Perfectly balanced economics?

[Cmdr Wyvern]

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 CobraMk3

Yeah, and with some humor thrown in for good measure. Reading through the contract details, the crimes your mark are accused of get pretty ridiculous.

[szaumix]

Perhaps not quite spot markets but close to the concept.

I meant spot market not in the sense of fluctuating prices, but just in the fact that you buy and load commodities, or sell and unload commodities, on the spot for whatever the price is right now. Real life futures are future delivery for current contract price, so not quite like Oolite's cargo contracts.

[Cholmondely]

Galcop is rather stingy when it comes to bounty payouts as well.

This would naturally be a concomitant of the current state of collapse of Galcop.

Reading through the contract details, the crimes your mark are accused of get pretty ridiculous.

This might also be a result of the state of collapse - ordinary people fiddling while Rome burns... pilots of course are involved in the serious business of evading pirates/Thargoids, have developed a rather more serious mindest and have no time for such nonsense - unless they get paid!

[Cmdr Wyvern]

Galcop is rather stingy when it comes to bounty payouts as well.

This would naturally be a concomitant of the current state of collapse of Galcop.

Reading through the contract details, the crimes your mark are accused of get pretty ridiculous.

This might also be a result of the state of collapse - ordinary people fiddling while Rome burns... pilots of course are involved in the serious business of evading pirates/Thargoids, have developed a rather more serious mindest and have no time for such nonsense - unless they get paid!

That's one way of looking at it, I guess.

I think it had more to do with Litlebear's brand of wit, after too many Monthy Python reruns over too many pints.

[szaumix]

Starting your space career as a hunter is noooo way to get rich. Better to get rich, THEN join the Guild.

This plus Cim's Space Sim thought experiment has made me consider something I never realised before:
Since hunters look for trouble and traders do not, and all the paths of combat only attract more and more violence (Parcel/Passenger/RandomHits/etc) the fact that it pays less is negatively multiplied by the much-increased risk of loss/danger/death.

Along the same lines, I am roughly happy with the miner's income as far as I've seen it, and this justifies Cargo Contracts because the freighters are more vulnerable by virtue of reduced maneuverability. *Then again while I have a lot of oxp/z I am in a state of mod flux right now trying to make the game harder and grittier and more consistent etc so what is normal for me might not be standard for all you vets who all share the same 30+ mods and wonder why I'm still speaking in Vanilla.

Anyway this results in the epiphany that I should be off tweaking bounties by ship and fugitive status by small percentage increases at least.

[Cody]

... trying to make the game harder and grittier

Do you have Skilled NPCs installed?

[szaumix]

I should be off tweaking bounties by ship and fugitive status by small percentage increases at least.

Actually scratch that, I'll chew on it.

Making this OP, I was focused on Trader roles and I feel happy with the combination of advice on mods and ideas so far, Switeck's Cargos Mod, and finally tweaking costs/prices on some staples and OXPs. For a long time now I have been adding and testing the in-game oxps, scouring the wiki, occasionally visiting this board unregistered to read posts on this and that, going back and forth over wiki pages for suggested oxps, to achieve the kind of balance I'm only finding this week. I feel like I should have found it on my own after this long Maybe perfect balance is the unicorn we have to tweak until we find, *sigh*

Cmdr Wyvern and Cody listed the NPC roles and it made me realize I had never played Elite or Oolite without centering on being a commodity buyer and seller because it is not only easily the best money until Cargo Contractor, it is more or less essential to making a good long-term income until you can upgrade ships at your leisure. So because the old Ag/Ind hopping was the primary way to go, I never found out if Hunter/ContractKiller was a good long-term income, nor pirate, etc. By "good long term income" I mean, you can end up buying new ships of your choice doing mostly that. I am once again trying to see how good parcel and passenger ferrying gets. The only career type that seems categorically neglected is that of the fugitive pirate. Come on, you're telling me there is no money in it trying to cutthroat your way to the top to become the next Blackbeard?

