Hey there!
So, I have been playing for a while now and I’ve been taking notes on what seems to work well and what seems to staunch the retention of new players. The most obvious thing is the rate of gameplay. The game is slow, and that’s actually not that bad for this type of game. The issue is really with the fact that this game is only slow. There is no optional content that allows someone who would normally love this game but can’t stand the slowness to play at relatively their speed.
This is where Paper Trading comes into play. Paper trades are non-physical buy and sell orders in real time. Typically, when you deal with the CXs IRL, you’re not always buying physical commodity and usually deal with futures or lots. This allows a company to purchase 10 million in rations in China, and sell that 10 million in Europe at 12 million without having to actually move the Rations themselves.
Since we’re looking at going to off-world CXs, now is a good chance to introduce a paper trading system like this. Allowing companies to buy lots or futures of a commodity, based on the total amount supplied to the CX, and sell it at any other CX without having to move it themselves. When a company wants to collect on the lots they have purchased, they either send their own ship to collect it or they hire a shipping company to pick it up and move it for them.
This does not allow you sell inventory from your base to the CX without moving it to the CX first.
The idea here is, you can get some day traders that join the game and work to move resources around the CXs to perform arbitrage, collect money, and stay engaged for longer. It gives shipping companies more importance in the long run, and it gives LMs a whole new use.
LMs would no longer be pseudo-CXs with less functionality, and rather they would become a direct market vs. an indirect one. As a shipping company myself, I might be contracted to pick up someone’s lot at a CX and move it across the universe to some far off planet. If the LMs are a direct market, producers on that planet might sell their goods at a much lower price than the CXs do allowing me to purchase a return cargo to the CXs.
This makes CXs great for shippers, because that’s where the contracts will come from, but it also means that LMs are great for producers because shippers will buy up their stuff. I already do this to an extent in the current system, but there are many LMs that have good deals on them but are just way out of my way to waste the time to fly to them just for pick up. Paper trading would give players a faster gameplay option, that has trickle down value.