Collective Economic Niggles

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:04 am

Everyone's suggestions, while they would be vast improvements, are way overcomplicated. This thread started as a list of bugs in pricing. A rebalance of pricing and some other tweaks are much more realistic for the upcoming release. In version 0.6 or later we can worry about writing a dynamic economy, but right now, we should be worried about fixing trade costs that make no sense, infinite cash exploits, and milspec packages that are bugged.

Wow that was alot more of a rant than it meant to be. Hope I didn't mortally offend anyone. If I did, I would gladly fight a duel to the death

. Peace out all

Post by **loki1950** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:28 am

Not much of a rant more like a desperate plea to return to the original topic

but i will second that plea lets get this beast out the door as a release first there has been work done on a dynamic economy but the author is not active ATM so we are missing some critical input IMHO here.Most of the tweaks to prices and such are all data side and centered in two files master_part_list.csv and units.csv so what is needed is eyes and brain to work though those files throwing the exceptions to a separate file for further work.

Enjoy the Choice

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:36 am

@ bgaskey - I'm glad somebody said it

What's the best way of collecting the changes together, since listing them in a forum topic has obviously failed...

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:18 am

maybe start up a wiki page of bugged/improbable/exploitable prices.
I think over all there should be more profit made from transporting cargo than is currently the case in SVn, maybe an increase of 10% on places where the items are expensive so trading is a little more rewarding, but maybe thats just my lack of patience

I wouldn't know where to put the wiki page and am not much of a wiki person myself so if someone could enlighten me on that...

Breakable · Post by **Breakable** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:43 pm

It might be a good idea to report balance and economy bugs to the bugtracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_i ... tid=119507

And give a link on this thread for reference.

whatch1 · Post by **whatch1** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 10:21 am

i broke out the master part list and found it wasn't realy current some things not used anymore and some things not up to date with what i see in the game.

broken into catagories 218 cargo items, 229 upgrade and 83 ships / variations, 20 odd planet types and apparently 5700 systems

Most sci fi authors fixed this problem by having most inhabited system or faction of people where almost self suffient either on planet or within their solar system for 98% 99% with the other 1 or 2 percent trading by selling the excese what they have for what they wether be it luxuries or machinery they dont have or can't produce yet. no one would settle where water or air had to be imported

This leaves us with much smaller problem of just tweaking the random numbers a bit so there are trade goods availble where you would expect them to be Food at bio planets ships at shipyard

i found 3 empty shipyards and a bio planet with no food

that's what made me post

Bill

OK you can beat me down now

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:48 pm

Nice idea but there would almost surely be a lot of resources where food isn't grown, but where the resources should be valuable enough to warrant importing food. Also the Vegastrike universe is already quite improbable in the number of inhabitable planets (have we actually discovered any colonisable planets yet?) without making more of them able to produce food.

You do have a point though, in that whilst space stations have no water or air of their own - this can presumably be recycled to a very high degree (is the station really going to just vent atmospheric gases all the time?) but it could be argued they need to supply atmospheres to ships without this technology... It's an interesting problem in any case, especially when we remember that water is a waste product from reacting hydrogen with oxygen, it seems like we should only be transporting the most efficient form of storage, like liquid oxygen (in the cold of space) rather than water which expands when it freezes...

Could you look at my standardised cargo MPL (master parts list) from the other thread and try add any changes onto that? It makes relative comparison of value a lot easier and it would keep the changes in one place.

whatch1 · Post by **whatch1** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 8:17 pm

Xit

can't find your file
are you a windows user?
or do you need this in a text file

bill

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 3:23 am

I'm using linux and windows atm, the file is near the bottom of this thread
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... hp?t=10822
and just needs renaming to csv since the forum won't let you upload csv files...

At present the file just standardises most cargos to 10 or 100 cubic meters, and the price of enhanced rubber was changed to make it less valuable than gemstones

whatch1 · Post by **whatch1** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:54 am

still cant find it i get the whole thread

send email to @berkshire.rr.com using my id without the one (1)

Bill

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 3:20 am

Done

vodalian · Post by **vodalian** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 9:01 am

I really really really hope that some of the changes talked about in the recent economy threads are considered and implemented. Of course that's easy for me to say being that I'm just a fan, but I can always dream

I think a better economy would lead to a much more fun and fulfilling experience with Vegastrike, I mean, the game revolves around it afterall

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 1:41 pm

I hope the devs are paying attention to this thread as it looks like Xit is doing a good job of cleaning up the economy artifacts.

Rabiator · Post by **Rabiator** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 7:29 pm

spiffariffic wrote:
To me this problem seems amenable to nodal analysis. We represent the universe as a resistor network with nodes being planets and jumppoints, and resistors being the space in between.
Are you an EE? Your analogy works, but is... different.

For the sake of simplicity, I would leave out interest and the time value of money (as time goes on the money becomes less valuable because of interest and inflation). Also trying to model a stock market would probably be outside the scope of a space-flight simulator.

This is not to say, modeling economics is too much, actually I think it is important, and the model above sounds like a simple enough way of doing it. (I'll have to review my econ, but I think it will work)

By the way, yes, I study business and finance.

I agree that the analogy looks nice, but it would need some adaptions:

-In the resistor and current analogy, more current means more potential difference across transistors. But transporting more goods over the same route does not necessarily mean higher cost per unit.
So the space between the nodes would be like antiparallel diodes that impose a constant potential difference once there is a current, aka constant transport costs per unit.

-Elastic supply/demand of planets on the other hand could be modelled analogous to a resistor: with a increase or drop proportional to the amount of traded goods.
So the planets would be like voltage sources with internal resistance.

Maybe someone can offer a better model, but the above seems reasonably straightforward.

By the way, I have studied EE several years ago

shadow_slicer · Post by **shadow_slicer** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 11:48 am

Actually in my model, price is roughly equal to negative current, so no diodes should be needed.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:29 pm

You guys are posting in the wrong thread. You want to post this here:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... hp?t=10828

The purpose of this thread is for cleaning up the problems for 0.5 as pragmatically as possible. The other thread is for planning a better economy implementation.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:43 pm

Found a little bug it seems like. Medical supplies are much cheaper on an arid planet than in a medical station

. Seems like med stations should be the cheapest, as they manufacture and planets use the stuff.

Xit · Post by **Xit** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:25 pm

Is that definitely how it works though? I'd have thought most planets could manufacture primitive first aid supplies for themselves rather than have them imported, wheras a med station may actually import supplies to treat people.

In any case I'd have to say that there's something fundamentally flawed about the whole concept of surgical techniques being a cargo item - a med station should have techniques that most other places will be very eager to get hold of - yet it should still be the highest bidder for cutting edge techniques.

Maybe if we had some method of attaching dates to medical techniques so that they can spread through the universe (but then we'd need to have a concept of time which is currently non-existant)

In any case we need more info in
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... al_Station

Vega Strike Forums

Collective Economic Niggles

as before

cant find your file Xit

still cant find it i get the whole thread