[Feedback] 7.00 Economy

[Scoob]

I thought traders had a "weighting" logic to what they'd buy. I.e. price, amount of wares available, travel distance. There's also this "only buy if UNDER average price, only sell if OVER average price" thing, that means many viable trades are ignored.

I set up a Warehouse style station in my game, buying ALL the rock-bottom priced wares at minimum price - they're on sale CHEAPER than the minimum price I can set - and selling above average. This station has shifted far more wares in an hour, than the "Fill Shortages" traders have in a dozen hours. They don't work.

On an unrelated note, but still Economy of course, is it at all possible to make a Stations trade log actually useful? Currently it just shows the balance of money in / out. So, my profit-making stations generally show basically nothing as the income from trades is perfectly balanced out by the transfers to my personal account. What would be useful to see is the pure PROFIT made by the station, not counting what it's transferred. The current view really is of very little use. I need to be able to glance at this and see how much pure profit the station has made in the last hour, last day etc. It telling me that its balance is basically zero, because it just transfers any profits to me isn't useful. Having a separate graph for expenses - so purchases and transfers - might enhance things further. So, the "profit" graph would be pure profit, it can be negative, BUT it doesn't include transfers to the player's main account. The expenses graph could be any costs.

Also, is the recommended budget a station sets its self basically totally ignored by the AI now? ALL of my stations are totally ignoring this in v7.0. With some, it's sensible, they don't NEED a budget (even though the UI says they do) as they BUY (mined Ore for example) for FREE, and sell for Profit. No money needed. While these stations show a minimum budget requirements, give it to them and they'll just transfer it directly to the player's account. I have other stations that have really high budgets - in the tens of millions- and these too, in fact, really don't need a budget (I supply their needs from my other stations) and the game will just transfer all the money to my personal account again.

It used to be, in v6.2 and prior, that'd I'd have to periodically clear down the accounts of Stations as they were sticking to the (incorrect) AI-set minimum budget. It's good they don't do that now, however, it makes the minimum budget number moot, as even the Station knows it's not right.

Ideally, a suggested many times, we need to be able to set our own High / Low water marks for station accounts. This, combined with a useful transaction log for earning would give us full control of budgets AND a clear picture of earnings and expenses. As it stands, I don't have a clear, concise view of what profit / losses a given station is making. I can dig though numbers and find out by going outside the game and totting up number manually, but that's a little silly lol.

[ubuntufreakdragon]

Terraforming Scale Plate Green is annoying as there are no reliable Resources nearby.
I think Hevas twin III and V should get dense yields for gases and minerals respectively.

Also It does not make much sense that the drifting provinces have no ice deposit.
Either there should be one drained deposit or they should have a tech extracting ice from another source.

[geldonyetich]

I will try to submit a saved game tomorrow, but I turned in early today because I spent all day working on my beta 3 run only for it to end in my strategy turning out to be a complete dead end due to bugs and quality of life issues.

I planned to build a solar panel plant in Mercury and then use the warehouse distribution method to distribute energy through the entire gate network and rake in a ton or credits on this effectively limitless resource. Meanwhile, I would self perpetuate my station building materials by having each warehouse also include a scrap processor, and then the scrap too is routed back to Mercury where I would feed it to recyclers so that I would have free building materials.

The first major problem here is that the warehouse distribution method broke. The idea of this method is that you set your space station up to buy max volume from yourself, and to sell with the minimum possible manual stock (1) to everyone, but you let an automatic price on that ware (which is based on stock level) motivate your station traders to keep the stock level roughly balanced between all stations, effectively increasing the market for your production stations over a much wider area.

What happened? Well, my station in Mars is set to buy up to 800,000 energy cells. By the time it has around 80,000 cells (10% of the demanded amount), the automated buy price is set to 10.00cr. The entire warehouse system depends on the price being set relative to the stock value, so if it’s not doing it then that’s broken. The Mars station manager will no longer buy from Mercury.

This might be related to an old bug with large storages. Which begs the questions, “Why was that bug never fixed?” and also, “Will the changes to storage modules in 7.0 make this bug even more prevalent?”

I suppose a workaround would be to employ large traders on repeat orders but it’s such an inelegant solution that I think would rather start over again in Beta 4 and not bother with warehouses.

The other problem encountered is just that the really long distances in Terran sectors, without superhighways, makes carrying raw scrap back to Mars or Jupiter from Getsu Fune take way too long. Also, relaying wares between stations takes a stupid long amount of time.

