Trade Development Blog

[Thyrzul]

Ever thought about that with this you could also task those who volunteer with dealing with new commodities to ease up your work? Obviously you'd have to do a quick check on if everything has been done properly, but imo that would be a way less amount of work than doing it entirely yourself. This could speed up the process and/or lessen the amount of stuff you would have to deal with yourself. And the instructions for said volunteers on what and how to do are already given.

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[Xoria]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?...utput=html

16) You'll notice that all the consumption bases have their base code names in Column F, while only California Minor is in Column H. This is a quick visual indicator to me which bases only buy the commodity, and which ones buy and sell. Resale points for commodities have high potential to create bugged trade routes. I'll illustrate by example.

In the case of this commodity set-up, probably all the Tier 1 bases could resell the commodity without creating any bugged routes. But what if Altona Station, a Tier 2 consumer, resells Iron? The potential issue is that The Ring is a Tier 1 consumer, and Altona lies along the travel path from California Minor to The Ring. With Altona buying/selling at a rate of 235 c/sec, and The Ring buying at 255 c/sec, what is the profitability of a route from Altona to The Ring? To determine this I would normally load all the prices into the mod and then use Freelancer Companion to check the Iron route from Altona to The Ring. But since this is just an example and the prices aren't actually in the mod, we'll do the math by hand. The travel time from Altona to The Ring is 240 seconds.
I can see from the spreadsheet that Altona's price is 1705 and the price at The Ring is 2397.
2397 - 1705 = 692.
So if you purchase Iron at Altona for 1705 and sell it at The Ring for 2397 you'll earn 692 credits over 240 seconds.
692 / 240 * 100 = 288 c/sec
So the profitability of Iron is:
California Minor to Altona - 235 c/sec
California Minor to The Ring - 255 c/sec
Altona to The Ring - 288 c/sec

Obviously the Altona to The Ring trade route is a bug, because the rate of profitability to make that one trade from Hamburg to New Berlin is greater than from California to New Berlin. Therefore, Altona cannot resell Iron.

Nearly every case where someone asks for a resale point for a commodity that I deny as unworkable is because of this type of bug. Geography and math determine which bases can resell and which cannot. Bases with low profit rates along major travel paths usually can't resell. Bases outside the main travel paths can sometimes resell without being a problem. This is exactly the situation that created the 4.84 New Berlin-Kyushu Diamond-Niobium run, when the routes should have been going from Falkland and Bautzen where those commodities are produced.

17) Debug, debug, debug. After all the code is in the mod, open Freelancer Companion and check every base for problems. If Tier 2 bases are resale points, there will be bugs to find somewhere. Even some Tier 1 resales can be bugs if the geography is just right.

There are countless exceptions, special circumstances, and nuances for the dozens of commodities in the mod, but these are the basic mechanics of the process for creating and pricing a new commodity. This process is how we got from a vanilla market_commodity.ini file of 80kb to our current mod's 1,768kb and over 27,000 manually determined prices.

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[Xoria]

The preceding explanations cover the typical commodity that is produced in one or two locations and sold to many locations. But some commodities do not neatly fit into that template. For example, what to do about H-Fuel that should be sold to nearly every base in Sirius, and should also be available for resale at most bases? Since H-Fuel would be resold by bases along major travel paths, then it would create the kind of bug I described in my last post.

It's simplest to think of the buy/sell price balance like a seesaw. If profitability tips down on one end, then it automatically tips up on the other end. Higher profit import means lower profit export, and lower profit import means higher profit export. Another way of looking at it is to consider three price points along a travel path: Bases A, B, and C, with B somewhere directly along the travel path from A to C. If the profitability of trade from A to C is n, then setting the profitability of trade from A to B less than n means that the profitability of trade from B to C will be higher than it is for A to C. Setting the profitability of trade from A to B greater than n means that the profitability of trade from B to C will be lower than it is for A to C. If you earn 1000 credits trading from A to C, then in order for B to be balanced as a reseller, the profit from A to B and B to C must be equal: 500. If A to B is 300, then B to C would be 700. If A to B is 700, then B to C would be 300.

