Oolite Bulletins

Some of you might find this little toy project of mine interesting: Space-sim simulator. It runs completely in the browser, so you can download it to play offline if you want.

It simulates a basic trader-pirate-hunter ecosystem, and lets you change various parameters. I've put some Oolite trade goods and ships into it to start with, which tends to end up with the traders killing all the pirates themselves and the hunters giving up due to lack of prey.

An initial challenge is to set up an ecosystem where all three professions make roughly balanced profit and is stable in the long-term - I'm not sure if this is actually possible: I've certainly not managed it yet...

A cim sim sim, eh?

Playing with it a bit, I've managed to keep a few pirates flickering along by reducing their running costs (on the shaky assumption that they're doing it for survival, not for a wage). Both piracy and bounty hunting seem to be bad economic options, though - I'll have to play with it some more.

The trader numbers seem to keep on growing, which might be a problem ... is there a way to limit trader numbers by profitability - i.e. the more traders there are, the less profit each one makes? Does this happen already?

My own understanding of ecology is very slight, but I think that boom-and-bust cycles are the norm ... a decrease in piracy makes for more traders, who eat into each other's profits and eventually start to put each other out of business, forcing some of the losers to turn to piracy. Is there a feedback loop from "failed trader" to "pirate"?

Disembodied wrote:

The trader numbers seem to keep on growing, which might be a problem ... is there a way to limit trader numbers by profitability - i.e. the more traders there are, the less profit each one makes? Does this happen already?

Not at the moment.

Disembodied wrote:

Is there a feedback loop from "failed trader" to "pirate"?

Indirectly - the ship with the greatest loss gets removed, and new ships are preferentially added to the highest profit profession.

Keeping the trade profit low enough that piracy is more profitable might be necessary.

I didn't play with the simulator yet, but I think, in reality no stable ecosystem could exist with a big number of pirates compared to the number of innocent traders. I always felt that there are too many pirates and too few traders in Elite/Oolite, especially big traders carrying a significant amount of cargo. It's a game, and 1 pirate for 100 traders would be of course be boring, but in reality, even this ratio would be considered as a problem by the governments, and they would do something about it to keep traders coming to their countries (or planets). Without governments (polices, military), traders would only go into very unsafe regions with very well armed ships, so they can be quite sure that they can defeat any attacker. Most pirates would have a very short life in this scenario - and even if they survive they wouldn't have much to live from.

Reducing the profit wouldn't change anything: Traders would simply avoid unsafe regions, if the profit isn't worth the risk. So piracy and bounty hunting would be less profitable too.

So the simulation is right, although it probably doesn't consider the fact that must humans (and probably aliens too) tend to avoid any significant risk of getting killed. In reality, I probably wouldn't even dare to fly my well armed Python through a Corporate System!

I don't think it's necessary to create a balanced, self-sustaining ecosystem: what we want is a model of something spinning - slowly - out of control (over generations: I'm not suggesting that the game should get progressively harder within the career of one player). It's possible that, at some point, some central authority might get its act together long enough to perform a (local) purge, or there might be a pirate amnesty declared, or some other external mechanism might be used to reset the situation if pirate numbers grow too high: the point is not to build a model but to create a situation where there are antagonists for the player to fight with - either as a trader, a bounty hunter or a pirate.

Historically, piracy has thrived in periods of instability, sometimes despite the efforts of governments, but more often with the connivance of, or indeed sponsorship by, those governments. Colonies in the West Indies and the Americas would often collude with pirates to encourage them to bring their stolen goods to what would otherwise have been economically struggling backwaters. Competing national governments issued letters of marque to privateers, licensing them to prey on other nations' merchant shipping.

Traders took enormous risks, because the profits were potentially huge. Crewmen sailed on these voyages because life for the average person was miserable, and cheap. A crewman making one round of the Triangle Trade (Britain > Africa > West Indies/America > Britain) had around a 25% chance of dying, and a lot of people turned pirate because if they were going to die soon, it might as well be on their own terms:

Bartholomew Roberts wrote:

In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.