. . . a worthy attempt to add trade to the game or a crude attempt to fix a game design fault ?
There is still Empire to Empire trade. There are commercial pacts (must admit I'm not really sure of the effects, advantages and disadvantages of these). And then there is the market, this great galactic resource bank. The market; the way to temporarily fix a spiralling deficit until you build those extra power plants or alloy forges, or get that tech that will allow you to upgrade. The market poses some questions for me:
There is still Empire to Empire trade. There are commercial pacts (must admit I'm not really sure of the effects, advantages and disadvantages of these). And then there is the market, this great galactic resource bank. The market; the way to temporarily fix a spiralling deficit until you build those extra power plants or alloy forges, or get that tech that will allow you to upgrade. The market poses some questions for me:
- Should it be an optional feature that can be turned off?
- Should there be limits on how it functions, e.g. you can only trade for stuff going into the market from empires that you are in peaceful contact with or that are in peaceful contact with empires that you are in peaceful contact with?
- Should it be possible for there to be more than one market, e.g. if a group of empires at one side of the galaxy are not yet in contact with another cluster of empires in another part of the galaxy, could there be two markets?
- Do the resources available on the market represent actual quantities put onto the market by empires or is this some theoretical number cooked up to facilitate gameplay? The amounts of resources available seem quite large, either AI empires are quite trade dependent and surpluses are being constantly traded or the books are being cooked.