2.0 Trade is far too easy and a proposed solution.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

I would like to address the issue of the new trade system being far, far too easy, but also propose a solution that I think would fit, in a realistic fashion whilst putting more requirements on other new aspects of the new 2.0 update.

The Issue

The big issue with the 2.0 Trade System is that it is far too easy once you work out the ideal scenario. In my case I discovered that all you need to do is open up the new "inner faction area" and only trade within that area. It houses the most valuable trade commodities due to it being a central location of the faction, but also the safest, again due to it being a central faction location, with a threat rating of less than 10% in most cases.

To put this into perspective, I play on Hardcore, I like a challenge, but starting out with this method I managed to reach 100m before even being close to reaching Naonite. In this entire journey, due to the area being safe, my trade ship was attacked only once. From what I can tell, this has no repercussions. Your trader instantly returns your capital and only ever seems to take a key to the paintwork. We don't need to use the Escorts? Or set up Asteroids? Or.... do anything anymore.... my one little trade ship is seeing me through the entire game.. yikes.

Proposed Solution

Just like in the real world, easy jobs are a magnet for the little guy, the notorious "white cargo ship man". To go along with the Profits and Threat %'s, perhaps introduce a Competition % which is higher the closer you are to the factions centers. The higher the competition, the more small time traders there are willing to do the job cheaper.
On the flip side, the higher the threat (further afield) the higher the profits become and the lower the competition.

Pirate threats on trade ships should also pose a more serious threat, thus requiring a larger starting capitol to further invest in Escorts if you want to take on the more dangerous, but higher paying trade routes.

This proposed solution should remove the easy street and force you into being one of the many small time traders looking to turn a profit and slow the progression into reaching the higher paying trade routes. Not to mention the Escorts, their Crew, Materials and Captain all contribute further to the capital investment required to reach this mark.



Hopefully the trade can be worked on a little more, but right now I've taken a step back from the game as I feel it's just a bit too easy right now.

[TheRogon]

I'm mostly on board with this, but I would disagree about there being many more smaller guys in the core. In reality there is far less competition in well established, highly lucrative trade routes. Like in real life, the best paying loads are done by the big guys. Swift, JB Hunt, Old Dominion.. they aren't doing the loads between the small businesses. They hold contracts with Wal-Marts, Krogers and Amazon. The "Little Guys" use job boards and do the small, one time hauls from Joe's garage out in the country side.

Maybe trade could have a minimum cargo capacity. As you get closer to the central territories you need more cargo, more deposit and more omnicron. Maybe even a mininum faction standing you are buying from.. since they are trusting that you will get their 50 million in satellites to whoever.

Edit to add: after rereading the OP, I think I am saying the same thing they said. Just with a different set of modifiers.

[Bobucles]

The trade mission is incredibly simple, profitable, and a huge pain in the ass. Trade ships require intervention every ~10 minutes, or less if they have speed quirks. Ambushes can happen at any time, so if they aren't also devastating combat ships you have to rescue them at a moment's notice. Of course the trade route respawn is far and beyond anything that real factories can supply or ever demand, so their income has no real basis in existing economy mechanics.

The money's great, far and beyond most other options in game. It takes a lot of cash to grow the fleet and arm it with good weapons. The mission setup, not so much. Perhaps if it was more like a trucking contract, where the ship works for a faction or an area or something for a while.

[Teralitha]

You seem to think that 100 million is alot.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

The trade mission is incredibly simple, profitable, and a huge pain in the ass. Trade ships require intervention every ~10 minutes, or less if they have speed quirks. Ambushes can happen at any time, so if they aren't also devastating combat ships you have to rescue them at a moment's notice. Of course the trade route respawn is far and beyond anything that real factories can supply or ever demand, so their income has no real basis in existing economy mechanics.

The money's great, far and beyond most other options in game. It takes a lot of cash to grow the fleet and arm it with good weapons. The mission setup, not so much. Perhaps if it was more like a trucking contract, where the ship works for a faction or an area or something for a while.

I think you missed my entire point. The Trade ships are never attacked thanks to 'inner faction' areas having extremely low threat ratings, that was my entire issue. Open up a factions inner circle on the map by flying around to reveal it all, then set your trade ships to trade only within that circle. Typically less than 10% threat. If I can make 100mil off a single, small, basic starter trade ship, on hardcore long before even seeing Naonite; that's way too easy.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

Originally posted by Teralitha:

You seem to think that 100 million is alot.

This is a post about the time taken to hit 100m in a starter trade ship on hardcore, not the monetary amount in general. Sorry that was difficult for one to comprehend.

