I'm trying to understand what the expanded Galactic Average tab's function is, I click on a different system and see no change to anything, what exactly is the purpose of this field ?.
Yes I'm frustrated, annoyed and angry.......basic game play needs to be continuously googled......
This is described on page 102 of the manual. If you read the manual (use the link in the launcher to get the latest version) you'll get answers to a lot of basic gameplay questions - and also answers to some more obscure things.
Selecting a system shows imports and exports based on the economies of the current station and the destination station. Very useful for getting an idea of which trade goods go which way - though no guarantees of a particularly large profit. You'll also want to check versus the galactic average prices - if your current station is selling an "exported to" good at close to the galactic average, your profit is likely to be negligible unless you get lucky ... and might even be a slight loss if you're very unlucky.
You can get the same information by reading the details of each trade good, which give both the general production/consumption economies and details of *mostly* nearby systems it's traded to or from - but this gives a nicer summary without the need to go back and forth to the galmap.
If you change systems and it doesn't appear to make any difference, then either:
- the new system has the same economy type as the old system, so the imports and exports are basically the same
- neither system has anything particularly interesting in the currently shown rows of trade goods - scroll up and down. Some economies have very little connection to each other e.g. an Extraction economy exports very little (and nothing actually worth the effort of hauling) to Agricultural economies so the column is mostly blank.
