About giving economic factions an advantage in construction of the marketplace, perhaps a simple solution like a hefty upfront dust cost would be enough, as they'd be able to start the construction sooner, and also be able to buy it out at an earlier stage of construction.



I do wonder about the ads, though. Will there be any incentive to fulfilling an ad? I don't see much reason to sell units or resources just because I see an ad, unless I already need the money anyway, in which case an ad wouldn't be needed in the first place. In fact, if Dust turns out to be too easy to generate without the market, the marketplace might turn out rather empty.



For that reason, I also think it might be good to unlock at least parts of the market without research, so that all empires can contribute to it in some way. The tech that usually would have unlocked that part of the market (be it units, resources, or anything else) could provide some other market-related benefit, like a discount.



Also, it would be great if we could actually see the price development for different resources on the marketplace screen, instead of checking manually every couple of turns.

Is there any gameplay reason for which the one holding the marketplace won't keep the tax rate always maxed out?

In theory, to encourage more trades and therefore make the difference up on volume, especially if they intend to be a seller rather than a buyer. And possibly a diplomatic tool.

Garak wrote:
In theory, to encourage more trades and therefore make the difference up on volume, especially if they intend to be a seller rather than a buyer. And possibly a diplomatic tool.

I really think this will have to be carefully balanced. The "diplomatic advantage" can be nice vs an AI which will be programmed to give a damn, but very often the player vs player interaction at that level is too simple (i'll max it and lock people out of trading unless they absolutely need it and then I make a ton of money off it and harm their war chest. Win win.).



Endless legend having a diplomatic currency was a huge step in the right direction to allowing diplomatic actions to actually matter in a pvp scenario, so I hope it's still around for space and that such market manipulations help you generate it.