Hi ! Thanks for the wonderful feedback. Our first priority over the coming month is a complete rework of the economy, including a much more dynamic pricing, modular stations, more information in menus, etc. The fact that pricing is very static right now is the core issue with the game, especially long-term. So I'm not surprised you won easily !

Population probably doesn't pay much attention to the station levels. I'll check it but you're probably right. I guess the best option would be to only have migration of population depending on habitats, but since habitats feed the population themselves, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

Anyway, I'll make sure our economy designer reads this !

Glad to help, and glad to hear economy updates are forthcoming. I do have to disagree or at least question your assessment that the reason I won easily is because of static pricing (although I favor more dynamic pricing). In fact, if the pricing were more dynamic, I might have won MORE easily, because:

- My steel would be more expensive, so I would have made more profit from selling it to arsenals and factories than I did
- Plastics and tools which I was buying and which had enormous gluts would have been cheaper

However, it is true that FeO and H2 would have been more expensive. Not sure if it would have been enough to be a net loss.

It seems to me the core reason I won so easily is because the AI did not recognize it needed to make more FeO/H2 mines and that it wasn't efficient at buying it quickly enough to prevent me from snatching it from under them.

Another thing I didn't mention that seemed ludicrous: throughout all this, the AI was upgrading factories and plastic works to L10 but never upgraded any FeO/H2 mines above L3 -- despite the fact that the economic situation would have suggested exactly the opposite.

Thanks for this amazing feedback. I'm will begin the development of a next version of the economy soon and your post is very helpful.

First, some reactions:

1. - The AI react mainly to theoretical consumption, this mean that if you buy all the FeO without increase Steel production, the AI react to station underflow.
   
   
2. - I think this is a bug. I probably forgot to make AI ignore stations that don't allow trade in AI's trade finder heuristic.
   
   
3. - I think this is due to the Nerf Ratio system. In the first alpha version of Helium Rain, it was too difficult to trade at the beginning of the game because the AI can be very good at trading (they can anticipate the production and consumption flow, and check all the trade combination to choose the one making the more money). As the players found nothing to trade, I was pretty frustrating. We introduced the Nerf Ratio to avoid this : a minimal buy quantity and sell capacity is reserved to the player in stations, so they will always have something to buy/sell. The reserved part will be lower if the player is high in leaderboard but if you actively buy some resources at a station, you will buy all the production.
   Even without Nerf ratio, player turn and trade route are resolved in the day simulation before the AI turn : the player will be able the buy the daily production before the AI.
   
   I think we should drop the Nerf Ratio system and integrate it in contracts for early game : resource and capacity could be reserved only with a contract asking you to buy or deliver resources.
   
   Don't allow the player to buy first will make the trade very difficult to understand (why my trade route bought nothing while there were 50 steels in the stations the previous day ?). Give this advantage to the player is huge and allow him to abuse. Maybe dynamic price will fix this problem : if you buy every FeO for long time, the producer will be happy to try to increase its prices indecently.
   
   
4. - Yes, AI is very nice now. Maybe too much. We balance the game to allow pacific player to play without any war. Maybe you should detect some hostile player commercial behavior and make loose reputation because of this. We could have more reputation threshold before war : price increase/reduction for player ,boycott, embargo, exclusion zone, etc.

For now there is not real motivation to upgrade habitats, or maybe allow to make face to big population consumption (and increase the minimum population reach in case of starvation). The population is not assigned to an habitation. Maybe we should limit the population depending to the habitation count and level.

The people will buy resources to each players with habitats in the sector. They will buy in every habitat but they will buy more to companies they like (there is an hidden reputation system for people ...). You gain reputation if you provide resources and high end resource, and loose reputation if you don't provide food for example.



The telescope was more useful when station price were depend on station count in sector. In this case you always have big advantage to find other sectors. The problems is the Spire : this is the only place to produce gas and the player cannot afford to build a station in this crowded sector. We still have to find the right way to balance station construction and limit the station count.
What about this : each player can only build 2 stations in a sector (4 with dense sector technology). No price inflation (and maybe more expensive station ?).
Another thing that cool be nice (if we are able to find time to develop it) is asteroid prospecting. Asteroid could have variable ore quality and mining at rich asteroid could lead to better mining yield. Telescope could allow you to claim rich asteroid fields.
Also, we have plan for telescope usage for future history missions.

