Perfectly balanced economics?

[Cholmondely]

Trade in the Oolite/Elite universe can be considered repeated games of the Prisoner's Dilemma

...piracy may ebb-and-flow, most traders may give anarchies a wide berth, but after centuries there's probably going to be a steady-state condition which hammers out both trade profits, fuel/consumables, and price of ships.
It won't be a perfect market or even a single fully-connected market...but it will have a LOT of chances to quit being dysfunctional.

But the Oolite.org blurb above tells us that things only recently started going to hell in a handcart after a period of stability and growth.

Lots of government subsidies would be built into the markets, consumables, and ship costs...which would be slowly paid back in reduced but often standardized profits.

This could be simulated by tweaking Spara's Commodity Markets OXP

Traders would be insulated from some of the expenses -- such as hauling fuel to the stations for them to quickly buy-and-leave.
Supply and Demand dictates that if the costs go up considerably, trade would drop immensely.

I would expect most freighter-type ships would be owned by shipping companies piloted by those with reliable contracts (both in pay and duration) and decent enough loyalty to not steal the ship and disappear.
There would be little personal loot and buying-and-selling because every TC of the cargo bays of these freighters already has planned cargo for them years in advance of their arrival.
...But they might be able to deal a little with Gold/Platinum/Gems, assuming they could afford to.

I heard that the British East India company used to give its officers space in the hold for their own use. So the company would freight back the cheaper teas in bulk from India/China whilst the officers would go for the pricier sorts.

[Cholmondely]

A perfect economy?

If you wanna get realistic about it, there's no such beastie. Once the robber barons and banksters get involved, it goes right out the aft airlock, and we're lucky the market works at all.

I rather think that I agree with Szaum-ix on this one, I'm afraid. There is no indication anywhere that the trade we encounter in Vanilla Oolite (or in the relevant Lore) suffers from heavy market distortions. It seems to me that the effects (market forces) of piracy and bankers are built in to what we see in the markets - especially when we start adding in the relevant .oxp's.

There are two comments on the above, though.
1) that most inter-planetary trade occurs through contract deliveries - the orbital station commodity markets (max quantity a feeble 127 units) are a sideline (and should thus have wider profit margins, no?).

And see Cim's comment: Let's assume a 1Tc barrel of Food contains 1000kg of food, or approx 500 person-days of food. A Boa will bring 125TC, and lets say 2 or 3 arrive each day carrying food rather than other goods. So they're only importing enough food to feed a couple of hundred thousand people at most. We can probably pretty safely assume then that the Food cargo is generally luxury food, interstellar delicacies, and the like, and all planets are usually self-sufficient for basic food needs. The NPC bulk haulers (eg HammerHead) could raise it to a couple of million people, perhaps, which is still negligible.(2012).
Note that arguments exist over the definition of a TC: weight or volume?

2) Cim on the price of ships:
With the current ship prices in Oolite, any pirate other than the entirely non-pragmatic would realise that the average act of piracy nets them a few hundred credits, selling a ship gets tens or often hundreds of thousands of credits, and the odds of surviving each fight are less than 99%. They therefore all sell their ships and retire in luxury.
:...I personally just assume that the player is the subject of a giant practical joke and all the shipyard owners stick three extra zeroes onto the price tags when they see you coming... (2013) - and see Cim's idea for a ship-price/maintenance oxp.

...
7. Just like in real life, people ask, "If it's so easy and lucrative, why doesn't everyone do it?" and if they're right, everyone does until it stops being easy or lucrative. As a real life market guy, I can tell you that EASY + LUCRATIVE is rare, and whenever/wherever EASY + LUCRATIVE pops up it stays that way about five minutes...

I do not think that trade in Oolite counts as EASY. In my very first game I was scuppered by pirates on my first arrival at Isinor. Lave>Zaonce>DEATH!
In a subsequent game, after a while I made my way down to Ensoreus' larger profit margins... DEATH!

This happens with reasonable regularity. Once I've invested in fuel injectors, matters change. But I have to survive that long, and it is not a given that I will. Admittedly my combat skills are virtually inexistent. But will that not be true for many new Jamesons? And affect the prices accordingly?

