Regarding the trading stuff: I have a lot of problems with some mechanics in the trading system. While most of the system is fine, there are a few things in particular I don't like about how the economy works. I'm gonna try to outline my perceived problems, and what my attempted solutions will be. Giant wall of text follows. Short tl;dr at the bottom.
1: Stability Drives the Market.
To maximize profit, you want 1 market to be very stable (9/10 on stability), and all the others to be really unstable (0 or 1). Stability provides too big of a difference to the point where it covers up the more standard economic concept of supply and demand. Specifically, a high stability world will usually offer a higher price for a commodity, even if its demand is 100% met than a low stability world where the demand is 0% met. Trade fleets won't follow supply and demand if they want profit, they will just head to the high stability world. Furthermore, as a stable world gets its demands met, its stability increases, driving up the prices, meaning that it's even better to sell to that planet.
Side note: Stability Crashing
The fact that 'stability crashing' as I call it, is a somewhat viable option, shows that the stability system is pretty broken. Stability crashing is where I flood a black market on a moderate stability port with goods. The smuggling will soon make the stability hit 0, so prices become roughly 50% of normal, allowing you to buy every commodity for cheap. If the port produces enough stuff, you can get super cheap goods from that world for a while. This allows you to make good XP gains from trading from that port. I think you make enough money to just buy the goods you sold originally back for less than you sold it, but I could be wrong. The only downside is a smuggling investigation can seriously hurt your rep with whatever faction you abused this with.
2: Price Variance is Too Low
This is somewhat related to problem #1, but essentially it's almost impossible to make money on the open market without abusing shortages due to tariffs being larger than the price differences between 2 worlds. The supply of commodities generated on a low stability world would be fine to trade, if only Tariffs being high somewhat masks this problem, as it's easy to blame the inability to trade via the open market on the high tariffs, but without the tariffs, or with reduced tariffs, you would just be better able to abuse what little price variance in commodities.
3: Trade Disruptions/Food Shortages are Extremely Abuseable
Trade disruptions and food shortages don't make a lot of sense. It's like the governor of a colony checks the food supplies one day and finds out that he has none left, and promptly declares an emergency. Did the governor seriously not notice that the colony was running low on food? Food shortages should really be building over time (so that the price of food increases), such that trade fleets (and the player) have the chance to address them a little better. The price shouldn't suddenly jump. The notification of a food shortage could still happen when the price of food pops over a certain value, and the same for trade disruptions, but they don't make sense as spontaneous events that just occur, allowing for time-based abuse, rather than volume-based abuse.
4: There is No Risk in Trading
Pirates largely do a bad job chasing trade fleets around. The player, with his +burn skill, is able to avoid most fights, as larger pirate fleets are too slow to catch him, and smaller pirate fleets do not pose enough of a threat to the player. It doesn't help that the fleet AI for pirates will break off the chase even if they are faster, if they don't catch the fleet within a duration. As a result, trading is a practically risk free way to make money, unlike combat. I'd say that this last point is debatable as being a 'problem,' but risk-free trading should not be very profitable, compared with reaching planets in pirate-heavy areas.
Basic Economy Mechanics, AFAIK: Someone correct me if I am wrong. I'm getting a lot of this from Project Ironclads' economy, which I believe is quite similar to vanilla Starsector's economy, functioning off the same mechanics, but with different sets of numbers.
Spoiler
From how I can see, the way the economy generates goods is that every ~30 days, the market's conditions figure how much demand for whatever commodities it requires is met, and calculates how much of a commodity the condition in turn produces. For example, an Ore Refining Complex requires Ores, Rare Ores, and Heavy Machinery (and I think that's it, it might require Organics as fuel, or Crew to work there) and converts them into Metals, and Rare Metals. If there is no Heavy Machinery, nothing gets produced, even if everything else's demand is met. If only 50% of the demand for Heavy Machinery is met, only 50% of the goods are produced.
In some cases, the materials do not actually get consumed in the process (not all the crew is consumed in a mining operation, but some are lost due to mining accidents and such)
I think there's a few things in terms of economy/trading that everyone can agree on, and I will assume are true for my solution:
1: Every colony should produce things. I believe this is currently the case, not actually sure in a few cases (does Maxios' Decivilized tag produce anything? It might produce black market goods such as Organs or Drugs...)