As it stands it seem you can only really get to the freedom to choose your ship through bulk trading.

Do you have Skilled NPCs installed?

Ah, I did but I removed it for a few weeks because it was clashing with something I was trying to do. Back now. I got too cocky while it was gone

[Cmdr Wyvern]

The only career type that seems categorically neglected is that of the fugitive pirate. Come on, you're telling me there is no money in it trying to cutthroat your way to the top to become the next Blackbeard?

"Why not come a-piratin' cuz a pirate is free
You are a pirate!"

There's money in it. Scooped cargo you didn't have to pay for, so fencing it is pure profit.
Alas, the problem is finding a market to offload your ill gotten gain.

Few stations will harbor criminals, and usually won't hesitate to launch the Vipers.
On top of Vipers, there's others that have a dislike for pirates. Hunters of course, the military, and that one guy in the banged up Cobbie who aint taking anyone's sh*t today...

With access to stations being severely limited to a pirate, getting to repair and reload also becomes an obstacle.

So, being a spacelane ruffian isn't all that easy after all.

[szaumix]

Well if I could change anything about Elite/Oolite economics, it would be

(1) somehow reduce dependency on regular bulk trading being pretty much absolutely necessary to acquire new ship levels of money, making all the other careers supplementary <--- still wondering how much tweaking this would require or if it's even possible without overhaul levels of effort
(2) make fugitive life -- the most dangerous career -- feasible and bulk-trader-level-lucrative if you've got the stones and your char. has the moral indifference (or worse, the terrorist-level moral conviction)!.

I remember being told as far back as Elite on DOS that you could "do pretty much anything you can think of," like I even remember maybe that sentence, and initially my imagination soared... but I could never make it as a gangster! Even pre Bounty System... like yeah you can pick up bits and pieces like some low income junkie robbing houses for bucks here and there, but according to the rule of "money should come low and easy, or high and hard" -- dedicated fugitives should be rewarded Pablo Escobar/Osama Bin Laden/Catch-Me-If-You-Can tier if they can pull it off.

Like imagine for example if Anarchist gangs, MultiGov factions, rebel terrorists etc were paying you big time for hits on Vipers in their system to make their lives easier and they would only pay a Fugitive -- or the amount of systems you were rated F in increased your street cred like every other reputation. I imagine the script for that might be challenging. Imagine if some sort of non-aegis markets paid out big time for your brazenly trafficked slaves/narco/whatever (partially) solved by Smugglers). This is all just off the top of my head. Imagine injecting through furious vipers to pull of assassinations for the underworld in the aegis or through traders' wormholes like RandomHits but for truly elite nasties. That's probably a chunk of my life and an entire mod's worth sadly.

I know you all hate intergalactic scum but I often wish I could play the guy you all want to shoot down and collect the big bounty on, haha

[Cmdr Wyvern]

You're not the only one to ponder the pirate's life. See this thread

[Cody]

I got too cocky while it was gone

<chuckles>

[szaumix]

You're not the only one to ponder the pirate's life. See this thread

Pro: I'm not the only one that wants to scratch the ruthless pirate itch in a big way.
Con: that was four years ago, so existing solutions it is. I just don't have the old stamina to obsess over making and getting mods right like I used to (other games).

I am moderately happy with my current Oolite and the mods i still have to try. I mostly just want it all balanced according to my OP goals.

perfect game balance is my life-long unicorn.

[Cholmondely]

You're not the only one to ponder the pirate's life. See this thread

Pro: I'm not the only one that wants to scratch the ruthless pirate itch in a big way.
Con: that was four years ago, so existing solutions it is. I just don't have the old stamina to obsess over making and getting mods right like I used to (other games).

I am moderately happy with my current Oolite and the mods i still have to try. I mostly just want it all balanced according to my OP goals.

perfect game balance is my life-long unicorn.

