Currently in the Starsector Economy, a colony's Market Share in a commodity is rounded to a whole number before being used to calculate the Exports Income for this commodity. This means that the effect of accessibility on income is rather coarse-grained, which can lead to some pretty strange behaviour close to the tipping point of rounding up or down. I would suggest allowing a colony's Market Share to be a decimal number to smoothen this out. This would have a couple of consequences.
Firstly, it means that Accessibility - as a player-facing stat - is a lot more intuitive. If I have a colony at 120% accessibility and I build a Waystation to get it up to 130%, my colony's exports will go up proportionally. As it is right now, some commodities may skyrocket (due to being rounded up rather than down), while others remain the same (4.9 and 5.3 are probably still rounded to 5). This makes it very difficult to tell how much of an impact increasing Accessibility will truly have. Allowing Market Share to be a decimal number is en easy fix for this and I think very desirable for a player's experience managing colonies.
(As a sidenote, I've come across an example of this kind of behaviour while
writing my Economy guide. Cibola and Culann should both have a 5.42% market share in Metals, but one of them is rounded up to 6% and the other down to 5%.)
Secondly, it would make the game a lot more satisfying to try to optimize. As an avid Theorycrafter myself, I enjoy thinking about and trying to optimize my way around a game's economy - and Starsector is one of the most interesting games I've tried to tackle yet. However, the discrete nature of a colony's Market Share makes exports income wildly unpredictable. It's quite possible to predict the income of the first colony a player will settle, but every subsequent colony will have a knock-on effect on the previous ones that is hard to predict. The added supply of commodities from the second colony may or may not push an earlier colony to a lower Market Share precentage, depending on how the minutiae of rounding up or down work out, which makes it really frustrating to try to get a handle on. Making Market Share a lot more fine-grained would help smooth this issue and let me tickle that optimization itch.
Thirdly, floating-point Market Share would also impact the scalability of the game. As more factions and worlds are added by yourself, the developer, or through community mods, colonies at bottom of the production lists go into limbo. Losing or gaining 1% Market Share is not that big of a deal if you're Sindria and control the lion's share of the Fuel market. However, if you're one of the Size 3 colonies outputting 1.46% of the global Food supply, being rounded up or down can be a big deal. Allowing this colony to take 1.46% of the Global Market rather than 1% or 2% means that more worlds can be added without upheaving the economy.
Of course, this comes at the cost of storing a Floating-Point number rather than an Integer. But I think Starsector's memory footprint is small enough to allow this.