An idea was to add sector ownership : there could be public sectors with multiple companies (like Blue Heart) and others sectors with an owner (you can own or sell the sectors you discover). In your sector, you could allow other companies to build station or not, build defense, etc. This need a lot of works but it could be interesting.



For new economy, I planned to totally drop the sector prices and the transport fee system. Instead of that, the prices will be configured per station : a buy price and a sell price for each resource.
The player and the AIs will choose the prices.

This system should fix a lot of problems:

• if you buy all the Feo at a station/sector, the AI will raise quickly the prices to see how much you are able to spend. As there is no limit, the AI will be happy to sell you Feo at 100k by unit if you dare.
  
• By giving a lot of money to the mine owner, it will be able to upgrade its mines and other stations. If the prices vary a lot and station construction is based more on margin potential, everyone will build Feo mines (for now, as prices is limited so the maximum profitability of a mine is low).
  
• If you try to sell steel at very high price the AI may not buy to you and just wait (if it make their stations not profitable, the salaries are fixed so the people purchase capabilities are not endless). When you will have no more money to accumulate Feo, as Feo production continue, the prices will go down, the AI will buy it and sell cheaper steel.
  
• If the AI is good, you will have tons of expensive Feo/steel and nobody want it :)

This kind of economy will need more attention to price from player but if the AI behave correctly it could be very interesting. The trade hub will become useful : configure a ressource per slot, a sell price and a buy price and you have a marketplace.
The transport fees will be dynamic as motivation to transport resources (impossible with a sector price as there is no motivation to transport resources between 2 stations in the same sector).
We will need to add a lot of financial information in the UI.

What do you think of this new system proposition ? Could it solve all the problems (I probably miss a lot of problems) ? Will it be more fun to play ?

Broadly, you face a very hard problem trying to make AI accommodate people like me who try to break the economy and newbies who are just getting started. Many games deal with this using AI difficulty levels.

AI:

1. Not entirely sure I understand what you mean by this, but I guess it means that AI builds/upgrades stations based on consumption rather than shortages. It seems to me that both are important and the AI (like a player) should make a decision based on both. For example, even if H20 consumption is less than production, it still may be worth making a station (and especially setting up a trade route) if there is a 60K global shortage.

3. In general, this makes sense and I think it's a decent system in general. I think the nerf-ratio might be improved by making it per-good, so if there is an enormous supply/demand gap, the nerf-ratio for that particular good could be decreased. Scaling it by player corp value is also a good idea too.

4. I remember when the AI would be nice until, one day, everyone would declare war on you simultaneously. Now, as you say, they're probably too nice. The main issue with the old system was that basically you were either at war with everyone or no one. In my example above, it would make a lot of sense if the owners of competing steelworks got very angry at me and attacked me for what I was doing, just as long as EVERYONE didn't do it all at once. That was frustrating and not fun because it resulted in an unexpected loss of a game several hours in. I like the idea of embargoes and other penalties short of war.

> The population is not assigned to an habitation.

My problem with this is that, if I spend a lot of money and effort into building a sector up from nothing, then another corp can come in and build a habitat and split the profits evenly with me. It also just doesn't make sense in general: just because a new habitat is built, half the sector's population automatically moves there?

And on the other side, it means that the player is far better off building habitats in sectors that are already heavily populated. Being the first one to build a habitat in a sector will always make you the loser.

> Maybe we should limit the population depending to the habitation count and level.

I agree. It makes sense to have each habitat support a certain amount of pop, and that amount can be increased by upgrades. It might also make sense to make a higher-level habitat more "desirable" than a lower-level habitat.

> ...there is an hidden reputation system for people...

Such a rep system makes sense, sort of, but IMO people should live in a specific habitat, and if another habitat is "better" (provides more resources or whatever), they will migrate there, gradually. In any case, all of this is undocumented and there's no indication in the UI. In the system I suggest, you could have an indicator of how desirable your habitat is, or what the net population growth/loss is. So the player can see: "Your habitat's growth is -2/day on average because no food (or whatever)".

