Oolite Bulletins

Hi there,

the game distinguishes planets between a few shades of agricultural and industrial economies.

Thinking about reality, we at least have some kind of information and service economy. In Oolite, we have strong ways of thinking in service economy (at least that's what all those ships do).

I think it would be quite a major change to introduce a third type here and relabel a few planets, or maybe there is another possibility. I guess an OXP would be very difficult to do, but maybe this wouldn't "destroy" the classical feeling for those who want it.
Service economies would probably have a stronger market, they don't sell food cheap or luxuries cheap, they sell cheap what is available in big quantities. I guess also the market reacts sensibly to the player selling or buying by adapting the prices while you do transactions.

What do you think?

QCS

In 1.81 this is a lot easier to OXP - you can introduce as many economies as you like, though you are limited to eight economy symbols (so if you wanted lots of economy types, you might end up with Poor Industrial, Avg Industrial and Rich Industrial sharing a symbol on the map). The trade good pricing scripts can then be used to set up different price categories in different economies (and introduce additional trade goods, or split an existing good into multiple categories, which may be necessary if you're adding more economies).

Resetting economies across the planets is a big change in terms of lines of code, but is also very easy to automate. If OXPers are looking for a scripting tool to use for this sort of automation, then NodeJS or io.js is free and also uses Javascript as its language, so you don't need to learn a new one - and may even be able to share code between your build scripts and your OXP, though I haven't tried that yet.

QCS wrote:

I guess also the market reacts sensibly to the player selling or buying by adapting the prices while you do transactions.

You'd have to make sure this couldn't be gamed by the player: buy up 35t of Minerals for 7.0Cr/t, watch the price jump to 9.0Cr/t, sell 35t of Minerals, make 70Cr profit, watch the price fall back to 7.0Cr/t, repeat.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of giving the player the ability to affect market prices, mostly because it undermines the sense of scale. One ship shouldn't be able to affect a planetary economy. I think there's more mileage in increasing the range of "interesting" commodities: produce brief windows of opportunity from time to time where certain planets (or groups of planets) have high prices for Radioactives, or Minerals, or Textiles, or Machinery, etc. To encourage the player to do some long-range trading, perhaps only one planet in the group would have high prices *and* low stock, so to make a decent profit the player would have to buy the goods up cheap two or three jumps away, and wouldn't be able to sell them (because of the 127t limit) until they found that core market.