What Trent said!! Just let us know if you or if anyone you know could use our help, we all love to get together just to sling cans in space, along with the other tom foolery that always happens.Very interesting Goemon. It seems that the amount of profit at the black market does have an effect on the influence drop and isn't capped at a fairly low cr/t level like trading for profit at the regular commodities market is.
I think everyone involved in loading up your cutter had a pretty fun time doing it. If you ever want loaded up with stolen goods we can do that just as easily, it's literally as easy as selecting jettison instead of abandon (also need to make sure we're a little further out if there are security ships about)
[BGS] Trading for Influence
- Thread starter goemon
- Start date
Thanks. I have a system I want to flip. It has a population over 8 billion, so will be a bit of an effort. It's one advantage is 4 stations and an outpost, all with blackmarkets.
On the Cap mentioned in OP and rumoured single Commander Cap
Trying to test the single commander cap rumours, here are my findings:
- two runs by a single commander are exactly as effective as two commanders doing one run each
- the general cap on trade mentioned in the OP is a cap on how much influence can be gained by a single run (instance/system visit, docking, ?)
- I will test at some later point how 3, 4, 6 runs are adding up, and might revisit the "single commander cap" question once i hit a soft- or hardcap by numbers of runs.
Trying to test the single commander cap rumours, here are my findings:
- two runs by a single commander are exactly as effective as two commanders doing one run each
- the general cap on trade mentioned in the OP is a cap on how much influence can be gained by a single run (instance/system visit, docking, ?)
- I will test at some later point how 3, 4, 6 runs are adding up, and might revisit the "single commander cap" question once i hit a soft- or hardcap by numbers of runs.
Thanks for running the tests. I also have a number of tests to do with trading and BHing, trying to find a ceiling. Just need to find a specific pair of systems with certain faction makeup and states.
Great work goemon! As I was doing some trade runs today, I thought of a little loophole you might want to test.
So you said: Trading different commodities gains more influence. But you didn't test whether this might only be due to the number of transactions. In my eyes it is not unlikely for this effect to be caused by the number of transactions as you have already shown that small transaction have a higher impact on influence (proportionally to the profit/tonnage) than large transactions.
So you said: Trading different commodities gains more influence. But you didn't test whether this might only be due to the number of transactions. In my eyes it is not unlikely for this effect to be caused by the number of transactions as you have already shown that small transaction have a higher impact on influence (proportionally to the profit/tonnage) than large transactions.
i'm don't see how you can create more transactions without using different commodities? after all the 1t-trading-bug was fixed?
more transactions of the same commodity act like one transaction.
Yes, I believe that was also the statement made by FD at the time of the patch.
Ok, cool. Thanks for the explanation. Does the transaction "last" for the whole tick? Or is there intransperent wall?
Just to be clear, it's per trip, So if you go to another station and restock, the second batch counts as a separate transaction.
You have to jump to another system to get another transaction.
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yeah, something like this. per instance. per docking. per system visit... as there are stations where you can fly from one to the other in real space, all kind of strange things might be possible ... but i have only tested "per trip".
Is there any data on trading at a loss to reduce influence on a controling faction of a station? If you lose money on a trade does that have a negative influence?
It was the case BEFORE the big BGS update. I have tested 2 months ago I think and it was not working. I don t know if they have fixed it now....
Bear in mind it is more difficult nowdays to generate negative transactions than before (even murdering has been nerfed).
(Sigh)
So is there any trading way or peaceful way to undermine influence of a target faction?
My target is a dictatorship faction, so the black market is closed :/
And I just got a thought, now selling goods at a loss wouldn't result in a influence drop for the CF of departing station, but would it cause influence gain for CF of destination station?
Because CF of destination station bought certain stuff with a cheaper cost.
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There's a lot that doesn't make sense when it comes to the economy... personally I think the whole thing needs a rethink but that's just me.
On a very extreme view, anything which causes a faction to give the player credits should (arguably) cause loss of influence. When there's the Inv/CL/PA combination and people dump thousands of void opals onto the market, that should totally trash at least the economy, if not the influence of that faction too.
In that context, I've always felt activities like claiming Bounties/Combat Bonds should hurt the influence of the faction paying out the bounty... and if not, it should be neutral, and choosing to "abandon" the reward should improve the influence of that faction. But I digress... back to the commodity market.
Profit and loss should have absolutely no bearing on the Economic/Influence effects. If a market has demand for 100t of Palladium, and I sell it for 15,000cr/t... it shouldn't matter to the buyer whether I bought that Palladium for 12,000cr/t (for 3k profit) or 18,000cr/t (for 3k loss)... the materials gained and credits lost are the same in both cases for the buyer.
I doubt this would ever happen... but in my opinion the economy should work as follows
Buying goods off the market should be +Economy, +Influence for the controlling faction.
- +Inf effects should scale based on the level of supply, +econ should be based off the cost of the goods.
- E.g Buying Grain (High Supply, low cost) should be +++Inf and +Econ
- E.g Buying Palladium (Low Supply, High Cost) should be +Inf, +++Econ
- +Inf effects are based on the level of supply, -econ based on the cost of the goods.
- E.g Selling Grain (High Demand, low cost) Should be +++ Inf, -Econ
- E.g Selling Palladium (Low Demand, High Cost) should be +Inf, ---Econ
- -Inf effects are based on the level of supply, -econ based on the cost of the goods.
- E.g Selling Grain to Agriculture (High Supply, low cost) Should be ---Inf, -Econ
- E.g Selling Palladium to extraction (Low Supply, High Cost) should be +Inf, ---Econ
- Selling to zero/no-demand stocks should be -- Econ, --Inf, regardless
- Black markets should be everywhere, and overhauled in a separate suggestion I won't tack on here.
