X4's Economy - Alive and working as intended (YMMV)

[aikjo2]

Wow! Okay, so the economy doesn't stagnate if you interact with it...

I built a $200mil factory to produce hull parts and claytronics from the raw materials. (So I can built my own stations, of course, it's recursive)

I purchased all the hull plating and claytronics I could lay my hands on - which was every single one of each in the galaxy (as far as was revealed to my sat network, which is all of the ring sectors and a bit more) as my complex needed a couple thousand of each.

After queueing up all the trade orders necessary, buying some M traders and L miners for the station, I flew off to Xenon space to find the rest of my SETA. With the SETA on, I parked in front of the construction project, hit SETA, and went back to my day, letting the station progress as a screen saver.

When I came back to the map, and started looking around, I saw a slew of new stations all around the galaxy. Averaging out to a little under 2 per sector.

If your economy is stagnant, then make a bigger impact on it. Things will happen.

Of course, this was a 200,000,000 credit station, and that's a tall hurdle to get to considering another 50 million in ships (guessing there, but 10 mil in to my L trader, a handful of M traders, other crap - seems like a decent guess), but it works. The NPC factions are building factories all over the place - even the pirates have build 6 new stations in one sector (3 booze, 2 blow, 1 bud).

Seems like it's working to me.

Keep flying y'all.

YMMV

[Tadas]

Don't know how to put it so it doesn't sound hostile, but could you check demand for shield/turret/weapon components in your game? At least in mine there is very little of it.

[PringleMan5]

Don't know how to put it so it doesn't sound hostile, but could you check demand for shield/turret/weapon components in your game? At least in mine there is very little of it.

So that is where the base issue with the endgame economy comes into play. Those components go into ship making and outfitting. So if no new ships are being created, then no weapon/shield/turret components will be utilized there. Fortunately it does seem like the AI periodically replaces and upgrades equipment on ships because the equipment docks do renew their demand for it slightly. This is why having the capability to create your own ships is needed so badly, because once you are making your own fleets then who gives a flip what the rest of the universe is doing. Realistically once you are at that point you are probably on the way to a grand war to wipe out everyone else and take over the whole map.

Side note, if you are ever stuck on a supply mission that just needs the delivery of more items and there is not a demand for it, send another trader to make a run using the end product from one of the stations you need to deliver to. This will force the station to start running again and demand that product.

[Tadas]

Devs posted that they will increase warfare in next patch, beta might be out tomorrow, that should fix it.

[Teleth]

While this is interesting, I think there's a difference between stagnating and having to prop the entire thing up yourself - that doesn't make a great deal of sense as each faction should be at least somewhat independent from each other. Although if what you say is true and holds true forever, perhaps all the economy needs is one 200 million dollar station placed automatically at the start of the game. I get the feeling it will still stagnate again, just a bit later into the game (which would probably still help a lot by the sound of it).

[gschultz]

Devs posted that they will increase warfare in next patch, beta might be out tomorrow, that should fix it.

where did you see that?

[Tadas]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/d ... 794393975/

[aikjo2]

Don't know how to put it so it doesn't sound hostile, but could you check demand for shield/turret/weapon components in your game? At least in mine there is very little of it.

Didn't seem hostile at all - Largest single order is 1200, average is 900.


Although, I just built this sucker so I can build my on stations all over the place.

Anywho, now to finish it by implementing my "booze blow and bud emporium" station strategy.

[turfprint]

X4 is pretty cool. The trade so far, 40 hr. play, is very confusing and I am wondering if that aspect of the game is worth the time to master. At some stations and occasionally in space the screen becomes jumpy. it has crashed at least 7 times. Overall I like the game... "a lot."

[Revenant342]

That's really interesting, can you keep us updated? I'm curious if it will stall out again once it reaches a certain point.

