Markets are a total joke

[Karl244]

Well, as a programmer (and physicist) myself I know it is very hard to write an AI that always does the smart choice ánd being able to feel human to a player. So I understand that the AI would have a much lower market fee, but getting stuff for free is a dangerous type and that could snowball to some redicoulus stuff.
To get to the galactic market, the market fluctions look like a heavily damped pendulum system in which the damping is so fast that within about half a year to a year the prices of the galactic market are back to normal. I would fix this by reducing this damping, in other words, slow down the effect of going back to an original price. What I would also add is adding some kind of braunian motion on top of the resource price in the order of 10% to simulate private investors.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

While this version of market might feel lackluster, image how real supply and demand would... well, not work. For example, there wouldn't probably ever be alloys for sale, and if there were, their cost would be atronomical. Might be same thing with consumer goods. You don't really sell these more advanced resources except in a case of emergency.
I don't think if its explained in-game, but the resources in the market represent private corporations not big enough to be empires. They are very abstracted, but then so is eveything else in Stellaris.

 

[Sarno]

I've literally never seen the galactic market spawn this early though.

I think the OP in that particular topic had internal market in mind, not galactic. But it does not hurt to check both.

 

[vortexsurfer]

Supply is not infinite. In my last game I had so much energy production from trade that i decided to set up very large quantities of monthly mineral trade. The prices continued to increase until I eventually got a warning that they were running out of supplies.

Strange, I have never seen that and it felt totally infinite. But it's a good thing that they have coded in some upper limits

 

[Sarno]

While this version of market might feel lackluster, image how real supply and demand would... well, not work. For example, there wouldn't probably ever be alloys for sale, and if there were, their cost would be atronomical. Might be same thing with consumer goods. You don't really sell these more advanced resources except in a case of emergency.
I don't think if its explained in-game, but the resources in the market represent private corporations not big enough to be empires. They are very abstracted, but then so is eveything else in Stellaris.

To be honest, if they also added more mercenary fleets than just marauders, such as private security companies and such, you would be able to get fleets/ships by using other resources than just alloys and in my opinion, this would work well.

X4 Foundations has similar "issue" you described. In this iteration, the devs basically said "to hell with spwaning ships out of nowhere, everything has to be built now".
Result? As soon as two factions clash with each other (Holy Order of Pontifex vs. Xenon for example), their shipyards immediately start churning out ships and buying up all components on local markets.
Yes, you now have a hard time of building your own ships, since those shipyards are essentialy low on materials, but if you decide to exploit this component shortage, you can haul stuff to them for massive profits and use the excess credits for hiring ships instead of purchasing them directly. Each system supplements other systems.

 

[Person012345]

Have you tried actually playing the game?

 

[SpectralShade]

While this version of market might feel lackluster, image how real supply and demand would... well, not work. For example, there wouldn't probably ever be alloys for sale, and if there were, their cost would be atronomical. Might be same thing with consumer goods. You don't really sell these more advanced resources except in a case of emergency.
I don't think if its explained in-game, but the resources in the market represent private corporations not big enough to be empires. They are very abstracted, but then so is eveything else in Stellaris.

yeah, it's almost as if you would have to make regular trade deals with the other empires wher eyou can exchange one type of resource for another type of resource...

Which you can already do, btw...

To me, the market is a cop-out by the developers.

They had made this hugely intrensic system that were supposed to be better than the previous, and then realized it gave them more problems then the old system while the AI was suffering even more from it as well (where the mantra had all the time been that the new system would help the AI). They knew they needed to release this thing before christmas, but knew there were only 3 "real" options:
-Ditch the whole thing and go back to use what they knew worked (old system). Would be a huge egg on the face of the devs.
-Hold the release till they figured out how to fix things, which would be an estimate of about 6 months or so in the future, given the massive amount of problems the new system brought.
-Cheat. Throw in "Mikes Magic Market" to hide the most obvious problems, ignore the ton of issues and hope people don't pay too much attention so they can release it on schedule and eventually hopefully fix things later.

