MARKET MANIPULATION???

I would love this, sadly with 3-4 resources and this being an RTS in essence, I doubt this could be successfully implimented.

I thought this was answered. Remember there was a huge discussion about this. We found out that we will have market ninjas. You just tell them to 'control' the supply/demand. But what they are actually doing is, just killing people who supply or demand.

this would only amplify it. having a several-dozen-item market would only dilute hte effects.
as for RTS, you should damn straight EXPECT this to be a strategy, all of the world's powers use it (well, that only classifies the US in that catagory... but China does it to emp!), its way more effective than any pathetic army.

Lets not bring politics and econ into this thread. Please, we have Off-topic for those.

I'm just poking at you Emp, we have enough of those threads.

but seriously. the "econ" side of RTS games needs some SERIOUS buffing, and thats what I'm hoping for here.

I would also like to see an effective economic model used for this game, whereby you could actually effect the game in a large way by using effective economic managment.
Considering were talking about a galatic civilisation and not an army in a sector (or 'map') like other RTS games then to be honest i would rather expect it to have more than the usual RTS economic stuff. One small example of this is the bounty system.

well, if everyone's primary resource is someone elses secondary resource, I imagine you could do some manipulating. (asuming primary resources gather faster then secondary) you could trade between allies or you could "tighten the market" by buying up a lot of what is your primary (even though you don't need it) to limit your enemies supply of secondary.

or you could monopolize all of the planets that contain your enemies primary resource, regardless of whether you need it or not. just so you can randsom it off to them.
monopoly!!!

i think resources will be spread out pretty well, preventing monopolization.

but still, you could have something close

and if you only have 10 or so planets, you could easily monopolize.

Poking me would not be advisable under any circustances, and today doubly so

I am pretty sure each planet will offer botht your primary resource, and your secondary resource. The only thing that will probably vary is the amounts you get on each.

Plus, we cant say anything about how the resources are even gathered. The resources might not even be available on the planets, your forgetting about space station production facilities and asteriods. So, IMO, I think its a bit too early to speculate.

I thought you were in a good mood today. silly me, an emperor is always too busy to be happy.

yeah, so you cant have a full monopoly, but say getting all of the volc planets ought to get you SOME sort of bonus

a warning to the devs: if this is not implemented you will get three e-mails a day from me throughout the total time of both beta's until you do implement it.
and if you ignore them and/or delete my emails without responding I will create thousands of accounts just to spam you E-mails.
you have been warned


considering that the planets are the nodule backbones of everything I think they will be the main forte of your supply

of course you can mine asteroids for such things as super cooled liquid, heavy metals etc. (no crystal)

As far as I know planets arent as important as space is. So in retrospect it could be either way.

Be patient Schem.

And actually I am in quite a good mood, that is why poking is inadvisable. Do you want me to lose it?

OK, I will first say I am sorry. I did not make a lengthy post and as a result Schem was able to give me a viable rebutle.

First up, I have not been on the forums as long as most of you, therefore, I may post things that are not what is in the game that you all know about but only because they were posted 3 months ago or something.

With that said, here it is. Pertaining to Manipulating a market, there is supply and demand as you all know. To manipulate/monopolize the supply of a particular item( used loosly in this post to describe anything), you must have nearly 100% of that items production location( having all the current stock of an item will only by time for a while) so that all additional supply goes to you.

The reason why I say that is simple, in todays economy the USA has enough oil in its own soil to last it long enough to take any other oil field it needs. What I mean is this, Say tommorrow mornign you woke up and the USA was at WAR with a dictator that poof had all the oil reserves in the world under his/her control( forget any obvious falicies here I know them). The USA would still have enough oil in the ground under our feet to be able to take back anything we wanted badly enough.

Translate that to SoaSE. From the info I have gathered from pics, site material, and dev responses, I am currently under the impression that these points are true:
1) There are currently 3-4 Empire Resources.
2) Each Empire will use 2 of them. One as a primary and one as a secondary.
3) Each planet in the game will produce 1-2 of these resources.
I am not sure if they are galaxies or just large solar systems, but I saw clusters of planets around one star and I though perhaps a screen of several dim stars(perhaps ordinary stars) around one bright one(galaxy center). So it looks as though there will be tens of dozens of stars to fight for, or dozens of star clusters that each have plants around them to fight for.

With the above paragraphs, it only makes sense that if one planet(earth) can sustain our entire Race, then one system of planets would have to be enough to sustain a small empire.

