need help on modding my private copys economy

[Motorb1tch]

hello!

the unit.cvs defines the prices and quantitis of gods saled by bases and planets.
i want to mod thouse values so that prices rise when they are nearly sold out and lower when exchange got plenty of the warrys.

like:
miningbase, current values:
Raw_Materials/Metals;.65;.2;42;15
to something like:
Raw_Materials/Metals;.65*(42/current_stockhold);.2*(42/current_stockhold);42;15
what wuld be the correct syntax for doing this?

t i a


mb

[Shissui]

You may not find that this results in a totally satisfactory change because it will require more work than I think that you wish to do . . .

Here are just two of the most obvious concerns that you will need to address.

1. Loop back

Imagine:
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
* {Planet} has 00 widgets @ 125 each. [I sell +1250]
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
. . . and so on.

Unless you also include a mechanism to prevent this loopback, there is no need to carry cargo at all. SO, you must first alter the engine so that sell price & buy price are different.


2. History.

The VS universe is very big. Systems are not generated until your first visit. After that, cargo quantities are not retained from one visit to another. To do so would currently require more memory & file space than is currently acceptable in the main engine.

SO, your proposed modification would also require for you to implement a file to retain "current_stockhold" from one visit to the next. This file will get very big, very fast.

***
If you are not yet totally discouraged, then there are a number of people that can give you some support and advice. However, you would need to do the core modification yourself & that is a lot of work.

[Zeog]

To my knowledge there is no scripting for csv files. If there was we already had what you want to do...

[Motorb1tch]

hum. damn. well, that formula hadnt work anyway

maby than modify the plantet and base scripts so that some gods are marked as export goods and others as import goods?
make export goods than verry cheap when selling to the planet and import goods verry expensive when buying from a planet or base culd fix this.
also a marker for export / import gods in the trademenue wuld make it more easy for beginners to see what wuld be profitable to buy.

the problem with huge savefiles when store the current stockholds of planets:
perspectively, is there a way to prevent this? i mean... just save, sell cargo to the planet, reload and buy cargo again is a to easy way to exploit the current solution. do you have plans how you will handle this in later versions?

[ace123]

Actually, that brings up an interesting point.

It shouldn't be too hard to keep a tally of the "supply" and "demand" for types of cargo in python scripting or something else, and then adjust the prices according to the laws of economics...

Then, the base price/quantity specified in the CSV file would be the price under normal conditions of demand, but in some cases, those prices could increase.

Unfortunately, as you probably know, supply and demand is on more of a macro level, while your privateer character must be on the micro level (remember: not even the U.S. president has the ability to change prices on the market).

When you say "nearly sold out", realize that it's not easy to sell a store out of something yourseld, and even if you do, they will get restocked along with other stores in days, so it's not a big deal with price. This game must have artifically low stock intentionally to make it more interesting, so I don't think the rules of economics would apply too well.

Anyway it would be cool to have big news events (battles, short supply or high demand) affect stuff... I believe it already does effect some stuff

[Shissui]

It shouldn't be too hard to keep a tally of the "supply" and "demand" for types of cargo in python scripting or something else, and then adjust the prices according to the laws of economics...

Actually, I had been thinking much along these lines. However, these are changes that I do not think should be started until there is a 0.5 release.

However, my line of thinking was to mine the news to create a reason for changing the prices -- where there have been recent battles, the price of some stuff should go up & availability down (starships, ammunition, food, medical supplies, alloys, etc); other stuff should have price down & availability (also) down (ie - luxury goods); and some stuff should be price down and availability up (local exports, pilots/slaves, refugees?).

Nearby systems should have smaller effects. Adjacent systems can have a smaller "scare factor", as people stockpile against the war. Systems a bit further away could have positive effects, if they export the stuff that is now in demand at the battle site.

Sound familiar? I knew that I was not the only one to be thinking along these lines.

