Living Economy

[Jay2Jay]

An idea that I was wondering if anyone else would be interested in seeing turned into a mod.

All stations consume and/or produce goods, so like agricultural stations produce food and other stations consume them over time. Also, these goods must be shipped between two stations physically, a freighter at a time. If these freighters are attacked, say by pirates, then the stations suffer.

So all stations (except those that produce these things) will need fuel, water, food, medical supplies, and basic consumer goods, and stations with large populations or certain modifiers would also demand illegal recreational drugs. Also this could affect the price of goods per station. An agricultural station with overproduction would lower its prices, where as a commonwealth station that is deprived of medicine would pay a premium.

How we do it:
We create an algorithm that defines how much stuff a particular station needs based on the type of station and population, we would do this by assigning simple variables to each station.

Example: foodconsumption = Population(basefoodneed)(stationmodifier)

Of course this means system generation will have to be worked on, every system will need to get their goods from somewhere, meaning there will have to be sources for all these resources, and iirc you can't track ships/stations between systems if you are not involved in some way.

I suppose you could cheap out and just have freighters regularly spawn from stargates, but that's kinda boring.

Also, if freighters are being spawned, then there is a good opportunity for pirates spawned from pirate stations to attack them, affecting the economy and adding in a whole new possibility for missions.

A decision would have to be made, however, if hostiles should be immune to these changes, if not then an entirely different system would have to be created for them. Well, maybe not for the larger groups, like the Ares but for the smaller ones changes would have to be made.

[shanejfilomena]

I , in fact always do this in my games: in Midst of Dragons - the only Mod where I released my "secret" Fuel Traffic & other behavior you do have manufacturing in stations & resupply by ships.