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That was the fun part. This is the really fun part.
10) I have two tools for finding the travel time between bases. Both of them use a feature in Freelancer Companion that Wizou was gracious enough to develop for me. If you open FLC and go to the File menu you will see an option for "Save base-to-base travel times". If you select that and then open the dump.csv file it creates, you'll find a text file that contains every possible permutation of the travel times between all the bases in the mod. In case your bored wingman ever asks you, there are currently over 352,000 of them. If every base in the mod sold a unique commodity to every other base in the mod, that's how many manually determined prices there would be.
The second entry of the dump.csv looks like this:
"br01_01_base","br01_02_base",71400
That is the entry for the travel time between Planet New London (br01_01_base) and Southampton Shipyard (br01_02_base). The number at the end is the travel time between the two bases shown in milliseconds. In order to transform it to seconds, move the decimal point 3 places to the left: 71.4
For whatever reason, the dump.csv does not include the 20 seconds of time that it takes a ship to undock from a base, although FLC uses those 20 seconds when calculating c/sec proft/distance. So you have to add 20 seconds to each time in the dump file. The actual travel time between PL New London and Southampton Shipyard is 91.4 seconds.
The java tool that Cannon wrote for me uses that dump.csv file to find and display the travel time in seconds between two selected bases. I use that for spot checking or when I only have a very few bases to set up prices for.
When I have many bases to set up prices for, I use a perl script that DeathsOverture wrote for me. I copy/paste the base pairs from Column E & F in the spreadsheet into a separate spreadsheet, then save it as a .csv file. I then run the perl script on that .csv file and it pulls the travel times from the dump.csv file and produces a text file of travel times that are already adjusted from milliseconds to seconds and include the added 20 seconds for undocking. I then copy/paste those travel times into the spreadsheet. The perl script runs to completion in just a few seconds, even if I have it run on all 27,000 transactions in the mod (which I do every time there are geography changes).
If you look at the spreadsheet now, you'll see the travel times in Column J. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?...utput=html
What you see is a nice orderly set of numbers, but they originally looked more like this:
1014.766
258.04
1345.649
554.042
368.883
1263.457
635.942
After I put the travel times into the spreadsheet I sorted the Tiers so that the travel times are shown in descending order. The longest travel time in each Tier is at the top, and the shortest is at the bottom.
11) If you look at the last three travel times in Tier 1 you'll notice that these are fairly short distances. In fact, these are bases that are within Liberty. Since California Minor, our source for Iron, is also in Liberty, this creates a balance problem. Even though these bases are logical prime consumers for Iron, trade traffic between Houses needs to have a higher rate of profitability than trade within a House. So to fix this, I will move all the Liberty bases in Tier 1 all the way down to Tier 3. I repeat the same thing for the Tier 2 Liberty bases. Once I've done that, transactions that cross Liberty's international border have the highest rate of profit.
So at this point we have all the consumption bases sorted according to 3 Tiers, with the bases farthest from California Minor at the top of each Tier. For this example, I've created a new spreadsheet and copied the data into it so you can see what the spreadsheet looks like before and after this change. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?...utput=html
In the next post I'll explain how the c/sec is assigned and show the formulas for working out the math.
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