When you say "nearly sold out", realize that it's not easy to sell a store out of something yourseld

So why is it so easy to do in VS? When I wander up to an agricultural planet with my Clydesdale, then I want to fill my hold. But, a few thousand fish are just not going to do it. It takes a lot of serious work to fill my hold to 1%. I have never reached 2% without vacuuming up some capital ships.

Why not? Taking a contemporary example, if I want to buy grain at Seattle, then I can buy a contract to fill my hold long before I route my ship there. If they can't sell me the contract, then I would look for one in Vancouver or Portland & send my ship there instead. Regardless, I don't expect to leave port with a nearly empty ship.

[Motorb1tch]

It takes a lot of serious work to fill my hold to 1%. I have never reached 2%

imo the question is, why someone shuld buld ships that are so big, that they never can be filled up and so never can run economic.
plus: the output of a whole planet of warrys the planet exports shuld fill any size of ship...
staying with food: there are enugh plaet and base types with verry small or even no own foodproduktion (desert, lava etc.). they shuld depend on verry large imports of food, so someone will produce verry large amounts of this on planets where it wuld be possible to do so. just because they can do and someone will buy.
i played a lot of tradinggames since hanse on the c64, (jeah, no flightsim in there, but buy and sell stuff and things) and i NEVER seen a tradinggame where it was just impossible to fill up the frighter hold.
that shuld not mean that all types of goods have be aviable infinitely...
filling a mule with diamonds on a miningbase wuld be unrealistic.
but its redicilous imo, that an m-klass planet cant provide enugh whater (or a oceanic planet wont sell enugh fish) to fill up a single frighter.

[mortaneous]

Production quantities aside, what if each planet had supply/demand ratios for each product? (Normalized to Biodiverse rates ~ 1.00)
e.g. Oceanic - fish supply 5.00/demand 1.00
Biodiverse - fish supply 1.00/demand 1.00
Mining Base - fish supply 0.00/demand 0.05

...and those numbers were used as factors in an equation for detemining buy/sell price.

[targ collective]

That could work, but what if you change your mind and decide to take Seafood instead of Grains? You'll lose and lose big, so if you make a mistake that could be painful.

I discuss a similar system in great detail in the suggestions and feature requests forum, including solutions to most all of the storage and processing issues, as well as practically all of the logic required to make this work (perhaps truly all).

Look under 'detailed plans and suggestions for VS', and please, someone, anyone, reply before I explode. I wrote all that for it to be read, not to make my fingers sore.

[Melonhead]

A related problem with the economy (at least in Privateer--haven't played Vega Strike recently) is that the prices don't actually vary, despite the variable in units.csv that's supposed to make them random within a specified range. Instead, the variability is just subtracted from the price.

I've found the code in trading.py that looks like it should handle that, but the code doesn't seem to do anything. (I commented it out, and there was no change...hmm...) I tracked it down into the source code (with some help), finding references to GetPrice and SetPrice in unit_wrapper.cpp and images.h, but I can't find the code that actually calculates the price. Does anyone know where this code is located?

If I can get this working, we can use random price variability as a temporary solution until there's time for a more comprehensive rework.

[Melonhead]

There is also similar code in universe.py (thanks to safemode for finding it!). But, I don't understand why there would be two modules apparently trying to do the same thing.

[Silverain]

Ah, a subject near and dear to my..... OK, a subject that had me run screaming from these forums!

If you dig back about 1 1/2 years in these forums, there are some fairly lengthy threads to do with economy - have a look at them if you can.

[Melonhead]

Yeah, I was looking at those! That was what inspired me to start digging--a problem that we keep revisiting must be an interesting hunt. (Besides, I'm a terrible artist. )

[Silverain]

Actually, that brings up an interesting point.

It shouldn't be too hard to keep a tally of the "supply" and "demand" for types of cargo in python scripting or something else, and then adjust the prices according to the laws of economics...