2: Every produced good should provide a higher value than its components. If it takes 10 volatile, 10 organic, 5 rare metals, and 1 heavy machinery to produce 100 fuel, the value of 100 fuel must exceed the value of 10 volatiles, 10 organics, 5 rare metals, and 1 heavy machinery. This is basic industry, you put in labor, and come out with a more complex product that is worth more money. If it's not the case, then no one would get paid for doing the work, so no one would do that work. I'm not actually sure if this is the case currently in Starsector.
3: Certain colonies have requirements that don't produce anything. People need to eat, people consume Domestic and Luxury Goods, Drugs, Organs, etc.
4: Stability as a number, in some ways, makes sense. A smaller, less civilized world can be considered less stable than the capital of the Hegemony, for example.
My thoughts on a solution, and reasoning:
Why a major change to the economy?
I know that Alex aimed for an 'exploitation' based trading system, where you are supposedly taking advantage of logistical mistakes/natural disasters on planets. From the blog post here:
http://fractalsoftworks.com/2014/03/02/on-trade-design/Why does this make narrative sense? There’s a race-to-the-bottom in the profit margins for safely shipping rocks, and that’s before you factor in faction-affiliated cargo fleets that don’t even have to operate at a profit. Frankly, if you think about it, it *wouldn't* make sense for easy profit to be available for shipping food or some such, under normal circumstances. Not of the magnitude the player would be interested in.
But really, when you look at what this sector has to offer, there clearly aren't enough trade ships to go around. You are able to piece together a sizeable fleet. Why can't that fleet be good at 'shipping rocks' around? High tariffs would ensure that any private trader like yourself isn't going to go around causing huge market problems without first lining a government's pockets.
Right now, the market system is an interesting system that amounts to nothing, since the player doesn't care about getting anything produced, he only cares about when trade gets disrupted. By pushing towards a more supply/demand oriented system, and forcing the player to look for profits in a more dangerous manner in trading, the market's production system gets brought to the light while hopefully adding an increased depth/risk to trading. Right now, instead of safely shipping rocks, you wait until a planet demands rocks so you can safely ship rocks to that colony.
In terms of scale, if each unit of cargo is 1 ton, a person eats roughly 1 ton of food per year, so 1 ton of food should be able to feed 10 people for a month. This means that in a colony of thousands, it will take at most 1000 units of food to feed them for the month. This is well within the scale of what the player is capable of providing.
So, my main points on my solution:
1: Make supply, demand, and production drive the economy more than stability. Make stability instead drive some parts of demand. A more stable world is one that is better prepared for the common issues such as a food shortage, lack of domestic goods, lack of materials to drive the economy, etc. A more stable world has a higher demand for Luxury Goods, and a lower demand for things such as Food or Domestic Goods. A low stability world is on the reverse of that. It does not make sense that a high stability world would buy Organics at a moderate price when it already produces Organics, especially if there is another world nearby that uses Organics to produce fuel. Multiplying prices across the board by a number based on stability doesn't make much economic sense, and leads to low stability colonies having all their resources sold to higher stability colonies. If a higher stability colony can produce whatever a lower stability colony can, why was the low stability world founded in the first place, other than as a forward military base or something?
2: Make demand represent several cycles worth of demand. Colonies should be a little less nearsighted in their planning, opting to set themselves up for several more production cycles. If a trader can provide that to a colony, perfect for both of them. The colony should be happy to pay for a few months of production. This is another place where stability can tie in to demand. A low stability colony is less inclined to pay for several cycles of productions in advance, opting to focus on setting themselves up cycle by cycle, or a few cycles at a time.
3: Make lower stability colonies run through their components faster. In effect, low stability colonies should produce through their stored components quicker than high stability colonies. At the same time, low stability colonies should generally be producing at a lower volume than high stability colonies, due to population and market volume. As a rough idea of how this would work, a stability 2 colony with an Ore Refinery might be able to process 1000 units of Ore per cycle. So the colony might decide that it's willing to store up to 3 cycles of production, so it will take up to 3000 units of Ore as demand. When it comes to producing, suppose that 2 units of Ore get converted into 1 unit of Metal, and the stability 2 colony has 1200 units of Ore currently. While the colony could process 1000 of the 1200 units of ore, it wants to make sure that people are employed next month, so it only processes 400 units of Ore, producing 200 units of metals. Now the colony has 200 units of metals, and 800 units of Ores. A high stability world, call it stability 8, with a higher population, can process 10,000 units of Ore per cycle. However, it is looking fairly far ahead, and is willing to store up to 20 cycles, or 200,000 units of Ore, so it will take up to 200,000 units of Ore. If we take the same proportion of the demand being filled as earlier, it has 80,000 units of Ore. When it produces, it will process 4,000 units of Ore, producing 2,000 units of Metal. After this production, the low stability world has significantly less of its demand filled (800/3000 is ~27%, versus 76,000/200,000 is 38%). This would mean that the low stability colony will offer a higher price for Ore, until the proportions equal out. Gameplay-wise, this would make low stability worlds offer greater profit, but at a lower volume per cycle.
