koxsos wrote:

Galactic market proposition is dangerous, as Lumeris already rely heavily on massively selling all those resources on market, else there is no reasonable way to produce the amounts of dust required to even expand, without dustsidious treets. 

Of course this at the same time makes every single faction out there pretty much even when it comes to dust once they have market access. It is not impossible, but it is difficult to bankrupt yourself, given you can always sell some titanium or hyperium, provided they are not currently stuck on 1 dust per unit.

No other empire basically says "oh yeah, colonize that? Hmmm 20k dust!".
No other empire actually even needs to reach such dust levels, besides shopping for heroes.

Pirates suck. Yes.

AI also takes forever to decide in diplomacy.

Of course argument is that INSTANTANEOUS production carries it's own value. It's just that combined with inflation well, you said it, it all goes to dumpster. I suppose setting inflation to 0 might be an interesting experiment, we should at least mod with.
But then again, EVERY empire can buyout, EVERY empire can mine strategics (some even start with them, wink wink), thus EVERY empire has easy access to massive wealth of dust for wild buyout strategies.
Hi, I am nakalim, I just scanned 5 adamantium and 5 antimatter on the turn 1, guess who has 500 dust? Guess who now has two colonizers, or more scouts or two T1 planets and more... =D

I would let Lumeris start with market and considerable buyout reduction for starters and see where that takes us.

I feel like the ability to always sell benefits empires that do not focus on dust (but expansion and ressources) far more than those that do. You can supply your dust needs by expanding and selling, but you cannot (on a large scale) supply your ressources and production needs via dust.

Yeah, instantaneous production is a large advantage, but you already pay 4 dust for 1 production, and the advantage is relatively larger on a small scale (buy defenses in an emergency) than on a large scale. This is why I feel you should be able to get it in the range between 2:1 and 1:1 if you focus on it, because otherwise it will not be worth it to focus heavily on dust.

dustwhit wrote:

Dust from on high!

My work here is done

I have been digging this issue quite long so I'll write down what I thought and suggested.

YertyL wrote:

In theory: Buy stuff on the galactic market

In practice: Sell stuff on the galactic market. For some reason, the galactic market is always happy to buy ressources, but securing a steady supply of ressources for yourself is basically impossible. Very often, you can buy 5 hyperium, and that's it. Which gives a strong incentive to focus on ressources instead of dust, since you can always trade the former for the latter, but not he other way around. In addition, the ships you can buy are extremely weak to the point of being crippled by their minimal movement points with no option to upgrade. The only thing that is worth buying is heroes, which are always in ample supply and IMO extremely cheap considering how hard they are to "produce" otherwise. This is however a pretty niche use which often does not even justify researching the tech that enables it.

Proposed fix: I do not fully understand the mechanics of the galactic market, but you should (only) be able to constantly sell if someone else is constantly buying, and vice versa.

What you proposed could be nice to have. If that's too complicated or even needs complete overhaul on Marketplace, then I think we can just add some feedback on price using variables like 'TurnsSinceLastTimeBought' (you can find at Public/Simulation/SimulationDescriptors[Tradables].xml). If there isn't enough transaction on certain category of tradables, crashing its price systemically would be fairly realistic thing.

But I want to say there is fundamental problem of overproduction, especially Luxuries. Strategic resources could be somewhat abundant but war can consume a lot of it. In the contrast, Luxuries have limited consumption. Once you choose 6 luxuries to use on modernization, all the others are quite useless. You can't burn them, other players also can't burn them. It would be inevitably dumped at the marketplace. I think this is because luxury production is automatic exploitation, rather than being deliberate choice. It's simple supply-demand thing. As players have nearly zero cost on mining luxuries, there is actually no incentive to stop luxury production even though you don't need them and market is already full of them.

Therefore, I think adding some costs on luxury exploitation could work. Maybe we could make a modifier of -90% deposit value on every luxury deposit and add a building which removes that modifier. Demanding quite a large amount of upfront dust cost on this building might stop players from exploiting every luxury in one's grasp.

YertyL wrote:

In theory: Hire pirates to do your dirty work for you.

In practice: Pump the equivalent of a small fleet in dust into pirate diplomacy, to then see either the message "cannot target because x has a peace treaty with pirates" or "raid successful, you get 25 dust for your 2500 dust investment". Since your favour with pirates also declines at a pretty rapid pace, I have never been able to make this remotely worth it compared to just producing a fleet and wiping them out. Letting pirate outposts live also takes away the option to colonize the system they are occupying. It is pretty much always a bad deal.

