“It’s too expensive, I’ll do it myself,” is a pretty commonly heard phrase in PrUn regarding products seen on the Commodity Exchanges. And to be honest, they are right-it’s way cheaper to do it yourself then buy it off of other people, which leaves older players sitting on piles of cash, and contributes to players needing to sell higher-tier products at high prices because demand is spotty, which leaves players building their own production lines, which contributes to expensive products because demand is spotty.
An endless cycle.
The problem is once you get out of resource extraction, there is virtually nothing differentiating companies from each other. This problem can be seen at even the PP1, INC, SME level-it’s way cheaper to create your own products then pay the markup.
Even with a base limit, it would be still way cheaper to produce your own products-you would just demolish and reconstruct the buildings. GDP-did to construct the first COGC-rather then running them at a loss, the buildings were just deconstructed and the A-fabs used to construct the next building in the line.
The buildings other then FRM’s and FP are not effected by where you put them, so you can literally place them anywhere and be able to sell products at a similar price to those that specialize.
Trade is generated from inequality-when all companies are equal, there is very little trade.
There needs be multiple layers of specialization, whether it’s from planetary projects, global experts, player buildings or some sort of bonus from planetary “features”.