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Over the next several posts, I am going to provide an example of how a new commodity is organized and priced. This will be a fictional example.
This spreadsheet will illustrate the process: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?...utput=html
1) First a base is chosen to produce the new commodity. Typically a base that does not already produce a commodity is the first choice, but since there are very few of those left in the mod, and basically none within the Houses among lawful bases, for the purposes of this example I am going to choose Planet California Minor in the California system of Liberty.
2) Once a base is chosen, I read the base's infocards and develop an understanding of the role that base already plays in the overall economy and lore, or I develop a new role for the base. For this example, I'll introduce lore that surveyors on Cali Minor have located large deposits of iron. After hundreds of years of exploiting iron deposits, the price of iron has increased due to dwindling sources, and a new source of iron has economic potential.
3) Columns A & C: Next I'll need to decide on the name of the commodity that will be used in the game files. The infocard will say Iron, but the game files will call it commodity_iron. Setting up a new spreadsheet for pricing iron, this goes in Column A. I'll use a google spreadsheet for this example, but in reality I use Open Office Calc. Column C has the name of the production base, Cali Minor.
4) Column B: This contains the "Base Price" or default price for the commodity that is located in the goods.ini game file. Any base that does not have a price manually set for it will buy the commodity at this price. This number is also used in the final calculation in the pricing process. This number is important to choose carefully, because if a base has a manual price set to sell the commodity that is below the base price, then that will create a profit margin to every other base in the mod. The old infamous Tau 31 prisoner bug resulted from a mistake doing this. Most raw metals have a base price of 100, so that's what I'll choose.
5) Column D: This is the price that California Minor will sell Iron for. This is what I call the production price, and this is usually the lowest price you can pay to buy a commodity. For Iron, I'll choose 109.
6) Column E: This is the name assigned to California Minor by the game files: li02_02_base. These names break down as follows. The two letters refer to the region where the base is located, in this case li for Liberty. The first 2 numbers refer to the system; California is designated as Liberty's second system, so 02. The next two numbers designate the base within that system, Cali Minor is 02, Los Angeles is 01. All base names end in _base.
7) Columns G, N, O: Now for the fun stuff. This is where all the bases are listed that will buy the commodity. First, California Minor gets an entry at the very top, because this creates an entry for a price that will go into the mod. To create the rest of the list, I use a master list of all the economically relevant bases in the mod (not shown here). This master list shows me base names, game names, faction affiliation, region, system, and economic role for each base. Economic roles are things like luxury, raw materials, processing, unlawful, semilawful, population, battleship, lawful outpost, etc. I sort my master list by role, and then I have grouped together all the processing bases that handle metals. These are going to be Tier 1 consumers for Iron, and I put them in the pricing spreadsheet at the top. Next I look through the generic processing stations for any that might also have a high demand for Iron, and add them to Tier 1. For this example I'll assume there aren't any. Columns N & O show the role of the base, and the price Tier.
8) Next I add all the Tier 2 bases to the list. For this example, this will include the rest of the processing bases, population bases, shipyards, and shipping stations. At this point I might remove unlawful bases on the list from Tier 2 and move them to Tier 3, or I might not, but for this example I won't edit the list further. This takes us to Row 191 in the spreadsheet.
9) Now I'll add the Tier 3 bases to the spreadsheet. These will be all the unlawful outposts (pirate bases) that pirates can sell pirated Iron at. Other raw materials producers, battleships, police outposts, and luxury liners don't need Iron in large quantities, so they will be left off the list.
At this point, I need to fill in Column J with the base to base travel times. I'll begin the next post with that when I have more time.
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