safemode wrote:lee wrote:
By limiting the range, it becomes impossible to fulfill demands for which there are no sources within the range. Same is for surpluses.
Privateers can still make multi-system distance trades, the information is still dumped to dynamic news when prices fall or rise over a thresh-hold (local supply and demand can't deal)
Oh, ok, I was thinking the news are for the player and not considered by NPCs.
You need to consider the cargo that is supposed to arrive in determining the demands.
demand is dictated by need + time not having it. Since the source of the goods is never known before it actually gets there, you have no "supposed to" variable to look at.
Yep, I got confused. The requests you use are not static and don't pile up, so the only thing to go by is what is actually there.
The merchant guild is largely neutral, older than most factions, highly organized and has the funds and means to defend and build their centers. They could be considered as stable places where business can be conducted outside of the chaos of space.
Well, everyone would hate them because everyone would depend way too much on them. For a relatively short time, they might become pretty powerful, but not for long.
It may sound like it's giving up a lot of freedom, but there are great advantages in dealing with the commerce center.
Sure there are, but that doesn't mean that they would be so extremely powerful. They could offer very useful services, but they wouldn't be the only ones for most of them.
also, bases dont have ships they own. Not currently. The idea that the commerce center would have some is a new idea, and is limited in function and number.
They should have ships, as much as they need and can afford.
not being able to sell something in order to buy what you need, is a failed economy.
You can't sell what you don't have.
Some places might not want to trade with some others, like when their factions are enemies to each other.
Hence the commerce center.
The commerce center doesn't change the origin or destination of the cargo. The seller/buyer might have requirements about the destination/origin of the cargo.
This is dynamic news, only it's done when the situations become such a priority that it makes the news.
Not really, the news are just news. They are not so easy to integrate into a trading computer/interface that helps the player to make decisions.
You want > 12000 units, then you want each one pushing requests into a list that each one reads and parses comparing what is demanded with what it has and determining how far it would have to travel to make the trade and what price is set to see if it is profitable to do so depending on risk involved.
Yes, and I'm even going further: You'll have to keep track of the cargo so that the weapons I manufacture are not being sold to my enemies --- and to be able to tell if a paracontainer needs to be repacked.
Do you plan on a turn based game?
I'm just awfully tired of all the poor economy and AI simulations that are only pretending things to make players believe that they simulate an economy or play by the same rules the player does. They are no fun anymore once you find out that they are skipping too many things or even cheat to make it easier for the programmers.
The FPS display in VS is jumping between 125 and 250; top is confused about CPU load (between 24 and 105% while flying on autopilot, but min 50% idle on both cores at the same time) and the graphics card is outdated. Of those frames, I can see 50 at best, probably less.
No, don't make it slower. But make an awesome economy simulation that does actually simulate and not just pretends to.
The list of requests would be available during flight.
By the time you got close enough to communicate directly, you'd not be worse off just docking and finding out you got beaten there by some other trader.
If I can see the list while flying, I can make decisions while flying and don't need to waste a lot of time docking at every station in every system to find out their prices and to compare them.
You're looking at the fact that there is no news during flight thus a trader can get screwed if they had been in-transit when situations changed as a bad thing. I see it as a feature.
It's not only news. Actually, I never read the news. It's the prices of the places in the current system I want to see while flying, and it would be the list of requests I would want to see. I see it as annoying, not as a feature, that I can't see the prices --- and as something that hopefully will be implemented soon. People fly around in spaceships, but they are unable to communicate cargo lists? That doesn't make much sense.
Besides, it is something you can give the players to do while flying. If they can read news, make an analysis of the market, develop their trading strategies and give orders to the other ships and stations they own, they won't be bored during flight anymore.
A freighter would be dealing with quantities of goods that are large enough such that if any other trader was making trades while the freighter was en-route, it wouldn't matter.
Huh?
Either the freighter is controlled by an NPC, or the commerce center of a given system.
What about the player?
If a privateer beats it to a base with their own freighter and plans on bypassing the commerce center, the merchant guild looks unfavorably on them.
