Trade-what would you do with it?

[Seridor]

I really don't know, but in its current form, imo, it is uninspiring and unnecessary. It's just another resource that you make... and it forces you to use the market to buy/sell stuff (which I'd rather not do at all).
It doesn't really represent what it should: trading between colonies and other empires.
The change that makes the colony pay for its imported resources is a good one, but it could be done in energy credits. I think surplus trade should convert into energy anyway, with some policies giving options to partly turn it into something else (even research or unity).
I think trade should be tied to starbases and starbase buildings. The resources or colonies in the system would affect the value—trade agreements too. There could also be commerce centers on colonies with trader jobs... so yeah, in my opinion, it should be more like what we had before, even if it wasn't perfect.
I'm interested in your thoughts—what would you do with it?

 

[dawedqafdAD]

I've always disliked trade. It was just a creepy secondary currency that was annoying to manage and largely inferior to regular energy production (excluding Megacorps) What purpose did it even serve aside from being turned into energy? Answer is nothing. It felt like the trade resource existed solely for Megacorps so they could take advantage of the trade policies. It only worked for them because they produced such a ludicrous amount of trade in the first place, for normal empires it was a just a weird middle man currency awaiting its ascendancy to a better currency (energy) oh and you know piracy, may it never EVER make a return.



Logistics on the other hand, man i was excited when my friend told me they were gonna try to implement a logistics system. Obviously this is not really what i had in mind. Trade serving as both currency and logistics somehow is just confusing and weird. making trains = money to buy stuff? ok... I don't know what i expected honestly.



At this point I'd say just revert and make energy the primary currency again and trade can be used strictly for logistics upkeep and this would be acceptable.

 

[Thiend]

My slightly longer answer is that the current implementation is deeply flawed, because it effectively duplicates admin cap for those that remember it.

To briefly explain, admin cap was empire size. You built it up to effectively increase your empire size ceiling before penalties applied. This was supposed to be a tax on larger empires, but was actually a tax on smaller empires that could less afford to just make a planet for admin cap. This is also why bureaucrats produce unity, they're repurposed from admin cap.

Trade does exactly the same thing. It's trying to be a tax on specialized empires, but specialized empires can make specialized trade worlds. It's actually a loss for empires trying to make mixed worlds, who still do need trade.

I don't have a clear standout solution, but that is why the current implementation kinda sucks.

My best general guideline solution is to say that admin cap failed because it made empire size simply a mechanic you paid pops to avoid. This is also what the local deficit taxes do. They should adjust it to give bonuses when in surplus, not penalties when in deficit. It sounds the same, but it doesn't play the same.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I appreciate the idea of chaging the trade system and adding logistics, but was disappointed by the implementation. My preferred changes:

1. Logistics:
Move to Naval Capacity since it represents your maximum capacity to continuously support active spaceships and shouldn't be stockpiled.
Exceeding Naval Capacity costs credits, reduces job efficiency for local deficits, triggers Weapon cooldown and Repair rate penalties (from lack of parts).

2. Trade:
Move back to Energy Credits since it represents your ability to buy stuff (with money).
Energy Credits+Trade for buying and Naval Capacity+Trade for logistics can simplify to: Energy Credits for buying and Naval Capacity for logistics.

3. Trade routes:
Reinstate without the calculations that previously hurt performance. No trade protection/suppression/piracy values. (No daily checks at all)
Trade routes shown between empires that have trades/commercial pacts as white lines on the map. (different colours/styles in the trade view if you want to be fancy)

4. Trade resources:
Add "Trade goods" as specimens you can make, buy and sell using a modified copy of the artifact specimen system (a space for many exotic things + flavour text).
[colony name] Dust, [science ship scientist name]'s Powder, [founder species] Toys, [capital name] Textiles (I want to make/trade some Ghorman Twill)

 

[DrFranknfurter]

My slightly longer answer is that the current implementation is deeply flawed, because it effectively duplicates admin cap for those that remember it.

To briefly explain, admin cap was empire size. You built it up to effectively increase your empire size ceiling before penalties applied. This was supposed to be a tax on larger empires, but was actually a tax on smaller empires that could less afford to just make a planet for admin cap. This is also why bureaucrats produce unity, they're repurposed from admin cap.

Trade does exactly the same thing. It's trying to be a tax on specialized empires, but specialized empires can make specialized trade worlds. It's actually a loss for empires trying to make mixed worlds, who still do need trade.

