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Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today we're going to continue talking about the 2.2 'Le Guin' update, on the topic of the Galactic Market. As said before, we're not yet ready to reveal anything about when Le Guin is coming out, only that it's a long time away and we have many more topics to cover before then. Also as said before, screenshots will contain placeholder art and interfaces and non-final numbers.

The Market
The Market is a new interface accessible from your topbar, where you can buy and sell resources. Resources are bought and sold for Energy Credits, with their prices dependent on a variety of factors such as whether the Galactic Market is founded, supply and demand, and possibly also from various events. On top of the actual price of the resource, there is also a Market Fee which has to be paid for any sale or purchase, equal to 30% of the purchase value. This Market Fee is there so that it will not be possible to make money by purchasing and then immediately re-selling resources at a higher price. Resources can be purchased either in bulk, or by setting up a monthly trade, where you for example specify that you want to sell 20 food and buy 10 minerals per month, and can set a minimum sale/maximum purchase price, if you want to ensure that major fluctuations in price do not disrupt your empire's economy too much.
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Internal vs Galactic Market
At the start of the game, empires only have access to the Internal Market, which represents trading with actors inside your empire such as corporations and local governments, or in the case of Gestalt Consciousness empires, resource reprocessing. The prices on the Internal Market are set to always be higher than those on the Galactic Market, so relying too heavily on trading will be disadvantageous in the first few decades of the game. Some empires, such as Devouring Swarms, may only ever have access to the Internal Market (this is something we're still testing and balancing) and so might get better prices there. Once the game has progressed to the point where at least one empire knows about at least 50% of the other empires in the galaxy, the Galactic Market will eventually be founded. One empire that meets the criteria is picked as Market Founder, and their capital system becomes the Market Capital, spawning a special station and map marker to denote it. From then on, any empire (barring possible restrictions for Devouring Swarms and the like) that knows of the Market Capital system has access to the Galactic Market and is able to trade on it. The controller of the Market Capital get a reduction in their Market Fee and increased trade value for their trade routes (more on that in a later DD).
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Prices on the Galactic Market are always lower than those on the internal market, though the actual prices will fluctuate based on supply and demand - every time Minerals are sold on the market, prices will drop, and conversely, every time they are bought prices will increase. The purchases and sales you make on the Galactic Market do not just affect your own prices but also those of other empires, so that it is possible to for example massively drive up Food prices by purchasing a huge amount of food, damaging the economy of any empire that is reliant on importing it. It isn't actually possible for a resource to 'run out' on the Market, so you will always be able to purchase critically needed resources, though the cost of doing so may be extremely prohibitive. However, some resources (such as Dark Matter and other rare strategic resources) will not be available until they are actually accessible to empires on the market in large enough quantities, and are not available on the Internal Market at all. The aim of the Galactic Market is to make it so that it is actually a viable strategy to specialize your economy, importing resources that are difficulty for your empire to produce and exporting resources that you can produce easily in large quantities.
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Trader Enclaves
Since the Market has much of the same functionality as the Trader Enclaves from Leviathans, we're also changing said Enclaves for those with the Leviathans Story Pack. Instead of trading food, energy and minerals, Trader Enclaves will sell rare resources (Rare Crystals, Volatile Motes and Exotic Gases) in the form of monthly trade deals offered at advantageous prices. Each Trader Enclave will offer only one of these resources. Additionally, once you reach 50+ opinion, Trader Enclaves will sell special Governor-type leaders with unique, trade and commerce related traits. Finally, if you control the home system of a Trader Enclave AND have 50+ opinion with them, you will be able to build a special Starbase building in that system which lowers your Market Fee, allowing for cheaper trading on the Galactic Market.

Finally, just a note to say that we're ignoring the Slave Market tab of the Market screenshots on purpose - this is something that will be covered in a later DD.

That's all for today! Next week we're continuing to talk about the Le Guin update, on the topic of Sectors and Factions.
 
Oh man, this has so much potential.

I imagine a possible evolution of the galactical market design:

At the beginning everyone has their own inner market where prices are forming dependent on their own trades. Then any two empire can diplomatically agree to unite their markets, so that both of them will affect the prices. Then add there new empires and so on. So we will get trade leagues similar to federations, though they don't necessary have to be transitive.

And then we have new casus beli and diplomatical interactions. Embargo, trade wars all these awsome stuff.
 
And what would be wrong about getting less research points from new systems compared to if they were your capital system instead of increasing tech cost? This way the big blob can research technology faster due to beeing able to spend more on research in a single place. And as already mentioned doing the research is the hard part (how to apply this to your current world/environment is also reseaerch and needs to be done once for a given scenario and then you can repeat that (probably not optimal but good enough) way everywhere else).
Also here are some problems with short solutions that any normal child that went maybe 2 or 3 years to school and can do basic math can understand but might take a while to solve if you dont have practise with such problems:

You have a deck of 52 cards 42 are face down and 10 face up but you cant see nor feel or otherwise know where those 10 cards with face up are. Your task is to create two decks of cards that have the similar number of cards with face up in them.

