Oolite Bulletins

I've got Anarchies installed (recent installation so I assume latest version, don't have the appropriate PC in front of me right now) alongside Black Monks OXP. One thing I've noticed, and taken complete advantage of, is that in Zaonce in G1 there is invariably a Salvage Gang and a Black Monk Monastery within a short flight of each other. The relative pricing of goods between the two stations means that trading between the two generally nets me a couple of thousand credits without having to risk a series of Witchspace jumps and flights in from the Witchspace buoy. While it's a quick way to get the beginnings of an "Iron Ass" (generally I'll pick up fuel scoop for the potential of a little asteroid mining, extra large cargo bay and an ECM) it's obviously also a little unusual because in reality you would expect local traders to do the same milk run and thus the prices differences or availability of goods would be minimised.

My question is whether Anarchies could be modified to either reduce the price differential or minimise the quantity of goods in systems where there are other stations beyond the main station?

commodities.plist is what you'll need to edit. Good luck learning the format it uses! I've already edited mine to reduce some of the "free money" from trading between stations. It makes sense that even nearby stations might have small price differences, but not >4 credits/TC.

Also, only the main stations are likely to get enough traffic or have enough storage space to have large amounts of goods for sale. Exceptions might however be like a Rock Hermit, which would have lots of minerals.

realbrit70 wrote:

My question is whether Anarchies could be modified to either reduce the price differential or minimise the quantity of goods in systems where there are other stations beyond the main station?

Unfortunately, no. And the same goes for Black Monks.

Commodity prices and quantities can be set for each station, but the mechanism provides no way to account for the presence of other stations in the same system.

It's really a long time ago since I calculated the prices and quantities for Salvage Gangs, so I don't even remember too well what they are. Checking in with one or two Gangs I see that they pay well for manufactured goods like computers or luxuries, and are cheap on things you can salvage from ships, like alloys or even machinery. Out of boredom they probably are good customers for beverages as well. They're not much interested in precious metals, and don't have many of them, so you can't make much of a profit from that. All in all it seems rather balanced, considering who they are and what they do.

Maybe the problem is more in the prices and quantities in a Black Monks Monastery? It's been ages since I last used the OXP, so I don't recall what their commodities market looks like.

The Black Monks seem to be fairly closely linked to the main station prices with small fluctation. I haven't looked in the OXP to determine how that's done but my guess is that it uses only a slightly modified commodities.plist than the one used by the main station.

The biggest difference I'd seen was when the very large random factor for Narcotics bought the main station (and the Black Monk) price down to 19c per ton. The Salvage Gang was still sitting at 85c per ton. With 45t available (again Narcotics has a large random factor for both price and quantity in the original commodities plist) at the Monastery and no legal penalty for transporting it from one to the other I happily undertook the 3 short trips for 65c per ton profit!

My thought was that the whole thing could be done with a script and a couple of alternative plists in the Anarchies.OXP but it depends on whether you can control the order in which OXP consume the event raised to spawn entities. In the shipdata.plist for Anarchies you could add two stations for the Salvage Gang, one references the standard Salvage Gang commodities.plist the other references a modified commodities.plist that has only minor variations from the main station commodities. When the OXP checks whether to spawn a Salvage Gang it checks to see how many stations currently exist in the system (cycle through System.AllShips checking to see if IsStation is set or even better used System.filteredEntities and specify a range to determine if their is another Station within a certain range of the spawn point of the Salvage Gang. ). If it's 1 (the main station only) then it spawns the standard Salvage Gang, if it's more than 1 it spawns the modified Salvage Gang with a less variable commodities.plist.

A quick look into BlackMonks.oxp reveals what I suspected from your post: it doesn't have a commodities.plist at all, but uses the default for main stations. That's the reason why the Black Monks' prices are more or less the same as in main stations.

realbrit70 wrote:

The biggest difference I'd seen was when the very large random factor for Narcotics bought the main station (and the Black Monk) price down to 19c per ton. The Salvage Gang was still sitting at 85c per ton. With 45t available (again Narcotics has a large random factor for both price and quantity in the original commodities plist) at the Monastery and no legal penalty for transporting it from one to the other I happily undertook the 3 short trips for 65c per ton profit!

Ah well, the Narcotics fluctuation issue. (Personally, I think of it as a bug, although it's most likely to be meant as a feature.) The only real way to deal with it in Anarchies.oxp that I see is to completely remove trading in Narcotics (price and quantity = 0). But I don't want that, because I see Salvage Gangs as a market for Narcotics. And at the end of the day the possibility of making a profit from intra-system training is a built-in feature of Oolite.

realbrit70 wrote:

My thought was that the whole thing could be done with a script and a couple of alternative plists in the Anarchies.OXP but it depends on whether you can control the order in which OXP consume the event raised to spawn entities. In the shipdata.plist for Anarchies you could add two stations for the Salvage Gang, one references the standard Salvage Gang commodities.plist the other references a modified commodities.plist that has only minor variations from the main station commodities. When the OXP checks whether to spawn a Salvage Gang it checks to see how many stations currently exist in the system (cycle through System.AllShips checking to see if IsStation is set or even better used System.filteredEntities and specify a range to determine if their is another Station within a certain range of the spawn point of the Salvage Gang. ). If it's 1 (the main station only) then it spawns the standard Salvage Gang, if it's more than 1 it spawns the modified Salvage Gang with a less variable commodities.plist.

Unfortunately the order of script execution is completely random. Also, BlackMonks.oxp is a very old OXP. It isn't even using JS, but plist-scripting. This greatly reduces the possibilities of inter-OXP-interaction. For instance, the Anarchies-script cannot check for the presence of BlackMonks.oxp, because plist-scripts are invisible to JS-scripting. And there is no guarantee that the monestary would already be spawned when the Anarchies-script would check for other stations.

So it would be a lot of extra work for very little (and uncertain) gain.

Thanks Commander,

It's not just the Narcotics issue. Alloys, Machinery and Computers can all net you 10-15c per ton which is reasonable if it involves a flight to the main station because of the time factor but when it's a two minute flight across the way it seems a little less so. I've only run into the situation at Zaonce, there seem to be few other systems where both Black Monk Monasteries and Salvage Gangs spawn and so as you say it's a fair amount of work for little reward.

I do like the variations that Anarchies adds and thank you for your work.