1st off: Commodities/Economy/Trade Tax.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:01 am by Xaanix

First off i would like to discuss commodities prices and the FL economy.

Commodity Prices:
I think the commodity prices should be fixed for certain items unless you are
dealing in illegal stuff or buying from pirate bases. I propose that each
commodity should not cost below a certain level. I will call these prices
"Base prices". Meaning that the price of a particular good will never drop
below this "Base" prices. These base selling prices should be a lot higher than they are now, basically for the purpose of giving a huge benefit to running illegal goods or buying from pirate bases, but also very risky. This mainly for the purpose of not being able to level very fast unless you want to take huge risks. At this point there is no reason to run illegal goods since the profit is often lower
or equal to legal stuff. Hence no risk/benefit ratio. So I think that with legal goods you should not make more than 500/item profit. With illegal goods you can make as much as 1500-2000, depends on what you trade and how far you have to go, and if the place you sell at is well guarded. And EVEN LARGER profit if you kill transports/cargo ships yourself. To make this viable the police should be much stronger and capable of catching you. I will discuss this later. (We also need more illegal goods)

You can never buy these goods below this price unless you pirate. It only makes
sense that you can buy stolen goods much cheaper. Here are some examples:

Diamonds: 800
Luxury Goods: 600
Weapons/Side Arms 300 (I think this should be an illegal item) - and if you suffer
hull damage during an attack while carrying weapons, you might blow up, since they
are stored in cargo holds not in safe conditions like Ammo.
Artifacts: 400 (illegal)
Consumer goods: 200

FreeLancer Economy:

FL NEEDS a dynamic economy. Prices should drop/rise based on quantity sold/bought. For example if you run the New Berlin
-New Tokyo diamonds trade, the more you buy from a place the price goes up, not much, depends on how much you buy. When you sell, the more you sell, the price drops, depends again on how much you sell. Basically, you cant run the trade route forever because you will
eventually suffer a loss after a while. SO the more you sell in one place, the less you get for it. This would make players seek some variety and not run the same route 90 times till they get rich enough and go buy a Sabre.

Trade Taxes:

There should be trade taxes on every convoy/ship that enters any system. Unless you want to use only jumpholes and not use trade lanes. For this I propose the following:

Jump Gates: 1000 tax/ship they auto-deduct from your account when you enter it, not when you exit.
Trade Lanes: 200/ship only when you enter. Your trip could be 4 trade lane rings, or 40, same price. This is to prevent people from entering the lane in the middle of it and not paying tax.
Docking: Stations/Planets 150 per ship. Pirate bases cost 500.

What do you guys think about this?
I will compile all ideas/suggestions discused that seem viable and put them in the final submission to MSFT.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:07 am by grapedog

I don't mind the idea of base prices and making trading less profitable for normal goods, but I don't like the idea of lane and gate tax's. That just makes me not want to become a trader. Perhaps you only pay trade tax is you are in a freight type vehicle like the Rhino or Dromedary, where ships like a Defender or Banshee would not get nicked or perhaps pay a tax on the type of ship you fly. A VHF would pay more for the trade lane than would a light figher since the LF is just about always not going to be carrying as much cargo as the bigger fighters or frieght vehicles.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:33 am by redmoon

Im strongly against the idea of taxes on the trade lanes...first, its annoying if your low level and trying to make some cash, second it sill be even still more annoying if your exploring and you have 5 or so seperate trade gates and 1 or two jump gates, thats alot of money (to me at least, I dont focus on making money in the game) I dunno..mabye if this option was able to be turned on or off or difficulty level changes would implement this. thats my two cents.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:46 am by Xaanix

Actually yes, youre right. Fighter class ships should pay 1/4th the tax of freighters. Normal freighters (150 tons or less) would pay 100% and heavy freighters (150+ tons) should pay 150% tax? I dont know about freight type, that would make things very complicated because you would have to classify goods and what do you pay if you jump with illegal goods?!

If you want to classify goods and pay tax based on cargo and not on ship, we could do this.
Maybe you could classify goods as:

Luxury (diamonds, good, silver, artifacts?, luxury food, lux csmr goods)
Normal (consumer goods, water, food, pharmaceuticals, copper, etc)
Industrial (mining eq, construction eq, boron, berylium, etc)
Illegal goods (artifacts, cardramine, weapons?)

Then set up tax factors as follows for system jumps:
Luxury x 12
Normal x 9
Industrial x 5
Illegal x 20
For tradelane jumps each factor would be divided by 5.

and compute tax as: Amount of good x TaxFactor = tax paid.