I think the workaround here is that I will need to set up my scrap processing in Getsu Fune and then set up a large mineral transport (or Xenon H) on repeat orders to bring the scrap metal to Mercury. But once again I find employing repeat orders to be messy on my sector unit list UI and just a lot less elegant than expecting station management to do it. So again, probably better to abandon this game for Beta 4 and next time forget scrapping, use miners.

[ZombyDog]

The first major problem here is that the warehouse distribution method broke. The idea of this method is that you set your space station up to buy max volume from yourself, and to sell with the minimum possible manual stock (1) to everyone, but you let an automatic price on that ware (which is based on stock level) motivate your station traders to keep the stock level roughly balanced between all stations, effectively increasing the market for your production stations over a much wider area.

What happened? Well, my station in Mars is set to buy up to 800,000 energy cells. By the time it has around 80,000 cells (10% of the demanded amount), the automated buy price is set to 10.00cr. The entire warehouse system depends on the price being set relative to the stock value, so if it’s not doing it then that’s broken. The Mars station manager will no longer buy from Mercury.

This might be related to an old bug with large storages. Which begs the questions, “Why was that bug never fixed?” and also, “Will the changes to storage modules in 7.0 make this bug even more prevalent?”

I suppose a workaround would be to employ large traders on repeat orders but it’s such an inelegant solution that I think would rather start over again in Beta 4 and not bother with warehouses.

In my experience station managers really don't like it when you try sell a ware that it needs to use for production ( in this case feeding the scrap processor ) and that can really throw it's logic out of whack. In my mind you'd need to leave the warehouse purely as a trading station and have the scrap processor be it's own station that is buying it's e-cells from Mercury. I haven't tried setting up chains of trading stations in the current beta, but pre beta I've definitely come to the conclusion that trying to be too clever with the allocations and pricing is just a recipe for disaster and while it may seem slow to start, just keeping it relatively simple with trade restrictions to only buy from yourself, automatic pricing and a few ships set to trade for station will sort itself out without the need for too much micromanagement, and throwing a production module into the mix definitely cause grief on what should ostensibly be a simple warehouse/trade station operation.

[geldonyetich]

Here's that save file I promised 2 posts up, an attempt at using Mercury to corner to energy market in 7.0 Beta 3, 26 hours in (lots of ship requistion missions done to secure the capital):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TBUoVa ... drive_link

In my experience station managers really don't like it when you try sell a ware that it needs to use for production ( in this case feeding the scrap processor ) and that can really throw it's logic out of whack.

You could be right.

Here's Mars, with a working scrap processor: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EItiLk ... drive_link
Here's Uranus, whose scrap processor has yet to be fully-built: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1npRGNo ... drive_link

Maybe the large storage bug is gone?

Might also go to show that the warehouse functionality is more of a player hack rather than an intentional X4 mechanic. Then again, the icon ends up looking like a trade depot and there's a "trade wares" option. So maybe it's a bug that adding a production module ends up breaking trade depot buy prices.

[sh1pman]

I have a negative feedback for Beta 3 economy. So there are 2 stations in Tharka’s Cascade sectors that consume superfluid coolant and graphene: a Plasma Conductor station in Tharka’s cascade XVII and one Quantum tube station in the neighbouring sector to the right.

My auto-trader is a 4 star captain set to auto-trade Graphene and Superfluid coolant with a 4 jump range for buying and selling, anchored in Tharka’s cascade XVII. It has to go 2 sectors to the south to buy the wares and then return to sell them to the aforementioned two stations (they are the only buyers around for both wares).

Now, the issue: the Quantum Tube station (which is 1 jump further than the Plasma Conductor station, remember) NEVER gets any Graphene or Superfluid coolant, despite having zero of both. All of it goes to the nearer station, even when it’s almost full. The trader will even decide to trade small amounts of Graphene and Supercoolant to the nearer station, instead of making 1 more jump and selling the full cargo hold of a ware for maximum price.

It seems that further away stations are completely ignored if there’s even a tiny buy offer 1 jump closer. As a result, the Plasma conductor station is always full of resources, and the Quantum tube station never gets any.

[Ketraar]

Terraforming Scale Plate Green is annoying as there are no reliable Resources nearby.
I think Hevas twin III and V should get dense yields for gases and minerals respectively.

There is a new mineral region in Scale Plate Green, think it should be in Beta 4.

Also It does not make much sense that the drifting provinces have no ice deposit.
Either there should be one drained deposit or they should have a tech extracting ice from another source.

