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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#31
Commander McLane wrote:If we're going the realistic economy route, interplanetary trade will be negligible compared to intra-planetary trade. It will be practically irrelevant for a planet's GDP. The only items traded at all will be high-end delicacies and specialties, things with a brand name, but certainly not the basic daily supplies.
i beg to differ. if your familiar with a book called Dune youd know that there can be very high demands for particularly daily items.
on that world water would be a most welcome commodity that they would trade quite happily for. and they export the spice melange and a sizable amount of other things that other planets cant produce. where as other planets have water covering 3/4 of theri surface i could see the potential for profitable interplanetary trade in resources that arnt particularly 'name brand' as it were.
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#32
Commander McLane wrote:Not really. I happen to know a planet in RealLife™ that has done very well over the course of about 4.5 billion years without a single freighter with supplies from outside. ;)

If we're going the realistic economy route, interplanetary trade will be negligible compared to intra-planetary trade. It will be practically irrelevant for a planet's GDP. The only items traded at all will be high-end delicacies and specialties, things with a brand name, but certainly not the basic daily supplies.
So just because people in the stoneage up to the medieval age survived just fine without a single freighter intercontinental trade from the outside, we will for all future never have any use of intercontinental trade?

Today intercontinental trade is HUGE because it's so cheap, just like interplanetary colonization, exploration and trade is so limited because it's extremly expensive today!

In a future where interplanetary trade is just as cheap as intercontinental shipping is today we could very well see massive star-freighters 10 times the size of todays biggest cargo ships supplying colonies or planets far away with most of their daily needs, in exchange for whatever resources they have that earth is lacking.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#33
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Western Union internal memo, 1876.

Predicting that technology would not be used has never worked to any measurable degree.
There is no "I" in Tea. That would be gross.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#34
Well, there is more than one trope lurking here. :D
Ixos wrote:So just because people in the stoneage up to the medieval age survived just fine without a single freighter intercontinental trade from the outside, we will for all future never have any use of intercontinental trade?

Today intercontinental trade is HUGE because it's so cheap, just like interplanetary colonization, exploration and trade is so limited because it's extremly expensive today!

In a future where interplanetary trade is just as cheap as intercontinental shipping is today we could very well see massive star-freighters 10 times the size of todays biggest cargo ships supplying colonies or planets far away with most of their daily needs, in exchange for whatever resources they have that earth is lacking.
Space Is An Ocean, or at least it seems like a reasonable analogy. Except that SciFi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. Have you any idea about the amount of goods that are consumed worldwide every day? Without having exact numbers, I dare to say that the vast majority of them are not shipped intercontinentally even today. The idea that even an armada of space ships with each of them ten times the size of our biggest ocean ships could bring in an appreciable amount of what's consumed on Earth every day is ridiculous. And tomorrow the armada would have to be back. Also, space is HUGE, and transportation costs to and from (and through) space are the exact opposite of cheap, and will always be. In science fiction scenarios that's different only because they're fiction.
Dadalos wrote:if your familiar with a book called Dune youd know that there can be very high demands for particularly daily items.
on that world water would be a most welcome commodity that they would trade quite happily for. and they export the spice melange and a sizable amount of other things that other planets cant produce. where as other planets have water covering 3/4 of theri surface
Thank's, I'm familiar with it. But are you familiar with that fact that that's fiction, again, and would be plainly impossible in reality?

The question is where Limit Theory with reside on the Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness. How much science and how much fiction? Interplanetary trade amounting to a good portion, even the majority of a planet's (and I'm talking about inhabited planets with billions of inhabitants, not just one small outpost with a dozen people who could obviously be supplied from space) GDP is fiction. That's not to say that it shouldn't be allowed in LT. :D
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#35
Commander McLane wrote:Well, there is more than one trope lurking here. :D
Have you any idea about the amount of goods that are consumed worldwide every day? Without having exact numbers, I dare to say that the vast majority of them are not shipped intercontinentally even today.
I have no idea how much is consumed, but I were able to find out that the port of Shanghai for example handles "561,446,000 tons of cargo per year"

That's about 1.5 million tons per day.

If every man consumes 1 kg of goods per day that would be enough to supply a population of 150 million on the other side of the of the planet. Pretty impressive I would say!
Commander McLane wrote:The idea that even an armada of space ships with each of them ten times the size of our biggest ocean ships could bring in an appreciable amount of what's consumed on Earth every day is ridiculous. And tomorrow the armada would have to be back. Also, space is HUGE, and transportation costs to and from (and through) space are the exact opposite of cheap, and will always be. In science fiction scenarios that's different only because they're fiction.
In case you are going to argue that this game should be based on reality instead of on Science Fiction then I have to disagree.

And who said anything about supplying Earth? Supplying a mining colony with half a million inhabitants on a distance planet is also supplying a planet, but 10000 times easier.

Who are you to say that space transport will always be expensive? If it's so expensive then why are we out there exploring it in this game in the first place?
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#36
Commander McLane wrote:Thank's, I'm familiar with it. But are you familiar with that fact that that's fiction, again, and would be plainly impossible in reality?

