Trading Feedback

[Mustacheion]

Just wanted to post my experience.  I spent probably 30 hours playing, mostly trading, and made about 3,000,000 credits in that time.  Pretty fun.  But then, while exploring, I found an amazing intra-sector trade: a trading post selling body armor for cheap, and a military outpost buying them for a lot, within only about 20 km.  I maxed out the trade route, turned my 3 million into 55 million credits in about 20 mins of work.  Seems a little too powerful to me.  I would recommend writing some logic into the world gen to try to prevent any intra-sector trade routes, or at least something to make sure they are not so lucrative.  I am concerned that getting so much money so fast will mess up my progression.

[Devious]

I agree, especially with Body Armors players are able to make ridiculous amounts of money, often in the same system as well.

Had players going from 100k to 2 billion in a day because of it.

[koonschi]

I probably won't be able to completely forbid it, but I should be able to make it a lot less likely. I still want players to have this "Jackpot!" feeling.

[Orlania]

Should be enough if it isn't as common as now.

[Mustacheion]

Been playing this game a ton in the past few days, and am enjoying it quite a bit.  I have a few other thoughts about things that could be done to improve the trading system:

 

1) It would be great if we had a search tool for the galaxy map.  When you have done a ton of exploring it can be really tedious to mouse over hundreds of systems looking for a specific factory type.  The ability to add a note to a system in the galaxy map is a really cool feature, but I find it a little hard to use.  Being able to search for words in notes might make it more useful / easy to use.

 

2) It would be nice if, at a sufficiently high quality/rarity the trading computer upgrade module would also record the number of units that the buyer is willing to buy.  Sometimes it will identify a trading route for a good that the buyer will only buy a small quantity of, and if the buyer is in another sector it can be really tedious warping to that sector to check and see how many units you need to move.  This should only be available at a really high quality.

 

3) In a similar vein to the two above suggestions, it would be great if we had an easy way to store the information on what a trading post is willing to buy/sell.  I have found myself making notes in a text editor recording trading posts that sell useful and rare goods like turret parts, which works fine but is a bit tedious.  Since the trading computer upgrade module already has quite a lot of features, I would propose adding a new upgrade module: a galactic database module.  If this module is present in your ship, when you enter a sector it will poll the structures in the sector and record various information into a searchable database.  Higher rarities of module would store more types of information.  Types of information the database can store could include: what goods a trading post buys/sells, average trading ratio of a structure, actual good prices the last time the sector was visited, total number of good a structure will buy/sell, actual quantity of good present in a structure last time the sector was visited.  If you upgrade the quality of your database module you will need to go back to previously explored systems to record whatever new type of information that quality allows you to record.  Perhaps rarity could also affect the total size of your database: at some point you might need to delete systems that you don't find useful to make room.

[Weylin]

I find trading really tedious at this stage of the game.

 

It would be a huge relief if we could just mouse over a sector and see what goods a sector is dealing in.

 

There's really no reason for a module on something that's as simple as taking a snapshot of what you literally just looked at 10 minutes ago but lack the mental capability to memorize it exactly and don't want to spend all day tabbing into notepad to copy the entire stock in for every given sector.

 

I am literally this close to writing a parser that extracts economic station info from explored sectors.

[Jack_Miron]

Trading in this game is dead, right now.

Universe is living only in that sector when you are in it. On other sectors time is stopped, nothing happens. Like on X series universe is living, growing or dying. your choices have fingerprint on universe. I hope someday in this game world will be living, or game will be mmo. 

 

[animark]

Hi Koonschi!

I noticed a bad KI behavior with freighter ships ramming the stations they want to trade with and destroying the docking port in the process! :o

This might be because of the new thruster system ?

The brake speed of the models may be too low...

 

 

[Tsunamik]

Nah, that was happening even before last patch :-)

[LogicSocket]

Yeah you really need to implement a mechanic that if player is in sector with station that has broken docks they get repaired. For immersion you could have little repair ships fly out and fix it  ;D

[Two]

Trading in it's current form feels heavily overpowered. I started fresh on a few servers to try them and on each I made like 15 million in an hour with trading easily before I even left the start sectors.

