I may have suggested it ingame, but for the record, here it is in the suggestion forum.

= Auto economy =

== Manufacturing ==
Stations convert ore into components, and components into other components and end product. End product are things players purchase like ships and weapons. Each station is specialized, so that a single station by itself without outside trade, could only produce a very few end products from raw ore, which in turn would only support a very few viable ship loadouts, typically supporting at least one minimally viable combination for each of: combat, trade, and mining. If a station where to sell all of it's inventory, without being provided with more ore, it might pay it's best price for ore, but have no end product to sell. A player that wanted a particular end product might have to first find a way to provide the ore and components to the station, and then wait for the station to complete one or more manufacturing cycle(s), before the end product became available.

== Trade ==
High end products typically require specialized components, of which few stations can single handedly produce all of. Only Axia can produce AAP, but no single Axia station produces all of the components for the construction of an AAP, and trade between stations is required for many items.

Traders tend to get drawn into conflict areas, because conflict areas tend to sell all of their inventory. The various conflicts (hive, deneb, etc..) deplete end products, and the rest of the galaxy ships recourses to the depleted stations. Profits are highest where demand is highest. Even ship repairs deplete resources. Some recourses become so scares that local traders might not be willing to even sell to the stations. They may hold a private stock and sell it on a private market. If you really want to purchase that X-1, you may have to obtain the ultra micro thrust exchanger, which would be available at the station 4 systems over, if only they had micro rivets... But it just so happens that player x has one of these parts, for the right price...

== Conflict Cycle ==
Many stations actively seek to promote the conflict cycle. Destroy the hive, to clear the sectors for mining, to get more ore to build more stuff to sell to players to go kill the hive...

Some of these conflicts may be fueled by players. Miners need someone to clear out the hive from their desired mining spot, etc...

== Production Distribution ==
The production capabilities of stations would not necessarily be distributed at random, but would have developed with the original exploration and expansion of the galaxy, with the oldest station being able to produce the most basic products, and more advanced production radiating outward from core production centers, but also often somewhat dependent on basic products from those core production centers.

== Credits ==
Credits are just a symbolic representation of existing inventory. And just because you have credits doesn't mean that the inventory you wish to exist, does exist, in the form and at the place you wish it to exist, unless you went out of your way to arrange it that way. If a station is fresh out of AAP, you might have fetch the needed items to get those AAP produced. On the up side, if you are willing to stock and transport AAP, there could be good markets where stations would pay top credits for AAP, because they know that people will buy them.

== Player Driven Infrastructure ==
There could also be player based infrastructure put in place to help support this type of economy. If you made stations do mostly just production, and left buying and selling to players, through a consignment method, or other interfaces where a player did not have to be online to support the market, then market prices would be decided by player supply and demand.

== Hive interference ==
There could also be conflict infrastructure put in place, so that any area that is not patrolled and maintained would develop pesky hive problems, blocking mining and trade routes.

== Summary ==
This type of system could support and encourage enormous amounts of mining, trade, and conflict. AAP might be available for sales in remote areas, but at such a premium, that unless you in some significant way helped support the economy, you would not be able to afford them. This means that someone will have to mine and trade, or no one will be able to afford to fight. Heaven forbid that conflicts evolve over mining and trading, to the point that you have to mine ore in order to support production of combat equipment in order to fight over mining spots...

Roda has exactly the right concept, though the degree to which automated trade will facilitate the system functioning sans player involvement is the tricky bit.

For simplicity of populating automated trade, I suggest allowing players to seed the trade routes, with bots playing copy cat for as long as it makes economic sense for them to do so.

Well thought out. +1

+1

Despite i really doubt that this will ever get implemented, unfortunely...

I went one better and sent Inc a prototype server that would accomodate this but my time is limited and Inc has been silent on the overall economy so far. I dont know if the economy is too far down the list or Inc has decided to stick with the current one. Economic theory is kind of a bore if your not really interested in it...

Either way it was kinda fun for me to code it and I may continue to actually coding a cleaner version....

I like the concept.

If this is in Roda's scenarios, I missed it, but I would have players who do the work of supplying the station with the resources maintain first option on the finished product(since I assume that by production cycle that Roda means something more than the insta majik production we have now), else be handsomely compensated for their efforts.

I touched on the subject fluffy. see == Player Driven Infrastructure ==

Imagine that I showed up at a depleted station.

