Colonisation. On paper a dream come true. In reality, a confusing and unintutive mess lacking the proper documentation and or controls to be more than a fancy way to put your name into the game.
I already left some notes on the lackluster documentation of system variables in the Pilot's Handbook. But today I want to just take a look at Markets/Economies for Stations.
Let us put up some ground assumptions.
Let's collect all installations and surface settlements in a list ordered by date of construction. This is our "sources" list. One for surface and one for orbital. And all we really care about is: Address of the Reference Body, Economy Type, Tier.
Now after determining market type. The size of demand and supply could be scaled by system values and or take into consideration each stations connected sources.
In a similar vein metal output could be determined by used sources extraction details.
Finally when it comes to Water and ELW these should provide boosts to a system value/a stations contribution to the system.
There a very straightforward algorithm that should be easy to implement and come naturally to everyone who looks at the system.
Now if you think your system is doing a better job, I would be more than happy to see an actual manual for it within the game. Because as of now, it is a mess.
I already left some notes on the lackluster documentation of system variables in the Pilot's Handbook. But today I want to just take a look at Markets/Economies for Stations.
Let us put up some ground assumptions.
- Installations and Stations either produce commodities or provide a service (military, pirates, research)
- Productive stations have a primary economy type, while everything else starts as a colony economy.
- Stations are logistical hubs that collect and distribute resources to and from installations and surface facilities.
- Whatever logistics a stations provides is reflected in the secondary economic type or in case of colonies wholly substitutes the colony economy.
- Logistical routes are based on orbital relationships between stations and other installations.
Let's collect all installations and surface settlements in a list ordered by date of construction. This is our "sources" list. One for surface and one for orbital. And all we really care about is: Address of the Reference Body, Economy Type, Tier.
- Let's loop over every surface port in the system. Starting with the oldest.
- Find all surface sources that share the same body.
- Group sources by economy and sum up their tier value.
- Pick the group with the highest value. If there is a tie between two groups, pick the one with the oldest member.
- Remove from our source master list the oldest members in the chosen group as long as it would still will the previous competition.
- Add the economy type to the current surface port.
- If the surface port has a colony economy, repeat again for a competition between the remaining group and replace colony economy by the second winner.
- Repeat for every surface port.
- Now add all surface ports and all remaining surface sources to the list of orbital sources.
- Put all stations in a list called targets along with their reference body address as a lookup address
- Now repeat while the list of orbital sources is not empty.
- Loop over all targets starting with the longest lookup address, solving ties by oldest first.
- Find all sources with a address that is a subset of our current lookup address. So if Reference is A7, then we would include A7a to z
- As with a surface settlement try to find an economy type that the station currently lacks.
- Do so again if the station has the colony economy to replace it with.
- If a station has two different economy types, remove from the target list. Otherwise shorten the lookup address by one level for the next loop.
- If the target list is not empty while there are still sources left, repeat again, with all stations now having bigger search radius.
Now after determining market type. The size of demand and supply could be scaled by system values and or take into consideration each stations connected sources.
In a similar vein metal output could be determined by used sources extraction details.
Finally when it comes to Water and ELW these should provide boosts to a system value/a stations contribution to the system.
There a very straightforward algorithm that should be easy to implement and come naturally to everyone who looks at the system.
Now if you think your system is doing a better job, I would be more than happy to see an actual manual for it within the game. Because as of now, it is a mess.