This is explained in the story and intentional. You can supply ice/water from outside or once that gate to KE opens there is plenty Ice in Boron Space.

MFG

Ketraar

[ubuntufreakdragon]

Terraforming Scale Plate Green is annoying as there are no reliable Resources nearby.
I think Hevas twin III and V should get dense yields for gases and minerals respectively.

There is a new mineral region in Scale Plate Green, think it should be in Beta 4.

It is not there at least in b4h1.
Main Issue are Methane and Helium btw.

Also It does not make much sense that the drifting provinces have no ice deposit.
Either there should be one drained deposit or they should have a tech extracting ice from another source.

This is explained in the story and intentional. You can supply ice/water from outside or once that gate to KE opens there is plenty Ice in Boron Space.

MFG

Ketraar

But it makes no sense logically.
There should have been some adaption, like a module that consumes ore(Oxygen) and Hydrogen +much Energy to produce some Ice.

[Ketraar]

It is not there at least in b4h1.

Just loaded a 6.20 save

But it makes no sense logically.

You are confusing it with not agreeing with something. It makes perfect sense within the design choices that were made. In any case this is not likely to change, so its a moot point and not really what this topic is about.

MFG

Ketraar

[ubuntufreakdragon]

That does not look like a gas deposit, SPG terraforming eats huge amounts of Methane which is nowhere nearby.

[JMCorp]

from the perspective of a brand new game played up to 17 Billion Net Worth so far. started in 7.0 beta 3.

Improved balancing of mineral and gas region yields across whole map.
Here we are mostly looking for feedback on impact to existing games, but general feedback is good too. While there were some cuts in some locations, this should not impact the overall availability, in fact there should be more gases.

the last time i played was beta 6.0 so take this for what it's worth, which isn't a whole lot. anecdotally the universe feels like it has less resources scattered around, not more, than the last time i started a game.

Improved balancing of stellar output across all systems to match stars and locations.
Following community feedback we adjusted the Stellar Output to match the star type and system look as much as possible to have a consistent "formula" across the map. This means that there is now much more variation, in both directions. Here too we are looking mostly for feedback on how much this impacts existing saves, but also general feedback as well.

i always put extra solar on my stations, so this impacted me 0%

Improved ware allocation for wharfs, shipyards and equipment docks.
The way shipyards, wharves and equipment docks allocated wares was adjusted to have a more sensible balance based on what is required to build and equip ships. In addition several of these stations were deemed to have too little storage and as such their construction plans were adjusted. This is also be patched to existing saves, so that these stations will eventually expand to add the additional storage.

i noticed this without realizing this is what you did. i could tell the shipyards and wharves had a bigger inventory than they used to or something. it felt much better ordering a ship early game and the shipyard not taking an hour to make the ship because it had no supplies.

Improved price balancing for several MK2 weapons.
Some weapons were asking for very high amounts of Advanced Electronics, which inflated the demand. As such we adjusted the pricing for some of those weapons to additional wares, but maintaining the price. The feedback that we are looking for here is if that impacts ships production, hopefully in a positive way and not have the now less inflated demand, improve the wharves production.

but but but, now who's going to buy all these Advanced Electronics? this is one of my early game money makers. i still make a good bit from them now but i could tell they're not as lucrative as they were.

Improved balancing of storage volume for S and M storage modules.
Here we increased the capacity for some of the S and M modules. This has the effect that existing stations will end up with more storage, which may in short term have some impact in pricing, but will balance itself out. For new NPC stations this will impact the decisions they make on which modules to use and require less modules to achieve their desired storage capacity. If you note anything strange due to this please report

. i don't use s/m storage, didn't really notice anything related to the npc stations either.

Several smaller fixes and improvements for Construction Vessels.
We adjusted the jobs distribution to have some CV focus more on their own faction construction tasks. Also adjusted their logic to avoid them idling in enemy sectors. This should have a positive impact, especially to NPC construction. If you spot any problems with this please make a note.

I could tell this almost immediately when i wanted to start building stations. finding a CV was easier and they were much more commonly the correct race. bravo.

Build Storage of deconstructed NPC stations sell their wares first
This will make so that the build storage of any station that has been deconstructed will try to sell the wares before the build storage gets removed. This should return at least a portion of the wares back to the economy. Please note if you find any issues with this.

this is fantastic. i bought wares from build storages quite often. it was great. now can we have our own constructed station build storages automatically list their extra wares please? i have a dozen stations with so many extra wares in build storage. one station has 47 thousand extra ecells for some reason. i just can't be bothered trying to empty them.