I see that the station can produce vulture mkIII, and I expect that it would sell well here, so I ship in the needed parts and build several, and place them for sale at the station.

I shipped in too many of part x, so I put these up for sale.

I can see where having extra of part y would be nice, so I offer a contract for some more.

Although I had to be online and active to get all this setup, Once it is done, I can go offline. Other players can come and buy the stuff I put up for sale. Players can see my offer to ship parts in for me, and the accept the contract, ship the parts in, and get paid. The parts will be waiting for me in my inventory when I log in.

Bots will be monitoring the shipping contract offers. But there will only be a limited amount of bot investment credits available, so bots will target the most profitable contracts first. There will probable not be enough bot credits to finance servicing all routes. I can make a delivery contract offer, at the station of origin, where I finance the parts, the cost of the ship, etc, basically assuming all the risks.

Bots will tend to pick safer profits, predominantly targeting delivery contracts, while players will pick profits that leverage their more advanced navigational skills, predominantly targeting bulk purchase contracts.

When I successfully sell a few of the vulture mkIII, but then fail to restock them, bots start to consider if they should build some, and place them for sale, as a sort of copy cat business tactic.

I really hope that all of this makes it in game.

So that you can find a way to tank it as a member of the BLM.

What PvP player would not be totally angry, however, when his favorite grey space station doesn't have what he needs because he's been pirating players and convoys?

I do like this concept, although I feel that the entire convoy system needs to be tied into it. Let's face it -- if VO has tons of players, working the economy, this works. If not...a lot of us are moving coolant, etc. around the galaxy just to get our free EC-89. For that matter, do you know anyone who has ever shipped a supply of Food, Purified Water or ordinary Aquean Ore?

So the convoys from one station to another should actually be transporting the things that other station needs and vice versa. Not, as I scanned in one trident on an occasion, Itani Education Disks.

Trust me, those Itani need all the education they can get.

I think a fully dynamic simulated economy would improve this game far more than just about anything else (capships, faction changes, ship/weapon rebalancing) under serious consideration.

Cranky:

It is true that a pirate might inadvertently effectively siege the very station(s) that he was dependent on for supplies. The irony...heh

zak:

We have a simulated economy. What I am proposing is a real economy. A simulation will always suffer at the hands of imperfect formulas and simulations. A real economy is what it is, by the nature of what it is.

+99

Also, dev input to the thread would be appreciated :-)

Ricker

There are historical newsposts, newsletter and forum posts of mine that cover every fundamental point on this suggestion, so.. yeah. I'm glad to hear you all mostly like it, since we've been working on it for five years now. The fact that people think otherwise certainly illustrates the need for a visible trac system to remind everyone of what we're intending to do. I've been pretty ****ing far from "silent on the overall economy so far", but I take full responsibility for not putting my commentary all in one cohesive place where everyone can peruse it easily and in depth, which is really what's needed (the trac).

Of course, implementing it is a different matter, and requires stability of a number of individual mechanics, as well as reliable means of artificially altering the system as it gets out of whack (usually by artificially boosting production to seed certain regions). That's the "tricky bit" that Lecter references.

The whole reason for the development of the current convoy system was to support this. The convoys already operate as part of a supply+demand "shadow economy" that doesn't impact the "real" one, but was intended to provide data about how those "virtual trades" would affect things. It's simplified of course, as the manufacturing tree is out of date and incomplete.

The creation of a "simulator" or a series of general ideas like those above are the easy part. Automated systems are theoretically wonderful, they provide more dynamic reactions and save you from work.. except when they go horribly haywire. Or, as I wrote in my newspost, entitled "Economies, Battles, Oh My!" on Jan 23rd, 2009:

Now some of you may say something like "But what about the fully dynamic system? Where supply and manufacturing and demand are all tied together?".. this is still our long-term goal. The frightening thing about a completely dynamic system, for a game designer, is the degree to which it may get out of hand. Now any dynamic system we create will of course have bounds, but these bounds have to be defined at some sane level to make sure the economy doesn't oscillate too wildly, but also provides the desired gameplay ramifications. Determining this "sane level" is basically what I'm doing now. I will hand-tune a lot of the static economy, such that we can use this data to implement a really solid fully-dynamic economy. The geography of the economy, as it impacts gameplay and is viewed by the lens of in-game galactic politics, is really the important factor to tune here. This will become especially true as we expand on the resources available to mine, the usages of the minerals and ores (in Manfacturing aka crafting), their contentious locations and the impact that all this has on the greater "War" between the Itani/Serco, as well as minor "hotspot" conflicts between corporations or the Hive. Thus, the bounds have to be set intelligently to take all this into account.. that we want people to be able to sell a lot of "Widget X" at deep grayspace stations, to push those particular kinds of lucrative routes, and that therefore that station's consumption must be artificially higher.