The importance of all this is that the A to C route is the critical route between prime producer and prime consumer. B is just a supply reseller along the way. Think of A as Graves in Dublin, C as Fort Bush in New York, and B as Kensington Shipping in New London. Graves to Fort Bush should be the best profit route. You don't want Graves to Kensington, or Kensington to Fort Bush to have a higher rate of profitability (c/sec) than Graves to Fort Bush.

There are 370 prices for H-Fuel in the mod. About 90 of them are Tier 1. About 25 are Tier 3 (these are all in Kusari), and the rest are Tier 2. The Tier 1 bases are the major lawful House bases that are located along the trade lanes. Tier 2 bases are unlawful bases or House bases that are located outside the main travel paths through the Houses (like Camrose in Alberta). H-Fuel's production location for pricing purposes is Fujisawa Mining Station in Okinawa; all prices are determined according to the consumption location's distance from Fujisawa.

So let's look at Bonn Station in New Berlin. It would logically resell H-Fuel, serving as a supply point for Rheinland ships. The Tier 1 profitability for H-Fuel is 260 c/sec. So if Bonn is priced at less than 260 c/sec, then it will export at a higher c/sec profitability than it imports. It is also true that if Bonn is priced at more than 260, then it will export at a lower c/sec profitability than it imports. But, if Bonn is priced at 260, then it will balance out ok. The resale rate at Bonn will actually be less than 260, because there is an additional 20 seconds of undock time thrown into the calculations for a resale point. If you check Freelancer Companion, you'll see that resales of H-Fuel at Bonn export at about 230 c/sec. That extra 20 seconds knocks the profitability down by a little more than 10%. But if Bonn imported for less, the export rate would climb higher very quickly.

The mathematical relationship here is not a linear equation because it's not simply price, it's price as a function of travel time, so reducing the c/sec of the import by 1 does not create an export increase by 1 or vice versa. It's probably a quadratic equation, and I expect the graph would be a steep curve. So small changes have greatly magnified effects. It's not unlikely that changing the import by 1 creates a change in the export by 5.

Bases that are outside the main travel paths can import for less than 260 without being a balance problem, so long as they do not have a base that is importing at 260 out beyond them somewhere. If they are not on a trade lane, then the added time spent backtracking to the travel paths will probably prevent them from being bugged routes. But the only way to know for sure is to check every resale point in Freelancer Companion. Fortunately, there aren't many commodities with the special resale requirements of H-Fuel. Food Rations are balanced the same way.

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[Scumbag]

Why don't you simply set an universal price for h-fuel in a house? Gas/petrol has the same price in a country, even a continent. That degree of complexity is not needed and not wanted. I would prefer a simpler economy with more lore logic.

[7AlphaOne1]

Why don't you simply set an universal price for h-fuel in a house? Gas/petrol has the same price in a country, even a continent. That degree of complexity is not needed and not wanted. I would prefer a simpler economy with more lore logic.

well, its not true. I can give you many examples.

for example: the US of A

you dont get the same price ecerywhere. you get it for different rates in florida, california and texas. dont believe me? go check the rates

eg2:India

dont doubt me on this one, its my home. it differs by 5-10 rupees(60 rupees =1 usd) for around a distance of 600-700 km.

similarly, in stuttgart, which is further away from H-Fuel, it should cost more, while in Frankfurt, it should cost less, but higher than the sigmas. get my logic?

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TO FLOOD OR NOT TO FLOOD, THAT IS THE QUESTION.

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[Scumbag]

Yes you are right. But i believe simple is better.

[Xoria]

Up to now I have focused on commodities that are produced in a very limited number of locations and sold to many locations. But what about something like Prisoners, or the new commodity Criminals? Both of these should have origins at many bases and only be transported to a very few bases. Prisoners are transported from battleships to prison stations, and Criminals are transported from police outposts to prison stations. There are two major balance issues in these cases. I will primarily discuss Prisoners in this post, but the same strategies apply to Criminals, and the Zoner Passenger routes.

First, transactions with Prisoners and Criminals should obviously involve local House economies instead of inter-House trade. In order to set that up, the first step was to create a list of all police outposts and battleships, and then pair them up with the prison station each one is closest to. This creates local markets in each House that funnel trade to the House prison.