> The problems is the Spire : this is the only place to produce gas

As an aside, once I realized this, it became obvious that if a player stuck a big fleet in Spire, they could destroy the entire economy that way as well. I am not sure it is such a good idea to have the Spire be the only place to do this. I haven't finished Pendulum yet, but I expected that at the end of it, the technology would be "discovered" to mine gas elsewhere. Your comment suggests that is not the case.

> asteroid prospecting...

I like that idea.

> ...telescope...each player can only build 2 stations in a sector (4 with dense sector technology)

The problem with the telescope is not that it is useless, it's just that it is not worth it right now because of station cost scaling and because there aren't too many unknown sectors to discover. It's not that expensive to build and run one, but it affects all the costs of future stations as well. If I could scrap stations, I would build a telescope, discover all the sectors, and then scrap it.

A per-sector station limit would be a bad idea IMO, especially one that low. If other players are like me, they are coming in with the assumption that they should try to build all their stations in one sector as much as possible because it's easier to defend. You already have a mechanism to prevent a player from building EVERYTHING in one sector, though: icy, non-icy, good light, geosynchronous, etc.

Clearly, you're trying to encourage people to spread out their stations. I think this should be accomplished by economic incentives (like, as you say, better asteroid yields in one place rather than another, or certain resources are only available in certain places, etc) rather than arbitrary limits or cost scaling. It just makes no intuitive sense: space is BIG -- what possible logical explanation could there be for making it more expensive to build additional stations in a vast empty sector of space?

If you plan to add more resources types over time, this should become easier. Suppose there are two sectors, one with high FeO and low silica yields and another with the opposite. A player COULD build everything in one or the other, but they would be economically penalized for doing so with less yield. OTOH, if they spread the stations out, it's harder to defend. I think this is why X3 did not have many sectors with all the basic resources in one place.

> sector ownership

I think this is a good idea, as I implied. It made no sense to me that I owned every station in a sector and had a massive imposing fleet, yet couldn't do anything about it if someone tried to build a station there, short of declaring war. And if I did declare war, I would capture their useless station and it would increase my scaling costs. But I do think there should be more required of a player to "own" a sector than simply discovering it. They should have to invest a significant amount of resources to get that status.

> For new economy, I planned to totally drop the sector prices and the transport fee system. Instead of that, the prices will be configured per station

I DO like the idea of per-station rather than per-sector prices. However, I also like the transport fee system, it is just that the transport fee is much too high right now compared to the (basically nonexistent) price variability. As you point out elsewhere, all dynamic prices and no transport fee is not very newbie friendly.

> the AI will be happy to sell you Feo at 100k by unit if you dare.

IMO this is a terrible idea. It will lead to a lot of players wondering where their bank account evaporated to because one of their automated traders bought some overpriced good. Yes, AI should be able to inflate prices, but not to a completely unbounded extent. This could be partially solved with "smart traders" which is a proposed enhancement.

In general on the Steam forums you will get the general impression that a lot of players have very little idea why their bank account is bouncing up and down. It is hard with the current UI to figure out where your money is coming from and going to once you have several trade routes online or stations built.

> If you try to sell steel at very high price the AI may not buy to you and just wait

In my example, I didn't really care what price I sold steel at. I assume with dynamic pricing it would be high because steel was in such demand. Actually I didn't make most of my money by selling steel, but by the usual stuff like Depths->LH H2O trades. The point of making a steel shortage was to prevent others from building ships. So that part wouldn't solve what I did above.

> When you will have no more money to accumulate Feo, as Feo production continue, the prices will go down, the AI will buy it and sell cheaper steel

I think that the AI should not respond to a FeO shortage by raising prices excessively (although yes, it should raise prices maybe 2-4X), but rather primarily by increasing FeO SUPPLY. That is the most fundamental point of my OP. If the AI had just increased FeO or H2 supply, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did.

Most generally of all, what I did above would simply be impossible if the galaxy were significantly larger than it is. I was only able to monopolize FeO and H2 because there are so few places where it is produced.

wow, I can't read all that as there may be spoilers for me. 2 hrs in, and very excited. sry for putting 2 cents in. cheers.

You said "Build a steelworks (after research) in an empty sector (I chose Outpost), deny trading of steel output to others"

How do you tell your station not to trade with others?

Aha! Those little "Trade" tags above the commodity icons are switchable.

Is this still possible now that 1.3.2 is out?