 

There is currently no jackpot feeling for me, because there are jackpots every few systems. Just check the trade upgrade for anything <-30%, buy it, sell it at the next station for >30%. A friend made 2 billion in one day doing that (and then was slightly annoyed by the use of an int32 in the wrong place ;) ).

 

I strongly recommend to limit those buy and sell values to something between +/- 10% market value instead of the current +/- 50%.

[MrVorgra]

Just a heads up to everyone out there, Real life trading snowballs just like in this game, you buy X10 lots, earn X10 net profits, Build X larger Transport, Buy X20 lots, earn X20 Net Profits, you now have 600% more X$$ than you started with.

 

Obviously that is a very dumbed down/shortened/simplified version, but you get the point, and this excludes any and all other expenses.

[Ohm is Futile]

Just a heads up to everyone out there, Real life trading snowballs just like in this game, you buy X10 lots, earn X10 net profits, Build X larger Transport, Buy X20 lots, earn X20 Net Profits, you now have 600% more X$$ than you started with.

 

Obviously that is a very dumbed down/shortened/simplified version, but you get the point, and this excludes any and all other expenses.

Except in real life you are limited by demand, which usually translates into either small, high margin trades or bulk, low margin trades. Yes, bulk high margin trades happen, and it should remain a possibility in the game, but the way things are, it's incredibly easy and somewhat frequent to come across trades that will set you up for credits for practically the rest of the game.

[Enzo Matrix]

No what we need is money sinks! I tried by making turret factories costing a lot more to make. But still its not making lots is my issue.. but not being able to spend it enough lol

[Two]

There are enough money sinks in the game, they just don't work.

 

For example you can build factories or mines for millions that they hardly will ever bring back in. Problem is: those only work when you are in the same system, which makes them entirely useless.

 

You could also build ships to patrol or mine. Same problem however: they only work when you are in the same system, and to get them to jump with you, you'd have to upgrade them to the same jump level and then still they sometimes get lost.

[MrVorgra]

Just a heads up to everyone out there, Real life trading snowballs just like in this game, you buy X10 lots, earn X10 net profits, Build X larger Transport, Buy X20 lots, earn X20 Net Profits, you now have 600% more X$$ than you started with.

 

Obviously that is a very dumbed down/shortened/simplified version, but you get the point, and this excludes any and all other expenses.

Except in real life you are limited by demand, which usually translates into either small, high margin trades or bulk, low margin trades. Yes, bulk high margin trades happen, and it should remain a possibility in the game, but the way things are, it's incredibly easy and somewhat frequent to come across trades that will set you up for credits for practically the rest of the game.

 

Well yeah, true, but I was too arsed to go into any of the details.

[Axe Coldon]

Just wanted to post my experience.  I spent probably 30 hours playing, mostly trading, and made about 3,000,000 credits in that time.  Pretty fun.  But then, while exploring, I found an amazing intra-sector trade: a trading post selling body armor for cheap, and a military outpost buying them for a lot, within only about 20 km.  I maxed out the trade route, turned my 3 million into 55 million credits in about 20 mins of work.  Seems a little too powerful to me.  I would recommend writing some logic into the world gen to try to prevent any intra-sector trade routes, or at least something to make sure they are not so lucrative.  I am concerned that getting so much money so fast will mess up my progression.

 

Trade is a bit unbalanced in my opinion.  Was player on a server of three of us. Things were going fine until someone noticed trades like you just posted. In 2 days he had 700 million credits.  Everything else seemed pointless after that. TO make it worse, once you do the trades there is no more money to be made because nothing works when you leave the system.  Before we found out how to make hundreds of millions on trade in a few hours, it was more fun doing missions and such to make money. 

 

We since started over and are running the out of sector production mod. Something like that mod really needs to be incorporated into the game.  It doesn't add much load because nothing still happens when you are gone but when you return it catches up.  A slick way to reduce load and have working factories.