After reading a fairly interesting post on Reddit discussing the economics of trade in Stellaris (mostly focusing on the Consumer Good, but relevant to others as well), I tried a bit of trade in my latest game(s). And it's actually quite fun to use! Find a few trading buddies, do some trading, and marvel as you're suddenly focusing on the political positions of your equals and neutral nations instead of just your enemies, your subjects/overlord, and occasionally your allies. However, I felt there were flaws- and, moreover, flaws that can be fixed. So! Let's have a ramble, and I'll try to explain how and (more importantly) why I think trade needs a few modifications to really bring it to the next level.
1. Trading for Profiteers
Let's start with the obvious one. Trade can make you a profit, which means interacting with other empires as a means of optimisation, which means more flavour and fun.
So, what are the current problems with this system, and why aren't people using it as often as they could? Well, that's simple enough- it's opaque and unpredictable, which makes it less optimal and less fun to use; and it's primarily player-driven, meaning a player who hasn't learned to interact with it generally won't interact with it. Thus, making it more transparent and more predictable will likely significantly improve the system.
Making Requests. The biggest issue is that the game doesn't communicate when it's a good idea to trade, which means people are less likely to spend time on optimising themselves to use the system. So! Why not make it easier for you to see what other empires want to trade, and more importantly, for other empires to trade with you?
The obvious suggestion is a dedicated trade screen, similar to the agreements screen for subjects. Every empire can put forwards goods they want to trade, and if they meet the minimum requirements for trading (e.g is an empire, don't both have a deficit), they'll show up on the trade screen. This lets the AI see what you want, and you see what the AI and fellow players want, which makes it much easier for both players and AI to go 'oh hey, I need X and you're offering, what can I give you?'. And that convenience is very worthwhile for getting a system going! (Of course, if you've got negative relations you can't trade, which should cut out a lot of the excess.)
Additionally, sometimes you might just want to open up a trade deal and see what's available for trade. You can do this easily enough by requesting +10 monthly goods and seeing their opinion, so why not skip that step and have the AI just tell you some things it wants to trade? Say it isn't willing to lose food, but it's willing to give you consumer goods; if you make some food, you can trade for consumer goods, and that's great.
This also has the added benefit of letting you specialise your economy for what you're good at, or compensate for weaknesses, which makes gimmick builds more viable if you know what you're doing. Want to keep your Organic Reprocessing build relevant after you're hitting the limits of starbase agrarianism? Buy some food off that Agrarian Idyll empire nearby with your energy economy. Want to make use of your Subterranean Mining Guild's mineral economy when you'd be a lot better off picking a trait that gets you alloys? Look for competitors, beat them up, and establish a monopoly on the mineral trade. The void's the limit! Even if you're underground.
Having a basic gauge of how good a deal is would also help a lot, even on the internal and galactic markets. Have goods turn red in the internal and galactic market if they're low-demand, or turn green if they're high-demand. And having a simple 'this good is worth X and you're getting a bargain/getting shafted' red/green on the trade deal screen would be extremely helpful for making it less opaque!
Renegotiating Deals. The second-biggest issue is that, if you're building your economy off of trade, you can only guarantee that economy for as long as a trade deal lasts. And that's not ideal, because economic adaptability is a big boon, and economic unpredictability is a big problem! Being able to renegotiate deals when they're running out, or earlier if you're willing to make some concessions (or have some concessions made to you), would be very helpful for making trade a more fun strategy in the long-term.
Say, for example, you're a Machine Empire running an Organic Reprocessing starbase economy. You make lots of energy and food, quite probably more energy and food than you can actually trade on the internal market, and then give it to someone else. However, you're running low on minerals for building up your planets, and want a supply of them without having to mine them yourself (since your big strengths are hydroponics and solar panels). You find some space dwarves, set up a deal trading away energy and food for minerals, and then go happily about your day.
In the current game, it's not unlikely that they'll simply refuse to trade the goods you want to trade- oftentimes I find that in the early game, a nation will suddenly decide that it only wants food and consumer goods, which is pretty terrible if you're- say- reaching your starbase limit and transitioning from a food surplus to a food deficit. So the trade deal ends, and unless you've been making small trade deals every year or otherwise checking what they want manually on a regular basis, you're suddenly down a pillar of your economy with no chance to renegotiate.
Thus- renegotiating! Let's go back to those space dwarves. When the deal ends, they're in a war, and want a shorter deal to help with their temporary expenses. You both want the food now, but the dwarves are willing to make a lot of concessions if you don't cut off the food supply, and will get rather angry at you if you shorthand them in the middle of a crisis. So now, instead of both of your economies suddenly going under, you can use it as an opportunity- to extort, to strengthen bonds in a time of crisis, or to find a new buyer!