Proposed fix: Far slower decline of pirate favour and far bigger effect of dust investments in pirate fleets.

Galaxy is already full of Non-Aggression-Pact. You can't do anything with your privateers already. I wouldn't kill them more. I think NAP should be harder to maintain and there should be some counters to NAP.

Therefore it would be nice if pirate mark can nullify the NAP until it gets expired or taken over with dust.

YertyL wrote:

In theory: Grease the wheels of diplomacy

In practice: Diplomacy in ES2 is generally pretty wonky, and value the AI gives to dust seems to be even lower than its practical value in the game. I have often seen AI value 5-20 strategic ressources more than hundreds or even thousands of dust.

Proposed fix: Again, I have never fully understood the mechanics, but AI valuing ressources more consistently would help

AIs value resources based on the amount they & you have. Generally AIs will not consider something valuable if it is abundant on both sides. But I don't know what will happen if we change that.

YertyL wrote:

In theory: Produce flexibly and instantly via buyout

In practice: The base value for buyout is 4x production, which is already not great considering dust and production are about equally hard to come by (at least via planetary production, without exploiting trade wonkiness).  So a theoretical player focusing solely on production will produce 4 times as much as a player who produces solely via buyout. But then we also have inflation, a mechanic with the sole purpose of making the IMO weakest part of FIDSI even weaker. So effectively 1 production will  often have a cost of 8 dust or more. Even specific inflation counters like buyout improvements and the lumeris ability are effectively "pay 6 times as much as you would in production instead of 8 times". Which means buyout is fine if you happen to have some dust left over from your most recent sale of ressources you did not need, but focusing on production via dust on a large scale is suicide.

Proposed fix: Kill inflation completely (or itroduce a similar mechanic for production and science). System improvements and Lumeris ability reduce buyout cost by 20% each. (which means if you stack everything, you can actually buyout at slightly better than 1:1).

FYI) Dust Buyout Price is [ 50 + (Industry Cost)^1.2125 ] x (Inflation) x (Buyout Reduction) .

I understand why you oppose to the very existance of the inflation. But trust me, without the inflation, FIDSi balance will be even more broken because ES2 has lots of dust sources which is really large. Making ES2 economy work without the inflation will consume a lot more time, even more than fixing inflation. That's why I have been trying to fix the inflation and did suggest recent inflation change (refer to release note of 1.4.21). We can't just abandon the inflation but might be able to make it better.

Recent inflation change made militarists need more dust. It's kind of indirect way of hurting militarists economically. It also alleviated the skyrocketing inflation. But I agree buyout is still in bad place. Tha't because the real value of your turn dust income does not increase because of inflation. So I think changing inflation formula a bit or making buyout price less influenced by inflation would be the first thing to do.

dustwhit wrote:

Are they useless though? The primary use for the ever expanding volume of luxuries is the ever expanding luxuries needed for population boosters. At some point, your pop gets so large that you stop boosting them because its beyond your ability to consume luxuries. What if each pop still had their primary luxury booster, but could consume secondary luxuries at an increased, less efficient rate? That would consume more of them outside of the market. Drop supply.

I do like consumption-side solution. Actually there would be plenty of things to do. As you mentioned, population boosters could be a nice luxury sink (if population management was convenient enough). Maybe we can add luxury cost on terraformation (and exempt luxury cost only for terraformation behemoth). Or make Autonomous Administration require random luxury. And so many others. But I think they will need quite a lot development resource, which is always in scarcity for all the game studios. That's why I've came up with the idea of introducing luxury extractor (like EL) to ES2.

PARAdoxiBLE wrote:

I have been digging this issue quite long so I'll write down what I thought and suggested.

What you proposed could be nice to have. If that's too complicated or even needs complete overhaul on Marketplace, then I think we can just add some feedback on price using variables like 'TurnsSinceLastTimeBought' (you can find at Public/Simulation/SimulationDescriptors[Tradables].xml). If there isn't enough transaction on certain category of tradables, crashing its price systemically would be fairly realistic thing.

