Ressurecting this, because there are a number of facts about inflation woth laying out, and we've been discussing the woes of Lumeris lately (who are directly related, being the most dust-focused of all the factions), and trade routes (which are related to dust mechanics).

On inflation:

• It affects market values.
• It affects upgrades.
• It does not affect fleet maintenance/upkeep (making it very questionable as a tool to cripple military empires in the first place!).
• It does not affect building maintenance.
• It affects dust buyout costs (but not influence buyout - if you are UE, one point of influence is worth the same amount of production turn 1 as turn 100, unlike dust - which is worth less).
• It is higher on higher difficulty settings - AI bonuses drive inflation up even higher than normal. This means dust improvements are worth less on higher difficulty settings. 
• Lumeris colonization costs are affected - a Lumeris player should prioritise making dust from the market, not by making dust itself, as the former drives up inflation, while the latter doesn't. Lumeris are also penalized more on higher difficulty settings.
• It doesn't affect trade-routes - but it does affect the resources generated by trade routes. The more inflation, the more valuable the resources portion of a trade route (and the less valuable the dust portion).

The higher inflation, the more you should favour resources over dust. It doesn't take long before investment in dust producing buildings, hero skills or anything else is rendered worthless. By contrast, it doesn't take long before resource producing buildings or hero skills are worth extravagant amounts of dust (their value, or how much they can get done, is not affected by inflation). 

Basically inflation means the value of dust, and non-inflation adjusted dust incomes, declines over time.

There are two popular ideas on inflation: one to add its behaviour to maintenance costs (and perhaps tweak its affect on buying/selling costs), or remove (or reverse) its behaviour entirely (and balance dust appropriately).

If Pacifists were meant to harm Militarists with this, then the mechanic is an abysmal failure. It actively harms Dust stocking Pacifists while making Military-Industrial factions sitting on lots of resources more powerful. That's just the reality of it- inflation is meant to let Dust producers hurt non-Dust producers, but no matter how much you tweak it, it will always do the exact opposite and just limit the ability of Dust empires to do anything but tick their Dust numbers upward. It always limits the growth of Dust empires.

The only logical way for a Pacifist empire to harm a Militarist empire is to allow them to enforce embargoes, in which case the clearest potential weapon for Pacifists is the return of the Marketplace Ban. Add a War Pressure value to it and you have a way for Pacifist empires to put a soft time limit on wars before A. the Militarist economy collapses from not selling resources, or B. the Militarist political scene accepts a forced truce from war pressure. It becomes a greater problem for the Militarists if they got greedy and miscalculated their ability to take enemy systems.

Granted that might have some issues too. Particularly, how do you determine who gets to use the ban? What if the Militarist is actually the Dust faction?

Point is, inflation clearly doesn't do it's job, and makes a market sanction feature necessary.

+1 to Kuma and,

I'd just like to reiterate that the market not reacting properly to supply/demand is also at the root of any inflation and Dust value related concerns, as it allows non-Dust focused empires a 'get out clause' to ignore the consequences of Inflation by liquidating assets ad infinitum. 

Inflation as a system is fully functional and does not need tuning down.

Cross-topic post with the Idea thread someone made on inflation :

I think Inflation is a great mechanic in the current state. What is currently wrong is how the market works and how the resources are spawned, especially luxuries. If as a Millitarist Empire you're flooded with Strategics, you're probably not that millitaristic or you're not going to war enough, because you'll need a lot of strategic modules and those end up costing a lot of resources. On the other hand, you're always flooded with Luxuries in the current state of the game, and only 3-5 types at most. This causes 2 problems : 

• First, since you always have tons of luxuries of a few given types, you ALWAYS have more than you need and thus can sell them on the market, which gives you tons of dust.
• Secondly, since you only have access to limited luxuries due to how tier 1 spawn in a clustered manner, and so do every player in the galaxy, you ALWAYS have a monopoly on one or more resources, which given how the prices are fixed, accentuate the previous point even more.

Now at this point, I must point out I'm the one behind the luxury mod so I've seen the effects of reworked generation of luxuries. First of all, declustering the luxuries and reducing the overall amount of depots of a given Luxury while also increasing the number of different types and the yield each depot gives had a lot of positive effects on the prices in the market, the average price of luxuries naturally goes down as the game goes longer because it is now easier to obtain the tier 1 luxuries which in turn reduces the monopoly situation everyone could get passively without caring about the depots, so the income you get from those is way more balanced.

Secondly, since I made the use of luxuries much more natural by fixing the preferences of populations -ie. Industrialists will always ask for Jad, Militarists for Dark glitter, etc no need for additional RNG in the preferences when the depots and the population you interact with are already random- and since I also tweaked the costs of System upgrades, you end up with much less "useless" luxuries that are only good at being sold on the market, coupled with that was also rebalancing their effects in the upgrades to offer more choices, so in the end I find myself mass selling my excess resources a lot less often and instead, I use population boosting and Diplomacy actions with minors a lot more often, and I also use more varried choices in my upgrades.

