Secondary Market Definitions Defined

[phkb]

So, what can we do to the markets? We want to discount farming goods, and because this is a big station, the market capacity needs to be increased.

shipdata.plist

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	"hathor" = {
		...various settings...
		market_capacity = 256; // we're giving this station a big capacity
		market_definition = (
			{
				type = "class";
				name = "oolite-farming";
				price_multiplier = 0.7; // big discounts on farming goods
				quantity_multiplier = 1.5; // with more for sale
			},
			{
				type = "class";
				name = "oolite-mining";
				quantity_multiplier = 0.0; // no mining products
			},
			{
				type = "class";
				name = "oolite-luxury";
				quantity_multiplier = 0.0; // no luxury products
			},
			{
				type = "class";
				name = "oolite-restricted";
				quantity_multiplier = 0.0; // no illegal products
			},
			{
				type = "default";
				price_multiplier = 0.92; // a general discount on prices over the main station
				quantity_multiplier = 1.2; // with usually a bit more for sale
			},
		);

And that produces this (at Tibionis):


Which isn't bad for a first pass. Thoughts? Where do we take this next?

[Switeck]

Hathor station needs a couple other settings changes.

The station probably shouldn't be in Communist systems or "worse", so maybe include that in the spawn script criteria.

It's a bit of trouble to create station exclusions so fewer extra stations are spawned in high tech corporate state systems so there was already a proposal to not have a Hathor station in the same system as a Nephthys station or (the very rare) Nuit Station.

In shipdata.plist it seems to be lacking or set incorrectly for these values:

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	energy_recharge_rate = 40;	// was 4?!	
	max_cargo = 2000;	// was 2?!
	max_energy = 20000;	// was MISSING!
	has_escape_pod = 40;	// was "true";
	heat_insulation = 255;	// was 1.0 even though it may be near the sun.
//	has_scoop = "true";	// not needed, not usable!
	"market_capacity" = 127;	// It's a HUGE station!
	scan_class = "CLASS_STATION";

And that produces this (at Tibionis):


Which isn't bad for a first pass. Thoughts? Where do we take this next?

We want to avoid creating "free money" balance issues.
Take Furs - 93 TC for sale at 46.4 Credits each.
Transporting them to the main station in the same system nets 20 Credits profit each (because main station's price is 66.4 Credits).
93 times 20 = 1,860 Credits total profit and doable by the starter Cobra 3 if it makes multiple trips.
Adding up the other goods which can be dropped off at the main station, total profit might be close to 3,000 credits.
That seems way too easy.

[Cholmondely]

Hathor should have had her own market stuff, but i'm guessing that's gone, given Cholmondeley's comments in the other thread

KW: When I downloaded your Hathor I found no sign of a commodities.plist - the only trade information was in the lore in your .pdf

[phkb]

It's a bit of trouble to create station exclusions so fewer extra stations are spawned in high tech corporate state systems so there was already a proposal to not have a Hathor station in the same system as a Nephthys station or (the very rare) Nuit Station.

Not much trouble. All we would need to do is create a condition_script entry for the station in shipdata.plist, and in the "allowSpawnShip" function of that script, put in the checks we want to perform.

"market_capacity" = 127; // It's a HUGE station!

If you look at my sample script, I'd made this 256 for this very reason.

We want to avoid creating "free money" balance issues.
Take Furs - 93 TC for sale at 46.4 Credits each.
Transporting them to the main station in the same system nets 20 Credits profit each (because main station's price is 66.4 Credits).
93 times 20 = 1,860 Credits total profit and doable by the starter Cobra 3 if it makes multiple trips.
Adding up the other goods which can be dropped off at the main station, total profit might be close to 3,000 credits.
That seems way too easy.

Totally. As I said, that was the first pass. We can now see the result of those initial changes, and work out what we want to do about it.

As I see it, there are a couple of ways we could go.

1. We could trim back the discounts, from the current 30% to something more like 5%. That would make furs cost around 63cr, making a net profit for transferring everything to the main station at around 300cr. However, that makes the trip to the station far less compelling. I'd feel more compelled to visit the Kiota Habitat, which is selling furs @ 59.2 cr, which is about a 10% discount. So, maybe a 10% discount would be better. Does that make it more compelling over the Kiota station, which is probably nearer to the main station, but only selling 9 units? And would this be the kind of discounts the lore indicates were on offer?

