In the last couple of months, I’ve been busy fleshing out the outpost/colony management screen shown in the previous blog post. Well, by “fleshing out” I mean “making all the buttons actually do something”, which in a few cases involves adding an entirely new set of mechanics into the game. The new mechanic I’d like to talk about here is “population growth”, that is, how a market grows in in size over time. (Brief aside: I’ll be using “colony”, “market”, and “outpost” interchangeably for the rest of the post. Yes, I really do need to straighten out the terminology at some point.)

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To start off, I’d like to clarify what I mean by “economy” here – just the underlying simulation that moves around commodities and is responsible for matching up supply and demand across the Sector. This does not include things like trade disruptions, which are events that cause price changes. These are certainly part of a more expansive and player-centric definition of “economy”, but for this post, I’d like to focus purely on the commodity distribution algorithm.

Overview
So, what does the algorithm need to do? We’ve got markets and commodities, and each market has a supply (i.e. production) and a demand (i.e. consumption) for each. What we need to do is figure out where commodities will end up, given the supply/demand situation. For example, if one market is producing food, its output should be distributed among food-consuming markets according to their demand.

There are some further complications, but the above is the gist of it – fairly straightforward supply and demand stuff, though getting it to actually work out is anything but.
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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 »