It would seem that if market manipulation is to be implemented, then the devs for one would need to make planets very crapy at suppling there one to two resources and, they would need to place dust clouds nebulai and the like in space to be mined( I hope they do the latter, for funs sake at least).

I thought I saw some place that there was a possiblity for a number of or minor resources to be put in the game for special projects. If that is true( which it could very well be my on thoughts intermingling with past memories), then those resources would be what could truely be maniplulated on the market.

It did say in the Features section of the website, "and manipulating the commodities market" and in the F.A.Q. section. "Numerous economic and diplomatic strategies" so I would assume they have found a way to make schems dream a reality. My point however is that there is no way an effective market manipulation model can be made with the number resources given(3-4) and the scope of the game (many, many, many planets) unless the devs made the resources needed for the ship extraordinarily unrealistic or, the more realistic view, additional items of interest for the empires.

I say those things is very simple. Resources that fuel an entire empire, can't be manipulated on any market to the point that it would hinder any faction. It just cant be done, the named factions' player is a moron, the game is unbalanced, or it is a special item that is in the game specifically because the devs wanted an econmic way for one player to hurt another.

As far as Monopolies go, they are immpossible in this game unless like I have said before, they are on a resource that is in the game specifically for the pupose of fostering an economic struggle.

Meh, I dont feel like writing any more in this post.

possibly.

not at all, 50% in a 4-5 person environment suffices, 70% in a 1v1 and 30% in a 10 person scenario would suffice for significant market domination.
it wouldn't be a technical monopoly, but it would be pretty bad for anyone not in the monopoly.

this is probably where your USA idea comes into an analyical falacy.
the reason we could take back the fields would be because we already have the resources to do it, and we simply need survival fuel. in SoaSE significantly choking a resource will keep an opponent from maintaining a large armada, hence providing a market-based defense. chances are that you will have a large enough armada to maintain a defense long enough for your enemy to malaise and whither, and you will have a chance of holding onto your monopoly
if you cannot defend it though, then you just didn't have the military resource to back a market dominated strategy, and that was your gamble taht you lost.
making the planets "crappy" won't be nescessary.

keep in mind, Earth is an absolute GOD amongst worlds, its perfect in EVERY LAST FUCKING WAY! (one of the reasons I believe in god, perfection of circumstance)
finding another "perfect planet" "capable of maintaining a whole race" would be over massive distances, far beyond the scope of the game. thats the idea behind partial-resourced planets. which again, supports the market concept.

nah... that would seem more like a planet-specific bonus (get planet Alcari, and build useless plasma space chickens from your "CHIC farms"). that would be CRAPPY for a market system. terrible really.

no, you see thats how our market works.
you need three things to keep a government working; food, fuel and precious metals. you dont nescessarily need specifics of each. how do you starve out a nation? by preventing them from attaining any one of these resources (preferably the last two, if you want to be humane)
our global governments are more than enough proof that the 3 basic market system works. and besides, I'm quite certain the market dynamics will work out IF THATS WHAT YOU PUSH FOR. if you just grab at planets at random, well duh your statistically not going to get a monopoly (or at least, its not likely)

you couldn't be more wrong (sorry, I'm getting egotistical here)
its because these commodities are in such high supply and in HIGHER DEMAND that this market manipulation would be more effective than ever (but harder to maintain).
getting in a 50 planet game of 5 people, 5-6 specific targeted planets under your control will be enough to swing the market to almost completely under your control (although it will take a lot of maintaining), by taking their most nescessary resource and limiting it (not cutting it off) you can destroy an empire with ease.
as you can tell I'll probably play by market manipulation if its a viable strategy.

on a last note:
I'm not saying a complete monopoly, I'm saying a dominator in market. that means just having a significant plurality of targeted resource planets in the game will cause you to become the center of both trade and envy (its what happens with America, we have everything stone gripped in our economy, everyone else is practically forced to trade with us to survive, so they hate us)
this will make you target of a lot of military action by people you are supressing, so you have to be careful
but more importantly it'll make you the center of at least several group's economy

Well, reading(kinda, brain is shutting down) what you've put down was interesting in a way. A lot of waht you said is circumstantial, and most of what I said left a lot of room for some one to poke holes.

I think we are thinking of some this in different ways. Most of what I say is based on the way I look at game design and how I would make a game. Seeing as I dont have a copy of this game or a beta to mess with I cant give accurate info.