This also helps a lot in peacetime or mid-deal; you might want to upscale a trade deal as your economy grows rather than adding new trade deals while waiting for a 10-year one to run out, or add a new good to it, and so on and so forth. Or you might just want to shrink your trade deal and diversify if you've found a good secondary partner. While you might have to make concessions if you're adding new terms to a deal before it's over, instead of just mutually agreeing to make it bigger, that's a good way to make it so you can trade efficiency for time in a deal with your major trading partners!
Once you have trade deals being easy to make and convenient to use, that's when you start having trade affect politics. You might want to guarantee the independence of a major producer of a good you want, or hold off on attacking someone because you'd ruin your friendship with a major trade partner. Or you might want to play things to your advantage- find a niche in the market, and use that to defend yourself instead of ships, by easily making allies and getting guarantees of your own independence from interested parties. Which is all a lot more interesting than only having subjects and wars as interesting political features!
2. Trading for Extortionists
And this leads us into the second part- trading for extortion.
Trade by force. So, you can trade with people who like you. That's all well and good. But... what about people who don't like you, or who are generally disliked? Xenophobes, Barbaric Despoilers, all that sort of thing. What if you could get trade deals regardless of their opinion of you, if you want to sell themopiu Zro and they don't want to open their trade routes to you? Well, they're not convinced, but if you- say- had a few battleships over their capital then I'm sure you could come to some sort of arrangement...
Just as subjugation wars allow for low-opinion empires such as Xenophobes and Barbaric Despoilers to interact with the subject mechanics more easily, so too could some kind of extortion war let them interact with the trade deal screen more easily. And there's a lot of interesting things to extort, here.
The first obvious thing is that not all extortion is equal, so let's say that a successful or Status Quo Extortion War takes you to the trade screen holding a points reserve with which to extort. Everything (probably minus the things you could've gotten with another type of war, ie system trades, or standard things like mixing monthly and instant trades) is available for perusal, though if you're trying to extort them for food when they're in a deficit, don't expect it to be very efficient! This lets you break into markets and create dependencies when simple diplomacy might fail; if you want every market in the galaxy to be buying SoylentCorp Xeno Yums for your own twisted amusement, then let it be so!
On the other hand, this is going to be pretty overpowered if you can do it to every person individually, so extortions might give your victims a casus belli against you to declare a counter-war, similarly to how your vassals can rise up against you. So you might have two strategies- either be a big enough bully that you can deal with the problems you're creating for yourself, or renegotiate and pay the cost in trade concessions to remove the extortionism from the deal (if they're willing to let the casus belli go, at least!). Eventually, you might be able to transition into a mutually-beneficial relationship, and if your only trade barrier was hostility you'll have a much easier time managing to do that.
This opens up the big wide world of trade politics to people whose definition of politics comes from the spinal cannon of a titan, and that's definitely worth something.
3. Trade for Meddlers
But what if you don't want to force them to give you free stuff, or force them to shut up and take your food surplus in return for those minerals? What if you just want them to get in range of your horrible, clicking mandibles and you're having trouble dealing with their extra efficiency? What should all those poor Purifiers, Swarms and Exterminators do when they have to deal with the horrors of isolationist trade policies that a lot of us know from Vicky 3?
New Vulnerabilities. Well, there's a fairly simple solution to that- put trade on the galaxy map, and make it something that you can attack. There's no advantage in trade if a bunch of space locusts eat all your trade stations! We even have a fairly decent system in place to represent it, what with the existing trade and pirate system and all.
Now, this does have its issues. There needs to be counterplay to interference, and the system needs to not feel really dumb. Which means making it simple, strategically-viable, and predictable.
I would go with a system like this-
-Trade flows from your trade hub (which must be connected to your capital to be active- this is your capital if all other trade hubs are invalid), through trade posts by 'jumping' a given number of systems, to your ally. (The jumps mean that neither you nor the computer have to micromanage exactly whose systems you're having trade flow through.) You have an energy upkeep based on how many trade posts you're using, and how much trade you're using them for. The use of trade posts minimises the number of calculations, and makes it easier to control the flow of trade for both you and your enemy.
-You can build trade posts in both occupied and unoccupied systems, with a trade post limit you can boost. If the borders close, any trade posts inside will be destroyed. If you're paying a maintenance fee in someone else's territory, they'll get the profits. If you have a trade agreement, your trade can flow through someone else's trade posts, which is vital for long-distance networks.