To hire a coach from Kyiv to the Polish border (carrying some 50 refugees) went up from last year's c.500€ to well over 20,000€ when the Russians started advancing on Kyiv. If I recall correctly, this included the cost of an armed guard.

b. reprice ships or any given piece of useful equipment until it more realistically reflects market value
--- example: I've repriced fuel and docking fees to more accurately reflect trade cost decision making. Imagine if flying a jet from LA to NY cost like $500? Markets would be affected.
--- example: I have repriced a lot of equipment. Imagine if buying a new fishing trawler catch setup cost $500 instead of $20,000?
--- example: I am in the process of repricing weapons. Imagine if the trucker's Uzi in the case of a mexican heist cost him $10? Everyone would have uzis instead of shotguns, six-shooters or baseball bats
--- I may consider tweaking ship prices, but there's no hurry since I am a while off my next ship anyway

See cim's comments on ship prices above

c. Introduce tariffs on commodities and watch all your trading habits change on a dime, it works in real life politics/economics.
--- I do consider this conceptually solved at least in part by increased Docking Fees, Diplomancy, and a few other oxps though..

This might be do-able by tweaking Commodity Markets OXP and/or BlOomberg Markets

e. Smugglers has purchasable ASC beacons for hermits, as soon as I figure out how I'll extend that to -- or simply remove beacons for -- Bars/Liners(markets)/FTZ/etc and reduce some of their appearance probabilities to much less than half at least, and/or, make their locations jump around.

Some of the beacons are only recognisable within a given distance. But surely bars, FTZ etc are all advertising for customers? Liner's with markets are nowhere near as recognisable at distance as those without (why?). Liners would surely want recognition to gain police attention, one would have thought.

f. UNPOPULAR/CONTROVERSIAL OPTION INCOMING: replace(remove) Torus use with injector use generally, tweak jump costs vs injector costs so that the one does not affect the other, and watch your trading decisions suddenly change as racing to GalCop for help, or the Cori, suddenly costs more. I already do this (Sun/boring trips excepted) and with my fuel price hike it massively affects my decisions.

Have you seen Hard Way?


Musings
I do feel that much more could be done with BlOomberg Markets by someone who has mastered the Dark Side. I've toyed with the idea of adding the missing commodities, but when you look at what GNN can do, there must be scope for incorporating some of that randomness into BlOomberg.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

@ Szaum-ix

What you say about truckers and highway bandits hits very close to home.

Even here in the States there's opportunistic hooligans that think a big rig is an easy payday. But not so fast!
I didn't know a single driver that wasn't packing heat. I personally kept a mossburg boomstick in the cab, and a .45 pistol on my hip; good thing I never had to actually shoot any of those punks. Just the thought of getting a buckshot load in the face was enough to make them cut and run.

[szaumix]

And did you come across Cim's thought experiment: Space-sim simulator (bottom of the page).

No but it's the sort of thing I just love when done correctly. Also he doesn't factor for risk. If you are so good at fighting that you win 90% of all your fights, and you risk death to fight someone for their goods once a month, you have a <30% chance of surviving to the end of the year. Risk of death is everywhere in Oolite, and it varies by career.

things only recently started going to hell in a handcart after a period of stability and growth.

Unless you were only retorting to his use of the word "centuries", it's actually irrelevant: market forces are entropic and reach equilibrium quickly, I would agree with all or most of his economic assumptions. Also since piracy is as old as the Silk Road and the Aegean sea, we know that (a) it is really just a market force by lawless entrepreneurs and (b) it is self-sustaining as an industry.

And see Cim's comment:

He makes a series of annoyingly bad assumptions and then makes the entire Ooniverse jump through hoops to fit them. Quantity for sale could just be quantity allowed. Trade and self-sufficiency are not mutually exclusive. Pirate ships could be stolen, drug-money, cartel allocations, inherited, too "hot" to sell, and even if they weren't he is taking game market value of ships at face value for a pirate, and even if he's not a trucker who robbed people for a living couldn't sell his truck and live in luxury! That doesn't mention loans, which is an economic staple and which most ship-owners would have. I just can't take his analysis seriously.

As for in-game prices, the only thing we have to compare any given price to is other game prices. In the real world we have the  Big Mac Index, but there is no Oolite equivalent, so we have no clue as to relative value. What does a handgun cost? A home? A car/pod/whatever? Are ships just our cars now? What does a meal cost? The Space Bar OXP for example tried to make a meal charge, which means I can buy a missile for the value of a few meals! The bottom line is we have no frame of reference on industry prices vs. everyday goods and services, so any price tweak can only do so relative to other industry goods which is fine.

I do not think that trade in Oolite counts as EASY.

That's probably my bad. No pirate swarm can kill me running from them with or without injectors, and I need a minimum of four on me with at least two of them beam lasered and one of them aftlasered in a dogfight and no ECM to even begin to stand a chance of losing. With a new game I put in the legwork corkscrewing from witchpoint to station with pirates on my tail the entire way. So you're right: I was taking reaching the station for granted and for the average trader that is wrong. That's why I prefer my Cobra Mk1 over even the adder for difficulty, speed is slightly better but turn and roll is crap enough to make things interesting for me.