It's pretty clear to me they chose the last option.

Problem with that path, of course, is that it means they not only have to deal with trying to fix the flaws of the new system, but also try to fix the additional issues covered by the mechanics now put in place to try and 'smoothe out' the problems for the release. In an interconnected system where you tied up everything to each other, this kind of development spells disaster and you NEED to contain and compartmentalize your testcode in order not to keep getting 'unforeseen effects' in other areas. That's way too late now, so the whole process of fixing things have become inceasinglt complicated and expensive.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the death of future iterations of the game because they realize they messed up the code too much now by this approach.

 

[Zergor]

The way I would do it is make all empires produce twice as much with a half going in their pocket and the other fill the market. So basically when you are in internal market you can at most double your production by buying things.
And that would resolve the food out of thin air without farms.

With the galactic market it would be the same but with a big pool of ressourse everyone can tap in.
And of course the closer a ressourse would be to depletion compared to the total generation of it the more expensive it would be (and the other way around).

There should probably be a ressourse decay in the market so even if a ressourse is overproduced by the galaxie for a long time there isn't an almost infinite supply of it for dirt cheap at the market (which could probably be exploited by the player)

 

[vortexsurfer]

While this version of market might feel lackluster, image how real supply and demand would... well, not work. For example, there wouldn't probably ever be alloys for sale, and if there were, their cost would be atronomical. Might be same thing with consumer goods. You don't really sell these more advanced resources except in a case of emergency.
I don't think if its explained in-game, but the resources in the market represent private corporations not big enough to be empires. They are very abstracted, but then so is eveything else in Stellaris.

Well, as a consequence of this, why not get rid of "resources"? Just abstract the whole thing to "economic power" which buys you anything you need to maintain your economy and make it scale with empire size/planet count.

In fact, that's what they achieved with the introduction of the more or less infinite market supply

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

The market allows to play specialized empires without having to be good at everything ever like in 2.1. I like it because it's good both for roleplay and """realism""" since usually it's rare for a real world country to not having to import something (either raw resources or finished products). It's not perfect, it's quite wonky and could be better, but i really want that system to stay.


The AI exploit is there, probably, just to help the braindead AI. Without it, they would probably just have to up the "basic cheating", so i guess no big deal. THe AI is already a pushover and they know it. It's likely those free market resources are a stopgap feature to buy the devs time to fix the AI.

Yeah, yet another side-effect of AI broken by new features.

 

[SpectralShade]

The market allows to play specialized empires without having to be good at everything ever like in 2.1. I like it because it's good both for roleplay and """realism""" since usually it's rare for a real world country to not having to import something (either raw resources or finished products). It's not perfect, it's quite wonky and could be better, but i really want that system to stay.


The AI exploit is there, probably, just to help the braindead AI. Without it, they would probably just have to up the "basic cheating", so i guess no big deal. THe AI is already a pushover and they know it. It's likely those free market resources are a stopgap feature to buy the devs time to fix the AI.

Yeah, yet another side-effect of AI broken by new features.

inifinite supplies is realistic?

Well that is a new one...

 

[vortexsurfer]

The market allows to play specialized empires without having to be good at everything ever like in 2.1. I like it because it's good both for roleplay and """realism""" since usually it's rare for a real world country to not having to import something (either raw resources or finished products). It's not perfect, it's quite wonky and could be better, but i really want that system to stay.


The AI exploit is there, probably, just to help the braindead AI. Without it, they would probably just have to up the "basic cheating", so i guess no big deal. THe AI is already a pushover and they know it. It's likely those free market resources are a stopgap feature to buy the devs time to fix the AI.

Yeah, yet another side-effect of AI broken by new features.

That's exactly my impression, market is a way to "legalize" AI "cheating" or underperforming. It's sad, I mean I really love Stellaris for its vision and scope. But the DLC policy of rolling out new features/mechanics as selling points which the already lackluster AI cannot handle is a bit alarming. I don't want this to be EUIV

 

[Sarno]

The market allows to play specialized empires without having to be good at everything ever like in 2.1. I like it because it's good both for roleplay and """realism""" since usually it's rare for a real world country to not having to import something (either raw resources or finished products). It's not perfect, it's quite wonky and could be better, but i really want that system to stay.