Perhaps part of the problem with this is I have never lost to someone that I was trying to beat( at least, that is if both this person and myself are both fluent in the game and its workings). I have played matches where my enemy had more resources then I did and I still prevailed and we are talking humans, not bots, although admittedly, I mostly play bots. The only ways I have lost when equal in knowledge of the game with my opponent, is through backstabbing, and the fact that the game had a unit limit.

The Monopolization of a good in this game coes down to how there resource collection will be done. I admit that i do not know much about this. As far as I know all it is, is that planets give off 1-2 resources, there are 4 resources in teh game, and there might be other things that give off those resources. If fuel for ships is one of the 4 resources, then you argument has a different meaning to me now and I agree that limited monopolization can be achieved, however, my current picutre of the games resources is that each of these races uses 2 of the 4 resources for production, research, upgrades and the like. That being the case, It is just like all other RTSs in that way. If there is NO ship cap, then that makes the game all the more interesting, because now instead of hording riches, I can now build stuff with it.

The reason I said you cant have a monopoly is this. This game proffesses to be a RT4x or some such. In a typical RTS the way you "monopolize" a resource is by mining it dry, defending it from attack, or killing the workers. In a 4x TBS, you cant do this, at least with the ones I have played, because you planets generate your income. You cant feel a loss for what you dont have. I have never felt that another had a monopoly on production points, credits, food, or whatever, because the colonies themselves generated them. The way to stop that is to destroy the colony.

That is why I said what I did. In an RTS, the game was over before the resources were a problem I had either won, or lost because they had ganged me. Even then I made them play for 2 hours longer then they would have liked. I was easily worth 1 1/2 times there number.

In summation, if this is more like a TBS 4x, then I dont understand how a monopolization of a good is possible if your the one generating it for you empire. If it is more like and RTS, then the only way to make yourself have a monopoly on something is to defend all the resources and or crush teh enemies fleets, however if you defend all the resources, you lose because you are too spread out, if you defeat the enemy fleets, you win because they cant challange your military might, therefore a Monopoly is mute bcause you have won already.

I have already forgotten what I wrote in the last post, so here is my revised view.

If these are true:
1) 1-2 generated resources per planet.
2) 3 unigue resources and one generic(credits)
3) many planets in which to colonize.
then a market monopolization is not possible, at least the way I believe you( and admittedly I) would wish it to be.

Least take the 50 planets for a 5 person game. If that is the case, then 10 planets per player. Each planet has a 2 in 3 chance to get 1 of the 2 resources needed for that player to build an maintain a fleet.

Ok. If Player 1(P1) has 50% of the "metal(ResourceA or RA)" in the map, lets say the other empires have all the rest. lets make it easy( not sure on numbers, just what if stuff) and say 100bt(bt = billion tons) are in the game map. That means P1 has 50bt of the metal under his control. 10bt on hand and 40mt being mined from various colonies. This means that the average share of metal per player would be 12.5bt of metal. P2(our player) has only 8bt of metal in his/her domain. 4bt on hand and 4bt in various colonies being mined. The operational costs of an average in metal is say 10t per/month(welds, repairs, etc.) the construction of an average fleet that P2 has would take about 100,000t. That leaves 3,999,000,000t of metal left in P2 empire, altogether, per year, P2 get 230,000t of metal from his/her colonies.

My point, yes P1 has more of everything. But this by no means, means that P2 is affected by anything P1 does to the market. Also, the other player probably wont need as much metal or any metal, unless they are all the same faction and most likely P2 would have more metal then what he/she was given.

Just because a faction controls more of a thing does not mean that faction neccassarily sets the price of the thing. If some one buys from that faction, then yes, but if they have enough of their own, then no.

A good example is something my father does. He plays World of Warcraft, and in that he has a monopoly on Essence of Air. From what I understand, a fairly high valued good in the game. He went from 20gold to 300 in a few days. Well, that is all fine and dandy, so why doesnt he say go out and monopolize the copper market? In WoW, everyone and their brother uses copper. THe answer is simple. There is tons of it. Tons, and tons, and tons, everywhere. Sure it is a valued commodity, you could farm the stuff if you wanted, hell, I have. But there is so much of it on the market that you couldnt possibly corner it, because five minutes after you are the only one in control of the market, some one else comes in and places up twice your number of lots at cheaper price.