Some of the beacons are only recognisable within a given distance. But surely bars, FTZ etc are all advertising for customers? Liner's with markets are nowhere near as recognisable at distance as those without (why?). Liners would surely want recognition to gain police attention, one would have thought.

In my head this was more about game balance and I hadnt worked it out yet. Also in my head: bars strike me as seedy and they have a blackmarket and you can leave with whatever you like so that's at least crime-enabling. I'd like to make them 50% abandoned and/or "if-you-know,you-know" (beacon). It's not like drug dealers have HEROIN MARKET TURN IN HERE on a sign out the front of their houses. If you know, you know, and if you're not the streetwise sort they don't really want you there. If I had the oolite coding skills at this stage, liners would jump around uncentered from the space lane but have beacons available for sale. FTZs might just have a 50% appearance rate (persistent). I like the idea that you have to find/earn a jackpot deal, and all markets are basically sitting jackpots.

Have you seen Hard Way?

will look into it!

[Cody]

He makes a series of annoyingly bad assumptions and then makes the entire Ooniverse jump through hoops to fit them.

<chortles>

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Some observations on the various npc pilots found ingame...

Traders: They have some guts to dare the dangerous business of galactic freight hauling. Yet, tend to cut and run at the first sign of trouble; few will stand their ground, and only when they have some backup, be it escorts, police, or hunters willing to cover their asses.

Escorts: Paid mercenary pilots, hired to cover the big long haul freighters.

Police: Gatekeepers of law and order... Usually. Not so much in the anarchic frontiers though.

Couriers: Freelance post runners, operating outside the regular postal services. Like traders will also break for it when shot at.

Hunters: Ranging from paramilitary squadrons, to lone wolf vigilantes. Former traders perhaps, who made their bank grinding the long hauls, and now seek to inflict the same misery on pirates as pirates inflicted on them as traders. Usually fly very well kitted combat ships, and will be relentless in battle.

Pirates: Whether natural psychopaths or too stupid to succeed at honest work, these are the scum of the universe who adopted a criminal lifestyle. Despite an outwardly bravado, many will scatter if they find themselves outclassed, thus why they tend to attack in packs, flying ships in varying states of repair.

[Cody]

Some observations on the various npc pilots found ingame...

Assassins don't back down, and a top-rated heavy assassin (they fly Asps) can be a challenge.
Then there are aegis raiders - they can be awkward opponents.

[Cholmondely]

Some observations on the various npc pilots found ingame...

Assassins don't back down, and a top-rated heavy assassin (they fly Asps) can be a challenge.
Then there are aegis raiders - they can be awkward opponents.

Aegis raiders? Never heard of them...

I've added the above two posts to Oolite tactics as Who's Who

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Assaassins, yes, I forgot about them.

Mercs hired to stop courier posts. Shoots to kill, ruthless to the point of shooting down eject pods.
Funny how they always show up as clean on the IFF. And always four powerful ships... To gun down one mailman that won't fight back? Really, what the frak is wrong with those people?

[Cody]

Aegis raiders? Never heard of them...

See here and the following post.

To gun down one mailman that won't fight back? Really, what the frak is wrong with those people?

Carrying certain types of parcel can attract trouble for experienced commanders.

[szaumix]

Something Cholmondely said stayed with me and I can't stop thinking about it.

I do not think that trade in Oolite counts as EASY.

He might just be talking about new Jamesons, but nonetheless it is valid to bring up difficulty relativity to different players. In my experience this massively affects the reception of any game, change in games, and of mods generally -- I have permanently walked away from games I loved, and been forced to fork mods I loved, because I couldn't stand certain new changes, even acknowledging that those changes are probably popular. It also hugely affects what any given player considers "balanced". In my OP I factored for danger in trade, but I never considered most trade from any station to any other station to be a genuine risk to equipment/cargo/life generally.

And something Switeck said in another thread:

Why I consider lots of extra stations a big deal fairness-wise:
viewtopic.php?p=169494#p169494

Or even just lots of a particular new(-ish at the time) OXP station:
viewtopic.php?p=161160#p161160

and again

I'm more likely to be mining asteroids than shooting at other ships, and I even find it to be slightly imbalanced/unfair due to the OXP/OXZ to refine/extract goodies from the minerals without processing that at a big refinery in a Rock Hermit or main station.

I started modding the Cargo Contracts that comes in the core game because I see the original profit multipliers as a free money cheat*.

*Emphasis mine. I agree with his takes. I laid out my opinion of conditions for "jackpots" in the OP, and I just don't want to feel like I'm consistently able to get easy + lucrative money (it should be one or the other, rough sliding scale) but then I realized that "what consistitutes a jackpot trade?" is another question that might be less self-evident than I thought. Basically, how easy is too easy and how lucrative is too lucrative? This is going to factor into everyone's idea of Perfectly Balanced Economics™. Damn it.

