Fix for broken trading

[OlFart]

Right, so after a few play throughs I decided to try trading on for size - and went from just a drone to 179 million in three hours - 99% of which I made in the last 20 minutes. I'd go so far as to say trading is completely broken, and by far the most overpowered profession you could possibly get into. I've seen the same issue on numerous games, and it all comes down to the profit margins and the population of goods. I'd like to present my view on how to make it a more balanced profession, with progression, an incentive to build bigger and better ships, and not end up with players earning hundreds of million per hour.

 

First and foremost it's an issue of the volumes in which goods is available. It's fine to have a hundred thousand tons of grain available to purchase, and have a profit margin of a few credits per ton - a large ship will still be able to earn a small fortune on a trip. The problem appears when there's ten thousand units of processors available at a profit margin of 6000 credits per unit, and their volume is 0.1 tons. In a 1000 cargo ship, which is frankly quite small for a cargo vessel, you could carry all ten thousand units, for a profit of 60 million in a matter of minutes. This is where it all breaks.

 

So here's my solution:

 

1) Expensive luxury goods should mostly be the domain of young budding traders. They should have a pretty hefty profit margin, hundreds or thousands of credits per ton, but be available in very low volumes. Diamonds, platinum, gold, processors, etc would fit in here. This is quite frankly the one place where a high profit margin is desirable, so it is nice and affordable to get in on trading without a massive investment of capital. These luxury goods give new players a way to make maybe 50,000 credits of profits on a trade run if they clean a factory/mine out of goods.

 

2) As you progress to bigger and bigger ships, you will have to switch to more and more mundane trade goods, from platinum, to gold, to aluminium, to proteins, that while having a lower profit per ton, is available in larger and larger volumes. It'll raise your profits, but not so much as to ever end up game breaking. It's important to get the math right here, balancing available tonnage with per-ton-profits on a trade.

 

I'll provide an example table of goods, with comments. Hopefully it'll illustrate what I'm suggesting. (Before anyone starts, there's no point arguing the numbers in there, it's just an example to illustrate a mechanic intended to achieve a smooth progression, not an attempt to dictate specifics on how profitable trading should or shouldn't be.)

 

Good	Buy/t	Sell/t	Margin	Profit /t	Factory max	Max profits	Comments
Platinum	500	1000	100%	500	100 tons	50,000	Newbie goods. Extreme return on investment, 100 ton ship can clean out a factory for 50,000 credits
Gold	400	600	50%	200	500 tons	100,000	Intermediate goods. More expensive, requires a 500 ton ship and 200,000 credits to clean out a factory
Silver	350	467	33%	117	1500 tons	175,000	...
Lead	200	273	37%	73	3000 tons	220,000	...
Steel	100	135	35%	35	10000 tons	350,000	Approaching the end game, 10,000 cargo hold required, 1 million investment to buy a cargo
Protein	50	60	20%	10	50000 tons	500,000	End-game bulk cargo. 2.5 million investment, modest profit, massive freighter required.

 

Simple really. As the available tonnage goes up, the profit per ton drops. Even though the prices drop for the more mundane goods, the investment goes up due to the increasing bulk that needs to be traded.

 

I realise this is a rather massive undertaking. Getting all the prices, volumes and all sorted out is a big job. Just making this little table took a good long while - and that's just an example... I do however feel this needs to be done, to fix the trading mechanics in the game. Thanks for your time.

[Ohm is Futile]

I like your idea. You still increase profit as cargo capacity increases, but the reduced margin per item makes it less crazy.

 

...and let's be honest, money can buy you just about anything in this game. I've dabbled with trading and made millions upon millions very early in my game and with little effort.

 

When background simulations hit for player-empty sectors, this kind of fix would be nice I think. It's not entirely related, but I'd like to add that perhaps a "better" script for procedural generation of stations, especially trading outposts and factories would be nice. Right now it's kind of hit or miss with regards to resource availability in the sense that there is very little logic, at least ostensibly, to where which factory is spawned and finding routes can either be laughably easy or an absolute nightmare.