Finding the right balances of production and consumption to drive the necessary activity, and having it react dynamically to population density (players online) is not simple. This is why I promised to hand-balance the economic over, theoretically, last year (then something really crappy happened and threw a giant wrench into my works, and all that had a big priority drop). We need the right ballpark numbers that drive the desired geographical gameplay, and then we can make the dynamic model fit it fairly easily, and allow more "unscripted" changes (blockades, etc) with the ability to tweak if it has undesired ramifications (newbie sectors, capitols must always have infinite production of certain types, etc). I'm still trying to create that guideline ballpark, but I'm also pursuing a bunch of other things designed to keep us in business long enough to develop a.. cool economy, and all that's tied to it.

Anyway, not everything I've had planned all these years is in-line with Roda's proposal. For instance, "Production Distribution" will basically be the reverse of what he states, mirroring something closer to the balance of trade between the new world (Americas) and the old (Europe) during the 1600s. Most refined goods will tend to come from the inner systems. More unrefined from the outer.

And yes, a big part of the reason why the dynamic hive was created, was to put pressure on production at stations due to competition for raw materials, creating a dynamic economic/survival driven conflict scenario. But I've written about that like.. at least five or ten times, and apparently no one remembers it. <sigh>.

But generally speaking, the economy is the fundamental underpinning of my planned Endgame. And I sincerely look forward to the day, as I'm sure everyone else does, when I can just post a single link to a Trac design wiki to answer this kind of thing.

Of course, once a dynamic economy is implemented, the very first thing a bunch of us vets will try to do is make it go horribly haywire. We'll probably start small, but making a whole system curl up and die would pretty much be the greatest thing ever.

Yes, definitely. That's a big part of why I need to do the stuff mentioned.

And generally, I want you to be able to make it haywire, to some extent. Things like blockading stations and driving up prices or reducing produced goods.. that's interesting stuff, and arguably the whole point. I just don't want it to be so widespread or damaging to the overall game that it becomes.. bad. There have to be some automated checks and balances. And we need a relative gauge on a starting point that meets the desired economic gameplay goals (lucrative trading in dangerous areas, less so elsewhere, etc). It's much easier to tune consumption/production rates, and later to auto-tune them by population with added/reduced NPCs and the like, if you have some ballpark numbers to start with.. even if it's relative, rather than absolute, values.

incarnate:

I do not think you understand how fundamentally different our approaches are to an economy.

You are attempting to create a dynamic, balanced, self sustaining, auto correcting simulated economy. A task of unrealistic proportions.

I am suggesting a real economy. A player driven economy is not self correcting. It is player corrected. In a player driven economy, the devs concerns themselves with resource location and extraction, and manufacturing details. The supply side of the equation. The players supply both the demand, and the servicing of the demand. Bots are limited to simple copy cat tactics. If it worked for a player, but players have since neglected the opportunity, then bots can fill in. But the economy is never dependent on bots. Any part of the economy that fails represents an opportunity to players.

Their may always be a need for a free ship and free mining beam, but beyond this, just about everything else can be represented by player selected manufacturing and distribution.

In some sense, you, as a dev, are playing a game, that many players would rather play for themselves. You are deciding manufacturing capacities, trade routes, etc. All this can be considered a game unto itself. You are being greedy. Share. Do the parts, as a dev, that can not or should not be realistically entrusted to players, and then come and play the game with us.

should not be realistically entrusted to players

And there's the point of contention.

Exactly. As Dr. Lecter points out earlier, lots of people would look forward to being "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo." Nevertheless, if that happens all the time, you can't gamble at Monte Carlo anymore and many people have no fun for the sake of one person who had a whole lot of fun.

I, therefore, look forward to the idea of the economy self-correcting through NPC convoys. If convoys are getting blown up, then they get sent with more support ships, or sent as larger convoys, etc.

But to expect that the economy would be *totally* player driven? That leads to more of what we have now -- a small group of hard core fans that have a lot of fun; others without the ability to create their own immersive RP, less so.