Damn! Now I'm starting to understand. Probably what's happening here is that Mamiya Otaru or someone after him indeed wanted to control prices and availabilities of individual items at every base.
My apologies. I totally assumed that prices were controlled by item (filename) at every base by the engine; didn't even occur to me that "category" in the cargo columns might actually mean what it does.
I think I'm going to take a step to the
right and relax the price controls, then.
EDIT:
Well, being that VS only allows to specify prices per-category, then we need a way to have hidden categories, or a separate way to control what categories are shown versus the ones that control prices.
We've asked before to be just rid of categories on the interface, but never get it. It can't be
that difficult...
If the VS engine only allows specifying prices per category, then PU needs a lot of categories; but that should not imply that we MUST
see those categories in the buy and sell interface.
The problem is that PU players are sick of clicking on category folders; and I am too. Why does it have to be this way? This is probably the most recurrent complaint after the AI. Just wasting the player's time; and one of these days someone's going to sue us for causing them carpal tunnel syndrome...
We NEED to define categories for like basic-to-advanced repair robots, for example; because advanced repair bots should only be available at places like Perry and New Detroit.
But that shouldn't IMPLY that those categories ought to be on the player's face all the time.
In fact, I don't see why we should have ANY categories showing in the commodities interface.
I'd be infinitely happier with just a plain, linear list of items.
Could we please get some attention to this issue? I've asked many times how to be rid of the categories, but now
I understand why everything breaks every time we try. We need to be able to control prices and availabilities; what
we don't need is a gazillion folders to click on.