I have some reservations. The resource consumption to build a station is a one-time fee, so without infinite station-building, it's still a finite demand. Could think of it like a ponzi scheme. To drive the whole economy off of station-building, you'd need to build more and more stations at an increasing rate to keep the stations you already built from stalling, as more stations means more wares being produced causing stalling due to excess supply. The other possibility is that the increased station numbers, due to capped faction ship numbers, would outstrip ship-based resource-gathering causing input-driven stalls due to a lack of basic materials. The solution there would be for the player to make up the difference, but the original problem remains. If the sole top-level demand is station-building, the economy will never reach a stable equilibrium because nothing is actually being consumed, just transferred into ever-increasing production capacity, again, and again, recursively, forever.

[Tadas]

Don't know how to put it so it doesn't sound hostile, but could you check demand for shield/turret/weapon components in your game? At least in mine there is very little of it.

Largest single order is 1200, average is 900.

Do you mean volume or trade price? Roughly how many hours in are you in this game?

[Teleth]

X4 is pretty cool. The trade so far, 40 hr. play, is very confusing and I am wondering if that aspect of the game is worth the time to master. At some stations and occasionally in space the screen becomes jumpy. it has crashed at least 7 times. Overall I like the game... "a lot."

Might want to check that you meet video ram requirements, the game has pretty severe issues with 2gb vram and below after half an hour (or less).

Trading I don't think is too hard, although the interface may lead you to believe so. You just need to buy where goods are plentiful and sell where they don't have many. You can put the product name into the trade search of the map screen in the top right to help find a good trade route. I'm not at all sure about auto-traders.

[Teleth]

I have some reservations. The resource consumption to build a station is a one-time fee, so without infinite station-building, it's still a finite demand. Could think of it like a ponzi scheme. To drive the whole economy off of station-building, you'd need to build more and more stations at an increasing rate to keep the stations you already built from stalling, as more stations means more wares being produced causing stalling due to excess supply. The other possibility is that the increased station numbers, due to capped faction ship numbers, would outstrip ship-based resource-gathering causing input-driven stalls due to a lack of basic materials. The solution there would be for the player to make up the difference, but the original problem remains. If the sole top-level demand is station-building, the economy will never reach a stable equilibrium because nothing is actually being consumed, just transferred into ever-increasing production capacity, again, and again, recursively, forever.

This is exactly why ships or stations should be using some form of supplies (regardless of output), or there needs to be another resource sink that is guaranteed (unlike war, which should only happen for good reasons).

[Lymark]

If your economy is stagnant, then make a bigger impact on it. Things will happen.
Of course, this was a 200,000,000 credit station, and that's a tall hurdle to get to considering another 50 million in ships

Here's the catch tho, most people seem to be complaining about the universe being dead after 20~50 hrs of playtime, and 200 Million is not a small number especially to new players. They will most likely bored to death before reaching that amount of cr, thus getting a wrong impression that the game is not dynamic. That being said, If it's true that the mechanic is already in place, It shouldn't be too hard to 'fix' it by giving the AI an extra edge in cr at the start, or let the modders do their things!

[aikjo2]

If your economy is stagnant, then make a bigger impact on it. Things will happen.
Of course, this was a 200,000,000 credit station, and that's a tall hurdle to get to considering another 50 million in ships

Here's the catch tho, most people seem to be complaining about the universe being dead after 20~50 hrs of playtime, and 200 Million is not a small number especially to new players. They will most likely bored to death before reaching that amount of cr, thus getting a wrong impression that the game is not dynamic. That being said, If it's true that the mechanic is already in place, It shouldn't be too hard to 'fix' it by giving the AI an extra edge in cr at the start, or let the modders do their things!

Yep. Since I've bankrupted my galaxy's hull plating and claytronics supplies - I'm thinking about starting over (in an unmodded way as well - in case of whatever) and Building that mega fab a different way.

I don't really know how the "restrict trade to other factions works" but hopefully It'll let me use multiple factories to make components in a supply chain, I'm thinking...

