trade just seems broken

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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6cef
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Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2010 12:33 am
Location: Charm City

I've been babying my empire for a week or two now, and have it to 30 worlds, but after eking out this domain, and dealing with constant rebellions on marginal worlds lacking air filters, I'm about too frustrated to keep playing.

Given the starting position I had, I made use of a network of trade hubs to distribute resources throughout my worlds. I had millions of trillum on refinery worlds connected to my trade network, but then many worlds would periodically rebel because they began devoting production to trillum refinery? It got to the point I was shuffling trillum around by hand with transports.

Then my trade hubs seemed to get into a loop where chronimium, which my empire used a very small amount of, wound up being transported between hubs as though they needed it. Demand between hubs was ridiculous, like 50k or something, when demand at non-hub worlds was maybe 100? Again, there was plenty of the commodity in the empire. Canceling and resetting the trade routes seemed to help, but that also immediately disrupted trade to connected worlds.

The last straw was my attempt to reboot the whole trade system. Cancelled all the routes in the empire, then restored them... but of course, that completely disrupted the trade in the entire empire, and boom, revolts everywhere.

Seems like there ought to be a grace period for revolts. Or allow commodities (as opposed to finished goods) to go negative for a few turns before bad things happen?

Anyway, in an undeveloped galaxy, maybe it's much easier to play viably without trade. But when it's crowded, trade between clusters of worlds on the edges of larger empires seems the only way to make a run to appreciable size.
gc2
Commonwealth Pilot
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Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2009 3:22 am

I had a look in game of your empire, two things jump out:
1. The TL of some of your worlds are too high, so you're having a hard time supporting them
2. You have too many trade hubs, for an empire this size there doesn't need to be any. Import the goods directly

Consider the followng:

Trade hubs behave strangely in many situations. At this point in time I would say they're not very well implemented, and there isn't really any advantages in using them.

The most basic resource you need is trillum, since that's required to make everything. From what I can see, you do have some producer worlds for trillum, so you do have the foundation for a good economy.

For your consumer goods autofac (CGA) planets, import trillum directly from your extractor planets, and have them export consumer goods to your trillum worlds so that they don't need to make their own consumer goods.

Once you have a steady base of trillum and consumer goods, you can start focusing your industry. As you designate more refineries and shipyards, check if your CGA worlds are keeping up with export demands by looking at the productions tab (figures appearing in brackets means you're demand is exceeding supply).

Be aware of the tech level of your worlds. You usually want it to be just high enough to unlock the best habitation upgrade (7 or 8 depending on type of world) or the ship you want to build. Any higher and the world will just eat up more consumer goods.

Feel free to ask if you have any more questions, and don't give up
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6cef
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Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2010 12:33 am
Location: Charm City

Thanks for the tips.

The problem is that many of my worlds are clustered between these giant empires. So, to connect them in a way that allows the production of Eldritch jumpships, exoarmor, and starfrigates, creates what seem to be tricky problems, because of the relative scarcity of chronimium from one cluster to the next. So trade hubs seemed a good solution, and when they're working, they seem to work well.

But either there are some strange rules or there are some serious bugs that prevent them from really effectively working, or so it seems to me. I was trying to just pump a backbone of trade hubs full of enough resources to supply the entire empire, but that strategy seemed beset by rule problems or bugs.

I might get back into it, I don't know. It's just extremely frustrating to spend time setting up an empire, and then not be able to understand what's happening to cause it to collapse.
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