There are some tricky aspects to this. It turns out that the battleship in Colorado is actually closer to Fuchu Prison in Shikoku than to LPI Huntsville in Texas. In the previous mod version I accounted for this by adjusting the prison prices for prisoners on a sliding scale, but in the current mod version I duplicated the Prisoner commodity so that there are two commodities, and that made balance much easier because I can simply use one Prisoner commodity in Kusari and the other in Liberty without any risk of cross trade. The same is true for Criminals.

Once all the battleships were paired with their House prison, I calculated their travel times. I then sorted them into descending order by travel time, so I could see which battleship is the furthest from its prison. That farthest battleship became the lowest cost "producer" of Prisoners. Using the travel time from that far battleship to its prison then set the "consumption" price at the prison, as described in past posts.

At this point, the pricing math changes from what it is for most commodities. The "production" prices for all the other battleships in that House are calculated in reverse from the price at the prison. Using the travel times for each of the other battleships to their prison combined with the c/sec profitability calculated the amount of profit for each of those transactions. That amount of profit was then subtracted from the prison station price to calculate the "production" price for the other battleships. So instead of the price formula being
Consumption Price = Production Price + Profit
the formula instead is
Production Price = Consumption Price - Profit
Remember Production Price is the price at the battleship, and Consumption price is the price at the prison. So the calculations proceed like this:
Prison Price = Price at Furthest Battleship + Profit
Remaining Battleship Prices = Prison Price - Profit

This is why the price of Prisoners and Criminals varies so much throughout each House. The closer the battleship or police outpost is to the prison, the higher its price must be in order to maintain a constant c/sec profitability for the commodity.

A side effect of this set-up is that it is possible to transport Criminals and Prisoners between battleships and police outposts, and even to the prisons of other Houses, but the profitability is fairly low for those transactions. When I was balancing all of this with just one commodity, the balancing was very complex and tricky, but having two commodities to alternate between the prisons extremely simplified the process.

This concludes my series of posts explaining commodity pricing, since I have now covered all the basic mechanics involved in the process.

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[Thyrzul]

Ever thought about that with this you could also task those who volunteer with dealing with new commodities to ease up your work? Obviously you'd have to do a quick check on if everything has been done properly, but imo that would be a way less amount of work than doing it entirely yourself. This could speed up the process and/or lessen the amount of stuff you would have to deal with yourself. And the instructions for said volunteers on what and how to do are already given.

In addition to this:
How far your freedom extends when it comes to multiplying commodities in order to avoid balance complexity and issues you described in your last post?

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[SnakThree]

Xoria, what do you think of making Trade Hubs - Capital Planets & nearby stations - T1 for most of commodities to direct people to one place if they wish. This would allow traders to meet at these points and perhaps allow the BHG and Freelancers to seek job opportunities.

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[Xoria]

Ever thought about that with this you could also task those who volunteer with dealing with new commodities to ease up your work? Obviously you'd have to do a quick check on if everything has been done properly, but imo that would be a way less amount of work than doing it entirely yourself. This could speed up the process and/or lessen the amount of stuff you would have to deal with yourself. And the instructions for said volunteers on what and how to do are already given.

While I have described a general procedure here, most commodities involve unique factors. It would take more time to properly train someone and then check their work than it would to do it myself.

In addition to this:
How far your freedom extends when it comes to multiplying commodities in order to avoid balance complexity and issues you described in your last post?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by freedom, but the best answer is probably: whatever I decide that I need to do to make things work.

Xoria, what do you think of making Trade Hubs - Capital Planets & nearby stations - T1 for most of commodities to direct people to one place if they wish. This would allow traders to meet at these points and perhaps allow the BHG and Freelancers to seek job opportunities.

So far as practicality and balance allows this is already the case. If a single base or close group of bases (like Manhattan, Newark, Trenton) are all the best in a House for every commodity, then that will reduce imports to the rest of that House's systems. There are not many commodities that do not have at least one base in the capital system in Tier 1 anyway (between shipping stations, capital planet, processing stations, and shipyards), and if not, then the Tier 1 consumers are past the capital system from the perspective of the production location. If a trader enters and leaves a House without passing through the capital system, that is somewhat unusual. I doubt much trade is going on exclusively between the near House border systems like Colorado and Shikoku, California and Manchester, Frankfurt and Honshu, or Stuttgart and Cambridge. The big profits pass through the capital systems due to geography, if nothing else.

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