Noob here. I know that missions will take me across borders but...

See there seem to be two groups of people, those who go into the contested zones or beg other to come out there for a fight, and all the people don't cross unless they have to.

As a new player I don't feel there is any real benefit for me to _want_ to cross. If I take a mission that will take me there I could lose a ship, sure, so best take a ship I don't care if I loose.

Consider a slightly different model than exists now... What if manufactured goods from other polities automatically got a multiplier at sale. Toss in an Identify Friend or Foe spoofer (like the cargo content spoofer). Effectiveness of spoofing could be tied to level and relative lack of weaponry and accumulated scan time. Now some noob, or enterprising guy has a reason to outfit a small fast craft to "slip through" to another polity for the occasional big-ticket run. A guy who "always does it" becomes familiar and easy to spot. Just as regular sales lower the sale price for regular good, contraband goods would cool off their _multiplier_ at stations so that such runs have a sharply diminishing return. If you try to sell at a station where the multiplier reaches unity you can get _busted_ and lose the cargo, your ship, or varying degrees of cash.

Double-plus this for running weapons.

Now you can have a "trading underclass" who live and die by situational and product diversity.

You don't need to add any sort of license scale for this, it would all come under trading.

This then also creates a good reason for a new class of add-ons for things like spoofing IFF in a large add, and maybe shield generators in the small adds, the kind of things that would really make a border runner instead of a warship.

Check forums and read what other people suggest, because this is very old suggestion..

* Draft: Border Patrol and Contraband
* New items, new twist on old items, smuggling, border patrols and consequences

And the ever-requested re-distribution of items, with more unique or rare items, sparsingly distributed.and with prices rising as far from where it is produced.

As a quick example, let's say that Deneb Rum is sold for 100c.
Then, in GR and Eo it should worth 101c. But in Edras or Verasi it should worth at least 160c, and some stations in Jallik or Pelatus should pay 200c...

And even more, banned/forbidden items shoudl worth a lot more for small quantities, tanking price exponentially as quantity grows above 50 units/day. Indeed, all price drops should not be linear, but with ~20 units steps. But this is another topic...

An old classic... I'm sure it'll happen, eventually.

But you see it doesn't have to be _anywhere_ near that complex. There is no need for "rare items" at all.

Every station would have a "hunger for exotic goods", or in the alternate a "hunger for goods from (each foregn polity); total cost to program/store is one floating point number. Normal value is from 1.0 to 10.0 (subject to game balance tuning). Any existing item that is "locally produced" would have its polity of origin (cost one enum value, e.g. "Itani"==2 etc).

Purchasing is completely unaffected, but the inventory would be "Consumer Elerctonics (Itani)" and you don't even have to _show_ that value in the messages (it's kinda funnier if you don't in some ways).

When you sell goods, if the polity of sale does-not-equal the polity of the goods, the sale price is multiplied by the hunger factor and then the hunger is reduced (so heat-up and cool-down logic used here).

That alone makes cross-polity piracy and border crossing worth the effort.

Additionally, in a phase two if the scheme catches on, there could be ramifications for selling at a station if the hunger is too low; e.g. the black market is becoming too common and local authorities are cracking down (or wanting a cut in the gray sectors).

Once you start down that road then you can have "letters of marquis" for a pirate that let him sell cross-polity goods without penalty because he is "a licensed pirate" not a "smuggler".

The addition of border-runner gear (shields, speed boosters, cloaks) can be put off till the value of the idea pans out, and can be dropped in peacemeal. Speed bosters being easy, shields being harder as they would basically be self-target-only repair beams, and cloaks maybe being prohibitive since that identity logic is probably central to some pretty sophisticated logical tidbits (I cannot estimate since the game is closed-source)

But you can strip out all that advanced stuff for the first run: A multiplier the buy/sell logic, a heat/cool multiplier just like the price change thing in the sell price calculaiton, and, by my count, two bits in the commodity data structure, are the full cost of adding the economic incentive to cross the border.

In terms of code complexity the basic system adds virtually no overhead and changes the user interface not-at-all. Its only slightly more complex than the difference between fresh-mined ore and commodity bought ore.

In terms of providing motive and getting the action along the borders to be more interesting.

(I _am_ an experienced programmer, and I go back to D&D in the 70s for gaming experience, _and_ I am a nicely lazy coder who doesn't like unnecessary bloat. The alpha-implementation of this recommendation is really quite trivial. Game balance questions are larger but so far seem well wort the effort.)

"shields being harder as they would basically be self-target-only repair beams"

Um, no, those wouldn't be shields, those would be self-repair systems. VO already has proper energy shields, they just aren't available in non-capital ships.

But yeah, more long distance trade incentive would be nice.

