buyer set up a contract. No one buys good by the thousands of tones without having a long term contract set up.Producers only produce as much as they expect to sell, they don't have huge excess stock 'just in case'.