I am curious though about pirate markets/pirate bases when you're trading with them. I don't imagine there being a 'black market' there...hm...I suppose you'll just have the one sub-market in those cases. Although maybe you could sell medical supplies, food and weapons to the pirates' slaves so they can overthrow the pirate mercenary leaders???
Even a pirate base has authorities, and people doing stuff that those in power wouldn't approve of. I don't think it's significantly different from a regular market in that regard, except that perhaps nothing would be illegal to sell on the open market.
Anyway, I like the UI even if it isn't immediately interpretable. Hm, actually the commodity screen is not that intuitive at all. Granted it's not an X3 spreadsheet, which is good but it doesn't tell me how much demand there is in qty. Looking over the right at top imports. 81% of imports is food or approximately 2900 units which is represented by 5 food icons...2900 ? 5? So there is a demand for about 3000 units of fuel, 600 units of food and 600 domestic goods?
The reason it doesn't is 1) you generally don't need to know and 2) the way the economic simulation works, seeing the number could be misleading depending on the circumstances. It it turns out that you indeed do need to know, some approximation of that number will show up on the mouseover. Right now, that approximation is the icons
(It does show up for the imports/exports, yeah. I'm not entirely sure it actually *needs* to be there, either. Perhaps it doesn't, to signal more clearly that the exact numbers don't matter.)
The scale for figuring out the number of icons is logarithmic, btw (base-something-between-one-and-two), since the actual numbers of commodities differ by orders of magnitude. That detailed a comparison of the number of icons across commodities isn't going to work. It's intended to provide detail on the level of "more"/"a lot more". Within each commodity, though, the distribution is linear.
Are those import/export quantities and percentages determined by the engine in response to supply/demand or are they coded in? For example, if we modded in a system/planet that had a large fuel surplus, would it automatically export to Corvus, or would we need to set that kind of thing up?
Determined by the engine, and these change in response to changing stability/events/etc. A new market with a fuel surplus would have far-ranging effects. If it was added dynamically mid-game, though, it'd take a few in-game months for the simulation to reach something resembling equilibrium.
From the hint that the stability could be effecting patrol regularity and composition, am I guessing that something that could be getting a rework are the .faction files/how to make fleets?
Yeah, that's the end-game here. Ultimately I'd like to see fleets being produced by planets based on available blueprints and resources; we'll see how it pans out, though. I'm currently trying out something along the lines of more dynamic fleet generation, but not quite sure how far down that path things will go for the next release.
@frag971: Hmm, I don't think that works. Bringing in data about the player's fleet is too much to try to cram into this screen, especially since you generally won't be carrying that many different commodities, and the quantities are likely to be negligible compared to market stockpiles/production/etc, so screen space dedicated to that is largely wasted. Your mockup is also not displaying import/export information at a glance, which is very important to the health of the market and the role it plays in the economy. The information you're trying to present is also already mostly there in the current layout, once you know what to look for. At a base level: anything green = surplus, anything red: unmet demand; that's easy to see at a glance once you know what it means. ... unless you're colorblind. Hmm, need to think about that. But wait, color-blind mode (in settings.json) should handle that, at least to an extent.
Again, though, there *are* mouseover tooltips explaining everything. So it's just a question of learning the system. I think whether it's intuitive or not at least in part depends on whether you've encountered something similar-looking before, such as, say, MoO2.
This is kind of a weird thought, but OH MY GOD THOSE COMMODITY ICONS ARE SO SWEET THANK YOU DAVID.
Not weird at all, I've been freaking about about it myself. I believe I've said "tiny and adorable" several times over the past week.
Also, patch notes? I don't imagine they will have anything more than what you've written here,
(and I certainly wouldn't want to hold up the update), but it'd be awesome if you already have some/are writing some up.
Yeah, soon. Just need to go through 'em, haven't done as good a job of keeping up with maintaining the list as usual.