Please do not mix real world countries with interstellar empires, as both are completely different. IRL country has to do with the land it has i.e. if the land is not fertile, then they are forced to import food. On the other hand can exploit natural resources other countries do not have. And even then, if the other countries experience bad harvest season, they are basically screwed, because those countries will prioritize themselves in terms of food instead of exporting it.

Interstellar empire would behave (since there is no IRL counterpart) differently in a way, that if the empire needs more food, they can just settle an agricultural world and ship that stuff to other colonies. Or build a hydroponic habitat. Or some other sci-fi technobabble.

The AI exploit is there, probably, just to help the braindead AI. Without it, they would probably just have to up the "basic cheating", so i guess no big deal. THe AI is already a pushover and they know it. It's likely those free market resources are a stopgap feature to buy the devs time to fix the AI.

Yeah, yet another side-effect of AI broken by new features.

I don't mind if the AI defeats me by being smart, employing better strategy, or by building a better economical engine than mine. But I heavily resent being defeated by AI, just because they pulled 10K of some resource out of thin air.

 

[corny.1234]

They should implement sales in December , so you can gift alloy to your allies on Christmas

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I don't mind if the AI defeats me by being smart, employing better strategy, or by building a better economical engine than mine. But I heavily resent being defeated by AI, just because they pulled 10K of some resource out of thin air.

Lol, why are you even playing games then? Breaking news: almost every AI "cheats". Stellaris AI in particular has always been cheating big time.

Current game-level AIs simply can't win "fair". They aren't advanced enough to match a good player.

 

[Sarno]

Lol, why are you even playing games then? Breaking news: almost every AI "cheats". Stellaris AI in particular has always been cheating big time.

Current game-level AIs simply can't win "fair". They aren't advanced enough to match a good player.

It's why I dropped the game after 2.2 hit. It has zero challenge whatsoever, unless the AI is full bonkers on cheat mode.

Also, regarding the "every AI cheats" statement.....I'll just leave this here: https://www.openra.net/
Also..Supreme Commander
Also.... Homeworld 2
Also...... C&C: Tiberium Wars
etc..

 

[The Boz]

regarding the "every AI cheats" statement.....I'll just leave this here: https://www.openra.net/
Also..Supreme Commander
Also.... Homeworld 2
Also...... C&C: Tiberium Wars
etc..

Let's see...
One resource, two resources, two resources, one resource, all simple combat games with straight-forward, military objectives...
It's almost as if complexity tanks AI capabilities...

 

[Adenru]

Before this market I had to think over my economy whever there was a "crisis", now nothing of it bothers me any more because I can always instabuy something I need instaselling something I have plenty of.
Haven't you forgotten there was and still is a similar mechanic? Yes, right in diplomacy, but there were certain conditions there to be met, you aren't getting any trade if you are galactic menace.

 

[vortexsurfer]

Before this market I had to think over my economy whever there was a "crisis", now nothing of it bothers me any more because I can always instabuy something I need instaselling something I have plenty of.
Haven't you forgotten there was and still is a similar mechanic? Yes, right in diplomacy, but there were certain conditions there to be met, you aren't getting any trade if you are galactic menace.

Exactly this. Markets (at least how they are implemented now) take a lot of challenge from an already easy game. I have zero problems with the AI empires it's a roflstomp in most cases. Before 2.2 it was possible to go in a death spiral of lacking food->revolts->even less food, nowadays 10K food is just a klick away. It's basically not possible to go into the reds with all resources.

 

[Karl244]

To be fair, the infinite buying and selling is only because prices go quickly to their original state. If this weren't happening (or at a much muuuuccch slower pace) then for sure some of your empires will be in trouble big time, for instance in the case where one were to rely on selling all the food, where after a while you'll be trading a 1000:1 or worse.