Then, the base price/quantity specified in the CSV file would be the price under normal conditions of demand, but in some cases, those prices could increase.

Unfortunately, as you probably know, supply and demand is on more of a macro level, while your privateer character must be on the micro level (remember: not even the U.S. president has the ability to change prices on the market).

When you say "nearly sold out", realize that it's not easy to sell a store out of something yourseld, and even if you do, they will get restocked along with other stores in days, so it's not a big deal with price. This game must have artifically low stock intentionally to make it more interesting, so I don't think the rules of economics would apply too well.

Anyway it would be cool to have big news events (battles, short supply or high demand) affect stuff... I believe it already does effect some stuff

Just rereading :-

I've always been imagining that we (the player) are operating not in an economic vacuum, but around the edges of the economic system. That is, we fill in the gaps around the big business corporations.

From a purchasing perspective, we don't buy out ALL of the production of a location, but buy out the remaining production AFTER the big corporations have either bought - or contacted to buy/transport - most of the production. We therefore have little effect on the locations price.

Examples: Mining base. That base has already contacted to fill two x transporters to brim with y minerals, but it still has some y minerals left over; which is where we come in. If we buy 1,000s of y, they have already dealt in millions. If its food from an agri planet, that we can buy in the 10,000s/100,000s, big business is dealing in exponentially larger amounts.

From the selling point of view - our sales do not affect the HUGE demand that location has, big business does. We just get to take advantage of the gap.

This takes care of the macro/micro aspect of ace123's post. So, what does affect pricing? News. News articles provide temporary variations of demand and supply. Exactly how is what we have to determine (see previous threads for discussion on this).

[targ collective]

And what, precisely, is to stop you from forming a merchant organisation of your own/joining one as part of gameplay or by virtue of having a big ship/taking trade missions for aforementioned organisations in a big ship/joining one as part of the campaign?

You start out micro-scale, but half the fun (the part that isn't blowing things up) is pushing into the macro-scale. Why exactly should the player be limited to that in the long term? The whole open-ended concept and philosophy centres on freedom - trader or bounty hunter, fighter or bomber or cargo tug, there should be freedom there.

[Shissui]

@Silverain: There is a problem with the "small trader" logic.

I take my Clydesdale to an agri-world & fill up. The Agri-world will not offer me more than a pitiful 15k fish (not the 100,000 that you suggest.) So, I must (a) hack the supply on offer or, (b) use the buy/sell exploit to double their stock available (a lot of times) or, (c) hack my save file to give myself more fish. If I just went from one agriworld to the next, I would need to visit 7 million to 10 million planets to fill my Clydesdale.

Regardless of how I do it, when I finally get my hold full of fish, I go to a mining base to sell it. The mining base will then offer me full price & full profit for every fish in my hold. Keep in mind, that my hold (if empty) could contain an estimated 5 to 10 entire mining bases, so I have no idea where they plan to PUT all of these fish, let alone where the money to pay for it might come from.

My point is that, as an individual trader, I *can* effect the larger trade market.

[ace_garp]

1. Loop back

Imagine:
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
* {Planet} has 00 widgets @ 125 each. [I sell +1250]
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
. . . and so on.

Unless you also include a mechanism to prevent this loopback, there is no need to carry cargo at all. SO, you must first alter the engine so that sell price & buy price are different.

Consider the economics of transporting goods through space. Space transport is expensive (in terms of the resources involved), risky (there is little assurance that your goods will evade all the pirates and other hostiles) and unreliable. To base your economic model on modern container shipping or something similar would ignore these factors - a much better historical parallel would be the 16th century european sea trade with the far east and america. The risks and costs of transporting goods were so high that it was only used for goods that could not be obtained in any other way. The flip side of this was that the rewards for a succesfull voyage far exceeded those that could be obtained in almost any other way.