Why can my father corner the market on Essence of Air, but not Copper? Simple, there is much less Essence of Air then Copper availible for sale. Another reason is the fact that there are hundreds of DIFFERENT items on sale at the auction house at any given time. There are 3 different items, there are hundereds.

meh, this one went downhill to. Brain is sleepy, I will make a better response tommorrow.

I will be interested to see how this market thing is to be implemented, better be good.

most games are "buy and forget", sins is different, anything you buy becomes a drain on your resources for maintenance (making this a very viable strategy). additionally most other games are created thru one resource, usually money. in those games the "market strategy" cannot translate, because your dealing with someone who has nothing to bargain with and someone with everything.
as well some of the games your talking about dont have resource nodes, and that bunks market strategy too.

all in all SoaSE is designed in every perfect way for this. it has a large enough map to allow for such a strategy (if you dont have enough materials here, you wont be winning. at least if the game is created effectively)

3

exactly (2/3) but you need both of the resource in order to work. so the strategy flies nonetheless

which brings up another point, if you go to dominate ONE market, you will affect one race significantly, another moderately, and the last not at all. so be CAREFUL.

there's a "soft cap"
when your resource input equals your resource drain (or nearly so) from constructed maintenance, then you really cannot build more ships. (so go get more planets!)
this is a keystone reason Market Domination strategy should work.

aha, here is where your wrong. mostly due to the soft cap
I'm sure you'll already know that by the time you read here.

I'll believe that your so godly
when I see it.  

you get around this by defending target resources and not putting a huge emphasis on the planets you aren't defending.
besides, you can always just send your fleet going to wherever you need.

from what we know there is no generic resource.

or... instead of bringing some out of scope analysis lets put it this way.
1 has 5 planets of target resource
anotehr point: most planets (supposedly) produce one major resource and the others minimally, forgot to point this out
target resource is major in 1/3 of 50 planets (~16) so the player has 1/3 of the market under his control at 5.
4 other players have to split 11 planets, down to 2-3. now they are going to have the other planets in excess (3~4) players who depend on the limited resource are going to have difficulty getting past this. severe difficulty
so far this is an (assumedly) pretty small game, but as the number of planets grow so too does the ease of potential, its easier to grab more planets with ease.
this person isn't going to be toppling any empires, but he's been pretty conservative.

now someone going for market domination should go for a significant amount of the metal always. more than in the last demonstration

mistake number 2: your assuming your going after your own target resource.
a smart market analysis (or rather... just a glance at your screen) will tell you that you should always strive for teh resource that is the primary of most of the races in the game (i.e. if your TEC and your going after 5 advent, go for the crystal, regardless of whether or not you use it)

the idea is to force them to not have enough, and for you to have excess.
that should be more than easy enough with a soft cap.

answer: soft cap. there will always be more demand than supply with a soft cap, it is specifically designed to be that way.

well of course you can monopolize a small resource with ease (1 person out of 6million, although I dont think I believe this. I haven't played the game though) but if your 1/6 people monopolizing 1/3 resources isn't all that hard.
unless if your enemies/allies catch onto your ruse.

Most of the stuff was confusing but I think I got some. Keep in mind, I am not familiar at all with previous Stardock games, so I can't guesstimate based on their previous works. Also, please cite if possible where you are getting your info, beccause I know I have not seen it anywhere.

I did make a mistake before saying that there are 4 resources and lumping them together. It is 3 production resources and 1 that everyone uses which is credits.

If what you said was true, with regards to there being only a handlful of planets in the galaxy of play that have a large amount of a given resource and most of the others have a minimal supply, then the game itself is severely flawed unless I have misunderstood you.

If the idea that say there are only 3 planets rich in one resource(for each resource) in a galaxy of say 50 planets, then your market system manipulation is correct, that however would make the game incredibly unrealistic and flawed though. This would easily be an option for senario play, but not for the main game.

My defense of a non-monopoly possiblity came from a more TBS point of view, in which the chances for each player to have a lot of crappy pop-only planets, some good planets, and a small few GREAT planets was high.
I mean in an territory of say 20 planets, I would expect for more then half of them to be just pop/research plantes with hopes for a steadily increaseing credit flow. I would hope for perhaps 1/5 of my planets to be suitable for limited naval construction, special projects, and perhaps the possibility that they would be military rally points. I would also expect for between 1-3 of my planets to be rich enough in any given resource that i needed for survival to be suited to building my armadas non-stop.