2. We could trim back the number on offer, making the number far smaller. However, as with the first item above, we're possibly deviating from the lore of the station a bit. It's a huge station, selling bulk amounts of the essentials at a discount. Only seeing 5-10 units on offer would feel disappointing.

3. We could bump up the number of furs available at the main station, so that, even if you can buy the furs, you can't offload all of them at the main station. So, make the main station have 100 furs on hand, meaning you can only sell 27 of them. You could then possibly sell some at the Kiota stations, but now we're doing a lot of in game travel, so maybe that would be worth it.

4. We could add a hurdle the player needs to clear before they get access to the station market. A simple one could be purchasing some for of temporary lease, at a suitably high price (eg 10000 cr), that expires after a certain time, and without it, you can't access the F8 market screen. Or perhaps there is a particular need for something on the station, and only after providing that commodity will you be able to buy an equivalent amount of sale items (which would limit the ability to buy all the units).

Options 3 and 4 would require a code solution outside of what we can do with the market_definition. There could also be other options I haven't considered. But I'm happy to go in any or all of these directions. What's your pleasure?

[phkb]

Another approach to the risk/reward equation is to add something extra to the lore: possibly a trade faction that is upset with those behind the Hathor stations. And they are trying to dissuade traders from taking advantage of the big discounts. So, adding some pirate groups between the Witchpoint/main station and the Hathor station, would mean every trip to the station is now far more dangerous.

[Killer Wolf]

Hathor should have had her own market stuff, but i'm guessing that's gone, given Cholmondeley's comments in the other thread

KW: When I downloaded your Hathor I found no sign of a commodities.plist - the only trade information was in the lore in your .pdf

yeah, looks like this was an abandoned OXP. Hathor and Nephthys were being worked on when i quit years back, when i dug them out the archives i must've assumed the OXP was more complete than just a testy thing i was working on. Was sure i'd done commodities for them both, maybe they were/are in an old documents file still being written and never got included. moot point now everything's changed.

[Killer Wolf]

Another approach to the risk/reward equation is to add something extra to the lore: possibly a trade faction that is upset with those behind the Hathor stations. And they are trying to dissuade traders from taking advantage of the big discounts. So, adding some pirate groups between the Witchpoint/main station and the Hathor station, would mean every trip to the station is now far more dangerous.

Isis Interstellar would take a very dim view of that. Vampire defence ships would be assigned to any stations under threat.

[Switeck]

It's a bit of trouble to create station exclusions so fewer extra stations are spawned in high tech corporate state systems so there was already a proposal to not have a Hathor station in the same system as a Nephthys station or (the very rare) Nuit Station.

Not much trouble. All we would need to do is create a condition_script entry for the station in shipdata.plist, and in the "allowSpawnShip" function of that script, put in the checks we want to perform.

I created a main station-spawning script and removed all the individual station spawning scripts, figuring that might marginally shorten the delay when I arrive in a new system.
This means I edit and/or delete quite a few scripts.
But it does have the advantage that I don't have to guess/test which script runs first, unlike the originals where the majority don't seem to use populator rules for spawning and few of them have a priority.
This also allows me to get a better overview of which station I want for a given set of conditions.
About half of my station spawn script file is comments, either copied from the original stations' scripts (to help me remember their original spawning conditions) or changes I might want to revert to.

I could spice up the spawn conditions, so every station allows savegames and every station is a populator spawn script rather than added by a semi-random system.addShipsToRoute

"market_capacity" = 127; // It's a HUGE station!

If you look at my sample script, I'd made this 256 for this very reason.

I treat the Superhub as the de-facto largest "regular" station and I gave it a commodity max of 255.
Hathor may have more usable internal volume but doesn't seem so bulky due to not near as much empty middle space.
But the main deciding factor for me is Superhub is almost the only station that can handle really large ships.

Superhub fits nicely in very busy very high tech systems but I'm not decided on where Hathor "fits" since it is a recent addition in my game.
Hathor's originally spawn rules were this:

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this.scrambledPseudoRandom(18) < 0.5 && system.countShipsWithRole("KW_hathor") === 0 && system.techLevel > 7 && system.government > 2

...which is high-tech enough that it likely won't be at a poor-to-rich agricultural system.