In VS terms what this means is that space transport would only make sense for goods that were not locally produced - it couldn't possibly be more economic to import goods from a different planet if those goods were manufactured locally in any meaningfull quantities. What this implies is that every location, planet, base etc should either be an importer or an exporter of a particular good - either it is produced locally and they want to sell it, or else it is not available locally and they want to buy it. By definition, you would expect the price of a good to be low at a location where it is produced, and high where it is in demand. In addition, and to finally address shissui's point about loopback, every location SHOULD have a different buy and sell price for each good, with the buy price higher than the sell price.

Example:

An agricultural planet exports grain, which a player can buy a unit of for 100. Its not realistic to expect to be able to sell grain to that planet, which is presumably awash with grain already,for the same price so the player may only be able to sell grain for 75.
Similarly the agricultural planet may import technology, so the player can sell a widget there for 100. Again though, if widgets aren't manufactured locally it isn't realistic to think that the farmers will be willing to sell the few widgets they have for the same price they paid for them, so the player may only be able to buy widgets at that planet for 125.

The price the player buys at should always be higher than the price a player sells at for a given location (in financial markets this is referred to as the bid-offer spread). The way the player makes money is by buying cheap at one location and selling higher at another location - the players profit is their reward for taking the risk and succesfully moving the goods from a place where they are in surplus to a place they are in demand.

In game terms the bid/offer spread could be implemented as a simple percentage, but obviously for the system to work locations would need to be classified as either importers or exporters of particular goods. This could be done in a very simple manner by just profiling locations, so agricultural planets will export foodstuffs and import technology, mining bases will export raw materials and import food, etc, etc.

[Silverain]

And what, precisely, is to stop you from forming a merchant organisation of your own/joining one as part of gameplay or by virtue of having a big ship/taking trade missions for aforementioned organisations in a big ship/joining one as part of the campaign?

You start out micro-scale, but half the fun (the part that isn't blowing things up) is pushing into the macro-scale. Why exactly should the player be limited to that in the long term? The whole open-ended concept and philosophy centres on freedom - trader or bounty hunter, fighter or bomber or cargo tug, there should be freedom there.

Nothing is stopping you, but you - the player - are sitting at that particular base, at that particular time, with one particular ship, with one particular sized cargo hold. You, at that particular time, are one local effect on the local economy.

Bear in mind, I was attempting to come up with the base rationale as to why we - the player - do not affect the overall market price in a local market... no matter what size cargo hold I have, the produce of the local market is exponentially larger, and already tied up by 10s/100s of other traders (NPCs of all scale) doing the same thing. I'm looking to avoid needing an overdeveloped economic model, with the requisit storage and processing overhead needed on a server (either your computer for local play, or a central server for MP).

I take my Clydesdale to an agri-world & fill up. The Agri-world will not offer me more than a pitiful 15k fish (not the 100,000 that you suggest.) So, I must (a) hack the supply on offer or, (b) use the buy/sell exploit to double their stock available (a lot of times) or, (c) hack my save file to give myself more fish. If I just went from one agriworld to the next, I would need to visit 7 million to 10 million planets to fill my Clydesdale.

Regardless of how I do it, when I finally get my hold full of fish, I go to a mining base to sell it. The mining base will then offer me full price & full profit for every fish in my hold. Keep in mind, that my hold (if empty) could contain an estimated 5 to 10 entire mining bases, so I have no idea where they plan to PUT all of these fish, let alone where the money to pay for it might come from.

My point is that, as an individual trader, I *can* effect the larger trade market.

I believe the reverse arguement. I don't suggest that what we - the player - are offered is the be all and end all supply of a good; only that it is the residue supply available to us, after the base has fulfilled its regular trade contracts. Example of meaning: A mining company of today has contracts to supply x number tonnes of ore each year, but produces x + y tonnes ( a bumper year ). It has a supply of y tonnes to offer on the open market, which allows the small trader (us in the game) to buy/sell for a profit. Granted, the mining company typically sells the surplus to the same customer, but the idea holds true.