Improved miner decision-making
This should improve the choice miners make where to mine, especially systems contested by hostile factions. They also should not clump together as much on one spot. Feedback on the impact of these is welcome.

one of my favorite money makers is a mining/trading station. i operate (probably)hundreds of miners. i can assure you they clump together like clay kitty litter. like in two grand there's 4 or 5 spots they'll go to, but with 10 miners at each location they're still clumped something fierce.

New Clusters
Several new clusters have been added, some will have established economies some only resources. Feedback on the impact of those would also be appreciated.

it did feel like some things were moved around or maybe a couple new things added, but i didn't really notice too much. but i have never really memorized where resources are at, i always just find the stuff by exploring and dropping resource probes anyway.

[geldonyetich]

Whoop, Beta 5 is out, here's my fresh Beta 4 save at around 20 hours of play: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o_zCHr ... drive_link

I did the Emergence start this time, and tried to mainline it to as much wealth as possible by exploiting the trade ship procurement missions. This turned out tough to do because a lot of those early-game handouts have been nerfed (a change I approve of somewhat). Crystals are hard to find and programmable interfaces even harder.

But I received a sudden injection of credits by defending a Split station from an attack of Xenon while performing a patrol. I sold the Xenon PE, Xenon B, and Xenon T (I think?) I aquired from that, and it was enough to kickstart my trade mission exploiting look. I went from 1M to 17M credits in the space of about a half-dozen hours.

I probably should have branched over to station-construction or fleet requisition missions directly from there, but I ended up having the bright idea to have a L Miner with a fast travel drive be the ship I took to exploit the trade mission chains. I ended up swapping between several of them experimenting with which one I'd like before landing on an old style Chthionos because the two launch tubes could not retrieve mining drones and it was very fast and maneuverable in travel drive.

So was this a particularly good save to demonstrate 7.00 economy? Not from what I described here. But take a look at the state of all the factions' economy in this save. It's pretty rough, significant shortages all around, yet not much demand for silicon. Seems a little iffy, perhaps it's just hard for me to understand why this is happening.

[Ketraar]

Thanks for the save, it helps to get a sense of where the economy is based on your interactions. Its not much about statistical data, we can get that ourselves, but just to have some comparison and see if any odd things happen.

Looking at the main economy what is being asked for globally and what is being sold it looks like a normal 20h game. Shortages are not a bad thing as such, so will depend if they are causing blockage and factions cant recover. It also allows player opportunity. At the start of this thread there were some notes about factions being too efficient and making earning credits harder via trading. You save looks normal, there is around 3miillion demand for Ore and 1.7 million for silicon, 850k for Methane and 1.3million for Hydrogen which is better then before but still quite high. I'll see if I find the time to have your save run for while and see where it leads.

MFG

Ketraar

[geldonyetich]

That's a very cool economy graph tool, and it good to hear it looks to be running in expected parameters despite the shortages. It makes a lot of sense: if all the factions were completely self sufficient in all times we would hardly need a player.

Although one thing I noticed is that the overall distribution of stations seemed to be more sparse than I remembered. Perhaps because this game is so young?

Another thing I am noticing is that there is always a bottleneck and it is natural. You can make a lot more money making sure production modules are running smoothly than in forcing them into shortages.

For my Beta 5 start, it's Wayward Scion. I am not entirely sure why it is called an "Assisted" start when all I have is a Nova and Venture connections blueprints.

But I plan to make this run more purely economical. I will avoid the easy money from ship procurement and station building missions, instead investing all credits I earn from lesser missions and piracy into traders and satellites at first. Early game should involve a lot of manual trades.

Then I will place several trade depots every two sectors around the central superhighways. (Defined as storage only stations set to buy total capacity from self, sell all but 1 to all, and have automatic pricing and no production modules because that seemed to mess up to buy prices.)

Than attach basic resource production stations (energy and mined resources) to the depots by having them in range of the depots. Then attach intermediate ware stations in the same way. Then final ware building station.

This should achieve rapid trade empire expansion. The point is to see if this turns out to be even faster in terms of credit earning potential than those lucrative ship procurement credit multiplying missions.

It's going to heavily rely on the ware economy to pull that off, so I hope it proves to be good economy data collection.

[geldonyetich]

I am not a home at the moment so I don't have a current save to submit, but I plan to shortly once I get a few more hours into it.