Deciding what kinds of systems Hathor should spawn in can drastically change how its market works due to being somewhat in lockstep with the main station to avoid free credit balance issues.

Totally. As I said, that was the first pass. We can now see the result of those initial changes, and work out what we want to do about it.

As I see it, there are a couple of ways we could go.

1. We could trim back the discounts, from the current 30% to something more like 5%. That would make furs cost around 63cr, making a net profit for transferring everything to the main station at around 300cr. However, that makes the trip to the station far less compelling. I'd feel more compelled to visit the Kiota Habitat, which is selling furs @ 59.2 cr, which is about a 10% discount. So, maybe a 10% discount would be better. Does that make it more compelling over the Kiota station, which is probably nearer to the main station, but only selling 9 units? And would this be the kind of discounts the lore indicates were on offer?

5% discount would seem more reasonable...but it goes back to something I've mentioned before - Multipliers!
(I also ran into the multiplier issue with the core game's Cargo Contracts.)
A 30% discount on food isn't going to create a huge profit margin because food is very cheap.
But on Furs, that same 30% discount is a lot more credits profit.

Both price_multiplier and price_randomiser can result in big price differences from the main station.

Even if we don't know what the prices will be, one way to keep the resulting profits reasonable is use price_adder instead of price_multiplier.

2. We could trim back the number on offer, making the number far smaller. However, as with the first item above, we're possibly deviating from the lore of the station a bit. It's a huge station, selling bulk amounts of the essentials at a discount. Only seeing 5-10 units on offer would feel disappointing.

Reducing the credits profit per TC is a better choice, although regulating the amount could also be done by quantity_adder instead of quantity_multiplier if more consistent results are desired.

3. We could bump up the number of furs available at the main station, so that, even if you can buy the furs, you can't offload all of them at the main station. So, make the main station have 100 furs on hand, meaning you can only sell 27 of them. You could then possibly sell some at the Kiota stations, but now we're doing a lot of in game travel, so maybe that would be worth it.

That workaround means bulk freighter players (Boa 2 and larger) could buy most or all of those furs and jump to a system where Furs are likely to be much higher priced.

However the other problem is having another nearly general-purpose commodities market secondary station in the system -- the Kiota station. Thanks to being able to compare the market prices (via a certain OXZ) without visiting all of the stations, planning a delivery route is pretty easy...and they're not likely to be really far from the main station unless you have Far Suns or similar OXZ loaded.

4. We could add a hurdle the player needs to clear before they get access to the station market. A simple one could be purchasing some for of temporary lease, at a suitably high price (eg 10000 cr), that expires after a certain time, and without it, you can't access the F8 market screen. Or perhaps there is a particular need for something on the station, and only after providing that commodity will you be able to buy an equivalent amount of sale items (which would limit the ability to buy all the units).

Or do like Galactic Navy OXP does -- make multiple versions of the station, each with a different market or lack of one.

Another approach to the risk/reward equation is to add something extra to the lore: possibly a trade faction that is upset with those behind the Hathor stations. And they are trying to dissuade traders from taking advantage of the big discounts. So, adding some pirate groups between the Witchpoint/main station and the Hathor station, would mean every trip to the station is now far more dangerous.

I'm reluctant to add more difficulty to the game in ways players might not expect.

Also, there's a lot of 3rd party stations that need market help and we're only on the 1st.

[Cholmondely]

Tweaking Hathor

For me, the Hathor is a beautiful station, one of the most beautiful in the game. And far too beautiful to act as a discount store for agriculturals.

But I've no other ideas as to what to do with it (thanks to the solar panels, it fits better near the sun, and in Stranger's World it can take quite some time to get there - which defeats KW's reasoning, and most other ideas of mine too).



But, looking at Switeck's comments above:


1) Size of market
Hathor's extremities reach out to roughly 7km x 6km x 4km - the Superhub's are roughly 2.5km x 1.5km x 2.5km - but it fills them.

