Have there been any attempts to actually fix the X-Universe economy?

[Luai]

Even simple stuff, such as sending out freighters at 80% capacity (before an actual shortage) would greatly help... but honestly, more is needed (such as actually using that comm system and reserving those units that freighter is crawling over to pick up.)

And why have the price fluctuate at all? Shortage is not a function of storage, it's a function of capacity. If the capacity of the resources (within a few sectors) is enough to run the factories... then unless the capacity changes (freighters / factories being destroyed); there is no fluctuation in demand.

In fact, so long as a factory has a freighter that can collect said resources (within a few sectors), the "demand" has already been supplied. The factory owner may appreciate having a few resources (5%) should she be completely out, but at this point the price is a issue of time... the resources are expected soon, so why pay full price?

And what seems really screwed up is that the local economy is stronger than the sector economy. Relatively worthless commodities in one sector are... relatively worthless in another (even though they rarely get said commodities).

If there was any kind of fuel, air fees or regulations in the game you'd expect the transportation costs to hike up the price. Hell, since local economies are so strong, transporting exotic goods should be a profitable market... But as a profitable market, there should also be others seeking to exploit it (glares at the inactive Teladai).


Where are the dynamics? Groveling about how small your profit is does not constitute dynamics... the market opens itself to exploit at every corner. Even if you lose money, you're not losing a large amount of money; so where is the potential for bankruptcy? Where is it that you're not just groveling about "working" and actually having multiple debts owed thus making the loss meaningful?


I mean, with everything being handed to the player on a silver platter the game quickly become "a matter of time." There seem to be an absurd amount of people who don't want to believe this; but so long as you can carry 1 item back and forth between stations, you already have your empire.

[samoja]

Its a game Ok, it is as hard as it gets without being boring, you can haul one item back and forth and make an empire...in a few thousand SETA years, you must be smart to make a good profit, it is simply hard to find buyers as you feed the resources because you are causing a ripple effect that gets all goods more available, it is therefore ever harder to stay in business as time passes, it needs not be harder.

[Luai]

The point was not that you could make billions ferrying a single item, the point was that it was not IMPRACTICAL to ferry a single item and "start over." There aren't any real market forces that prevent you from earning a profit as a trader; thus you can have your empire in "a matter of time."

I understand that most people are attracted to the combat in the X-Universe; but if you actually paid attention to the trading, you'd realize how simplistic it is. SURE, there is a limit to how much you can make given the preexisting market conditions; but that is not staying in business... it's just groveling about profit. (Of course, if you're talking about overexpansion, that's just bad business practice... shame on you for not looking at your spreadsheets.)


I know that people want to get their empire built as fast as possible, but when has having everything handed to you ever been fun?

[samoja]

I have never seen a game in my life that gave you"less" on a silver platter, if there is a game that forcas you to play smart then it is X trilogy.

[devilofbelfast]

hi, try using this script; Burianek's Laser / Economy Rebalance v1.0 *Update* from the community plugins sticky at the top of the page. i kinda remember feeling the same way about x2s economy in the beginning but once i started using scripts things got interesting.

unleash the dark side

[Jonson27]

...............
I mean, with everything being handed to the player on a silver platter the game quickly become "a matter of time." There seem to be an absurd amount of people who don't want to believe this; but so long as you can carry 1 item back and forth between stations, you already have your empire.

(I cut off your post just to save screen space, not because I in anyway think your concerns are unimportant)

I actually like your post. You do realize that there're mods that attempt to add more "dynamism"?

I don't think mods can overwrite the fact that the overall economy in X2 (not sure about those offerings before or after X2) is SET. What do I mean by SET? Imagine there's a population of Rats on an Island. Now imagine that they eat something in particular on the island, a beetle. Now imagine that after 12 generations there're so many rats that have lived and died that they've finally wiped out the beetles and the last beetle has died. So they no longer have a food supply! What happens is that the Rat population drops to zero because they're unable to find another sufficient food source. This is somewhat realistic because it HAS happened before in reality. I just wanted to use it as a tool to explain WHY the economy in X2 is SET. It's SET because it's preventing the possibility of ultimate destruction. You see this in a number of indicators: 1) destroyed stations will -always- respawn 2) destroyed ships will -always- respawn in the stations 3) the price of a given resource is permanent within a given range 4) mining stations -never- run out of ore 5) etc. Essentially, you can destroy everything in the entire X2-universe and it will all respawn again and everything will carry on IN TIME. IN TIME, just as you say!

One way to create the illusion of permanent loss is permanent conflict. Permanent conflict can create a situation where goods on a station are zero because the ships keep getting destroyed and/or the stations that supply it are constantly under attack. This can prevent a player from making their own factory complex - and thus making their own weapons/etc. Non-player shipyards will still build their ships without a dependency on other stations (i think), so they have to be destroyed if there's a need to cut-off the supply of ships to stations. And if respawned ships travel from shipyards to their homebase then they have to be destroyed before they can supply their homebase.

One thing to keep in mind is that since the X2-universe can completely respawn itself (except for maybe hte asteroids even though the non-players don't use them?) then the developers never had to wonder how the game would change if it couldn't. Thus, a lot of your ideas are aren't in the game because they would really serve no function.

I've been away from X2 now for 3 years. It's an old game. I was just researching the later products from Egosoft and am wondering whether I should purchase X3-Reuinion or X3-TC + AP. So I really am rusty about all of this. But I'd recommend you go to this address and speak to Chris_GI. He knows a lot about the scripting in X2 and has spent some time figuring out how to create more "dynamism":
http://www.x2-pandora.de/index.php

[Jonson27]

And one more thing...