The impression I got from what you wrote, was that an average empire would have nearly no worth while planets, with one or two that are some what ok, and if your really lucky, then maybe one that has a lot of one resource.

If that is the case, then you are correct that a market manipulation is possible, but hte game would be no fun unless your the controller of the market. That would mean that you would have no ability to produce a navy that could possibly get what is needed, so you pretty much keel over and die.

If that is the case, then there would need to be a few options availible to the player for compensation:
1) there must be options to allow production of viable fleet combinations using the secondary resource as a substitute primary. Perhaps the ships will ahve more firepower and or be faster, but less armored or something. The cons will outweigh the pros or else why bother haveing a primary and secondary resource, why not just make it that the player ahs the option of useing one resource as a primary and the other as a secondary.
2) -insert something here-

My understanding of the game is this (please let me know if I am wrong, then tell me how the game design is and I can formulate a better response).

1) In the galaxy there are "X" number of planets and up to 10 people can play.
2) There are 4 resources that the players have access to, 3 hard resources(resources used by the factions for production, research, etc.) and 1 soft(credits - everyone gets credits).
3) Each planet in the game area generates 2 of these resources. 1 resource in a primary role, the other in a secondary role. I have no knowledge how much is being generated.

Here is kind of what i mean.
Say of all the planets in the galaxy, the crappiest generates 10ru(ru = resource units of whatever resource) and the best 100ru.

My idea of the game was that probably 50-70% of the planets would generate 10-50ru,25-45 and maybe 5% would generate 85-100ru per cycle. With maybe a fraction of a percent of hte planets genereating 100+ru's. That would be a pretty nice balance.

If I understand you correctly, then using the same model, it seems that 70-80% of the planets are usless snot balls, maybe 15-25% are ok, but not that good, and 5% are godly. By usless snot balls, I mean that they are nothing more then people holders. The 15-25% bracket have some recources but nothing to be happy about and hte 5% is what everyone will fight over.

Please inform me where I am wrong[ (not where you and I have different opinions) but where what I have come to see the game as and what the devs stated the game is are different].

One thing I thought of that may be part of my misunderstanding, are the resources going to be physical ones or will they be numbers on a sheet?

What I mean, is in every RTS I have played with a very few exceptions, once a resource is harvested/mined/what-have-you, it is no longer in the game other then in number. If the devs allow for raiding of a resource, they have the ability be that when an enemy players hits your hut or whatever, it pulls "X" quantity of that resource from your stockpile and places it mysteriously into his.

I ask this because now that I think on the fact that there will be trade fleets, and routes, and all that. If physical transportaion(to and from mines, to and from stockpiles, to and from production areas), storage, harvesting and the like, then I could totally see how a market manipulation could work.

I was under the impression for some reason that it wasnt an ingame item that is to be physically transported and the like.

If taht is so, please let me know.

I will try to stop posting on stuff here, I am getting way outside my space of fact, I am not very good at hypothisizing. Once the beta comes out, and i have played it for a while I will begin to make whitty comments, at least I hope I will.

I've realized, that if a post is more than 4 sentences long, I don't have the desire to read it...

from what we know there is no money standard.
which is viable and makes sense.

misunderstanding, every planet is unique, but certain planet "tiles" have a majority of one sort.
most planets have a majority of one tile, ex: volcano (metal based) and a neglect in the other, of course I believe there is a possibility of resource crossover, but I get the feeling thats minimal

not at all, evey planet should have a good amount of one or so resource (possibly there are crap planets... has neither been confirmed nor denied)
which is much better for a market based strategy than 3 heavy-resourced planets.

I'm no dev but I dont think that this is how it works.
resource rich planets will double as your population/research planets, these are the planet's you'll defend with your life. (unless if your dealing with hostile terrain, such as icy weather)

I'm going to stop commenting on the rest of your conjecture because it all appears to be based on faulty assumptions.
wrong, no "soft resource" has been confirmed, and I believe outright denied.

each planet has several facets and is usually best at one or (maybe) two.
confirmed facets:
survivability
resource in metal
resource in crystal
resource in... (I forget the last one...)
these are the major factors, most planets will not be good at doing more than one, ones that are will probably be highly contested.

your conjecture is getting too complex for the facts, stick to what you know instead of assuming dozens of things.

OOOOO   

Its a lengthy post battle!!

As soon as I'm done wathching the paint dry I will try to join this pointless arguement

when I'm in a post, there are no "battles". there are asswhoopings and ego bruises, never afflicted to me.