For the game, as a small (ish) trader, yes, we should have to go to several planets to fill our hold - we live on the margins remember?

As to your sale side paragraph; yes, they offer us full price for everything in our holds. The assumption is not that we are filling their hold (because they regularly deal in 'residue' numbers less than our hold, but their holds are exponentially larger - we are just a drop in the ocean (space comparision here please?).

Of course, this opens the option for a bit of economic modelling play here. What if such bases were pre-determined to have a finite limit of demand? You would get a minigame within the minigame; today you don't get a car-transporter full of 100s (1000s?) of cars from Japan turning up at a Pacific Island which only wants 10 cars, its the smaller ships the provide this supply (for a higher price). Similarly, you wouldn't turn up at a small mining base with 10000 purchase capacity, with a Clydesdale carrying (err, what is their capacity these days? Did the balance get completed?) x cargo, since you only make the sale on 10000. Or, to go further, you could do this, because that base is one of several on your delivery route...

ace_garp, I'll look at your post next.

[Silverain]

1. Loop back

Imagine:
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
* {Planet} has 00 widgets @ 125 each. [I sell +1250]
* {Planet} has 10 widgets @ 100 each.
. . . and so on.

Unless you also include a mechanism to prevent this loopback, there is no need to carry cargo at all. SO, you must first alter the engine so that sell price & buy price are different.

Consider the economics of transporting goods through space. Space transport is expensive (in terms of the resources involved), risky (there is little assurance that your goods will evade all the pirates and other hostiles) and unreliable. To base your economic model on modern container shipping or something similar would ignore these factors - a much better historical parallel would be the 16th century european sea trade with the far east and america. The risks and costs of transporting goods were so high that it was only used for goods that could not be obtained in any other way. The flip side of this was that the rewards for a succesfull voyage far exceeded those that could be obtained in almost any other way.

In VS terms what this means is that space transport would only make sense for goods that were not locally produced - it couldn't possibly be more economic to import goods from a different planet if those goods were manufactured locally in any meaningfull quantities. What this implies is that every location, planet, base etc should either be an importer or an exporter of a particular good - either it is produced locally and they want to sell it, or else it is not available locally and they want to buy it. By definition, you would expect the price of a good to be low at a location where it is produced, and high where it is in demand. In addition, and to finally address shissui's point about loopback, every location SHOULD have a different buy and sell price for each good, with the buy price higher than the sell price.

Example:

An agricultural planet exports grain, which a player can buy a unit of for 100. Its not realistic to expect to be able to sell grain to that planet, which is presumably awash with grain already,for the same price so the player may only be able to sell grain for 75.
Similarly the agricultural planet may import technology, so the player can sell a widget there for 100. Again though, if widgets aren't manufactured locally it isn't realistic to think that the farmers will be willing to sell the few widgets they have for the same price they paid for them, so the player may only be able to buy widgets at that planet for 125.

The price the player buys at should always be higher than the price a player sells at for a given location (in financial markets this is referred to as the bid-offer spread). The way the player makes money is by buying cheap at one location and selling higher at another location - the players profit is their reward for taking the risk and succesfully moving the goods from a place where they are in surplus to a place they are in demand.

In game terms the bid/offer spread could be implemented as a simple percentage, but obviously for the system to work locations would need to be classified as either importers or exporters of particular goods. This could be done in a very simple manner by just profiling locations, so agricultural planets will export foodstuffs and import technology, mining bases will export raw materials and import food, etc, etc.

Firstly, to your first points about transport through space, bear in mind the shipping of today is the outgrowth of the shipping of yesteryear, just with improved economies and economies of scale. Who, really, manufactures cheap clothing and exports them to China? You have to differentiate your product from theirs to manage that (which is beyond the VS scope excepting basic, normal, luxury levels). Your arguement holds true even today; no one exports to a country that produces that good cheaply - and the VS economy is based on this idea - no arguements there.

