Stale Economy? Are players actually trading?

A fantastic example of tier 2 supplying tier 1 that works is flux. It isn’t really viable or necessary for every metallurgist to make their own flux and a chemist arguably does better selling flux than producing it for out-competing metallurgists. So there’s clearly a demand from the start for chemistry plants and good reason to build one. Once you have chemistry plants, now it suddenly makes sense to make buildings that are dependent on it, like hydroponics farms. This naturally opens up more of the tech tree without requiring that one player take on the ownes of building the whole production chain from the ground up.

What we’re looking for is more of that.

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For me, having a highly vertically integrated company, two more factor are important on why i chose as i did:

  1. Reliabilty
  2. Management effort

For 1, i started at Prox as a “small vertically integrated” guy. Mainly making MCG+PE and some B-Fabs (at start mostly BDE), and had my own FRM/FP/INC for my own demand of C and some RAT/DW… bought some FE for BSE/BBH…
Later i got PP2 as well as POL+PPF as there was little supply for PSL and i needed only MG besides C+H i needed anyway for PE…

But

  • first there was FEO, but very few FE available → got my own SMEs (and even sold FE in the early days…)
  • then there was a huge shortage of H2O (and resulting DW), we could hardly get any H2O at all, even at crazy high prices, base was stalling due to lack of DW/RAT → had my second base to get me H2O!
  • as prices for SF were very high at some point (and i love to fly fast), i decided to get into SF-business (had everything ready for my third base → Katoa it was…)
  • hard to get H, i needed it anyway for PE/PG → fourth base at Umbra
  • the FE-supply was still low, as was FEO rising in prices → fifth base at Kiruna

Most times, the choice of my next base was influenced by lacking supply or crazy prices.
Sure, i could try to get suppliers somewhere in the universe, but still i have to contact, set up contracts, ship,… every few days!

→ what would stop me from going vertical even further would be recurring contracts! Those should even have the ability to adjust prices while still being active! Maybe even with a “bid” function?

Next renew due in 3 d 4h
Delivering 100 FEO each week to xyz 
Current price 75 CIS/unit
Suggested price by contract partner for next cycle: 78 CIS/unit [accept] [conter offer: ___ CIS] [end contract]

I think this all boils down to specialization.

It’s too easy to vertically integrate. There is less incentive to actually participate in galactic trade vs. just consuming the items yourself.

The benefits of vertically integrating and insulating from galactic material shortages vastly outweigh the slight production penalty.

The difficult part is, because there are 4 different cx’s & not that many people playing this game, it’s difficult to solve this chicken-egg problem. How do you incentivize players to specialize into one industry? How do you make sure there are always materials available for people to run their production? How do you boostrap that economy and stimulate player trade and dis-incentivize vertical integration?

12% for a 3/3 expert base versus 28% for 5 experts. 16% is hardly a slight difference…

16% increase is 3.84h saved per day of production; or 341 extra production-hours per 89 day repair-cycle

Faction Contracts are going to be interesting. They may be a good start.

Vertical integration is generally stopped by things like MM’s and guaranteed market forces, when your profits are consistent, you can start going up tiers and specializing more, simply because the market is inflating due to the increase of money in the system.

With deflation and things in higher tiers costing more and more money to produce with no-one willing to buy, there is never going to be any benefit to a market for higher tier products.

The Dev’s are really anti-MM as a concept, but the fact is we need some inflation based force to be able to do anything to actually expand and grow into higher tiers.

I’d wager they won’t do enough, unless they go really overboard with them, since the thing we need is basically hyper inflation in every currency, and for that to happen, we as players either need to agree to exploit them (bidding for the contract only makes the contract worse for everyone) or they have to be basically allowing every player to sell their products at whatever price they want

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Contracts will be between you and the NPCs only. You won’t be competing for faction contracts with other players.

If that’s the case, that probably makes them like 50x worse, no competition probably means the system decides the price, and the price will be awful, especially if you take into account what the devs have done to MM’s in the past.