what kind of items would be in the game for colonies would there be general items such as furniture, food and water of course, pastas, pastries, candy, TVs (assuming they still exist in whatever year LT is in), pets would be a good commodity to put in for colonies in the game?

will there be services in the game for colonies that you will need for the colony to be happier? if so what services? health and medical, stores of course, veterinarian (look up I mentioned pets which would be pets such as cats, dogs, green iguanas), fire departments, police stations these would be a nice addition to colonies assuming the way we select structures to be built is a list of structures that we add to a build queue.

also how much control over the colony will we have? will we be able to adjust taxes and change taxes on commodities? will we be able to have, implement and enforce policies/laws? is it possible to have total control and do all the mentioned and have an AI governor automate the above mentioned gameplay abilities?

This is mostly uncharted territory as far as I know so here's what I think (this is just my opinion).

I believe that a economy works off of supply and demand. If there is no demand for an item then it won't sell at all. So, with that said, when you talk about general items I wonder, "How does this influence my LT space ship?" If the answer is "it has no effect" then I don't see why such an item would need to exist in LT. Things like ore, sub-components (for construction of items), and ship related items are all things that influence the game and have prices that are based off of the supply and demand of resources in the system. Things like water, food and candy aren't related to my ship and because my pilot never gets hungry it really isn't an issue. I can't put a price on things that I am never going to use, because my demand for such items is zero, which means my price must also be zero.

So, the kind of items I would expect traders to take to a colony would be system maps, ore, fuel, ships, assembly chips (for building things), and ship related items such as physical missiles, scanners, mining lasers and other things.

I'm not sure if happiness is going to be a metric in LT. I also don't think that colonies or stations will need services in the sense that Sim City needs them. What I mean is that as long as they receive the goods they need, things will be produced. Local security will likely be a thing, but only for stations since it's is impossible for ships to do much more than trade with colonies. (Again, pretty much just my opinion)

We will have zero control over colonies. The only thing the player can affect would be the the price of commodities entering and leaving the colony.

Just remember, whatever the player can do, the AI can do also. It's late here so I apologize if I miss any of your questions or fail to answer them fully. I'll come back to this thread in a few hours.

If only direct influence mattered, I might agree with BFett.

But it sounds like we'll need money to buy ships and ship systems. If so, then money can come from selling anything, even if ships don't use those things directly.

There won't be any special reason to let factories/colonies produce sellable items like chairs, potted plants, paintings, and other such furnishings, because unless something has changed radically in Josh's plans, there will be no first/third-person-walking-around-inside-interiors gameplay in Limit Theory. "Making" bookshelves won't yield a visible 3D textured object.

BUT there is no impediment to letting factory owners produce notional objects -- in other words, you can make any object for sale you like as long as it's just a piece of text in a list. I can't think of any good reason why LT won't include a database of craftable objects that includes (at a minimum) a name, the resources required, and the quantity of each required resource needed to make one unit of that "object."

And since I assume that database will be a part of every game that the player can edit, if you want NPCs in your game to be able to make chairs, then just add "chairs" to the database of your game.

Just don't expect to sit in them.

As flat said.
Interesting economy extends to more than just equipment.

Simply finding a planet with a kind of wood that carpenters love and bringing them to some luxury carpentry manufacturies for some nice cash.

It expands the exploratory and trade gameplay without having to introduce more throughput for more war material which may or may not have some use in a peaceful area.

It would also introduce some economic inertia at the beginning of a war, when the economy has to restructure from furniture and steaks to weapons and ships.
Instead of the equipment only from mining lasers and ships to combat lasers and ships.

A peaceful economy would look fundamentally different from a warlike one.

While I'm not strongly opposed to the idea, I'd like to know how the introduction of these things would help the game economy.

Are we assuming that there are assets that are in demand even though they have no use? Wouldn't that lower the prices of the items to the point where they are next to free?

How do the colonies and stations differ from ships?

And why would you ever introduce a good with literally no sink for it?

Colonies/civilian populations would take and consume any end products of those production lines.
Food, furnishings, clothing, consumer electronics, ground/atmospheric vehicles, etc.

In exchange for population growth to found new colonies, money, better worker npc's to aquire and whatever else colonies would produce.