I can imagine a mod where you increasingly up the khaak/xenon/etc fleets that jump (or travel to) friendly space to wreak havoc. This is already in place, but I'm imagining a scenario where the fleets become increasingly devastating. What would happen is that if you fail to build your empire before a certain threshold, and/or are unable to keep expanding your empire, then the xenon/etc fleets will overwhelm you and essentially end the game.

It's possible to put the player into "debt" in this way.

In fact, somebody has already made a mod similar to this, but I don't recall its name, neither do I know what considerations they had. Nonetheless, something like this would have put an end to this idea that the player can always rebuild with time. In fact, something like this could keep the whole x2-universe essentially mostly empty.

Just imagine massive khaak fleets destroying all stations and then waiting there to destroy them when they respawn.

Also...

I made a series of scripts for a factory loop, here:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=243286

In one arrangment where I had several stations in close proximity I had to lower the "capacity" of the traders so that multiple stations could use the same supplier without emptying its stocks. I also upped the price that non-player traders had to pay to purchase from it. This increased the chances that my loop would go on uninterrupted. Of course, there's no way that I'm aware of to ensure that non-players will never buy from one of your stations. (It might be possible to override the stock trader scripts, but I'm not sure if: a) it can be done b) isit hardcoded or put into a script? If it's possible to override non-player trader scripts then you could foreseeably forbid them from purchasing from a station that's marked as "no-buy" by another script.) Anyway, it has been about 3 years since I scripted. And X2 is such an old game now! I'm thining about getting X3: Reunion because it's like $5. Can get TC and AB on steam for $20.

Man, time flies!

[Jonson27]

.......

I'd really love to talk with you more about this.

I wanted to write a bit more about what you said. (sort of a review)

Lets say that there're 5 solar power plants in Universe A that produce 5 total solar cells each cycle. There're 3 factories in the same universe and they consume 5 solar cells each cycle. This means that (everything equal) just as the solar power plants produce their cells they're bought. If this were in the X2-universe, the solar power plants would mostly be at 0 stock even though stations could still meet their potential if they waited until the solar power plants were at full stock before buying. Non-player stations aren't smart enough to wait in this fashion, but it doesn't matter either (read more).

Now, if the solar power plants are a good distance away from the factories then the limited cargo space of the tradeships might lead to supply exceeding demand simply because the buyers are limited by the ability of their tradeships to supply the station rapidly enough to meet its potential. So the buyers will sit idly without producing anything as they wait for the cargo. (Just imagine a tradeship that can only carry 1 resource unit having to travel across several systems and requiring 8 units of time but meanwhile the station is able to potentially produce product at the rate of one product per unit of time per unit of resource. Thus, the buyer is only producing 1/8 of its potential.) This would not be a economic situation if the profit could not pay for the losses and furthermore it would be extremely slow to build a profit even if the profit was greater than the losses. (In RL a business owner might make a loan that has an interest rate and if their profits are so slow that they barely pay the interest on the loan then they may never pay the loan in full and thus be stuck in a hole and not be able to make more loans because more loans means more interest.) If there were considerable losses then, assuming stations actually had to pay out of pocket for things, they would go bankrupt and their station would be scrapped. In the X2-universe, far as I know, non-player stations DO NOT actually pay for things. Their homebase ships are automatically respawned and assigned to duties. They don't have a bank account so they can't run out of credits. This is why they act stupid.

(note: losses can come from all sorts of things, including pirates and wars and bad collision detection (lol).)

Bottom line, the economy in the X2-universe is SET; it's not held accountable for things. So stations cannot fail become scrapped and races cannot be overtaken and destroyed and so on. This is the root of things.

How does it affect the game that station owners aren't held accountable for their bad choices and are instead allowed to stay in business? If a non-player station sends its trader on a non-profitable route where it's constantly being killed by pirates, there're a few things to bring up. First, the station won't -ever- go bankrupt because of its bad choice to send its supply ship on a bad route. Second, the station will not meet its potential production capacity because its tradeship is continually destroyed and having to be respawned (which takes time). Third, if it doesn't meet its production capacity then this will have implications for stations that're nearby that might need to purchase from it. Fourth, as far as I know, this has absolutely no militaristic implications. Patrol ships and homebase ships are respawned automatically and are outfitted without concern for the availability of weapons or shields. So there's no existential effect for the non-player race. HOWEVER, the availability of goods WILL impact the ability of the player to find them and profit from them (or use them).

So dumb non-player choices can impact the player. It might sometimes be in the interests of the player to patrol the sectors in which their tradeships or consumers travel in order to ensure their income. For example, to put it more plainly, if the Khaak invaded every sector and destroyed all of the non-players then the player would effectively have no income. There'd be no ships to capture, no tradeships to profit from, no missions to acquire (stations are destroyed), etc. It's in the interests of the player to preserve the non-players and to fight the khaak/xenon to bolster their profits. This becomes ever more important the larger the player's empire is. The have to protect their interests wherever they might be.

(i've had stations where buyers would come from several systems away... not using jumpdrives either, but they were part of my income so it was in my interests to keep the lanes clear for them. jumpdrives make this somewhat easier because they effectively allow ships to skip past hostiles and arrive directly at their destination. on the downside, jumpdrives also boost the danger since every system becomes vulnerable to fleet attack. it forces everybody to use jumpdrive so they can defend themselves against attack. and if races want to survive then they have to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. in turn, it makes sense to spread out stations in a system so they're not all in one place waiting to be annihilated by some sort of hypernova explosive bomb that's jumped to their vicinity and set off. jumpdrive should change a lot of things. but again, all of htis assumes that the non-players are smart. games don't have to be smart, they just have to be fun.)