Found an incredibly expensive authentic Ringer artifact

[Brzelius]

...and can't sell it, because no Ringer commune or shipyard can afford to buy it (even if I didn't sell them anything else yet).
I just found a Ringer artifact on a Ranx dreadnaught and identified it with an advanced analyzer for the heck of it. "The cerusite sculpture depicts a lonely four-armed Ringer figure hovering in an asteroid field." Suggestions on uses? Keep as a talisman?

[Xephyr]

From the code, looks like the thing's worth 150,000 credits. Since Ringer Shipyards carry 100,000 rin, you *should* be able to sell it to a shipyard.

[NMS]

Except that it's RingerValuable, so they pay 150,000 rin for it. You should be able to sell it to a Ringer exchange or shipyard if you wait for them to have full money and then buy items costing at least 50,000 rin from them.

Edit: If you can't find one with items you want, you can buy other RingerValuable items from them then sell them to another Ringer station for 10/11ths of what you paid. For resources, you'd get back 65% of what you paid.

[Xephyr]

Except that it's RingerValuable, so they pay 150,000 rin for it.

Ah, right, my bad.

Looks like the "notable" Ringer artifact is worth 750,000 rin, which is kind of stretching into ridiculous territory.

[Brzelius]

I'll buy valuables or ressources for 50,000 rin then to sell this artifact, thanks. There should be a way to sell the notable Ringer artifact though, otherwise it'd be unintended behaviour, aka bug.

[JohnBWatson]

I'm always confused by how the game's economy is intended to work here, to be honest. The superfreighters we see flying around have more cargo space than most stations have resources, many stations have fewer credits/rin to spend than an average endgame gunship costs, and so on. I know it's low priority compared to combat updates and glitch hunting, but I'd still really love to see an update that reworks the scales and trading system to be a bit more immersive, and makes items' values a bit more in line with each other.

[Brzelius]

While that would be nice for sure, I'm still frequently impressed by the games depth in several dimensions: The hinted at and implemented storylines and background, the consistent and interesting sci-fi high-tech (I love stuff such as "Hadron Archeolith"), the very complex and partly obscure game mechanics and also the economy with some kind of supply-and-demand price rendering, lots of different entities with own wants and needs and even a stock market

[Song]

I'm always confused by how the game's economy is intended to work here, to be honest. The superfreighters we see flying around have more cargo space than most stations have resources, many stations have fewer credits/rin to spend than an average endgame gunship costs, and so on. I know it's low priority compared to combat updates and glitch hunting, but I'd still really love to see an update that reworks the scales and trading system to be a bit more immersive, and makes items' values a bit more in line with each other.

Hmm. Don't suppose we've got any economists hanging around the forums? I know we've got a buttload of software engineers and programmers, but a few peeps with economics and a few other backgrounds (I can lend some tourism science!) might be able to brainstorm a few changes. Would make a cool bit of community or registered extension content.

(I also really like the depth ingame, but making the numbers add up a bit better and adding even more depth is always cool. Plus making the stock market less broken)

Edit: Also! I've made a ticket about adding sinks for items that simply can't be sold. Comment away on it with other ideas!

[Ihlosi]

Hmm. Don't suppose we've got any economists hanging around the forums? I know we've got a buttload of software engineers and programmers, but a few peeps with economics and a few other backgrounds (I can lend some tourism science!) might be able to brainstorm a few changes.

The problem is that with a complex economic simulation running in the background, the game becomes a lot more dependent on in-game time. And the economic simulations I've seen in other games were either exploitable (hey, but that's the point of economy, right?) or they were made unexploitable and unrealistic, e.g. by setting limits (price for trade good X can only vary between Y-20% and Y+20% and there's no chance ever of scarcity driving the price higher or excessive supply making the price crash).

Then again, I love even mediocre simulations of economy/physics/etc. in games.

[JohnBWatson]

I don't think it has to be complex to the point where things are likely to fail. A simple adjustment of the pricing system where price bonuses and reductions for goods are altered based on the level of danger nearby and the proximity of the nearest station that produces/consumes that resource and a second alteration that bases how much a station is willing to pay for non - necessities(Ship equipment at non - arms dealer stations, luxury food, artifacts, etc.) on how much money it has would do wonders.

[NMS]

Here's an earlier thread about dynamic economy ideas.

I have taken some economics courses, but as I posted there:

A dynamic economy would be very cool in an open world game, but I'm not sure it's a good fit for Transcendence.
Pros:
- Realism
- Cool
- Makes trading less mindless
Cons:
- Makes trading a lot more complicated, and probably not in a fun or beginner-friendly way. You'd have to collect a lot of information about current prices at various stations before getting started, and then know something about how the economic model calculates those prices in order to manipulate them.
- If the model is realistic and there's a competitive market for shipping, price differences between stations should be driven down to the point where traders make a "normal" profit (enough to compensate them for their time and the risk of pirate attacks).
- If the player is able to manipulate prices by a significant amount, trading could become the most efficient means of earning money. George has said he doesn't want other sources of income to take the focus away from combat.
- Requires a continuous flow of goods in and out of a system's economy. This means the player could earn an arbitrary amount of money in a single system, eliminating the part of the game's difficulty that comes from limited resources.

[Song]

It's not so much fancy dynamic stuff that I'd be interested, but just working out some scales and optimising things a bit. Working out some background details.



(Personally I headcanon station funds as being their general purpose slush funds, so we don't actually bankrupt stations with trade: we just deplete what they have set aside for trading)

[digdug]

many stations have fewer credits/rin to spend than an average endgame gunship costs, and so on.

I don't see much problem with that.

1 single jet fighter can cost up to $200 millions (I'm thinking F-35), that's more money than an entire small town can make in a year.
I don't know what would be the cost of a Carrier/battleship with twin nuclear propulsion. (USS Enterprise CVN-80 Ford Class for example) But I'm pretty sure it's absurd quantity of money for a private "normal" citizen.

[JohnBWatson]

I thought it was odd based on the fact that they are apparently sustaining populations in the millions, more on par with small nations and large cities than towns. I'm not sure about the populations of the smaller colonies, but it still seems strange to me that they would have so little on stock.

This may be an acceptable compromise with real economics based on the fact that large stations would produce massive amounts of loot if destroyed if their goods scaled accurately, but I do maintain that making major stations feel more 'big' when encountered, with more cash on hand, goods offered, and defenses as well, would enhance the trading system overall. A lone pilgrim traveling to the core shouldn't feel like the biggest, richest, most powerful thing in the sky by the 1/3 of the way point. A small enhancement that would similarly add to immersion would be adding some extra low - tier items and food in the form of citizens' personal property when a civilian station is destroyed, Korolov containers for Korolov stations, and possibly tossing some repair paste, armor patches, and similar items into the cargo hold of maintenance stations, along with fuel rods for any station that offers refueling services.

Come to think of it, would adding some more realistic loot be viable? Rather than randomly generating everything, populated stations could have a minimum level of supplies and water, shipyards could have some plating from the ships they make, and

[sun1404]

The small amount of loots you get from big stations doesn't need to reflect the amount of items that were on the station. It may be just that they're all you can find, or reach, in the wreck of the station. I'd say most things on a station would be kept in secure rooms, which even if you could reach in the wreckage, you couldn't open without destroying everything inside.

I think the loots system is pretty balanced now, for a game, if not realistic. Tampering with it may very well destroy the balance.