To expand upon what
@Jmanis wrote above, here's how the economic sim worked in Alpha 4, before Frontier took a chainsaw to it to satisfy those who wanted a
guaranteed trade profit of 1000 credits/ton.
1) First, markets in ED are per station (or planetary port or settlement) only. The prices in one station won't affect the prices in any other station of the system, let alone with neighboring systems or human space as a whole. As Jmanis said, the "galactic average" price is simply a global variable to determine what local prices are.
2) The "supply" and "demand" values of commodities in any particular market is determined by a variety of factors, such as economy type and the size of population served by the market. This apparently
isn't the size of the system's population, unless its the only market in the system. These are the "maximum" values, which the market started at when the game began. The buy and sell prices in the market are determined relative to "supply" and "demand" a
per ton basis. This is the source of the so-called "bulk tax." It isn't a "tax", but reflects the difference in price between the first ton you sold, and the last one.
4) Each commodity sold by a market has a "baseline production" value, which basically represents baseline NPC trading. Every fifteen minutes, aka the market tick, the market adds this "baseline production" to its level of supplies, and also adds the commodity's "ingredients" from demand. This repeats until "supply" and "demand" reaches their maximum values.
5) Each commodity sold by a market also has a "maximum production" value, relative to its "baseline production" value. Between market ticks, the market would produce as much of the commodity as it could, up to "maximum production," assuming that it had "ingredients" to do so. For example: tea in an agricultural market would be produced if it had stocks of crop harvesters, pesticides, and biowaste available.
6) A market
also "consumed" certain commodities, such as food, consumer goods, coffee, tea, and luxuries, at a fixed rate, based on its population and wealth.
7) A market will
always buy a commodity, even if there's no demand for it.
Alpha 4, when the economic sim was introduced, only had five stations, which covered the five basic economy types in one form or another: high tech, industrial, refinery, agricultural (land and sea IIRC), and extraction. With only a handful of stations to trade from, a high number of eager alpha-testers, many of whom rushing to get the biggest ships, the inevitable happened: between dwindling supplies of high-value goods, and dwindling demand for the same, the most profitable trade goods soon bottomed out. Where players were filling their increasingly large ships with 1200-1500 credit/ton luxuries, those
same luxuries were selling for several hundred. Given that at the time there
were operational costs for ships, which were proportional to their size, trading those luxuries in large ships were often at a
loss.
Certain commodities, such as gold from Freeport, tea from Azaban City, or performance enhancers from Beagle 2 Landing, returned to a more profitable 400-500 credits/ton, thanks to demand in the
other stations far exceeding the limited baseline production. Which led to quite players camping those stations, "F5-ing" the commodity screen on the market tick to fill up their cargo holds. This process took several
hours, and was likely macroed so the tester could watch TV or sleep. After all, if you were going to spend
all that time traveling in Supercruise in the blue zone, which was the "forum recommended" (
) technique at the time,
before they discovered the seven second rule, you should have a full cargo hold to make a profit!
This situation was
intolerable for many of those big ship testers. Who, incidentally, were far more plentiful than they
should've been thanks to one alpha-tester discovering a
literal gold duplication bug, who graciously showered whole Type-9 loads of gold canisters upon anyone who wanted it at the back of Azaban city.
Now, it
was possible for a commander to make a
constant profit, at a rate of over 300,000 credits/hour in a Cobra Mk III,
if you could:
- Play during off-peak hours
- Diversify your outgoing cargo load
- Travel to a less "popular" station
- Bring the "low value" ingredients back
- Complete the entire cargo run before the market ticks again
Which is what was yours truly was doing during that time. Before Frontier "increased" Supercruise speeds to pacify the complaints of those who
chose to slowly travel from star to station, I was usually able to make a round trip between market ticks, thanks to being able to use mass shadow braking at my destination. I'd snatch up the "excess" production, wait a bit to snap up my "allotment" (since multiple commanders could grab the same commodity) on the tick, fill whatever space was left over with animal meat, and then fly to Dahan Gateway to sell my tea and coffee for profits, and bring the "worthless" biowaste back with me, along with a dozen crop harvesters. I would then repeat this process for the Eranin <-> Beagle 2 Landing, only this time I'd bring "worthless" pesticides, along with a dozen advanced medicines.
If there seemed to be another player using a similar strategy when I was playing, I also had Dahan Gateway <-> Beagle 2 Landing as an alternative trade route. Slightly less profitable overall, but it had the advantage that each trip was much more consistent, thanks to Dahan being able to fully supply the "ingredients" of what I wanted Beagle 2 Landing to produce. I also had an Eranin -> Dahan Gateway -> Beagle 2 Landing -> Eranin trade route I could use if it seemed that there was low player activity the night I played.
It was this need to make my cargo runs in under 15 minutes that was the origin of me "Buckyballing" it everywhere. I wasn't about to "play it slow and safe" when there were profits to be made... not to mention how much fun it was to "thread the needle." Or dodging around player Type-9s at dangerously high speeds.
And then Premium Beta One hit, with its "improvements" to supercruise (which actually took
longer for me to get most destinations, thanks to how much longer it took to brake at my destination) and its "improvements" to the economic sim, when baseline production levels were adjusted upwards so much, that most of the time most markets are functionally the same as those from Frontier: Elite 2! Overnight, I went from having to pay attention to the dozen or so commodities I was trading, at three different stations, and adjusting my strategy accordingly in response to what I saw, to being
guaranteed a larger profit by trading only
one commodity from each of the three, in a circular three-hop route.
[sarcasm]Yay! Progress![/sarcasm]
I
believe that this system, at least for commodities that existed in Alpha Four, is still there. There's been a couple of CGs where I feel like I was able to "boost" production at an allegedly "depleted" nearby station enough to always fill my Python's hold by returning with the "ingredients" I knew. But I only know a few "recipies," and the situation is so rare it might as well not exist.
