The Marketplace: Better supply and demand

At the moment, the marketplace feels rather static and liveless. Prices often either stay the same, or go up or down in a rather linear fashion.

In my opinion, the marketplace has to exhibit two features for players to enjoy it:

1. A "living" economy: Prices need to fluctuate along with supply and demand, in a somewhat random but not erratic way. Ideally these fluctuations would be connected to events in the game.

2. Reasonable Supply and Demand: Much like in Endless Legend, it feels like resources, units, and heroes on the marketplace appear out of nowhere, as they probably do. This makes the marketplace feel a little alien to the game universe.

Suggestion:

1. Introduce a small amount of random noise to marketplace prices to create minor price fluctuations stretched over the course of a couple of turns.

2. Add sources and "sinks" to the universe that contribute to supply and demand and interact with game events. (Ideas below. Numbers not final)

Sources:

Each resources harvested by a major faction adds 0.1 of that resource to the marketplace

Each resources harvested by a minor faction adds 0.3 of that resource to the marketplace

Each resource produced by a trade route adds 0.2 of that resource to the marketplace

"Sinks"

Every colonized system in the galaxy should consume a small amount of strategic and luxury resources from the marketplace. This could scale with:

-System Population

-System Level

-Technology Era

-global and local events

-potentially even market price (higher price means lower demand, until the price stabilizes)

Both the sources and "sinks" could serve to introduce the random noise, creating small variations in supply and demand.

In addition to this, events in the game should be connected to the marketplace.

An empire at war would have a much higher demand for strategic resources and/or withhold its production from the marketplace

Blockading a system would sto its resources from reaching the market, and possibly even give tem to the blockading faction.

On the other hand, if minor factions or pirates blockade a system, there may be more resources going to the marketplace as they sell their loot.

Laws could increase or decrease the amount of resources added to the marketplace in exchange for dust.

If a player posts an ad for a resource, they also have to specify an amount, and the price immediately goes up as if that much had been bought (after all, demand has just gone up.)

And finally, to stop players from gaming the system, buying, selling, or placing an ad should block the players from the opposite action for a few turns: You can't place an ad and then sell your own stock at the increased price.