Shouldn't trade value have something to do with trading on the market too? Maybe not as trade value is an abstract of all the other resources and services that a private economy produces.
Food is better than energy
- Thread starter redharo
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The AI must be buying you out. If you saturate the market, you will crash HARD.
Mid game I tried specializing into an alloy-making economy and importing my minerals. This works small-scale, but as it turns out, it's AWFUL large-scale. I was selling about 500 alloys a month.
What happened was I ended up crashing the entire friggin galactic alloy market. Prices went down to 0.6 energy credits per alloy, and 4 credits per mineral!
Overspecialize at your own risk.
I suppose this is right to happen... otherwise it would be exploitable.
Would you say there's a balance to be struck? Is producing energy from alloys more efficient and easy than from food.
I think the more strong your economy is relative to the rest of the galaxy, the less worth it it is to make your energy via selling. Or importing resources you need for that matter.
Poor you with those cheap food prices. It's closer to 3 each in my play-through and I'm selling 150 a month. Nice profit!
The poorly named trade value is some sort of resource that isn't normally collected or excess that could have been collected but wasn't. Instead it can be distributed for profit. It's not literal money lying around.
It's more a concept of something than an actual something.
Edit: Think of it like the parable of the two merchants. Each would sell the same item back to the other, but each time they raise the price 10% and somehow both make profit.
Or think of it like investment banking. You put your money away into a bank, the bank takes that money and invests it into businesses that can make a bigger profit to produce more money.
The trade value is like that. It's not a physical thing, it's you somehow creating more out of nothing.
Note that being able to crash the alloys market doesn't necessarily mean that you can crash the food market before earning enough credits to power your economy without any generators.
Also, some players have reported being able to make the alloy-based economy work. I presume different galaxy settings would yield different results for the strat, but I don't know which ones make the strat unworkable.
Doesn't this interpretation of trade value make it a little... pointless? Unless of course we use trade value to buy/sell things on the private / internal market.
I thought it Is more like a tax on private products and services and as such cannot be generated by hives or machine empires (as it's pointless for them).
Alloy prices really only spike up dramatically during wars or galactic threats. They aren't a stable money maker.
Consumer Goods is a consistent performer, but not really profitable in bulk either.
Food is always needed, and many AI don't seem to produce enough food. Minerals is always in demand, needed to produce the alloys and consumer goods that everyone needs.
I feel that typically the AI is trying to boost their level 2 economy towards mid game, but don't really focus on building their level 1 economy to support it. This is probably because doing so causes you to fall behind on economy towards mid/late game. As a result you can make so much money on food and mineral districts where the AI is focusing on other things.
Of course, your results may vary. If your universe has wars that the AI don't fight because they forgot to build starbases, or can't build colony ships, then you might see a much weaker market.
That is definitely another way to think of it. As a tax.
Machine Empires wouldn't use my system either, because savings are inefficient. If you have something to save, you aren't expanding your ability to produce goods.
It's a necessary inefficiency for organics that aren't perfect in every way thoughI might use that excuse for why I never have any savings
Well, stability isn't a big problem if you have enough of a balance to ride out any downturn. Anyway, I imagine people who are running the alloy strat end up in a situation where they're the ones deciding how wars work in their galaxy.
Also, another thing to note: You can set the min price you will sell things at to prevent the game from short selling you. This way you sell as much alloy as the market will allow at good prices.
That's quite interesting. Imagine a galaxy is dependent upon a single civilization for one product... you can't kick people out of the galactic market or embargo selling your product to a singled out empire on the market. You withdraw your product and then go straight to war, even if they could destroy your fleets you could rebuild and they could not! That's an interesting economic strategy, but it'd be hard to tell who was dependent or not... maybe espionage or more information would be helpful here!
Are you saying it's an opportunity for the Devs to expand the diplomacy?
Also, I already do this. During war I withdraw all of my sales on the market.
Food has good raw value on the trade market, but it has even MORE trade value in diplomacy. You don't have to double dip on the sell/buy penalty and many empires offer 70-90% exchange rates. Turn your food into alloys, minerals and consumer goods all while taking those same resources away from your future enemies!
I have a feeling the only reason this works is because the AI is broken and so is starving. In the AI mod i'm using this doesn't work at all.