I don't have a clear standout solution, but that is why the current implementation kinda sucks.

My best general guideline solution is to say that admin cap failed because it made empire size simply a mechanic you paid pops to avoid. This is also what the local deficit taxes do. They should adjust it to give bonuses when in surplus, not penalties when in deficit. It sounds the same, but it doesn't play the same.

I actually liked admin cap as a resource both thematically and mechanically. I thought it was a much more fitting output for bureaucrat jobs than unity is, but it needed balancing to achieve the intended purpose.

My issue with it was, as you say, that it wasn't balanced to be easier to produce for tall empires. To fix that I'd have made empire-unique sources stronger and the scaling sources weaker so that a wide, galaxy-spanning empire choosing to fight sprawl would have to dedicate a relatively larger percentage of pops to admin cap than a tall empire confined to a single sector of space - with bureaucrat-themed empires getting some small incidental bonus from the huge mass of bureaucrat jobs like unity/job efficiency/upkeep reduction/crime reduction/governor xp gain/etc.

Concerning trade:
I wonder if moving some of the Deficit effects from the planet level to the sector level could work to improve the current situation. With only that change Ringworlds (when they work properly) would not incur penalties moving the food between segments, nor would a forge world suffer penalties when supplied by a local mining habitat. Obviously the balancing side of this equation would be making the penalties scale slightly with the number of sectors so that it's harder for large empires to keep everything moving where it needs to go over longer and longer distances without increased effort in logistics (trade).

One consequence would be that you would be encouraged to plan more on balancing production at the sector level instead of the planet level, always looking for potential production chains - perhaps choosing to add habitats to sectors to help cover local deficits. Isolated worlds in new sectors would then be encouraged to stay smaller or to be generalists to avoid the trade tax, while large specialist worlds avoid the trade tax by being paired together with local resource production whenever possible.

 

[GreyJack]

Personally, I've largely enjoyed the new trade system. Albeit, I've mostly played a megacorp in 4.0. So I imagine I've been able to get more out of it than many others. Especially as a cooperative, which works really well with it.

If you ask me what I would do, I'd quite like for trade to take on more of the currency roles that Energy Credits still have. Energy should, IMO, only be for upkeep. It's energy, that's what it does. I also think that the trade cost of having a resource deficit on a planet should be bigger than it currently is. Right now, I don't even really notice it.

 

[Wolfgang I]

It seems really annoying for gestalt empires and I hope they keep trade with enclaves energy based because of that.

 

[Nabil ad Dajjal]

I actually preferred trade routes. They didn't add much of anything to the game mechanically, but it made logical sense.

If I were to re-rework trade, I would keep it as the 'market currency' but not let players stockpile it. By that I mean, if you generate 100 trade per month from jobs/buildings/etc. and an additional 100 from recurring trades, then you can buy 200 from the market that month. If you run a trade deficit or surplus month-to-month then it converts to something else according to your trade policy (this also means players who don't want to touch the market don't have to).

If we also want it to function as logistics, I would also try to bring back some computationally-simplified version of trade routes. Ships in a system connected to your capital by trade routes pay low or no upkeep and moving along a trade route works like hyper relays (which would be removed). Same logic as in Star Wars: hyperlanes used for trade are big and well-traveled so calculating a series of jumps is easier on the nav computer and hyperdrive than taking less well-explored lanes.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I don't have a clear standout solution, but that is why the current implementation kinda sucks.

The simplest solution would be to increase the deficit cost to something meaningful so that the cost for imports actually mattered, but then a small but very loud section of the playerbase would riot.

e: Oh and the +200 job resource buildings would still almost completely invalidate the entire thing anyway but adding that basic fact to the end of every post gets tiresome.

The biggest problem with specialised vs generalist planets is that planet designations still provide mechanical bonuses.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Concerning trade:
I wonder if moving some of the Deficit effects from the planet level to the sector level could work to improve the current situation. With only that change Ringworlds (when they work properly) would not incur penalties moving the food between segments, nor would a forge world suffer penalties when supplied by a local mining habitat. Obviously the balancing side of this equation would be making the penalties scale slightly with the number of sectors so that it's harder for large empires to keep everything moving where it needs to go over longer and longer distances without increased effort in logistics (trade).

One consequence would be that you would be encouraged to plan more on balancing production at the sector level instead of the planet level, always looking for potential production chains - perhaps choosing to add habitats to sectors to help cover local deficits. Isolated worlds in new sectors would then be encouraged to stay smaller or to be generalists to avoid the trade tax, while large specialist worlds avoid the trade tax by being paired together with local resource production whenever possible.