Contraband, smuggling, border patrols and inspections are all great ideas that would make the game more interesting. But we really need a non-silly faction standing system first or they just won't work.

"...any long distance trade incentive would be nice."

Fixed that for ya.

But we really need a non-silly faction standing system first or they just won't work.

+1

I agree we need a fixes on Faction system... but from my point-of-view, it just requires IFF to be aware of Guild affiliation, and include BAN for traitors.

Despite that, contraband would work fine without any faction fix. Simple, Border Guards close in, inspect and depending on cargo/spoofer/blocker the pilot is authorized or not. No faction involved.

Also, since all systems produces mostly everything, the RARE items, and locally forbidden ones, should have a great price.

Better would have a major items redistribution around the universe, with every system not producing many things and paying better from them.

Simple and quick example: Bractus should produce no food. So they pay 500c for a food crate, sold in Dau per 50c and 150c in Pelatus.

Indeed, very few items should be produced in Grayspace, and only those items not produced in any nation space, to foster trade. And every non-locally produced items should pay at least twice its value in nation space...

"Bractus should produce no food."

It is a Very Bad Idea for an entire system to rely entirely on other systems for the absolute basics such as food, water, and air. Relying on them for luxury food and drink is another story, but each system should be capable of producing the bare minimums needed for human life. Too much potential for catastrophe otherwise.

Guild IFF has nothing to do with fixing the faction standing system, Alloh.

Alloh is .. Holla

Stay on Target, Red Leader.... Stay on target....

I make a simple suggestion and everybody is talking about a complete rewrite of the economy and the addition of a whole bunch of stuff.

Right now the inter-player combat stuff is like a game of Street Fighter, I keep seeing people all "meet me in sector X for combat", the bulk of the rest of the people are puttering around their inside their own polity doing trading and mining. This means there are two communities largely divided by a common platform. There needs to be a reason for the "don't want to fight" people and the "let us duke it out" people to often be in the same places.

Any correction for this has to influence the "individual story-lines" of the characters in a constructive way. To that end there is no value to encouraging long-distance trade within the polities. A guy flying form Eo to Divinia isn't really daring much, but a guy running from Jallik to Verasi is stirring a pot indeed.

The game really _doesn't_ need to get all War of Warcraft with a bazillion special objects; bit if it did they would only be bits of text in quests. The game is about moving through space, gaining fortune and experience.

So having "Power Converters (Serco)" to sell in UTI is simple enough to get things moving.

Just because you can't have it all (gards, customs, "Pyronis Rum", or a plus seven sword of orc slaying) is no reason to hold up, or even conflate, this simple suggestion with those dreams of infinite complexity.

So no, I am not re-making the old "lets have special objects" suggestion, I am not making the "things from more distant ports should be more valuable" suggestion, I am making the epically simpler suggestion "foreign goods are always at a premium, and that would be easy to do, and since it would bring people across the borders it would improve the game" suggestion.

If the border running proves popular and interesting _then_ the technological support items can start showing up by ones and twos just IRL.

I am suggesting _evolution_ not _revolution_ in the game play.

"things from more distant ports should be more valuable"
"foreign goods are always at a premium..."

Kinda the same idea... but +1 as a quick fix until the economy is fixed.

Back in OP, limited mode
+1 to small changes to make "foreign items" more valuable as a quick improvement.

Keep that horse piss that serco call "Ale" at low price elsewhere, and increase purchase prices for unique/rare items, as Deneb Rum, Eo Crystals, Sedina Chocs(should worth over 20Kc inside nations)

Resuming open mode:
-Make capital stations consume more rare items, and *Spices, Beverages, so its "low reserve list" only have exotic items from abroad.
-while doing that, add the regular and hefty price tags to every item in station's desired list, highlight those more rare and most profitable ones... (deserves own topic)

Distant goods and foreign goods are radically different concepts. Try stepping from Hong Kong to China with certain things. Try taking contraband from South to North Korea. East vs West Berlin in the seventies is another example of borders being more significant than any kind of distance. In the alternate, I live in Seattle Washington, and get stuff from New York with no particular difficulty and at no significant additional expense.

There is zero need to invent "unique" or "rare" items at this point. It is sufficient to have all the normal things in the "locally produced" category retain a source. There is no reason that such goods would need to be taken to "Capital" stations. Everywhere there are people there is money there is need.

Remember that the goal, as far as the game is concerned, is to get the money and the people to cross out of their safe places.

Seriously, keep is simple. This is _not_ about making stations more interesting, its entirely about making _space_ more interesting.

Now _eventually_ the economy could evolve. There could be "armored car" ships and stockpiles of super unique goods etc. But that eventuality is a horrific distance in time and code from the current architecture. Unique and Rare are very pokimon-meets-WoW ideas, and they are not ideas that are within an order of magnitude of the current code base. That is why the previous million iterations of that suggestion sit stewing in the suggestion archives.