But I want to say there is fundamental problem of overproduction, especially Luxuries. Strategic resources could be somewhat abundant but war can consume a lot of it. In the contrast, Luxuries have limited consumption. Once you choose 6 luxuries to use on modernization, all the others are quite useless. You can't burn them, other players also can't burn them. It would be inevitably dumped at the marketplace. I think this is because luxury production is automatic exploitation, rather than being deliberate choice. It's simple supply-demand thing. As players have nearly zero cost on mining luxuries, there is actually no incentive to stop luxury production even though you don't need them and market is already full of them.

Therefore, I think adding some costs on luxury exploitation could work. Maybe we could make a modifier of -90% deposit value on every luxury deposit and add a building which removes that modifier. Demanding quite a large amount of upfront dust cost on this building might stop players from exploiting every luxury in one's grasp.

I think I sell strategic ressources more often, and I usually play pretty agressive games with rare ressources. But that may be subjective.

The main problem for me is that someone seems to consistently buy ressources at the galactic market, to the degree that you can consistently sell a larger amount every 5 turns for a decent price, whereas the reverse (buy a larger amount consistently) is not even remotely true. I do not know if this is AI behaviour or some market self-balancing, but it is weird and sets incentives to acquire ressources instead of dust.

Galaxy is already full of Non-Aggression-Pact. You can't do anything with your privateers already. I wouldn't kill them more. I think NAP should be harder to maintain and there should be some counters to NAP.

Therefore it would be nice if pirate mark can nullify the NAP until it gets expired or taken over with dust.

It would be nice if you could simply outbid a pirate NAP. However, you IMO also need to fix the problem that maintaining good relations with pirates is ATM a pretty huge ressource sink with very little payoff. Maybe drastically increase the effectiveness of marking a system for attack?

AIs value resources based on the amount they & you have. Generally AIs will not consider something valuable if it is abundant on both sides. But I don't know what will happen if we change that.

Good to know :-) Though currently the AI still seems to hugely over- or undervalue items... 10000 dust will be better than 20 titanium even if both sides have a lot of dust.

FYI) Dust Buyout Price is [ 50 + (Industry Cost)^1.2125 ] x (Inflation) x (Buyout Reduction) .

I understand why you oppose to the very existance of the inflation. But trust me, without the inflation, FIDSi balance will be even more broken because ES2 has lots of dust sources which is really large. Making ES2 economy work without the inflation will consume a lot more time, even more than fixing inflation. That's why I have been trying to fix the inflation and did suggest recent inflation change (refer to release note of 1.4.21). We can't just abandon the inflation but might be able to make it better.

Recent inflation change made militarists need more dust. It's kind of indirect way of hurting militarists economically. It also alleviated the skyrocketing inflation. But I agree buyout is still in bad place. Tha't because the real value of your turn dust income does not increase because of inflation. So I think changing inflation formula a bit or making buyout price less influenced by inflation would be the first thing to do.

Again, thanks for the info. I just assumed the factor was constant and generalized one example. Is there btw an easy way to verify stuff like this without spending hours digging through program code?

Concerning the "we need inflation"...is dust supposed to be as valuable as industry or not? Because as soon as you introduce inflation to balance other sources of dust income (selling ressources?), you indirectly heavily nerf toxic and temperate gas planets, dust improvements etc. Would it not be easier to try to balance those other dust sources?

Inflation will also always hurt dust-focussed strategies more than others...I believe I read it is supposed to hurt military strategies, but in practice it is exactly the opposite, because it hurts you less the less you invest in dust production, to the point where it does not hurt you at all if you finance your empire via the sale of ressources (which you will have more of in a wider empire) for inflation-adjusted prices. To me, the mechanic seems fundamentally flawed on several levels.

YertyL wrote:

I think I sell strategic ressources more often, and I usually play pretty agressive games with rare ressources. But that may be subjective.

The main problem for me is that someone seems to consistently buy ressources at the galactic market, to the degree that you can consistently sell a larger amount every 5 turns for a decent price, whereas the reverse (buy a larger amount consistently) is not even remotely true. I do not know if this is AI behaviour or some market self-balancing, but it is weird and sets incentives to acquire ressources instead of dust.

I'm 100% blind to AI behavior in marketplace. Actually my knowledge is quite limited to microscopic choices like 'How it values exchange terms?' or 'How AIs prefer modules?' things. But from my experience, AIs are not that keen on selling strategics when I bought all of them at marketplace. There might be some preference on resources over dust.

It would be nice if you could simply outbid a pirate NAP. However, you IMO also need to fix the problem that maintaining good relations with pirates is ATM a pretty huge ressource sink with very little payoff. Maybe drastically increase the effectiveness of marking a system for attack?