The only issue is consumables such as food and domestic goods since it does not make sense for people to just 'eat less' when there is less food around. Food could just be on a longer storage plan (a low stability world would potentially want food for up to 6 cycles in advance for demand)
4: Remove trade disruptions/food shortages. These should happen automatically under supply and demand. If there is a lot of pirate activity around a world, its prices will be higher because trade fleets sent there tend to die. As a result, demand is less met around that world, so prices are higher. This means that more profitable worlds will tend to be the more dangerous ones. Food shortages could potentially occur if a colony actually runs out of food, but it should have been offering a very appealing price before it ran out of food, as demand met would have been almost 0%. Perhaps a notification will still pop up if the price is abnormally high, or if a produced good's price is abnormally low. This keeps information as important in trading. Naturally, though, an AI trade fleet might take advantage of this problem, and ship the goods before you get there, just like how a trade disruption might end before you get there.
5: Add an employment modifier to stability. This is basically the 'demand met' modifier right now for the markets. Basically, if everyone is able to work, the stability of a market will go up. On the other hand, if a market has very little of its demand met, its stability will be lower, as people would need to resort to crime and such to pay their bills.
How would gameplay under this system be?
Ideally, high tariffs would force the player to not just ship rocks, the way EV Nova did trading. The best profit margins would be had on low stability worlds to other low stability worlds. However, these profit sources would dry up if the player heavily engages in trading due to the low size of the market. This means that these runs would not be "easily repeatable" runs, as markets would need several cycles to process what trade you provided. Information about markets would be important still, since AI fleets could be making the same trade runs that you want. The trade system would be enormously complicated, but logical, where the market screens' %demand met or %supply met actually give a good estimate of what the price is. There would not be huge XP gains, rather these gains would be acquired slowly, similar to combat.
As an example, many of the locations in Magec mine ore. So you head to Magec to pick up Ore from one of the small stations there. The best place to sell your new Ore would probably be somewhere with an Ore refinery. Ratatosk, Sindria, and Agreus all have refineries, so you try to find the one that has its demand least filled, and sell it there.
What are the problems with this system?
For one, there could be repeatable trade routes. Just the most profitable ones will only be available once per cycle, and quickly become less profitable. I suppose it's possible to end up in a circular route around the sector, but that will have a minimum profit at best. The AI for trade fleets might be able to fix some of this, by having some trade fleets fly on a schedule, especially from higher stability worlds. It would make sense for Jangala to ship Organics out every month, and it would have the infrastructure to handle shipping. As long as the AI cheats and doesn't have to deal with tariffs, it should reduce the ability of a player to make a profitable trade run.
This probably does not adequately add risk to the player. Part of the problem, as I covered above, are that pirates are bad at their job. Their AI should be improved so that they avoid a fair fight with a patrol/other fleet, but are a little more willing to engage a fleet comprised of cargo ships. Pirates aren't going to get rich by standing their ground against Hegemony patrols, they are going to get rich by avoiding them. The goals of a pirate fleet differ from the goals of a Tri-Tachyon invasion fleet, and should probably be reflected in their choice of engagements. Something as simple as having a pirate fleet take a very wide orbit around a patrolled planet would allow them to survive a little better.
Each world might need a small supply/demand of a good so that it gets things at a baseline price. I think that something like this already exists, but I'm not sure.
I might migrate this over to suggestions, depending on what people think. No, I don't expect this to really get implemented, but I think that at least some elements of it are sound. At the least, I hope that my statements about the problem are accurate.
tl;dr: I think moving to a supply/demand based economy makes more sense than the stability/disruption based economy we currently have. The current system feels irrational from an economic standpoint, and doesn't do a good job getting anything produced.