Let's not discourage the devs implementing _this_ suggestion by conflating it with those old ones.

How bout this...

Locally produced goods (which should comprise most of the current items, inducing travel) are limited to certain areas of nation space and command a price based on initial cost/distance from production.

Nationally produced items for the Serco and Itani would be illegal to bring across their borders, thus driving up demand, thus driving up price. Which SHOULD encourage distant trade. UIT produced items would still fetch a high price but lower than Serco or Itani goods due to the non-enemy status and the same would hold true for Serco and Itani items sold in UIT space.

Items produced and bought from Gray Space stations not represented in National space would fetch a much higher price due to stations non affiliation/distance/danger/illegality.

Check out this post too... I think its in step with what you're getting at...

Distribution of goods: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/24807

"Nationally produced items for the Serco and Itani would be illegal to bring across their borders..."

I'm not sure how much the money is really pivotal to the gameplay experience of the game. As a noob I accumulated 700,000 or more in cash in 20 hours of play while engaged in no PV etc.

In terms of "illegal" etc, its fairly immaterial.

In terms of any station having what I described as a "hunger for" stuff from different polities, that should indeed be influenced by the theoretical danger/risk to the player of engaging in the trade.

In terms of "Nationally Produced" and "Distance from Production", that is unnecessarily complex. There are rednecks and collectors of all sorts of goods all over the world. Substitute universe for world in game terms.

The "choke points" of the limited borders created by the map and the wormholes already does most of the work, so most of the station side computation is unnecessary.

In my proposal the "milk run" stations will be used up pretty aggressively.

Your counter makes it more clear to me that there needs to be a way to encourage deeper penetration into foreign polities. That is there is a need to have a way encourage the trader into going deeper into unsafe territory travel on the buying end of the trip.

Implicit in your counter is the idea that the hunger value for different source polities should be different. Also implicit on your counter is that the penalty for selling in an over-used station would be different for different origins (e.g. just normal prices for X->gray or gray->X, serious penalties or losses for S->I transactions). All this can be done with simple table-based math.

You would already get this if the station heat-up (loss of hunger) were fairly steep. A "smart trader" is going to want to carry goods in both directions so they are going to quickly punk-out nearby stations (e.g. that are in border sectors).

The time of sale sanction if the hunger gets too low (up to and including loss of money or ships) will cause the stirring of the pot rather a lot.

Keeping in mind that some goods in the commerce tab are already flagged as "locally produced" there is little need to mess with that at all (assuming I am not missing something in the economic model). That limits the origin goods to a reasonable subset, The return trade will cause the trader to have to switch-up his source stations or risk half the journey for no real return on the danger.

Finally, _maybe_ I wouldn't tell the seller what the current hunger is until the sale. The trader should know his market.

For the _first_ version _not_ limiting the target goods beyond "was 'locally produced' at the site of purchase" is plenty.

The IRL comparison here is that things like "consumer electronics" and "power converters" and whatnot do vary by origin. And even if they don't, there are fools who will buy "premium HDMI cables" from Monster... 8-) And there are far more Monster Cable suckers than there are people wanting a bottle of 1968 Dom. The trading model of the game is based on bulk goods and an unseen mass of millions at each station.

Clearly there will need to be some tweaking of the system, especially in the first few weeks.

Clearly as well, this approach could evolve into having rare goods etc.

In an intermediate, there could be one or more fake-chat black market chat channels where the game would announce decaying bounties for specific goods. You know, "Bob The Trader at station blarg in sector foo, will pay $XXXXX for up to NNN units of Itani spices delivered within XXX minutes." Of course pirates and partisans might well be monitoring those channels as well to catch Itani people showing up in the non-itany space to dock with that very station. Also there could be Itani partisans rushing to the stations that "locally produce" spices.

Starting with the simple hunger plus cooling plus source model is mathematically simple and easily sets up underlying conditions for ever-expanding incremental possibilities.

P.S. the reason that the referenced link wasn't terribly informative is that they were talking about ship and weapon loadout availability. I am (primarily) talking about commodities. The rewards may _seem_ disproportional at first, but we are trying to make it worth the while of the traders and grinders to venture out of their comfort zones.

I am also trying to turn two parallel paradigms in terms of ship loadout etc into a triangle. Once there really is commerce across the boundaries then there becomes a reason for, say, some pirates to have a large cargo scow or four in a sector along with their combat vessels to pick up the goods en-bulk.

So not just shooters and "miners or traders", but also "runners" and "scavengers" come up as real participation roles. And then gear for same... and on it grows.