[Bobucles]

100mil is needed to build up a size 15 ship to survive the core. That kind of investment is needed for every ship hoping to brave the core, so it adds up very fast.

The best way to get that kind of money is from trade missions. Bulletin board missions tend to die out at a million or so. Most of their value comes from enemy salvage, the target ships tend to be worth far more than the mission itself.

Typically less than 10% threat.

Yes, it looks low on paper. But when using 2 or more trade ships popping trade missions every 10 minutes, a mountain of dice rolls add up. Sometimes it's peaceful for a long time, sometimes there's back to back ambushes. If the trade ship isn't a dedicated war vessel, the player is forced to abandon their task and personally intervene. Ambushed ships don't have the ability to escape or survive on their own.

[rickcarson]

There's something about them nerfing these for the starting faction, I think the quantities are quite small.

There's a not inconsiderable time-sink involved in just jumping around looking for a half-decent merchant captain (as they are the only ones allowed to do trade missions).

I've done a bunch of rerolls around testing out different starting tactics, and there's a large degree of variation. Sometimes you can get this off the ground in about an hour - sometimes after five hours you give up looking for half-decent merchants and settle for 'not a gambler'.

-------

My latest playthrough I had two merchant captains, in the heartland of a faction that was considerably closer to the center (straddling the tit-nao border) and their trade missions were sometimes okay, but mostly garbage by the standard I got calibrated to during the betas.

And yes once their cargo reached a certain size pretty much anything that was worthwhile could be done in a single iteration - e.g. why take 2 trips for 0.5mil profit each trip when you could take 1 trip for 1.0mil profit.

And I realised that if I spent say 10 hours (long enough to crack trinium and start working on xanion) - playing the game with those two traders then I'd sent them off on close to 100 trade missions.

And the problem is - in terms of actual gameplay - once you've 'solved' the trade mission puzzle (e.g. do it in the central areas), there's basically very little else of interest and so it's a boring AF as the tail-end of an entirely random multi-hour setup process.

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Anyway, the constant twiddling they require makes me wonder whether or not I'm better off (in terms of having more time to spend on other more interesting parts of the game) - with a wholly passive solution likes mines/factories.

Though I'm curious whether that is genuinely passive, or whether it ties you to a particular area - and if it is even worth bothering with pre-hangars.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

100mil is needed to build up a size 15 ship to survive the core. That kind of investment is needed for every ship hoping to brave the core, so it adds up very fast.

The best way to get that kind of money is from trade missions. Bulletin board missions tend to die out at a million or so. Most of their value comes from enemy salvage, the target ships tend to be worth far more than the mission itself.

Typically less than 10% threat.

Yes, it looks low on paper. But when using 2 or more trade ships popping trade missions every 10 minutes, a mountain of dice rolls add up. Sometimes it's peaceful for a long time, sometimes there's back to back ambushes. If the trade ship isn't a dedicated war vessel, the player is forced to abandon their task and personally intervene. Ambushed ships don't have the ability to escape or survive on their own.

Seems our experiences differ here. My trader was only attacked once. Outside of the inner circle, sure, attacked plenty of time there, but I never once lost the basic, crappy trade ship I threw together. In my experience your trader will always instantly return any funds they are carrying and I can simply drop to Galaxy map and tell them to jump a sector over. On top of that the damage is always laughable.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

Originally posted by rickcarson:

And the problem is - in terms of actual gameplay - once you've 'solved' the trade mission puzzle (e.g. do it in the central areas), there's basically very little else of interest and so it's a boring AF as the tail-end of an entirely random multi-hour setup process.

Indeed, that's pretty much my entire gripe with the system, though I never bothered to look for a quality trader as the money is so easy they traits didn't really matter all that much. I found plenty of Traders I could hire by just going to systems within the inner circle whilst I was opening up the inner circle boundaries in the first place so I really killed two birds with one stone there.

[Nyrin]

Originally posted by Lord Dan™:

Seems our experiences differ here. My trader was only attacked once. Outside of the inner circle, sure, attacked plenty of time there, but I never once lost the basic, crappy trade ship I threw together. In my experience your trader will always instantly return any funds they are carrying and I can simply drop to Galaxy map and tell them to jump a sector over. On top of that the damage is always laughable.

You're very lucky and/or your sample size is still just too low :)

There's a limit on how far you can push ambush chance down, so it *will* happen at least occasionally. You do get your money back if the ambush time chosen is <35% of the way through the mission (trade ambushes happen randomly between 10% and 85% completion, so money back is only a 1/3 chance), but for other ambushes the money is gone and your trader is plopped into the ambush with a cargo bay full of goods that it bought.