Just a quick comment on changing the system to sector deficits instead of planetary deficits:

The entire point of the system is to be a counterbalance to the benefits you get for specialising planets, there's comparatively little benefit to specialising sectors.

So by changing it from planets to sectors, you are effectively the entire point of the system. Might as well delete the whole thing!

 

[Voidian]

This is my opinion.

What's the point of trade empires?

Just curious. It seems like the only real advantage is producing consumer goods, unity and energy with trade (as a trade federation) but otherwise this "trade" resource seems absolutely useless. For tiny empires? Yeah, sure, you can get by...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Mechanically and conceptually it was a terrible idea.

Energy was a real resource, you could use it for upkeep, going way over your ship capacity, producing hundreds of thousands of it and it would still be useful

"Trade" isn't a real resource, you have to trade it for the things you actually do want, which means if you produce a lot of it you'll be paying several times the cost of everything in the market and none of it can be used for anything as it, so when you start moving into mid-late game, trying to use tens of thousands of "trade" it turns into a disaster and you'd be better off just producing any other resource instead.

 

[Thiend]

The simplest solution would be to increase the deficit cost to something meaningful so that the cost for imports actually mattered, but then a small but very loud section of the playerbase would riot.

e: Oh and the +200 job resource buildings would still almost completely invalidate the entire thing anyway but adding that basic fact to the end of every post gets tiresome.

The biggest problem with specialised vs generalist planets is that planet designations still provide mechanical bonuses.

Making the cost for imports larger has no impact on the admin cap comparison. It doesn't change the problem, it remains easy to circumvent.

Removing planet designations obliterates the viability of unity builds by negating planetary ascension, and that's just one reason of several why removing planet designations isn't a good idea. Removing mechanics because 4.0 isn't compatible with existing parts of the game isn't a solution, it just means the incompatible parts added in 4.0 should be removed.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

The simplest solution would be to increase the deficit cost to something meaningful so that the cost for imports actually mattered, but then a small but very loud section of the playerbase would riot.

e: Oh and the +200 job resource buildings would still almost completely invalidate the entire thing anyway but adding that basic fact to the end of every post gets tiresome.

The biggest problem with specialised vs generalist planets is that planet designations still provide mechanical bonuses.

Just a quick comment on changing the system to sector deficits instead of planetary deficits:

The entire point of the system is to be a counterbalance to the benefits you get for specialising planets, there's comparatively little benefit to specialising sectors.

So by changing it from planets to sectors, you are effectively the entire point of the system. Might as well delete the whole thing!

Trade deficit/logistics currently is the cost to move raw materials to planets (this punishes specialising planets)
Logistics is not used to move raw materials to shipyards or space construction in general (logistics do not apply to shipyards or in space)
Logistics do not care how far you move materials, or the speed of FTL (Hyper Relays and Jump Drives do not matter)

The latter two points make new trade deficits feel odd to me (that and as with all of 4.0 the poor UI). Sectors are a computationally cheap way of simulating some distance-based modifiers for transporting goods that hopefully would require no additional pathfinding at all. Instead it could all be handled by checking the sector resource outputs that we already can see.

If deficits were moved to the sector level there would be some differences:
Encourages local production chains inside a sector instead of only inside a single planet.
Encourages shipyards to be placed in the same sector as production (if sector resource production determines trade deficit/logistics costs added to ship production).
Can scale costs with distance indirectly (free logistical costs within a sector, more expensive between sectors the more sectors you have - with cheaper logistics if you have Hyper Relay connections and advanced FTL techs like Jump Drives and Gateways).

I hope that explains why I think it could be different and not completely pointless - it could help make location and nearby infrastructure matter more.

 

[ToneyT]

The current implementation is an absolute mess. Adding a second currency was absolutely unnecessary. They could have done the same, getting rid of trade route calculations, without making a currency that's so abundant for how low the actual use for it is.

You end up stockpiling a huge amount of it with nothing to spend it on, because of market inflation imposing a limit, and logistics costs are largely negligible.
This gets alleviated once the Galactic Market is formed, but if you wanna play an actual trade based empire... it's not particularly rewarding experience.

