Bankrupting or destabilizing planets?

[imipak]

Warning: Seriously twisted idea

In theory, it would be possible to ship enough goods of a given kind to a planet to completely wreck havoc with its stability and/or economy. This would be extremely rare and could not occur accidentally. I'm picturing three possible contingencies of this kind:

1) You sell enough highly valued goods that you significantly disrupt the economy and deplete the planet of monetary reserves. (Game mechanics: If the planet's population is P and Gross Planetary Productivity is G, you sell more than some given fraction of P in a single given item category, where the net value is more than some given fraction of G.)

2) You sell enough disruptive goods that you significantly disrupt the functioning of the planet or paralyze it completely. (Game mechanics: If the planet's population is P, you sell some fairly large fraction of P in a single category of illegal items.)

3) You sell enough of the items the planet primarily manufactures that the value crashes through the floor. (Game mechanics: If the planet's GPP is G, you sell one of the top export items to that planet where the value exceeds some given fraction of G.)

For planets with any kind of sophistication, I'm picturing this temporarily plunging the planet into a full-scale depression (fewer goods for sale, for example) with a random (but very low) probability of a total collapse into anarchy. The system would then slowly recover over time. A planet that is already a dictatorship or anarchy probably wouldn't be affected significantly.

In terms of how large to make these fractions, I'd say that for a single-user version (ie: the only one we have, right now) it should be possible only as a special mission in which you need to have the largest ship you can have, fully stocked as per requirements, in a convoy of ships travelling to the same planet for the same purpose. (Pick a planet that has some "obvious" strategic value.) The actual value is then not that important, you just pick some ludicrously high threshold that's needed for the mission.

For a multiuser game, should one be written, you'd need something more solid. The fraction would be across all ships jointly involved in the transaction, not just a single ship. You'd probably want it to be a thousandth for both the population and the GPP, requiring considerable cooperation on the part of players, and even then only being meaningful for planets that are relatively poor and relatively unpopulated.

[TGHC]

Ermm..........consults log tables and slide rule...........I think Giles has set limits on what you can unload, the upper limit a planet can hold of gold, platinum and gemstones for example is 127kg per item.

(sits down and waits for the experts to say what really happens)

We do like "seriously twisted ideas" so please keep 'em coming.

[imipak]

Ermm..........consults log tables and slide rule...........I think Giles has set limits on what you can unload, the upper limit a planet can hold of gold, platinum and gemstones for example is 127kg per item.

(sits down and waits for the experts to say what really happens)

We do like "seriously twisted ideas" so please keep 'em coming.

...Have a mission in which group X plans to seize control of a space station during the confusion caused by a Thargon attack. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get 127 tonnes of weapons through the ensuing space battle to the space station. The doors will be opened at some precise time in the mission, only briefly...

After the mission, the system becomes a dictatorship and your legal status becomes, ummm, downgraded, but you get paid a fair bit.

[Frantic]

I think what would make more sense is to buy everything in stock, then blockade the station.

An agricultural planet would still be able to feed itself, but their machines would start to break down over time. You should only see results after blockading for a long time, and scaring away traders.

Blowing the station up would be more effective.

Industrial planets might starve after a while. You'd expect at least a couple of times for a large external force allied to the planet in question to attempt to break your blockade.

[JensAyton]

It has been established – repeatedly – that what free traders have access to is a miniscule portion of the total market. As such, a player can’t have much effect on a planetary economy through trade.

[Jinx999]

Someone should build the massive haulers (many times bigger than an anaconda) that carry the bulk trade between systems.

Unfortunately for pirates, they don't carry most of their bulk cargo in standard containers (ever tried fitting a tractor in one?), so only a small proportion of their cargo could be salvaged.

[Ramirez]

While trade's out as a means of directly manipulating a planet's economy, could the same basic effect be created through the use of scripts and the planetinfo plist? Say you have a mission to deliver x (could be a person or a package) to a corporate state: on completion of the mission a script turns the planet's government type to anarchy.

If this does actually work, you could take it further and create a whole load of scripts to simulate a small inter-system conflict with fluctuating tech levels and government types, complete with news updates on the latest situation. Admittedly it's a rather hard-coded approach and not exactly the emergent dynamic campaign that I think has been suggested before, but bundled with a good story it could be quite effective.

[imipak]

A mission could be to send an assassin or a bioweapon to a specific planet. In line with the original Elite - where missions required you to visit two specific planets in sequence in order to complete - you might even pick up someone from one planet, go to another planet that sells the materials they need, and THEN go to the target world.

The spacestation scenario I described in an earlier post would be really a merging of your idea with the second mission in the CBM64 version of Elite, where you need to destroy a captured spacestation. In this case, it would be some method of enabling the take-over in the first place.

Assuming that a regular ship cannot significantly impact a planetary economy, what if you were given a loaner Space Dredger (which is something like 500 times the volume of a space station) for a specific mission? I imagine that Space Dredgers should be able to impact almost whatever they want.

Talking of Space Dredgers, those things are truly gigantic, horribly massive and probably very difficult to manoever. A mission in which you caused one to smash into a spacestation or planet would certainly make a mess of things. Wouldn't it be hard? Well, yes, almost in direct proportion to the mess you could make of a place by blasting one out of orbit. They're designed to be able to hold off entire Thargon invasion fleets, so one paltry Cobra III isn't going to find it a trivial task. But if you obtained blueprints indicating a possible weakness in the design, and could drop a missile at point-blank range down a reactor vent...

(Yeah, yeah, I know, but the idea was originally stolen from 633 Squadron anyway, so I don't feel too guilty.)