You have the numbers 1 to 21 each written on a seperate sheet of paper. Can you create piles of sheets using each sheet once such that the biggest number of each pile equals the sum of all the other numbers of the pile? If not why not?

You have 4 coins that lie on a flat surface such that their middle points would be the corners of a perfect square. If you can mirror one coin at another meaning you pick two coins draw a line through their middle points and then move one coin to the other side of the other coin (exactly the same distance away as before from the second coin that does not get moved). Can you create a bigger perfect square that way? If not why not?

Having the base knowlede and means to implement something is not the same thing as actually doing it. Most advanced technology also need infrastructural changes both socially, politically and technically. You need the expertice in building and maintaining said infrastructure and the ablity to actually use it. Most of this will take both education and new manufacturing equipment in all the places you want to introduce said technology, just repeating it is not a realistic solution.

You can't just give an Iphone to a bush people and instantly have them start using it. There are many levels of development such as research, engineering, education and social acceptance for new technology to be taken into wide practicl use. There usually are many dead ends in the practical use of new technology as well.

As I said, the current system work well as an abstraction and in my opinion is better than reducing the science income from new worlds, that make little sense if you spend the resources to make a world a research centre.

One example of this is trying to introduce democracy to poor and uneducated states, this is nearly impossible as most western countries have experienced in the last century. For example Japan could easily transition to a democracy since it had a well educated people and already had many of the institutions to facilitate such a change after WW2. Otherwise the change to such a demanding governing stgructure take allot of time and sometime fails becasue the underlying fundamental knowledge base of the people simply is too poor. This would in Stellaris be the use of social science points to educate and set up the neccesary infrasructure (education and government structure) in all corners of the empire. In practice you would obviously have a stronger democracy in the urban parts before the rural areas but as I said it is an abstracted feature which rely in the median rather than any of the extremes.
 
Bah, Gestalts should get trade routes. No organism is completely self-sufficient. Humans provide feed to smaller animals in order to get labor, food, or by-products from them, I don't see why the non-purifier Gestalts shouldn't be able to do the same thing.
 
I know slave markets will come up in a later dev diary, but I just have to ask this. Can I buy slaves and free them as a non slaving empire?
My democratic crusaders can't just stand there and watch people getting sold into slavery!
(Also please make a democratic crusader civic.. please.)

You would be making the slavers rich though. You would become part of the problem.

But I suspect only slaver scum will have access to the slave market.
 
If a Purifier type took over the galactic market by force, would they control it, would it cease to exist, or would it simply flip control to another empire? (And if so, which does it decide?)
 
Tech cost is not just transferring theoretical knowledge but also incorporating it into your society which is a different kind of beast. So the increased cost for empire size is a semi realistic way to represent that in an abstract way. In reality you basically have three levels of technological development, theoretical, practical and product engineering. I would say that the cost in most cases include the first two sometimes even the third level.

Exactly. In CKII, individual countries each have a tech level, so while learning an individual new tech takes relatively less time, the larger your empire, the longer it takes for that advance to propegate to the edges.

In a perfect world, Stellaris would have a more robust system for simulating this concept, but they have a lot of places in the air. As such, it is easier (for the time being) to represent that practical application of technology in the tech research cost - the cost not being merely to understand the principles of a technology, but how such a discovery would be grafted onto an empire itself - the larger the empire, the more problems that need to be solved.
 
You can come up with any justification.
Some of the top of my head:
- Pops you have on a planet are only the ones working for the state. You may have more of them, but they are working for the private sector. So when a new pop grows, it can either be population growth, or the pop goes from the private sector to the public sector.
- Public/private partnership. When you start a building, you don't dump 200 minerals on a place and let it build itself. A part of these minerals can be used to make some contracts with the private sector.
Then why I don't just nationalize those private sectors to get more mineral/power per month?:rolleyes:
 
Bah, Gestalts should get trade routes. No organism is completely self-sufficient. Humans provide feed to smaller animals in order to get labor, food, or by-products from them, I don't see why the non-purifier Gestalts shouldn't be able to do the same thing.

Trade routes are still just a term and similar to trade value their actual effect wasn't explained yet.
I'm going to make a few wild guesses that are partially based on information we have.
Wiz said that not having access to trade value is the way how the growth and production bonuses that Gestalts have are being balanced.

So if I assume that trade routes create trade value and that trade value gives some kind of discount on market fees, or can be used as an additional currency on the market then not having access to them would in fact be quite a disadvantage.
Based on this, immersion wise, while I would imagine a Gestalt to use transport ships to exchange assets (minerals/food/alloys) between its worlds in order to create maximum efficiency towards production, I cannot imagine that said Gestalt would start negotiating with itself to create some kind of trade currency.
This argument would of course not hold as soon as we start talking about intergalactic trade routes. Maybe canon will state something like Gestalts can't be bothered to negotiate with individual traders from the private economy sector in the galaxy to create those trade routes and therefore don't gain trade value.

Again I'm just guesses but like almost in all cases, arbitrary arguments can made to justify gameplay & balance decisions.
 
