I’d started out trying to add a story point option that would, to quote my TODO list, “make ground raids more of an early-game activity the player can engage in”. Some time later, I ended up with a total revamp of the ground-raid system, and no story point option. I promise, I can explain!

(If you’re unfamiliar with story points, see this blog post. In brief, they’re limited “do cool things” points that you’ll gain as you level up. Both the points and the cool things to spend them on will be in the next release.)

Now then, back to how this happened. Story points are not an end unto themselves – the goal of the TODO item was, after all, entirely about ground raids in the early game; story points were just a possible way to do it. So, the first thing I’d tried was letting the player use a story point to stage a “surprise” raid, with higher effectiveness. This means you don’t need as many marines to accomplish something useful, which in turn means you can do it earlier in the game. Technically correct (the best kind!), but also, doesn’t hold up.
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In the parlance of the economy system, a market is any entity (generally a planet or a space habitat) that participates in the economy. One of the primary ways of interacting with a market is through the trade screen, which therefore needed a major revamp from its current incarnation. Let’s take a quick look at the new trade screen, and then talk about the details of how markets work.

 Trading with Jangala in the Corvus system

Please note that the market-related screens aren’t completely finished. Some of the artwork in the screenshot uses placeholders – for example, the top-right  icons for market conditions currently use hull mod icons. In general, things could change from what you’re seeing now, but I wouldn’t expect them to change too much. That said, let’s dive into the details!

Market Conditions
In the upper right, you can see a row of icons labelled “market conditions”. Market conditions are the building blocks that define a market – they determine what it produces, what it consumes, how much population it has, what type of planet it is, and so on. For now, buildings and installations are also rolled into market conditions, though later on they’ll probably receive more detailed treatment.

Jangala has the following market conditions:

• Urbanized Polity
• Regional Capital
• Orbital Station
• Military Base
• Autofactory – Heavy Industrial
• Organics Complex
• Orbital Burns
• Jungle World
• Population – hundreds of thousands

The “Urbanized Polity” condition, for example, increases demand for luxury and domestic goods, and reduces food production. (Rampant speculation on what the other conditions do may officially commence.) Read the rest of this entry »