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[Bungee_man]

I've heard, a long time ago, that Starsector used to allocate trade routes dynamically, prioritizing nearby sources for various items, but this was scrapped due to complexity. While this is understandable, it does introduce a new problem - a self-sufficient pair of player colonies on the far East of the sector will continually attempt to import vital necessities from the core, ending up with severe shortages that must often be corrected. For example, if an agricultural and an industrial world are paired together, the latter will be trying to ship in food from Gilead, and the convoys doing this will end up under continuous attack from other factions, luddics, and pirates, as they traverse a full three quarters of the sector. The end result is a starving planet that's twelve hours away from a planet producing an abundance of food.

I'd propose a very simple adjustment to convoy generation: when generating trade fleets, ignore demands that are satisfied by a same-faction market within the same system. This would give more of a feeling of progression as the player's colonies become self-sufficient, and add more thought to the process of profitably cutting off trade to other factions' colonies.

[actually-a-cat]

I agree with this so much that I made an account just to post this screenshot:



It is rather infuriating to suffer from these disruptions, finally manage to create a local and secure source for the problematic commodity, and then it doesn't help at all.

It makes some sense that markets would import from multiple sources for variety and redundancy, but that shouldn't make a place more prone to shortages.

[Killer of Fate]

heh... I never realised this. So, every time I made self-sustainable colony combinations, it turned out I was just wasting my time.

Oh, well... Life in a nutshell.

[Ragnarok101]

And here I thought the Penelope's Star Republic just had a bad Pather problem whenever I wasn't onscreen (in 0.96).

There definitely should be a more dynamic trade system to account for player colonies.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then. On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

[prav]

They may make good bread on Nova Cydonia IV, but I'll be damned if I live in on a planet that doesn't have Extra-spicy Fikenhild Cheeze-Its.

[Nettle]

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then. On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

The above screenshot also demonstrates why the "colonize planets as close to each other as possible" approach doesn't really work for preventing shortages. Your faction will always trade with other factions, so your trade convoys will be shutdown now and then, and you will get shortages from time to time even if you only ever colonize a single system and produce everything in-faction.

[Ragnarok101]

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then. On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

I feel that faction-building should be something that incentivizes you to build locally rather than the 'spread them out across half the sector' approach the devs apparently want. Not a fan of having bizarrely non-contiguous territory.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I feel that faction-building should be something that incentivizes you to build locally rather than the 'spread them out across half the sector' approach the devs apparently want. Not a fan of having bizarrely non-contiguous territory.

It's not that they specifically want you to spread out your colonies, it's that there's already a TON of built-in incentives to colonize locally, to the point that it feels punishing whenever you want to colonize even fantastic planets in different systems so instead you colonize sub-par planets in the same system.

[Killer of Fate]

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then. On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

The above screenshot also demonstrates why the "colonize planets as close to each other as possible" approach doesn't really work for preventing shortages. Your faction will always trade with other factions, so your trade convoys will be shutdown now and then, and you will get shortages from time to time even if you only ever colonize a single system and produce everything in-faction.

okay, but don't you think the game is going to look kinda goofy when a planet starts to starve and slowly die, because they're too stupid to import food from place 1 day a journey away? I mean... Uhhhhhhhh... I guess who cares.

[Bungee_man]

heh... I never realised this. So, every time I made self-sustainable colony combinations, it turned out I was just wasting my time.

Oh, well... Life in a nutshell.

You do get a flat reduction to upkeep costs when you're self-sufficient - the game assumes that your colonies are importing from each other, but this doesn't happen in practice.

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then.

I'm not sure I understand the logic here. That's like saying the player is supposed to lose ships now and again, so some of them should dive into the enemy formation without turning their shields on.

On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

I think it's more of a tradeoff - perhaps now more than before, since colony crises have replaced raids, meaning there's no long-term need for overlapping military bases. Wide-spread colonies make it easier to explore and allow you much more latitude in picking resource-rich planets, while densely-packed colonies make it easier to access all of them at once, and provide some defensive benefits while that's still relevant.