[Switeck]

What Elite/Oolite simulates is spot markets -- spot markets and prices specifically. Delivery contracts are like futures, in real life commodities contracts delivery is indeed usually part of it (although speculators like myself don't want delivery, we just want to resell it to someone who does).

Perhaps not quite spot markets but close to the concept. The max buying/selling limitations on each commodity is part of the "stuck on rails" economic limitations to prevent flooding the spot markets by the arrival of 1 or more Anacondas loaded with 500+ TC of a commodity. Probably to combat "cornering the market" actions that happened in the distant past.

Cargo contracts can exceed the 63 TC buying/127 TC selling limitations because they're not being dumped into the spot market but rather sold to an endpoint destination.

[szaumix]

Assaassins, yes, I forgot about them.

Mercs hired to stop courier posts. Shoots to kill, ruthless to the point of shooting down eject pods.
Funny how they always show up as clean on the IFF. And always four powerful ships... To gun down one mailman that won't fight back? Really, what the frak is wrong with those people?

I've found that you can fire back and keep clean status, just not kill them. Firing back until they think they are just about to die makes them back off, temporarily. And I've never had the cops come to help me either. I've had to lose profits hiring escorts ( Hired_Guns_OXP) on occasions just to have mercs to draw the fire where the jump leaves me insufficient fuel for a injector evasion. Highly irritating. I could be transporting gangsters, celebrities, journalists, snitches, junkies running from payday, ex-wives, trial lawyers in landmark cases, inconvenient politicians etc, but I don't ask questions of my clients.

A perfect economy?

If you wanna get realistic about it, there's no such beastie.

Incidentally since you were the one who said there's no perfect economy, may I ask what you personally find to be imperfect about your setup? Cholmondely's recommended setup did soften some of my irritations, but then again I first noticed RI/comp>PA boons in a CobraMk3 ... and I am running a Mk1 with 7T cargo space right now, not exactly getting rich on trades here so maybe I'm not noticing things I would be noticing in bigger amounts.

I'm looking for insight here, you guys have all played 1000x more Oolite than I at this stage.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

A perfect economy?

If you wanna get realistic about it, there's no such beastie.

Incidentally since you were the one who said there's no perfect economy, may I ask what you personally find to be imperfect about your setup? Cholmondely's recommended setup did soften some of my irritations, but then again I first noticed RI/comp>PA boons in a CobraMk3 ... and I am running a Mk1 with 7T cargo space right now, not exactly getting rich on trades here so maybe I'm not noticing things I would be noticing in bigger amounts.

I'm looking for insight here, you guys have all played 1000x more Oolite than I at this stage.

My current pilot made her dosh running milk runs and long hauls. She was Trump level wealthy and could have retired... But being a Roh'i, oh no, iiiiiit's showtime, and the pirate scum that harrassed her for years are now on the receiving end. That's right, she bought a kill machine and turned vigilante.
Now fighters, when they do have cargo space, don't hold much. Galcop is rather stingy when it comes to bounty payouts as well. Starting your space career as a hunter is noooo way to get rich. Better to get rich, THEN join the Guild.

[szaumix]

My current pilot made her dosh running milk runs and long hauls. She was Trump level wealthy and could have retired...

This very phenomenon right here is what pissed me off enough to start this thread after stewing on it pretty much as long as I've been playing. Thankfully I've started the tweaking process and it's going well.

Galcop is rather stingy when it comes to bounty payouts as well. Starting your space career as a hunter is noooo way to get rich. Better to get rich, THEN join the Guild.

Sure, but this actually makes sense to me. It's very Judge Dredd-esque: cops can't police everything, courts are bogged, criminals are in an arms race with the feds and holding steady enough: so it's "pls help citizens we have lost control". So the problem is that "offender" != pirate. I have a couple of times accidentally hit offender status -- and I'm a fugitive in one system, just for leaving a station with goods sold legally to a willing buyer for fair market value. It's not like I'm selling poison drugs to pregnant schoolkids, like, directly. Besides that any offense can get you killed. So citizens assume the prejudice is correct (prejudged because you have achieved the bounty despite not having had your day in court) and the universe is full of trigger happy killers willing to be either executioner or murderer depending on who it is they are fragging.

Also doesn't Random Hits make bounties both more lucrative and more dangerous? There have got to be others too.
[EDIT]: you're right that being a hunter/fighter is less lucrative though, I'm stacked with a few merc-rewarding OXPs and still can't match a trader's income even in a boring CobraMk1