Bidding for NAP could have been better. And while I also agree somewhat stronger pirates on mid~late game would make them more important, I think pirate league was intended to be disbanded to some extent.

Good to know :-) Though currently the AI still seems to hugely over- or undervalue items... 10000 dust will be better than 20 titanium even if both sides have a lot of dust.

From my experience AIs do not consider the market price when negotiating diplomatic deal. That leads to quite wired results in some cases.

Again, thanks for the info. I just assumed the factor was constant and generalized one example. Is there btw an easy way to verify stuff like this without spending hours digging through program code?

Concerning the "we need inflation"...is dust supposed to be as valuable as industry or not? Because as soon as you introduce inflation to balance other sources of dust income (selling ressources?), you indirectly heavily nerf toxic and temperate gas planets, dust improvements etc. Would it not be easier to try to balance those other dust sources?

Inflation will also always hurt dust-focussed strategies more than others...I believe I read it is supposed to hurt military strategies, but in practice it is exactly the opposite, because it hurts you less the less you invest in dust production, to the point where it does not hurt you at all if you finance your empire via the sale of ressources (which you will have more of in a wider empire) for inflation-adjusted prices. To me, the mechanic seems fundamentally flawed on several levels.

No you should check the XMLs.

And again I understand why you want to remove the inflation but ES2 has been working with inflation for more than two years. All four expansions are also quite reliant on it. Are you confident that just balancing dust planets, improvements, and buyout would be harder than removing inflation and adjusting other system in accord?

Finally, I admit inflation still hurts who produces dust but with recent inflation change, which makes fleet upkeep increased with inflation and war, inflation pressure of dust production is being diversified by warmongering empires. And financing your empire with resources is actually more of marketplace problem. If we remove the inflation without changing it, dust buyout will just break the game even more than now. Fundamental cause underlying all these things is actually abundance of dust. If you are not going to change all the dust sources and do following adjustments, then we need inflation to regulate it. Fine-tuning & making case-by-case adjustments on inflation are something we can expect to devs or modders right now.

YertyL wrote:

Thank you again for the tip, but I do have to ask: What exactly are the sources of dust income that would be completely imbalanced? Trade companies have been nerfed pretty hard, to the point where I believe people often do not even bother with them (at least I do not). Salvaging and racial traits provide dust on the same level as they do science and production...quest rewards do not exceed something in the range of a few hundred as far as a I can recall. Honestly, the only possibly unbalanced source of dust I can see is the galactic market. Would it not be easier to balance this market instead of nerfing everything else across the board? And if inflation fundamentally does the opposite of what it is intended to do, I don't think  tweaking numbers in a few special cases is the right approach. Are you sure this is not just sunk cost fallacy?

Your 'dust production is not that broken if we exclude market' argument is quite contradictory with 'inflation is killing dust value too much' conclusion.

Current Dust Inflation formula is: Dust Inflation = 1 + ( Global Dust Production ) / ( 500 * (Number of Empires at Start) )

 ※Global Dust Production is sum of net dust income (Turn Revenue - Turn Upkeep) galaxy-wide.

If you suppose there were 10 empires at start, inflation goes up by 1 per 5000 turn dust income. So if you are complaining about skyrocketing inflation, then you can't say turn-based dust sources have nothing wrong. Because the skyrocketing inflation is the evidence that dust income, which does not include market transaction, is also skyrocketing.

In regard of luxuries, there is indeed problem of overproduction. At a certain point of time, they become purely trade resourses which is not very good for oblivious reasons. Personally, I like system from EL where luxuries have use of boosters. Pay number of luxuries based on your cities number and take some empire wide bonus...maby something akin to this can be a decision? And idea of techs to mine luxuries seems good for me, especially with increase of theirs worth.

In regard of inflation, it is necessary for balance and not the problem itself.

About dust itself. I believe that Dust is not something, that should fall on players from the sky. Large dust production should be result of serious investments in this domain. And only for the one who do it, it should provide big bonuses. The main problem here is the market...maby it is possible to separate buyout from it? So buyout is very ineffective without proper praparations regardless of your dust stock?

And of course, possibilities which dust grant should be amplified too...privaters, for example...

Clearly we should be applying inflation to industry too.

Dragar wrote:

Clearly we should be applying inflation to industry too.

now that is wild, and I want to see it happen, just for funsies.