Bearing in mind the limitations of Hathor's market - it shouldn't be selling or buying computers, for example - then 256 seems perfectly reasonable as a limit. And maybe even higher: Superhub trade presumably includes contract pickups/deliveries which constitute the bulk of interstellar trade, so we are told by Ahruman, Cim, Cmdr McLane, etc. Hathor stations presumably get contract deliveries from the planet's farms - but the customers buying are presumably "buying on the fly" so to speak, even if they are fulfilling contracts for delivery elsewhere.

And KW's emphasis was on food, not on furs. There will be some furs, but there should be ooooodles of food.

Say 1024 TC of food, 256TC of textiles, 256 TC of liquor/wines, (64 TC of furs - or no furs at all due to better profits for planetary producers at the Main Orbital?), 32TC of cheap food-based luxuries, and zippo of anything else. And for OXP commodities 1024TC of water, 256TC of oxygen, 256TC of medicine.



2) Prices of market
Comparisons of average vanilla prices for goods according to economy are (sort-of) found here:

Food in a Mainly Agri is 2.4₢ more expensive than in a Poor Agri; in a Rich Agri 1.6₢ ; and in an Avg Agri 0.9₢

This is where KW's Hathor should be offering price reductions. Bringing the prices down to match the Poor Agri. After all, those systems should have better technology etc to reduce their costs and increase their yields.

For comparison:
Liquor/Wine: Mainly Agri is 6.0₢ more expensive than in a Poor Agri; in a Rich Agri 4.0₢ ; and in an Avg Agri 2.0₢
Furs: Mainly Agri is 10.7₢ more expensive than in a Poor Agri; in a Rich Agri 7.2₢ ; and in an Avg Agri 3.6₢

I would expect the wine-liquors of the rich agris to be of a superior quality to those of the poor agris, and so have a slightly higher price. No great ideas about fur prices. And the (food-based) luxuries price should be cheap-ish.

And for the OXP commodities, Water and oxygen should be cheap. No great ideas about the medicine.



3) Shipdata.plist

I wonder if has_scoop = "true"; was inspired due to Hathor's proximity to the sun and its massive solar panels?



4) Also, there's a lot of 3rd party stations that need market help and we're only on the 1st.

I think that Hathor is so beautiful that it is worth spending the time and effort working out what makes sense for it. And the more complex it is, the more useful Phkb's tutorial - and the better the comparison with the second station. Phkb was only talking about 2 stations.

When they are done, I would hope that we could polish off the rest. I'm hoping to try my hand at an AstroFarm! (If I could only manage modelling/texturing I could then create something for Digebiti with Semaphore towers!).

[Cholmondely]

Wiki Issues

Just looking at this:

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Aegidian's old system had prices typically going from lowest-to-highest by fixed amounts per economic change.
If the price changed by 2 credits going from Poor Agriculture to Avg. Agri. ...it would also change by 2 credits going from Avg. Industrial to Rich Ind.

Cim may have wanted a "curve" instead of a "line" for the price differences between different economic systems.
So... going from a Poor Agriculture to an Average Agri. could raise the price by say 10 credits.
But then going from Avg. Agri. to Rich Agri. might only raise the price further by 5 credits.
And lastly going from Avg. Industrial to Rich Ind. might only raise the price further by 1 credit.

Does this mean that the information on our wiki is all wrong?

That the prices on the Commodities pages are codswallop?

That (eg) the prices given on the 2048 systems' pages (here's Digebiti's) are perfect only for Oolite pre-v.1.82?

That the table mentioned above has been trashed?

And that the amounts on the OoliteRS.pdf are obsolete?

[Killer Wolf]

Tweaking Hathor

For me, the Hathor is a beautiful station, one of the most beautiful in the game. And far too beautiful to act as a discount store for agriculturals.

thak you

will be interesting to see what you make of Isis Interstellar.

[hiran]

Is this related? https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite/issues/293

[phkb]

Deciding what kinds of systems Hathor should spawn in can drastically change how its market works due to being somewhat in lockstep with the main station to avoid free credit balance issues.

The new criteria I proposed would see a Hathor station spawn in 15 systems in Gal 1, almost all of them mainly agricultural system except for 3 rich agriculturals.

