I love the market idea, and it's implementation. However I think that a small improvement should be made, at least at lower difficulties.


My first problem

This was a few days ago (30 hours of gameplay in between) I've learned that I should very carefully chose my System Upgrade luxury resources. What had happened is that I explored an endgame planet (lava, I think) and got a luxury resource that just so happened to be unique to that planet within my sphere of influence. 


I made the mistake of making my lvl 2 system upgrade with a resource I could not harvest, I even think the system got picked up by one of my allies (or who became an ally later). What this meant was I could not upgrade my systems, despite me having the technology for rank 3.


Now this would be where I would search the market and buy the resource at any price, right? Well no, I guess no other empire had it, but no one was selling, at all. Maybe once in a fool moon I got a message about "Rouge Trader" who would sell like 5 (I needed 25).


My thoughts on a solution

I think the rouge trader should either sell more often, way more stock, or ideally, you could make a function that once every, idk, 20 turns, checks if you are a moron and are in my situation (need resource, don't have it, no one selling) and THEN sell a lot of them at a high price.


I hope this gets some attention. I now know not to do this, but this does not change the fact that this small mistake can be crippling


Other Solution  

Let me change the resource, for a price. If you want to consider balance, make price scale with systems already upgraded.