All in all, I don't think Inflation is perfect in the current state and I'm not saying my mod would fix everything wrong with it currently, but imho the problems lie elsewhere. If the devs were to reiterate on some other gameplay mechanics and fix some of their problems, I'm pretty sure your issues with Inflation would go away on their own. Also if Trade was to be buffed again by offering more options for pacifist empires to increase their outcome WITHOUT making it so easy every Empire can do it just by placing a few HQ and subsidiaries here and there, I think Dust would be more useful.

jhell wrote:

The purpose of inflation was indeed to make Pacifist empires able to hurt Militarist empires indirectly, by driving inflation up. If you're the one driving it up, granted you may suffer from it, but imagine for the other empires who don't generate a lot of Dust :).

I imagine they're very happy with how their resources get more valuable, turn after turn!

A militarist empire has a lot of strategic resources (for their ships), and has cherry-picked conquered systems with lots of resources. It therefore makes more dust by selling those on the market.  Almost certainly they are helped, not hindered, by inflation.

Edit: To put it another way, and tie it to real economics, inflation benefits those with assets (or asset derived incomes, like housing/stocks/shares)  and hurts those with cash (or fixed cash incomes). Just like in the game, inflation benefits empires with assets - mines, resource stockpiles, ships, and hurts those with fixed dust-income from planets or improvements.

If you want to benefit an empire with dust income versus one with capital, you need deflation. 

jhell wrote:

If you invest in real Dust, you move closer to Economic victory, but begin ruining Dust for everyone with inflation, self included.

The purpose of inflation was indeed to make Pacifist empires able to hurt Militarist empires indirectly, by driving inflation up. If you're the one driving it up, granted you may suffer from it, but imagine for the other empires who don't generate a lot of Dust :).

Maybe if we had more active tools to actually impact Inflation it would be perceived better. In the meantime, if a lot of players feel your way, I believe we could tweak the values to slightly reduce it.

Thanks for the feedback,

While I like this idea in principle, I think there are still some downsides to the current, large inflation values:

1. Dust improvements/ressources are already weaker in early game, and almost completely useless lategame. Dust values for pop improvements have about the same values as science and production (e.g. +1, +3 on a ressource), but are much less useful even in the early game.
2. Even in terms of pure dust production, ressource selling is the most economically viable strategy, especially lategame. Even early game, a +1 bonus on a ressource is at least a +15 dust if you sell. Late-game it can be 100+. I am not sure if ressource production bonuses/improvements should be strictly better for dust than dust ones .

Perhaps the dust generated by dust improvements and system upgrades could grow with inflation as well? Or inflation could simply increase fleet upkeep instead of all prices, or other prices to a lesser degree? The currently IMO best strategy actually mirrors real life behaviour in economies with unstable currencies: Hoard ressources, only sell as needed and spend the money immediately.

The best way to play a Dust empire is to not play a Dust empire, but instead a Trash Merchant empire.

If you invest in real Dust, you move closer to Economic victory, but begin ruining Dust for everyone with inflation, self included. If you invest in mining Super Spuds to sell on the marketplace, you will make tons and tons of Dust without driving up inflation, even when the Super Spuds price bottoms out. It's really quite absurd, as it basically creates two kinds of Dust: Winning Dust, which you produce domestically but cannot actually use to do anything fun, and Fun Dust, which you get from selling your unwanted trash and can buy fun stuff with but does not get you closer to victory.

Except Fun Dust from sold trash ends up paying for your Freighters anyway. Your Freighters are just a Dust sink to keep you poor if you want to win by being rich. And the kicker is that as the Dust players drive up inflation, the Dust income from selling trash gets even higher.

I think Dust inflation is too strong.

I played a game with a friend yesterday and didnt have a very good start.

By the time i was able to make my comeback, dust inflation started to kick in like crazy (my friend was playing lumeris).

All i had was a 7/7 cp fleet made of 3 minor faction ships and 4 scout ships and it was like 400 dust upkeep. 

End of the story was that i lost because i had to sell everything while the never bankrupt ai took my systems.

This was between like turn 40 and 60 or so, on fast.

Not a friend of the mechanic, really annoying. I feel like it forces you to either rush the lumeris or lose because reasons.

I mean why does my empire disassemble itself just because someone on the other side of the galaxy (i havent even met) has a lot of dust...

I have all the knowledge, ressources and manpower of the galaxy there for my taking, but nope.

On that note i want to add that i really love the new diplomatic system, but it feels often useless because of the way factions like lumeris and unfallen work.

You know they will f*** you up if you side with them, so you never do.

great game nontheless. really hooked me up now, even though i was very sceptical in early access.

edit: The irony is we actually wanted to play cooperatively but in the end my friend defeated me by inflation...