Those ambushes up the ante dramatically, as you're going to have a very hard time recovering those goods and selling them if the ship is destroyed. At a minimum, that means you need to react quickly and have good enough engines to outrun the ambush until you jump away--otherwise you risk losing the entire investment sum.

That said, I do agree that it's overall too easy to make money this way. It'd be nice if automated trade were more focused on reputation gain (with a little bit of profit as a side effect) and money-making focus were shifted into economy-building, as that's one of the draws that's overshadowed a bit by how good trade can be.

By the end, when you need hundreds of millions for big ships and powerful factory turrets, the few million profit per mission won't look so absurd anymore. But especially until the core, it's a low- (but no no-) interaction way to not worry much about credits.

[Doomwarrior]

Trade, if you mean auto trade, is really not the most broken thing in the game. Its rather boring and tame considering the real evil broken beast in the game. The money printers of money prints: procurement and autosale. All you need is said 1 tradeship with an ever increasing cargosize. You go procure something expensive jump a few jumps and use auto sell. In a good area you can manage around 45-50% difference in price. If you use something nice like processors which are expensive and small you can make hundreds of millions even billions in just 60 minutes. with a rough chance of attack around 1%. All you need to worry about is buying up all ressources everywhere in all resources refineries fast enough so you can keep up with expanding your cargo size to your new wealth of 50% more than before every hour or so.

Why is that broken? Because there is no limit of how much you can sell in an area. No limit of how much you can buy in an area. The areas are just printing goods and money for you. Very lovely :D

Its so utterly broken its...perfectly balanced as some would say.

[Magitek]

A lot of games don't get trading right (I can probably count these on one hand from thousands of games), and Avorion has indeed fallen into the trap of making trading a simple A to B endeavour with little nuance.

At the end of the day, so long as Avorion doesn't have any dynamic relations and/or economic tension going on, it'll always be like this. It doesn't feel like you're contributing to the economy, providing a service or achieving anything but updating your accounting books.

Nobody in the universe cares what you are trading, essentially.
The pre-2.0 system wasn't exactly great, but I did feel like I was helping a factory produce at 100% and having some effect on prices and supply (even if it was mostly just fake). It's a little disappointing to see trading reduced even further.

I like all the interface work they did for trading and the idea of setting traders up with missions, but it's just not interesting to run and that is my concern with it more than anything else. We needed more authentic shipping lanes, more nuance to supply chains and factions, more competition/dynamic demands and some kind of transport contract system beyond take x to y in a single step. It's just too simple to be interesting in Avorion.

[Urmel]

compared to the time/investment (ship, captain, explore, credits to buy anything)
you have to do before you are able to make this money ....

... no... its exatly at the difficult-setting it should be.

[Bobucles]

Trade ships super easy to set up, compared to mining/salvage ships. Cargo doesn't scale with distance to the core so trade ships don't need to grow very much. Traders don't need heaps of rare mining turrets (which there are NEVER enough of), they can just use some of the piles of trash weapons that drop everywhere. There's no need to stack rare modules or invest in fighters or even bother approaching the core. Build a box, slap on some trash guns, stay in the titanium regions and your trade ship is raking in tons of cash.

Trade ships can easily pay themselves off in an hour, maybe less if you already have enough cash to get them going.

It's quite difficult to grow a trade/salvage fleet. They require large numbers of resource lasers. The loot table just doesn't have enough to go around, and they require constant replacement with every new tier. A huge number of civilian turret and fighter modules are required to max out harvest yields, and gun modules are needed for defense. Harvester modules are pretty crowded so high level modules are essential. Harvesting fighter squadrons easily cost millions of ore at the high end, and millions more ore is required to keep growing the mining ship as it approaches the core. Resource harvesting missions will take hours to recoup the investment, but that profit typically gets invested back into the harvester to keep it viable.

Harvest ships pay back... eventually. You don't see the big cash money until the very end, when they finally have all their equipment maxed out and need no further investment.

[Anomalous Beanbag]

Originally posted by Urmel:

compared to the time/investment (ship, captain, explore, credits to buy anything)
you have to do before you are able to make this money ....

... no... its exatly at the difficult-setting it should be.

You've got to be kidding me. There is no investment. There is 99% of the time, an asteroid to sell right in the starting sector. Sell it, get the first trader you see, then slap together a crappy ship with as much cargo as you can, get any basic cargo tech upgrade, send him out.
That's all I did. It's not hard.