The question is where Limit Theory with reside on the Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness. How much science and how much fiction? Interplanetary trade amounting to a good portion, even the majority of a planet's (and I'm talking about inhabited planets with billions of inhabitants, not just one small outpost with a dozen people who could obviously be supplied from space) GDP is fiction. That's not to say that it shouldn't be allowed in LT. :D
josh has said in countless different areas that the game will feature more fiction than fact so i dont think it would be unreasonable to assume that this would be any different. while there will be a factual basis fictional classical themes will be making an appearance in some shape or form.
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#37
TanC wrote:One problem that I'm realizing when planets are factored into the economy: Billions of people to feed, clothe, supply = mega freighters and tons of competition supplying the planet with everything the planet needs (if we are going the realistic economy route). How could we as a single trader survive in this type of environment? I guess you could just either work for one of the corporations supplying the planet until you have enough saved up to start your own little operation or go it alone, supplying little bits of food/water/raw ingredients to the planet and potentially be muscled out by the big boys.
In the Traveller RPG (as I recall, specifically the GURPS Far Trader book from Steve Jackson Games), argued that mega-freighters are very large and complex operations the routes of which are generally fixed, or at least planned months or even years in advance. This makes them great at moving large amounts of cargo along settled trade routes with high volumes, but they are not economical for smaller planets and stations with smaller volumes, and they are too inflexible to take advantage of all the small shifts and changes in supply and demand that an economy experiences. Small trading craft, on the other hand, operate on a much smaller volume and can change plans very quickly, so there will usually be niches that they can exploit alongside the mega-freighters.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#40
I don't think Limit Theory needs to be a blend between spawn-based and dynamic. I think it could work perfectly if it were completely dynamic, and I think that would be best. The X-series of games were my first ever space sim game, and while it was good, I found that it was no longer fun because the game was a spawn-fest where traders had infinite credits, ships didn't need resources to build, ships and stations and wares were spawned from nowhere, and there was no such thing as supply and demand, etc. X is pretty much smoke and mirrors when it comes to that. Even the missions were spawn-based. I couldn't even take over a sector or anything because new ships would be spawning etc. not to mention that in the vanilla game there was no option to take over sectors. That really takes the fun out of the game. It's like a car salesman saying "You can get this here car in any color you want, as long as it's yellow". The only thing I could really do in the entire X-universe was do missions that were spawn-based or fly around. Either that or kill ships that were spawned out of nowhere, or trade resources that had no economic purpose.

Limit theory is a different game than EVE or X. I think it has a chance to break the mold and go where no space-sim has ever gone before. Some mentioned that there needs to be some sort of sink or a hybrid between dynamic and spawn-based to make it work out, but I don't think so. That would take out the RTS part of the game, and a lot of fun possibilities. It's great knowing that there could be a depression that's part of the game. There were economic problems in X, like in Terran Conflict when the terran economy was completely wrecked, and that game was spawn-based. I like knowing that some factions will collapse and others will persist. It adds a whole new layer of RTS/dynamic type of gameplay that X or any other game never had. And I think that's a main point behind the economy of limit theory (sorry Josh if I misinterpret your vision).

We already have other space-sims that have spawn-based economies/ hybrids between dynamic and spawn-based with missions that are also spawn-based. Limit Theory can bring something new to the table, that has never been done before by making the game in whole completely dynamic. But at the end of the day it's Josh's choice, and I trust in Josh's vision for Limit Theory.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#41
RageQuitKetchup wrote: But at the end of the day it's Josh's choice, and I trust in Josh's vision for Limit Theory.
from everything ive been able to read everything in LT will be both procedurally generated and dynamic (with the exception of planets asteroid which are static in space itself)
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#44
Gazz wrote:
Grumblesaur wrote:re-learn the positions of the planets/sun/fields/clouds/stations every time you re-enter a system.
This is not what procedural generation means.
You completely missed the point of what I was talking about.
from everything ive been able to read everything in LT will be both procedurally generated and dynamic (with the exception of planets asteroid which are static in space itself)
I was talking about the asteroids and planets being static.
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Re: Economy and Crafting?

#45
RageQuitKetchup, you have summed up my vision quite well I think :)

I am a firm believer in going fully-dynamic to the extent that it is possible. To what extent will it be possible? Naturally, this remains to be seen. But from my perspective, I don't see any logical barrier in implementing the dynamic economy. Will it take untold hours of simulation, observation, tweaking, and balancing? You bet. But in the end, will it be worth it when you see that your blockade of a system is actually indeed running up the prices on the planets therein, creating an opportunity for you to profit? Yes, I think it will be worth it.

The good news is, I have a contingency plan. The idea of what amounts to an "unstable equilibrium" has been discussed a bit here, meaning that the economy, as a dynamical system, would tend towards instability. This is an interesting claim, and completely non-obvious to me, because I am not an economist. I was hoping that the system would end up as a stabilizing one, in which deviations are automatically brought into balance by the dynamism. But again, it's not at all clear to me a priori whether the economy that we're describing is inherently stable or unstable...and I'm not sure how we could tell without just implementing it.

But here's the key: there's always a way to bring an unstable system into balance, it just requires what you might think of as a spring or drag force, i.e., something that opposes the radical motion of an unstable system. How could we do this in the game? Easy. Random events. Hear me out, because I think we could do this in a very natural, believable way, contrary to the "magical sources/sinks" that people have been talking about in X.

Imagine that a certain type of food is becoming dangerously scarce in Region X for whatever reason. You might be concerned that this instability could set of a chain of problems, and that the system will never recover from the underlying issue, perhaps because various factors in the region have conspired and resulted in the production of food in the region coming in way below the demand. Indeed, it could be a bad situation. But we can easily solve it: the engine recognizes the instability, and smooths it by giving Planet Y, situated in Region X, a "record growing season," and large amounts of the food are produced by Planet Y. The system slowly comes back into balance.

Is it a hack? Yes. It's a temporary source, and we could do the same to create a temporary sink if the balance swings too far in the other direction. But it's a tasteful hack. The player would see this panning out as an actual event in-game, i.e., news bulletins would be reporting the news of a record growing season, which would explain the source. Sure, the extremely observant player might recognize the improbability...but of course, they would never be able to prove that something has been tampered with :)

Naturally, this sort of hack is a last resort in the event that the system does turn out to be unstable. The point is, even if the economy turns out to be unstable, I believe that we can find tasteful ways to produce stability!
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford

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