Example: You carry 100 gold and 50 pharmaceuticals

At a system jump you would pay:
100 x 12 =1,200
50 x 9 = 450
Total Tax = $1,750

For a trade land jump:
100 x 12/5 = 240
50 x 9/5 = 90
Total Tax = $330

This would make players plan their routes much better to save money and not just time. If you have tax, you would have to balance the two, since less time = more tax and more time = less or no tax.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:47 am by Xaanix

@redmoon

Maybe at low levels 1-5 or 10? you only pay half the taxes? *shrug*

Fri Mar 21, 2003 3:00 am by redmoon

yeah mabye, Im just a cheapskate, I dont wanna spend any money unless I absolutley must...or can't stop my mad desire to buy the sunslayer torp launcher and attack fighters with it

Edited by - redmoon on 21-03-2003 03:02:02

Fri Mar 21, 2003 3:02 am by Xaanix

Well, this isnt a world conquest game where you the the best **** in the world and go kill everyone and everything. Unfortunately thats what this turned out to be and it needs fixing.

Fri Mar 21, 2003 2:34 pm by Easy Rhino

First of all, I don't think a dynamic campaign is necessary, or even "realisitic", since after all, you're just one guy in a big universe. How much of a difference is edison trent and his Humpback going to make the the cost of manufacturing engine parts in Honshu? Answer: very little.

Second, charging a toll on tradelanes and jump gates does make theoretical sense. However, the alternative (not using tradelanes), would make traveling extremely slow, and extremely boring. Slow and boring = bad for games. Now, maybe if there were 'ghetto trade lanes', that were fast, but unprotected, that might be good. if there were a tax, having it based on "weight" (ship + cargo) would be best. But again, slow and boring not good.

Third, I do agree that illegal goods don't seem as profitable (or even as dangerous). But my only personal experience is the short cardamine run to manhattan from mactan. However, I don't think increasing commodity prices on everything (especially normal goods) makes much sense. I mean, blasting a rock and getting a diamond out of it really is pretty easy, so diamonds should be cheap in dresden. Also, pirates are not going to be able to buy normal goods cheapy at their bases, since whatever they buy will have to be smuggled in, not shipped on Trains.

I think the key is to increase the selling price of the illegal goods. Cardamine maxes out at $1500 in Manhattan. Considering alien bacteria are worth $2000 at three different bases, I think the illegal narcotic could stand to be worth a whole lot more. Ditto with alien artifacts.

Another option would be to increase the length of the "product cycle" for the illegal items. This already happens with some commodities in the game. For example, Beryllium gets bought by a base which produces Super alloy, which gets bought by another base which adds Boron and makes High-Temp alloy, Which then gets bought by the places that make Engine components, etc.

Well, the real world drug market usually transforms a simple little plant into something incredibly expensive by insane markups in the supply chain. So Planet Malta could produce "Orange Malta Grass", which would be like raw poppy plants. This could then get shipped to various nearby orbiting stations, where it is added with hydrocarbons (or something) to form "Carda-past" (opium). Then from there it would be shipped somewhere else that would combined with alien organisms, and turned into Cardamine (Heroin). Malta Grass would cost like $5 a unit. Carda-paste would be maybe $300-500 a unit. And then cardamine could be, I dunno $2500-3000 a unit at the most expensive locations.

But the thing is, each of these interim locations would effectively be a drug lab, and the repsonsible governments would go through extensive efforts to interdict traffic in and out.

The simpler thing would be to just increase the cost of cardamine and artifacts and many planets

Er

Fri Mar 21, 2003 4:29 pm by fyo

X-Beyond the Frontier had the best economic model I've seen in a space game. The principles were *very* simple, yet it worked very well.

The basic assumption is "supply and demand".

The price of any product is purely a function of the current amount of that product available on that base / factory / planet.

The planet has a certain consumption of the products that can be sold there. Let's say a planet makes product A. Every one unit of A produced requires (consumes) X units of product B and Y units of product C. If not enough B and C are available, no A can be produced.

That's it. All you need.

Yes, there are ways you can make this better. E.g. having the computer traders switch to the more profitable routes would help out a lot. But, really, this is all you need for a vibrant and dynamic economy. And it's SIMPLE. And, as always, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

In my opinion, XBTF was a bit extreme in the price fluctuations, but that need not be the case. You could make the function of units available anything you wanted. You could even "smooth" it out a bit by taking a time-average of the units available rather than just what's in stock *righ now*.

-fyo

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