So this was over a week ago now.

Any new ideas about perfectly balanced economics?

Anything that you would really like to see?

Any oxp's which you feel badly need tweaking?


Personally, I'd love to see a working version of New Deal (four poles for commodity trade).
I'd love to see SW Economy with a genuine third pole for mining economies.
I'd love to see a bug-free version of Real-Life Economics, where prices don't tend to zero - and where quantities also fluctuate.
And lastly, I'd like to know if New Cargoes is really broken. I used to think it was fine. Then I saw this note on cim's website: New Cargoes especially needs a ground-up rewrite to use the new commodity features properly. and came across another note which said that there were issues with the assignment of legal/illegal status to the commodities.

But last week I prised open Smugglers, and came across this in the ReadMe:

Incompatible OXP's
At present, this OXP is incompatible with the following OXPs:
- New Cargoes: The system of permits, how it stores cargo, and how it controls illegal goods are all potentially conflicting.

This conflict has been recorded in the manifest file, so if you have it installed the "Smugglers" OXP will not load.

Which implies that New Cargoes works fine. Which tallies with my own limited experience.

[szaumix]

So the fact that I have an aegidian account at all is the direct result of me not being able to find an economic balance with downloadable mods alone. That's not including the other minor deficiencies in my Oolite gaming -- economic easy money was the worst most despised one for me. I went all the years between finding Oolite until very recently without a bb account and since no mod combo gave me balance, I finally signed up to see if I could fix that.

(Before I go on, I see that as a fixable problem in itself. Not sure how the wiki or the in-game list of mods could be updated information wise -- I know it's all "there" -- but I just feel like an earnest Ooliter should have found it naturally after that amount of time and checking mods etc.)

Your first reply got me so far in the right direction that the things I was most pissed off about trader economy are somewhat solved for me now. What I am left with is minor but still significant (to me) imbalances, and I have had to break my rule* and start editing code to fix them and I'm still not done.

To clarify, my current list of economics-effecting mods is now:
- SW Economy (thank you)
- Risky Business
- heavily tweaked(increased) equipment prices, Vanilla and mod equipment
- Docking Fees
- Stashes
- Pirate Coves (<-- I do not dock at any Hermit I am attacked from)
- Free Trade Zone
- Smugglers
- Random Hits
- Switeck's Cargo Contracts (untested)
- Escort Contracts (in the process of modding fees)

Top are colored because they form the "core" of the economic balance, others are damn relevant but I reckon if I removed every one I would still have the "core" of the balance generally.

And since it has significant effect on income (and therefore balance), I will mention that the combat difficulty and consequence level I play with is very high. I have most of the difficulty-increasing mods I have been able to find -- too many to list -- Hull Damage (increased 2x), almost all of my equipment is breakable, I reject almost every advantage-increasing mod or player-centric "cheat" there is, and unbeknownst to me my entire current save game has been played in very strict Iron Man mode -- so the constant danger and occasional damages cause serious setbacks until I die and it's game over for real. This all hugely effects income and business decisions.

Equipment increases and the justifications for it:
- Fuel. Vanilla fuel was hardly even a cost, barely an annoyance. I've increased it I think 2.5x -- and much more at other dockables -- so that every injector burn and every emergency fill-up at a dockable is a serious business decision, and even route divergence might begin to affect profits.
- Weapons, especially missiles. What was an "annoying" bounty wipe out is now essentially a guaranteed loss of some profit.
- All equipment, vanilla and mod, have been considered for cost "fairness" in my estimation and about 1 in four have been increased significantly.

As per my comment before:

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

Having now implemented all this I can say it turns out I was right!



*Editing code was something I resisted for years specifically. Like I wouldn't even look at the code. There's a whole story to that but for now, I am still resistant to any serious manual modding.

[Cody]

... and unbeknownst to me my entire current save game has been played in very strict Iron Man mode...

Are you using escape pods?