I had an idea how to fix this that I want to run by you guys;

Since the "problems" with inflation, the galactic market, buyout & luxury resources are all connected, I think they need to be fixed together.

Summerizing some of the above and adding my own opinion I think the main problems are as follows:

1.) "buyout" is a very powerful concept, since it allows to focus the effects of empire wide dust production to be used instead of industry on a single system. This is why there cannot be a simple 1to1 conversion required industrie = buyout cost.

2.) A "buyout" focused gameplay requires you to generate & stockpile huge amounts of dust. This in turn triggers inflation and makes the concept of buyout less attractive.

3.) Inflation is calculated based on the global dust production only, which results in dust production being a poor choice compared to selling stuff on the galactic market.

4.) The galactic market is great for generating dust by selling stuff but it cannot be even remotly reliably used for buying stuff. In most cases its much more reliable (and cheaper!) to get scarce commodities via diplomacy.

To tackle these problems I'd suggest the following:

4.) Change the way the galactic market "replenishes" it's available recources and change the way their cost is calculated:

4.1.) For each luxury resource [X] have "StockIncreasePerTurn" be 1/10 of the global production of that specific recource:

<BinaryModifier TargetProperty="StockIncreasePerTurn"            Operation="Addition"    Left="0.1"    BinaryOperation="Multiplication"    Right="$(LuxuryXGlobalProduction)"    Path="ClassMarketplace/TradableCategoryResource/TradableSubCategoryResourceLuxury/TradableResourceLuxuryX" />

(add in class Marketplace -> please note that LuxuryXGlobalProduction is not a thing yet, however this should be easy since NetLuxuryX already exists on each empire)

This makes low quantities of each recource available for everyone as long as someone has access to it.

4.2.) For each recource have "Value" be based upon recource generation vs. change in available stock:

<Modifier            TargetProperty="Value"                    Operation="Addition"        Value="$(ValueLastTurn)"/>

<BinaryModifier        TargetProperty="Value"                    Operation="Multiplication"    Left="$(StockLastTurn)" BinaryOperation="Division" Right="$(Quantity)"/>

(change in class TradableResource)

As a result prices will deteriorate as stock increases, go up if someone buys or go down faster if someone sells.

3.) Change Inflation from being based purely on global dust production to "net worth". By this I mean to include the value of global (luxury) resource production

Dust Inflation = 1 + ( Global Dust Production  + [LuxuryXGlobalProduction * LuxuryXValueLastTurn]) / ( 2000 * (Number of Empires at Start) )

Since net worth is significantly higher than Global Dust Production alone, the divisor also needs a little tweak.

Doing it this way would link Inflation to the production and market value of (luxury) recources, while decreasing the influence of dust production on inflation. This makes it less desireable to forgo dust production in favour of recource selling.

2.) & 1.) Drop "buyout" completely. Instead add "Dust to Industry conversion" on system level. Not as an construction queue option but rather as an individual tool. In System view add a slider, that allows you to set "SystemDustToIndustryConversion", which will add a bonus to system industry while taxing system upkeep.

<Property Name="SystemDustToIndustryConversion"/>

<Property Name="SystemIndustryFromDustConversion"/>

        

<Modifier       TargetProperty="SystemMoneyUpkeep"      Operation="Addition"            Value="$(SystemDustToIndustryConversion)"                          Path="ClassStarSystem"/>

        

<BinaryModifier        TargetProperty="SystemIndustryFromDustConversion"    Operation="Multiplication"    Left="$(SystemDustToIndustryConversion)" BinaryOperation="Division" Right="$(Inflation)"/>

<Modifier           TargetProperty="SystemIndustryFromDustConversion"   Operation=Power"            Value="0.85"/>

        

<Modifier       TargetProperty="SystemProduction"       Operation="Addition"            Value="$(SystemIndustryFromDustConversion)"                          Path="ClassStarSystem"/>        

By doing "buyout" this way having good dust production suddenly becomes much more relevant. Dust production can be used to fuel conversion to industry and by taxing system upkeep the impact on inflation is reduced. For example you could have one system with a hugely negative dust balance or add a little industry in every system while still having a balanced dust economy.

What do you guys think?

also: I like the idea of having luxury boosts to give those recources more value. Perhaps simply have a buildable effect on system, that adds half the system upgrade effects at half the system upgrade cost (for each specific recource) for like 5 or 10 turns?