If they'd do that, I'd start shooting down all the commerce centers and their ships I can find once I could afford the fleet I'd need for that --- either that, or take away their business so that they run out of money and have to abandon their stations.
Basically, i dont want to think about making such large organizations with such vast funds, knit pick on meaningless differences in some prices of a single trade. So long as the net amount of money is positive, why would it care?
Why would it not? Their purpose is to make profits, and as you describe them, they would be the most powerful organization in the universe which means that they could do whatever they want.
You don't want to pay their prices? Ok, you don't get your cargo and you're out of business. You want more for what you have to sell? Well, you can either sell it for the price they dictate or go out of business. You have been elected president of your faction? Too bad that they don't like you and that there's nothing you could do against your faction being denied all trade. You need to repair your ship? No chance, the merchant guild looks unfavorably on you so that no ship dealer would sell you parts or repairs because he'd be out of business immediately if he did. You don't want to work for them? Ok, but see to it that your family can hide from them on some uninhabitable gas giant and hope that they will never be found.
They would care: To maximize their profits and to keep their power. They are not at all like your friendly walmart --- walmart has competitors, but they don't.
Commerce Centers are the walmarts of the universe. Yea, sometimes they do things really cheap (much cheaper than they could get away with), but they're doing it so many damn times more than anyone else can do, that it doesn't matter. They are still the richest in the universe.
You don't become the richest in the universe by giving away things for free when you don't have to. And they don't have to. They are greedy bastards.
Not that commerce centers weren't useful: If you want to use paracontainers, it's likely that not every place is able to handle them. Not many could do that. Each of the detachable paracontainers of an Ox is too large to be squeezed into the docking bay of a mining base, and mining bases don't exactly have the capacity to handle the 221000 containers an Ox carries. They'd charge you for their service, and they'd charge a lot. But that doesn't mean that there weren't as many other places to handle such freighters that are not owned by the merchant guild as there are places owned by them.
If you had to run a faction, could you allow another "sort-of faction" to be in total control of the economy of all factions? You couldn't. Soon there were no factions but the merchant guild.
Maybe the merchant guild _would_ be a faction. They could hold a tight grip on a couple unlucky systems and participate in the trade in others, but that's it.
We have to dumb down the process to an extremely limited set of variables that can scale well and doesn't require much time.
And the result is just another stupid and boring simulation that pretends rather than that it simulates.
All we care about is that everyone has the ability to remain profitable to some level.
What do you need a "simulation" for then? Trade is already profitable for the player, and it doesn't matter for NPCs.
Finally, we technically have no means for interstellar communication.
Sure you have, just place satellites at each end of each wormhole, have them record communications and transmit recorded communications and then change places. It would take time, but it's better than nothing or relying on ships to eventually fly through a wormhole. Maybe you can even transmit through the wormhole ...
We rely on ships physically transporting news from one system to the next, and the idea of news within a system is still a bit shady, but we ignore the physical limitations of the speed of information within a system.
If prices change like every 10 or 15 minutes, intra-system speed should be sufficient. Even with delays, it's way better than nothing. Your ships computer would watch the prices and start showing you the development once the first update has been received. You could still be off, but that makes it more interesting.
The idea of information being only available at the base has a little to do with "speed of information" and a little to do with the merchant guild controlling how this information gets distributed. They're neutral, but they're not about to let themselves get phased out of existance.
Obviously, they are a dangerous enemy. They control all information and tell people what to think and to do.
That doesn't sound like a universe that's fun to visit. It might be fun if there was a plot you could play that leads to the extinction of the evil merchant guild, or better, the extinction of the evil merchant guild could be a possible goal to achieve for the player.
One could probably imagine a means for looking up info on bases within your own faction, bypassing the merchant guild. but such trading likely wont be nearly as profitable.
Maybe it's a good idea to set up production and consumption before designing ways to trade. It would allow to figure out how much cargo needs to be moved; and that would make it easier to think about ways how to move that cargo.