So far into my 7.0 Beta 5 run (roughly tem hours) I am being reminded that it is hard to get economic traction from wares alone because the margins are so low around the Federation highway ring.

It makes sense: the federation highway is going to provide very fast transport to address any demand. But it might confuse new players when, in the very heart of the mist accessible part of the early game, there's probably only about a 10% profit margin on virtually any ware.

Perhaps this is intentional in the same way asteroid fields are significantly less dense near civilization. Opportunities are bound to be filled by others already.

The only consistent exception I have found is teladianium. There's usually a significant shortage on Teladi sectors in the highway that can be filled by the foundries in the sectors between the highway ring. These are far enough away from each other that a fairly large margin can be found.

But I think that by and large 7.0 is poised to create an impression in new players that trading and mining aren't particularly worth it. Given a choice between a low six digit figure trade profit and a six digit mission payout to fill a shortage, I know which I would rather do.

I imagine my outlook on trading will probably look quite a bit brighter when I have a set of stations feeding in raw resources. Lots of trading is happening, just it's a pittance unless you're producing what you're selling for free.

[geldonyetich]

Given a choice between a low six digit figure trade profit and a six digit mission payout to fill a shortage, I know which I would rather do.

This was a typo, I meant a choice between a five figure trade and six-digit mission payout.

After all that yakking I think I owe you better than that. Here's my current beta save: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PcnH1X ... sp=sharing

It only has 6 hours on it because I've been working the day job since 7.00 Beta 5 came out. But it's mostly the new game experience I am talking about here.

In this game, I have already placed 104 satellites to track station trade offers. These satellites are placed predominantly around every friendly sector on the Federation highway. However, there's also a few sectors covered nearby the highway.

Leveraging all of these satellites, here's some of the best trade offers that are current visible to me when I trade with an empty Ides Vanguard:

Microchips: buy @ 918.72 Cr (-3%), sell @ 1083.89 Cr (+14%): 61,867 Cr profit.
Refined Metals: buy @ 145, sell @ 206: 35,512 Cr profit.
Hull Parts: buy @ 202.73 (-2%), sell @ 279.78 +(33%, non-build storage option): 14,164 Cr profit
Energy Cells: buy @ 16.0 (+7%), sell @ 22.32 (+39%), 18,794 Cr profit.
Silicon Wafers: buy @ 304.19 (+2%), sell @ 303 cr, sell @ 303.64 (1%): : 4,689 Cr profit (Somehow? I should have lost money here.)
Claytronics: buy @ 1,999.2 (-2%), sell @ 2,039.00 (-1%): 322 Cr profit.
(Turret components, weapon components, smart chips, : not available in sufficient quantities to fill hold, but looks like a decent margin.)

As for raw materials, the best price I can see for Ore is 54.32 (+8%) and Silicon is 113.18 (-13%) but, you know, they're free, so I guess I should feel glad they're paying anything at all.

Now somewhere in this universe, there are far better trades, but the point here is they're not visible to a starting player. It would rather sour their first impression about trade.

Alternately, I can find a quest to "fill supply shortages" that requires about 250 medical supplies and less than 250 food rations or nostrop oil and trade that for over 400,000 credits. In fact, that's how I made a lot of my money in this save so far. Most of the missions I accept are in the six-digits. I've been deliberately avoiding trade ship requisition missions, but I can earn about 3,000,000 doing one of those if I load a M-freighter up with TER gear (half the over 6,000,000 credit payout). And it begs the question: why bother with trade when it takes over 49 manual trades to equal one trade ship requisition mission?

And the answer is, "Because once you have a trade empire up it runs itself in an orgy of automatic trade scripts." Little effort for infinite passive income. But I wonder if maybe that may have jaded our perspective a bit in terms of how it should be for players who choose to participate in the economy more directly.

[MaybeNot]

Is that save analyzer tool openly available?

[Huib-Bloodstone]

i did 2 playthroughs on beta 7.0 but TER always had problems with there economy.

first ship i order for a mission..

[Huib-Bloodstone]

i did 2 playthroughs on beta 7.0 but TER always had problems with there economy.

first ship i order for a mission..

https://imgur.com/a/PLjXmuB

[MaybeNot]

But that's only a little microalattice, how is that a problem? And after ordering Tokyo? Just those rockets are 15,5k
TER eco is even more OP than it was before for me, they easily manage to keep up with basic resources.

Only a bit funny in my new b5 game they start with only 3 microtattice factory while PIO have like 4. But still, they start with like 0.5m in trading stations, and 1 fab is around 4 modules ~17k/h