[ReshE]

I believe this is intentional, because you are supposed to experience trade disruption every now and then. On top of that, this places *massive* incentive to colonize planets as close to each other as possible, and you look like a fool colonizing in separate systems. It does look really weird and counterintuitive though, with the above screenshot being a perfect example.

The game already gives the player a method to deal with trade disruptions for things such as food; "Use Stockpiles during shortages". Now, a world that doesn't have local food production won't stockpile food if I recall correctly (the waystation creates stockpiles of any local exports + a little bit of the standard stuff you might need while exploring, such as Supplies, Fuel, Volatiles, Transplutonics, etc).

However, if we have a waystation on our food-producing world, then we actually can solve our own food shortage: we just need to hope over to our food world, draw some food stockpiles out, and plop it down on our starving industry world. This will incur a cost at the end of the month, obviously, but it was already going to do that so no big change there.

The issue (or annoyance, I suppose) with this strategy - we actually have to move the stockpiles ourselves, physically, as the player. We can do this beforehand (drawing out food stockpiles in advance and plopping them down on our non-food-producing worlds to anticipate trade disruptions), but it's really hard to know exactly how much we need to place in the stockpiles for trade disruptions, and depending on how far apart your colonies are (and how much they produce), this can get quite tedious quite fast. It's also a bit silly that we can have a food world orbiting the same gas giant as a starving world, with stockpiles just chock full of food, but we can't draw from them without player intervention.

I propose we modify the stockpiles/shortage behavior so that it allows the drawing of stockpiles of nearby colonies (i.e. same system) as well. This way trade disruptions still do stuff to our profitability, but our colonies don't need us, the player, to come in and manually move 2000 units of food from one moon to another (when they could clearly do it themselves). Maybe add it as an additional button, or a modifiable behavior under the doctrine tab or something? Or maybe put it in that unused "Orders" tab.

[Nick9]

Sometimes it is within sense to import from a far away colony, but yeah, these disruptions are *** with me too. If this mechanic exists because of gameplay reasons, I agree with you that it should not. It's infuriating.

[Nettle]

The game already gives the player a method to deal with trade disruptions for things such as food; "Use Stockpiles during shortages". Now, a world that doesn't have local food production won't stockpile food if I recall correctly (the waystation creates stockpiles of any local exports + a little bit of the standard stuff you might need while exploring, such as Supplies, Fuel, Volatiles, Transplutonics, etc).

Stockpiling locally produced commodities is something colonies just do naturally. Waystation additionally creates demand for fuel, supplies, volatiles, transplutonics, and crew, and stockpiles all of the above as long as demand is met.

[ReshE]

The game already gives the player a method to deal with trade disruptions for things such as food; "Use Stockpiles during shortages". Now, a world that doesn't have local food production won't stockpile food if I recall correctly (the waystation creates stockpiles of any local exports + a little bit of the standard stuff you might need while exploring, such as Supplies, Fuel, Volatiles, Transplutonics, etc).

Stockpiling locally produced commodities is something colonies just do naturally. Waystation additionally creates demand for fuel, supplies, volatiles, transplutonics, and crew, and stockpiles all of the above as long as demand is met.

Oops, my mistake. Been a while since I had a colony without a waystation, so I forgot they stockpile local production by default.

Still, I think the spirit of my suggestion remains. If two colonies are close enough for their orbital stations to kiss, I think they should be able to exchange stockpiles between each other without the need for full trade convoy generation. Similarly, I'd argue that colonies within one system can probably exchange stockpiles to solve shortages too. If we need a lore explanation, just say the patrol fleets are able to ferry stockpile goods or something.

This takes advantage of a mechanic that we can already do (taking stockpiles from one colony and depositing them on another) without forcing the player through the tedium of doing it themselves. It also preserves the spirit of colonies by making sure that you aren't unaffected by trade disruptions (since drawing stockpiles takes money each month and the stockpiles can run out). Fair compromise, I think.