What a change like this would do is bring Trading inline with all other activities in terms of BGS interactions for the player being an ongoing trade-off between earning credits, and helping the faction. There's already many examples of this:
- Missions: For an assassination, you go for either a 2m credit reward and ++ Inf, or a 200k reward and +++++ Inf
- Missions (again): An economy might be a good source of high-value trade missions which all factions offer, but you explicitly only accept missions from the faction you want to support.
- Bounties: You hand in all bounties for any faction in the system for cash, or you never hand in bounties for the factions you don't want to prop-up
- Black Markets: You could make good credits, but if you don't want to hurt the controlling faction, it's out of the question.
- The best avenue to support a faction becomes selling high-demand, low-cost items to the market, while purchasing high-supply, high-value items from the same market. This will ensure continual Economic and Influence growth.
- Selling high-value items to in-demand markets will have the same influence effects, but it'll line your pockets faster, but potentially trash the economy. Think of it like an entity over-expending to support it's industries.
- Selling to in-supply markets is essentially undercutting the supplier in that station, hurting their influence and sucking money out of the system. Although this would typically be for a loss... the utopia here is an aggressive campaign against a faction where you sell to in-supply items, and still turn a profit... with turning a profit made somewhat easier if the target item is a low-supply commodity, at the cost of reduced influence impact.
- A further aggressive campaign could involve purchasing low-cost, low-demand items from an "enemy" market, bringing them back to your supported faction's low-cost, high demand market, and purchasing a high-cost, high supply item such as Imperial Slaves, and bringing them back to the enemy market, turning a big profit and having the whole transaction hurt them... but obv you risk getting fined[1]
Eh... sorry... essay...
[1] Which may not feel like a risk at the moment, but see my previous point about overhauling black markets.
No. it isn't just you (but we may disagree on the solution).
The problem with this approach is the non-production economies - Colony, Tourism, Service, Terraforming ... and maybe to an extent Military - which would just become drains on their owners' Econ because the service sector is abstracted so much it's basically not in the BGS at all.
It would also have the odd effect that when this drain pushed a Colony into Famine - massively increasing the demand and cost of food - actually bringing it the food would just make the situation worse. (though their influence would go sky-high)
An alternative which might work to separate +INF and +Cr concerns for trading might be to make the +INF proportional to the percentage demand position on sales (purchases still no INF effect, since it would be too easy for rich pilots to exploit by buying and dumping)
Sell goods which are at 100% demand, big +INF. Sell goods which are at 50% demand, small +INF. Sell goods below 10% demand, no +INF. So Core mining probably stops producing any INF at all very quickly.
More expensive goods already have both lower absolute base demands and lower regeneration rates for that demand, so would rapidly stop being a useful source of INF if over-traded, while the cheaper goods are likely to maintain a high demand percentage even if hauled all day long.
If demand sizes were generally reduced and regeneration rates made slower, this could also mean that best +INF naturally came from bringing a variety of goods, rather than all the void opals.
Is that a problem? If they don't have any primary outputs, their economy should be weak.... and let's face it, it's not like the galaxy is hardly swimming in Bust or Famine; indeed, such a change might actually fix that (in my opinion, massive) problem with the current BGS.
And think about it; why would/should a lone Colony economy with a military outpost have a strong economy? Why should a lone outpost with no strong economic backing not be in a virtually-constant famine state? Suddenly multi-economic systems where an Extraction economy for a faction might strengthen the economy, while a colony economy weakens it , makes much more sense.
RE: It would also have the odd effect that when this drain pushed a Colony into Famine ... I'd grant that, but I'd counter the response is that a famine should flip that -ve econ effect when trades are for food. I'd make an alternate argument that perhaps the economies with no outputs besides Biowaste need an overhaul, but that's a whole other topic... but bear in mind... run "Source" missions and the like (which is stuff the colony is specifically asking for outside the markets) and you'll strengthen the economy.
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Oh, absolutely something needs to be done about the lack of -Econ (and -Sec) states compared with 3.3 ... but I'm not convinced pinning all the non-production economies to Famine is the solution. (Except for the ones no-one ever trades with, which are in Econ: None instead)
And certainly not in a way that means importing food makes the famine worse. Obviously there has to be a lot of abstraction and breaks from realism to make things work as a game, but I think you'd need to change the state's name to "Overfed" at that point ... there's too much food, so everyone is having banquets and parties rather than working, until it's been eaten.
Service (which is mostly fairly rare, of course, as a primary economy type) should be getting a lot of income from providing those services - but other than maybe the occasional courier mission, this isn't currently modelled in-game as it doesn't really involve the players.
Tourism should be getting a lot of income from visiting tourists - perhaps passively drawing +Econ from neighbouring systems? - but half the tourist missions to a lot of these systems scan the beacon only, so don't touch the local factions at all.
Colony presumably make their money from the rental income from the residents - who themselves make their money working elsewhere. Again, other than a few passenger missions, mostly out of scope of the player-touched bits of the economy.
Terraforming, yes, probably is just a big pit to throw money down in the hope that it'll get a big payoff when the atmosphere is breathable and you can start opening facilities there on the land you bought up cheap with terraforming bonds. That one probably should require the faction to have other sources of +Econ to support it. This is actually an area where the 3.3 states don't work so well, I think - a faction can theoretically be in Investment in one system and Famine a few LY away, which is a bit weird - and means it can't model the funding for terraforming very well.
EDIT: agreed with your edit that the non-production economies need an overhaul - not necessarily to make them produce commodities, but to bring the service side of the economy into being something that the players can interact with in the BGS as much as the commodity side.