Colonies would have very large civilian populations and be large sinks and producers of commodity goods (as outlined above) and basic materials to produce them.
They would produce large amounts of commodities to to trade to other planets and consume large amounts of basic and intermediate space produced materials.
(Processed)ores and small volume high value (like electronics) commodities would be imported from space.
With high supplies civ pops would grow in numbers and standard of life and would create more and higher quality workers for the space industry to take and more and higher quality goods to trade to other planets by the space industry.
A wealthy area would and have to spend large amounts on supplying their planetary populations.
Which limits the efforts they can put into any warlike activity (which also decreases steamrolling because you have to supply planets with stuff for crews)
planetary supply needs would also create "war fatigue" effects, as your planets get ever less supplied with escalating wars which decreases the quality and amount of crews they can supply.


stations would have large civilian populations, which wouldnt rival planetary pops, which have the same needs as planetbound pops.
They could serve as outskirt source of pilots and maybe man larger industrial modules like refineries and big factories.
I'd even go so far that you need pops for manning all larger stations and ships, but thats beyond the current discussion and will probably be put into another post soon(tm)

Ships would have small to medium sized pops (or none at all) which would need their share of resource upkeep

I'm doing a large writeup on this as we speak, I think it will address pretty much all issues with colonies. I hope to have it up later this week. Early next week at the latest if I add graphics.

But rough summary of my ideas on OP's concerns, commodities and trade goods are created by colony entities for the primary consumption of other colony entities. Colonies also meet somewhere in the middle between no detail and Sim city levels of detail when it comes to control. The governor can control the "RCI" of a colony, can add or remove pieces to it, but each piece when attached "just works" it doesn't need power grids or sewers or hospitals, those are just assumed to be present or unnecessary.

Sorry to be a party pooper but shouldn't this be in the suggestions thread?

How picky am I especially as I haven't posted in quite a while!

Starbuck wrote:Sorry to be a party pooper but shouldn't this be in the suggestions thread?

How picky am I especially as I haven't posted in quite a while!

No, because the OP was asking a question, not making a suggestion.

BFett wrote:Are we assuming that there are assets that are in demand even though they have no use? Wouldn't that lower the prices of the items to the point where they are next to free?

How do the colonies and stations differ from ships?

Think of non-usable items as commodities bought and sold in bulk. That offers a couple of gameplay possibilities.

For the purposes of a game that's focused on ships, rather than a colony-management sim, you don't even have to worry about supply and demand -- you make money by transporting N units of commodity X from point A to point B. Exciting? Not really. The main benefit here is that the contract boards can have more things than just ships and ship systems.

The other possibility is speculation -- playing the markets -- if you do allow non-usable commodities to have intrinsic value. Instead of only making money for delivering a commodity, intrinsic value creates "buy low, sell high" opportunities. It's more complicated coding, but it offers more active gameplay, plus it's what Freelancer did.

If Josh doesn't spend the time to code it, I imagine someone will design and implement a full colony management sim on top of vanilla Limit Theory. Colony-based supply and demand for many kinds of product, including things that have no active function on a ship, is something those modders would have to address.

Hyperion, I'm looking forward to your writeup!

I really hope that things like this aren't abstracted too much, perhaps a 'general goods' and 'luxury goods' similar to how Star Ruler did it but allowing individual commodities to be generated procedurally with subcategories that fit under those umbrella categories. That way the definition is there while at the same time being abstract enough so that if you want to worry about hedging certain markets you can but if you are looking to just generally fulfill needs you can just grab 'general goods' and 'luxury goods' and perhaps specifics will never become a problem because what you yourself don't supply the colony itself will put market orders for to be fulfilled by AI.

Ok, um my Colonies writeup might be a little bit delayed. I'm pretty much describing EVERYTHING about colonies. I already have 10,000 words and I'm not even close to finished. I've spent nearly every waking moment in the last month on this

Hyperion wrote:Ok, um my Colonies writeup might be a little bit delayed. I'm pretty much describing EVERYTHING about colonies. I already have 10,000 words and I'm not even close to finished. I've spent nearly every waking moment in the last month on this

Submit it to the LTFC!

0111narwhalz wrote: Submit it to the LTFC!

Speaking of which... I should probably do my job and judge that.


Just five more minutes mom!!!!!!!!!!

No seriously, i'll do it when I'm done with this section

Ok, scrap that SoonTM nonsense. my write up will be a bit, i now have about 15,000 words, and im like... half? done?