Hathor's originally spawn rules were this:

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this.scrambledPseudoRandom(18) < 0.5 && system.countShipsWithRole("KW_hathor") === 0 && system.techLevel > 7 && system.government > 2

...which is high-tech enough that it likely won't be at a poor-to-rich agricultural system.

Assuming the random number check is effective 50% of the time, that would mean Hathor stations are in around 50 systems in galaxy 1. That seems high.

I could spice up the spawn conditions, so every station allows savegames

My feeling is, if the station doesn't allow save games, it's broken and needs fixing!

That workaround means bulk freighter players (Boa 2 and larger) could buy most or all of those furs and jump to a system where Furs are likely to be much higher priced.

But it adds in the need to make a jump, and then encounter risks on the way to the station. So, some mitigating factors. Not a lot, mind you, but some.

However the other problem is having another nearly general-purpose commodities market secondary station in the system -- the Kiota station. Thanks to being able to compare the market prices (via a certain OXZ) without visiting all of the stations, planning a delivery route is pretty easy...and they're not likely to be really far from the main station unless you have Far Suns or similar OXZ loaded.

Correct. Which is why a 5% discount is not a very compelling option. The Kiota's are offering a 10% discount in my sample system. Why would I want to go to the Hathor, other than there's more on offer? Unless I'm in something with a large cargo bay (Python, Boa, Anaconda), then having 90 units for sale isn't the deciding factor.

Or do like Galactic Navy OXP does -- make multiple versions of the station, each with a different market or lack of one.

We may end up there, if our tweaking process can't solve all the issues for all systems. Given the rejigged spawning routine limits us to Rich Ag and Mainly Ag systems (although I'll have to check other galaxies), we'd only be creating two station variants.

I'm reluctant to add more difficulty to the game in ways players might not expect.

I don't know - don't players already expect to meet pirates in space? It doesn't seem to me to be stretching the bounds of reason too far. And it can be telegraphed (via news items, or even adding some flavour text to the shiplibrary entry).

Isis Interstellar would take a very dim view of that. Vampire defence ships would be assigned to any stations under threat.

Perfect! Then we could also occasionally spawn in a flight of Vampires to engage with the pirates. Great way to add drama to a system, and environmental story telling!

And KW's emphasis was on food, not on furs. There will be some furs, but there should be ooooodles of food.

Say 1024 TC of food, 256TC of textiles, 256 TC of liquor/wines, (64 TC of furs - or no furs at all due to better profits for planetary producers at the Main Orbital?), 32TC of cheap food-based luxuries, and zippo of anything else. And for OXP commodities 1024TC of water, 256TC of oxygen, 256TC of medicine.

So, on the basis of this, we need to move away from the [oolite-farming] class, and head down to the individual commodities. That will then give us finer control over how much discount we give each of them.

Comparisons of average vanilla prices for goods according to economy are (sort-of) found here:

Do you know, that's the first time I've seen that page! The wiki does hold quite a few little nuggets.

This is where KW's Hathor should be offering price reductions. Bringing the prices down to match the Poor Agri. After all, those systems should have better technology etc to reduce their costs and increase their yields.

So, for the next round, we'll aim to get to that point.

That the prices on the Commodities pages are codswallop?

That (eg) the prices given on the 2048 systems' pages (here's Digebiti's) are perfect only for Oolite pre-v.1.82?

That the table mentioned above has been trashed?

And that the amounts on the OoliteRS.pdf are obsolete?

With the commodities page, given they're averages, they're not wrong per se. They just don't match the updated numbers I put into the most recent version of the OoliteRS (I put a copy here, by the way: OoliteRS.pdf) We could certainly update the commodities page to match this, purely for the sake of consistency.

I did have a plan to go back and revisit the commodity sample prices on the wiki. But please note: there aren't 2048 different price tables on the wiki - there are 8: one for each economy type. For Digebiti (a Poor Ind), my calculations produced this:

Which is close to the values on the Digebiti page. My values are from one galaxy - I didn't finish going through all the galaxies to collect a full picture. But, given the vagaries of RNG, I could potentially run the suite of checks 100 times, and get 100 *slightly* different answers. My feeling is, other that updating the Commodities page to match the OoliteRS for consistency, we don't need to update anything else. They are fine, as-is, because they are really only an estimate.