Station 1: 1000 clay and hull / hr should let me build the rest of my stuff on my own
1 - Dock, Container storage, residence, 4x claytronics
2 - 3x hull parts, microchips, pier


Station 2: Power Plant:
1- Dock and such, Solar cells-a-plenty

Station 1:
3 - Liquid stoarge, graphene, microtubes, coolant, antimatter

Station 3: Refinery
1 - dock and such, silicon
2 - ore

Station 4: The Fun palace
1 - dock and such, liquid storage, Spacefuel
2 - wheat
3 - Spices, swamp plants, Spaceweed
4 - Maja snails, Maja Powder.
5 - Meat, rations, medical supplies (restrict this to my own faction)

Anyone know how the supply line "trade only with me" works?

Can we have our own "trade stations" where I can stick the finished goods of my super illegal factory for sale without the production modules? (next door to pirate bases)?

[captainradish]

I have some reservations. The resource consumption to build a station is a one-time fee, so without infinite station-building, it's still a finite demand. Could think of it like a ponzi scheme. To drive the whole economy off of station-building, you'd need to build more and more stations at an increasing rate to keep the stations you already built from stalling, as more stations means more wares being produced causing stalling due to excess supply. The other possibility is that the increased station numbers, due to capped faction ship numbers, would outstrip ship-based resource-gathering causing input-driven stalls due to a lack of basic materials. The solution there would be for the player to make up the difference, but the original problem remains. If the sole top-level demand is station-building, the economy will never reach a stable equilibrium because nothing is actually being consumed, just transferred into ever-increasing production capacity, again, and again, recursively, forever.

This is exactly why ships or stations should be using some form of supplies (regardless of output), or there needs to be another resource sink that is guaranteed (unlike war, which should only happen for good reasons).

Kind of like that X:R mod that added resourse sinks to RoC space in the form of refugee camps. They dramatically improved the economy there.

[CaptainX4]

Wow! Okay, so the economy doesn't stagnate if you interact with it...

I built a $200mil factory to produce hull parts and claytronics from the raw materials. (So I can built my own stations, of course, it's recursive)

I purchased all the hull plating and claytronics I could lay my hands on - which was every single one of each in the galaxy (as far as was revealed to my sat network, which is all of the ring sectors and a bit more) as my complex needed a couple thousand of each.

After queueing up all the trade orders necessary, buying some M traders and L miners for the station, I flew off to Xenon space to find the rest of my SETA. With the SETA on, I parked in front of the construction project, hit SETA, and went back to my day, letting the station progress as a screen saver.

When I came back to the map, and started looking around, I saw a slew of new stations all around the galaxy. Averaging out to a little under 2 per sector.

If your economy is stagnant, then make a bigger impact on it. Things will happen.

Of course, this was a 200,000,000 credit station, and that's a tall hurdle to get to considering another 50 million in ships (guessing there, but 10 mil in to my L trader, a handful of M traders, other crap - seems like a decent guess), but it works. The NPC factions are building factories all over the place - even the pirates have build 6 new stations in one sector (3 booze, 2 blow, 1 bud).

Seems like it's working to me.

Keep flying y'all.

YMMV

erm, let me get it right, you just shown us why the game is NOT working as intended... if it would, it would work WITHOUT you interfering with it at all, and you would need to jump in as a competitor to others. you shouldnt be the drive of the economy.

BTW, just checked, now the system Im present as a player has grown to 52 stations while in other sectors barely any or NONE built... tell me this is the intended way

[Chris0132]

Are you in a HOP sector?

[CaptainX4]

Are you in a HOP sector?

if you were asking me then no, im in grand exchange 1

and just to make sure im right, i moved my player character to ianamus zura IV and in 20 min 2 builder ships arrived. lets see if now this system will build up as well. note, im not doing anyhing here just sitting in the rep office. aaaan by the time i wrote this arrived the third constuction ship. for now they are not doing anything just flying aimlessly. probably out of resources?

[Baldamundo]

I have some reservations. The resource consumption to build a station is a one-time fee, so without infinite station-building, it's still a finite demand. Could think of it like a ponzi scheme. To drive the whole economy off of station-building, you'd need to build more and more stations at an increasing rate to keep the stations you already built from stalling, as more stations means more wares being produced causing stalling due to excess supply.

Welcome to capitalism, baby!