Say, for each empire that signs on the "Blorg Dark Matter Embargo", the Blorg get a 25% market fee penalty on Dark Matter purchases from the Galactic Market? But to prevent abuse, the initiator of the embargo has pay some kind of monthly maintenance (Influence?) to enforce it?

It'd be better to tie the penalty to your proportion of resource production. So, for instance, if you produce 50% of all Dark Matter in the galaxy, then the Blorg have to spend +50% more to buy Dark Matter. If you don't produce any Dark Matter, then your embargo is strictly a symbolic gesture (though you can still create it so you can invite the actual producers).

There'd be no need for a particular maintenance fee, since it's already balanced by diplomatic considerations and by the need to corner markets if you want to really hurt someone.
 
And what would be wrong about getting less research points from new systems compared to if they were your capital system instead of increasing tech cost? This way the big blob can research technology faster due to beeing able to spend more on research in a single place. And as already mentioned doing the research is the hard part (how to apply this to your current world/environment is also reseaerch and needs to be done once for a given scenario and then you can repeat that (probably not optimal but good enough) way everywhere else).
Also here are some problems with short solutions that any normal child that went maybe 2 or 3 years to school and can do basic math can understand but might take a while to solve if you dont have practise with such problems:

You have a deck of 52 cards 42 are face down and 10 face up but you cant see nor feel or otherwise know where those 10 cards with face up are. Your task is to create two decks of cards that have the similar number of cards with face up in them.

You have the numbers 1 to 21 each written on a seperate sheet of paper. Can you create piles of sheets using each sheet once such that the biggest number of each pile equals the sum of all the other numbers of the pile? If not why not?

You have 4 coins that lie on a flat surface such that their middle points would be the corners of a perfect square. If you can mirror one coin at another meaning you pick two coins draw a line through their middle points and then move one coin to the other side of the other coin (exactly the same distance away as before from the second coin that does not get moved). Can you create a bigger perfect square that way? If not why not?

A. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not a development priority. B. This topic isn't really germaine to the thread discussion, it might be better if you made a separate thread about it for future development discussion.
 
Then why I don't just nationalize those private sectors to get more mineral/power per month?:rolleyes:
That can be part of what you do when a new pop grows or you finish a building
 
Quotes not going through. Whatever.

It says nothing about claiming it and becoming the founder though. This could be anything from only being able to destroy it so they no longer get Founders benefits, to destroying the market altogether.
Also the very next line after what you quoted is "I mean unless you want to build a 2 for 1 giant target on your capital anyways." I'd rather not have it tied directly to my capital I guess and have it be some other position you will have to keep secure.
It literally says "controller" not a "founder".
 
Now i want conquer the galaxy by slowly and carefully moving the strings of the galactic economy to make other empires my vassals, by making them dependant of my goods to survive.
 
Having the base knowlede and means to implement something is not the same thing as actually doing it. Most advanced technology also need infrastructural changes both socially, politically and technically. You need the expertice in building and maintaining said infrastructure and the ablity to actually use it. Most of this will take both education and new manufacturing equipment in all the places you want to introduce said technology, just repeating it is not a realistic solution.

You can't just give an Iphone to a bush people and instantly have them start using it. There are many levels of development such as research, engineering, education and social acceptance for new technology to be taken into wide practicl use. There usually are many dead ends in the practical use of new technology as well.

As I said, the current system work well as an abstraction and in my opinion is better than reducing the science income from new worlds, that make little sense if you spend the resources to make a world a research centre.

One example of this is trying to introduce democracy to poor and uneducated states, this is nearly impossible as most western countries have experienced in the last century. For example Japan could easily transition to a democracy since it had a well educated people and already had many of the institutions to facilitate such a change after WW2. Otherwise the change to such a demanding governing stgructure take allot of time and sometime fails becasue the underlying fundamental knowledge base of the people simply is too poor. This would in Stellaris be the use of social science points to educate and set up the neccesary infrasructure (education and government structure) in all corners of the empire. In practice you would obviously have a stronger democracy in the urban parts before the rural areas but as I said it is an abstracted feature which rely in the median rather than any of the extremes.

True. Though education is not science, the cost for infrastructure (a quick internet connection for someone living in a rural area) can also be really high though that is still not science. At least from my understanding science can be considered as figuring out how something works in general or a given scenario/environment the cost to create the required environment is something different for me and part of the economy/education system or whatever. But that point aside if you colonize a world then you use your own sufficently educated people to do so not "bush people" to use your term. Unless they changed it there is also a recently conquered penalty so new underdeveloped worlds wont contribute much to your empire (or in case of genocidal empires nothing at all besides food) and upgrading buildings is not for free either. My point about the cost is simply that it is way more difficult to figure something out the first time than getting told how it works (the first one beeing science for me the second beeing education). The stuff i learned in university about mathematics in a few years is so much more than i could have ever figured out myself in millenias if at all (assuming i could live that long because magic or whatever) due to the simple fact that the people that did figure out the stuff did this (if you add the time) in centuries or maybe even millenias.

And at least i dont want to lose my research worlds so if i make one it would be rather near the core of my empire and if that part gets conquered well new game. And if you make a distance penalty then you could just allow for a research capital (the place from where the penalty gets calculated) anyway.