The good news is that it's easy to fix. They simply have to adjust the trade conversion values. We can even do it ourselves as players, which is what I've done.
I took a simple approach and will iterate with further testing but, for example, I've added energy into trade conversion. I took Consumer Benefits from 75/25 Trade/CGs I made it 50/25/25 Trade/Energy/CGs. Same with Marketplace of Ideas. Trade League, being more of a "later early" or mid game policy I was a bit more aggressive, making it 30/30/20/20 Trade/Energy/CGs/Unity as opposed to vanilla's 50/10/20/20. It may not seem super drastic a change but it's made trade less of a hassle, while still feeling like a nerf because you still need massive amounts of energy to field those 9999 NC fleets against the 25x crisis.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Making the cost for imports larger has no impact on the admin cap comparison. It doesn't change the problem, it remains easy to circumvent.

Paying your taxes isn't circumventing them. The problems with adjustable admin cap were innumerable but the relevant one was that the opportunity cost for a large empire to bypass it was lower than the opportunity cost for a smaller empire to work with it or bypass it. A single resource planet being able to address logistics costs by building a logistics cost planet isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's only a problem if doing so comes at a lower effective cost than addressing them at source.

With admin cap this was a literally unsolvable problem without massively altering the entire admin cap system or rewriting math as a concept, for reasons to complex to bother typing out in this post when the search function is right there. For trade costs it's just a case of making sure that trade costs, the benefits of hyperspecialising, and a non-trade-focused empire's admin planet trade per pop output are in line to slightly favour dealing with deficits at source.

And the first step in that is to remove the redundant hyperspecialisation bonuses from planetary designations.

Removing planet designations obliterates the viability of unity builds by negating planetary ascension, and that's just one reason of several why removing planet designations isn't a good idea. Removing mechanics because 4.0 isn't compatible with existing parts of the game isn't a solution, it just means the incompatible parts added in 4.0 should be removed.

Let's work this out as an example of how instead of a knee-jerk "Retvrn to 3.14" response we can try looking at how old mechanics could benefit from the new systems.

Planetary ascension boosts the mechanical bonuses from designations.

The mechanical bonuses from designations disproportionately benefit hyper-specialised planets.

Larger empires can more afford to hyper-specialise planets, even in 3.14.

Planetary designations providing mechanical bonuses is redundant given specialisations mostly take up that space now.

Planetary ascension -"mechanical bonus from designation" +"district specialisation" = planetary ascension should directly boost district specialisations, or provide boosts based on district specialisations.

Not only does this expand the ascension mechanic and integrate it better into the new system, it also makes it much easier for ascension to be viable for mixed planets. Since tall empires are the ones most incentivised to use mixed planets this also increases ascension utility for tall empires. And every ascended planet will be slightly different instead of just max ascension homeworld designation number 137.

Man this looks way better than 3.14 planetary ascension.

 

[Critical Ethics]

If deficits were moved to the sector level there would be some differences:
Encourages local production chains inside a sector instead of only inside a single planet.

But the point is to reward production chains inside a single planet.

Now, if youre suggesting an additional tax for sector deficits, that I can get behind.

 

[HFY]

Things I'd like to see from an improved Trade mechanic:

- Logistics, including fleet support during a war

- International influence

- Some way to expand what "local supply chain" means as the game progresses, so it goes Same-Planet -> Neighbors -> Sector -> Hyperlane Link -> Gate-Mates as your tech advances

I actually liked admin cap as a resource both thematically and mechanically. I thought it was a much more fitting output for bureaucrat jobs than unity is, but it needed balancing to achieve the intended purpose.

Strong agree, Bureaucrats were more interesting than the global sprawl reduction mechanics we have now.

Not much was done with them, but a lot more could have been done.

 

[Muldeh]

As someone doing primarily trade builds prior to the patch and now after 4.0. It really doesn't seem that much different now.

The trade needed to support specialsied planets doens't seem like much from what I've seen, but I don't have much experience wit hthat?

I don't think the suggestion to allow overflowed trade to be converted to unity/science is ideal, since you can already use trade to cover every other resource need by purchasing it on the market. So it would make trade builds even more one dimensional.

 

[grommile]

Removing planet designations obliterates the viability of unity builds by negating planetary ascension

Er, no, because you can just change what planetary ascension does at the same time that you remove planet designations.

 

[Thiend]

Er, no, because you can just change what planetary ascension does at the same time that you remove planet designations.

If you suggest removing planet designations and don't suggest a replacement or say that one would need to be added, I am going to judge your ideas on the merits of what you actually say.