I suppose here we would need to determine which paradigm VS fits in: the 16th century model where we are the ONLY/ONE OF FEW transporters, or a more modern day paradigm where we are one of many transporters (obviously, I subscribe to the latter - maybe not fully today's transport paradigm, but certainly favouring it).

As to the loopback, yes, we should be able to build in sell/buy differentiation. Alternatively, we can work it such that your 'purchase and sell orders' do not process UNTIL you exit the trade screen i.e. your orders are unfilled until that point, and you can cancel them up to that point of exit.

[Motorb1tch]

realism is a great thing. im always pro realsim. exept it cripples gamefun.
i think its important to think about this point... noone is motivated to earn money to buy a bigger ship if that ship is just useless and the only ship can actualy be filled with goods is the one you start with...


but maby there is another way to do this:

make the prices be affected by god and bad news so they rise and drop.
than, give players the option to "remote-buy" goods. i mean: one is in a system and orders goods in another system. lots of goods. the player have to pay instantly, but the goods will need some time to be in the stock so one can load em up. this wuld enable the player to buy large amounts of gods and put in some aditional risk as the price cand drop bevore he arrives and therefore he wuld make a bad deal... well, we all know: no risk, no fun... difficultys are making games interesting, not the save and easy money.
of cause, a max-demand wuld be needed non the less... no minigbase wuld buy a 10 jears-stockpile of food leaving no room to store the produced minerals...
this way, there wuld be aditional goals to reach, not only the one: "i get the goddart and blast all pirates" thing.

[prestidigitator]

There was an old Macintosh game called Escape Velocity that was basically a 2D version of Vega Strike. It had an amazing economy. Many of the suggestions on this thread were implemented in some fashion. I think VS would be greatly improved by implementing a system like this.

Here is a description of the way Escape Velocity's economic system worked:

• The price of a commodity at a port was influenced by several factors, including the type of planet/station, the number of units of that commodity currently available, and certain random factors.
• The random factors often appeared as news items you could view from anywhere. They gave anywhere from vague hints ("A local rebellion has been creating unrest in the Tiranus system," might imply that there is a high demand for medical supplies and illegal weapons there) to specific ones ("A drought on Uthena in the Tribec system has drastically increased the price of food," or, "A technological breakthrough has increased the production of luxury items on Utopia," meaning their price will be reduced).
• Different commodities had different price ranges, and when you traded in a port the system would tell you whether the price was in the very low, low, medium, high, or very high ranges (for example, food might be "very low" if a unit cost below 10 credits, "low" in the 10-15 range, "medium" in 15-20, "high" in 20-25, and "very high" above 25; illegal drugs might be "very low" if less than 50, "low" in the 50-70 range, etc.). These were basically hints to the player as to whether it might be good to buy or remember it as a place to sell; I believe the game also told you what you bought a set of commodities for, and it may have remembered what the general price range was for systems you had been to also (probably at the time you stopped there, with the understanding that it may have changed since).
• Buying in bulk was taken care of by the system telling you the price of the next unit of the commodity. However, it calculated each price based on the amount left, so if the price was listed as 5 credits but you bought 10 of them, it would cost you more than 50 credits total (e.g. it might cost 5+5+6+6+7+8+10+12+14+16=89). Selling worked the same, but in reverse (there was generally a small markdown for selling, but for example if there hadn't been you might have sold those 10 units back during the same visit for 16+14+12+10+8+7+6+6+5+5=89 credits). This could be annoying, yes, but eventually you got used to either buying one at a time, not caring, or getting a feel for how much prices would increase/decrease as you bought and sold so you knew how many to buy/sell at a time and such.

This kind of system would not have an unmanageable data demand. The amount of data could easily be managed by keeping a maximum number of random factors cached, only generating news items for systems within a certain number of jumps, only remembering the prices for a maximum number of systems visitied (e.g. the last 50 stops the player made), etc.