I'll have a play with some of this information and post an updated market_definition shortly.

[Cholmondely]

That the prices on the Commodities pages are codswallop?

That (eg) the prices given on the 2048 systems' pages (here's Digebiti's) are perfect only for Oolite pre-v.1.82?

That the table mentioned above has been trashed?

And that the amounts on the OoliteRS.pdf are obsolete?

With the commodities page, given they're averages, they're not wrong per se. They just don't match the updated numbers I put into the most recent version of the OoliteRS (I put a copy here, by the way: OoliteRS.pdf) We could certainly update the commodities page to match this, purely for the sake of consistency.

I did have a plan to go back and revisit the commodity sample prices on the wiki. But please note: there aren't 2048 different price tables on the wiki - there are 8: one for each economy type. For Digebiti (a Poor Ind), my calculations produced this:

Which is close to the values on the Digebiti page. My values are from one galaxy - I didn't finish going through all the galaxies to collect a full picture. But, given the vagaries of RNG, I could potentially run the suite of checks 100 times, and get 100 *slightly* different answers. My feeling is, other that updating the Commodities page to match the OoliteRS for consistency, we don't need to update anything else. They are fine, as-is, because they are really only an estimate.

I'll have a play with some of this information and post an updated market_definition shortly.

Your table does not look quite right to me. There seems to be too little variation. There are only ever 10TC of food on sale? Never 9 or 11? Not to mention 5 or 15? et cetera...

Presuming as you imply that it is based on an analysis of G1 using your CheckingTradeGoods.oxz, I'd have expected rather more variation.

[Switeck]

1) Size of market
Hathor's extremities reach out to roughly 7km x 6km x 4km - the Superhub's are roughly 2.5km x 1.5km x 2.5km - but it fills them.

Bearing in mind the limitations of Hathor's market - it shouldn't be selling or buying computers, for example - then 256 seems perfectly reasonable as a limit. And maybe even higher: Superhub trade presumably includes contract pickups/deliveries which constitute the bulk of interstellar trade, so we are told by Ahruman, Cim, Cmdr McLane, etc. Hathor stations presumably get contract deliveries from the planet's farms - but the customers buying are presumably "buying on the fly" so to speak, even if they are fulfilling contracts for delivery elsewhere.

Superhubs can handle much larger ships docking, which implies much larger cargo loads delivered by individual ships. While the majority of trade may be bulk contracts signed up in advance, there's still plenty "room" for Superhubs to have a large commodities spot market.
Even a single loaded Anaconda could probably refill it for the next ship.

And KW's emphasis was on food, not on furs. There will be some furs, but there should be ooooodles of food.

Say 1024 TC of food, 256TC of textiles, 256 TC of liquor/wines, (64 TC of furs - or no furs at all due to better profits for planetary producers at the Main Orbital?), 32TC of cheap food-based luxuries, and zippo of anything else. And for OXP commodities 1024TC of water, 256TC of oxygen, 256TC of medicine.

There is no point in offering for sale something almost nobody can buy.
For standard ships, that means Anaconda's 750 TC capacity but (considering how awful slow it is) the Boa 2's 175 TC capacity is a more reasonable cutoff.
That means 127 or 256 TC max capacity for each commodity is perfectly reasonable.
Buy more than 1 commodity type to fill your Boa 2 or Anaconda!

But if Hathor is to be in Agri systems, I do like the idea of Food being plentiful.
Textiles can also be plentiful, because profit on them is terrible.
Liquor/Wines is far more desirable as a good plus reliable profit cargo, so maybe not as numerous as Food!
It shouldn't be selling computers but might be willing to buy them...agri systems use them too!
Luxuries probably also should be 0...but definitely buying small amounts of them as well, probably for no more than the main station. No point in being less than the main station either.

This is where KW's Hathor should be offering price reductions. Bringing the prices down to match the Poor Agri. After all, those systems should have better technology etc to reduce their costs and increase their yields.

I agree that so long as Hathor's prices aren't lower than found at a Poor Agri. then profitability wouldn't be so great...but this is easier said than done!
price_adder, price_multiplier, price_randomiser are all based off the main station in-system, not Poor Agri. prices.