-In peacetime, nations can pirate other people's trade posts, similar to a reverse starbase protection aura. (I don't think this would make sense with a starbase construct, since your border starbases will need to be defended if you're hostile, so making privateer bases in the same way you make mercenary bases or habitats seems logical.) If your privateers are in range of a trade post between valid targets for whatever reason (e.g you're harming relations/rivals with both parties), they'll build up privateer power, presumably based on your investment into the privateers. Privateering range is predictable, so as long as you've either secured your borders or invested heavily enough into protection for your trade posts through whatever means, you'll be able to figure out where to put your trade posts to counter privateers easily enough.
-In wartime, trade posts become an excellent target- make sure that they've got protection! Enemy ships in a system with a trade post might act as a blockade based on their pirate protection strength, functioning similarly to privateers as a means of stealing trade goods; alternately, you can manually destroy them, potentially preventing the trade route from existing at all.
Granted, this is a bit more of a system and a bit more debatably-effective than the others, but the argument is less the specific system and more the general concept of 'have trade route, do attack, fun purifier times'. You could have trade routes function as straight lines between trade hubs and privateers as circles on a map, for example, rather than needing a whole trade post system. But the general idea of 'predictable locations an enemy can target' is something I feel would be very necesary. If anyone else has any ramblings to add, please feel free!
TLDR;
-Trade is fun for diplomacy, and makes niche resource builds more viable! Ways to see who wants to trade what, and ways to encourage the AI to volunteer a deal, are thus good.
-Some empires aren't as good at trade! Ways to force the system open, like how subjugation wars can force the use of the vassal system, thus make the system fun for empires who don't like trading as much.
-Some empires can't trade at all! Ways to affect enemy trade routes, both in peacetime and in war, thus make the system fun for empires who can't use the trade system directly.
-I have thus had a good long ramble suggesting specific ways that these three points might be achievable. sage nod
1. Trading for Profiteers
Let's start with the obvious one. Trade can make you a profit, which means interacting with other empires as a means of optimisation, which means more flavour and fun.
So, what are the current problems with this system, and why aren't people using it as often as they could? Well, that's simple enough- it's opaque and unpredictable, which makes it less optimal and less fun to use; and it's primarily player-driven, meaning a player who hasn't learned to interact with it generally won't interact with it. Thus, making it more transparent and more predictable will likely significantly improve the system.
Making Requests. The biggest issue is that the game doesn't communicate when it's a good idea to trade, which means people are less likely to spend time on optimising themselves to use the system. So! Why not make it easier for you to see what other empires want to trade, and more importantly, for other empires to trade with you?
The obvious suggestion is a dedicated trade screen, similar to the agreements screen for subjects. Every empire can put forwards goods they want to trade, and if they meet the minimum requirements for trading (e.g is an empire, don't both have a deficit), they'll show up on the trade screen. This lets the AI see what you want, and you see what the AI and fellow players want, which makes it much easier for both players and AI to go 'oh hey, I need X and you're offering, what can I give you?'. And that convenience is very worthwhile for getting a system going! (Of course, if you've got negative relations you can't trade, which should cut out a lot of the excess.)
Additionally, sometimes you might just want to open up a trade deal and see what's available for trade. You can do this easily enough by requesting +10 monthly goods and seeing their opinion, so why not skip that step and have the AI just tell you some things it wants to trade? Say it isn't willing to lose food, but it's willing to give you consumer goods; if you make some food, you can trade for consumer goods, and that's great.
This also has the added benefit of letting you specialise your economy for what you're good at, or compensate for weaknesses, which makes gimmick builds more viable if you know what you're doing. Want to keep your Organic Reprocessing build relevant after you're hitting the limits of starbase agrarianism? Buy some food off that Agrarian Idyll empire nearby with your energy economy. Want to make use of your Subterranean Mining Guild's mineral economy when you'd be a lot better off picking a trait that gets you alloys? Look for competitors, beat them up, and establish a monopoly on the mineral trade. The void's the limit! Even if you're underground.
Having a basic gauge of how good a deal is would also help a lot, even on the internal and galactic markets. Have goods turn red in the internal and galactic market if they're low-demand, or turn green if they're high-demand. And having a simple 'this good is worth X and you're getting a bargain/getting shafted' red/green on the trade deal screen would be extremely helpful for making it less opaque!
Renegotiating Deals. The second-biggest issue is that, if you're building your economy off of trade, you can only guarantee that economy for as long as a trade deal lasts. And that's not ideal, because economic adaptability is a big boon, and economic unpredictability is a big problem! Being able to renegotiate deals when they're running out, or earlier if you're willing to make some concessions (or have some concessions made to you), would be very helpful for making trade a more fun strategy in the long-term.
Say, for example, you're a Machine Empire running an Organic Reprocessing starbase economy. You make lots of energy and food, quite probably more energy and food than you can actually trade on the internal market, and then give it to someone else. However, you're running low on minerals for building up your planets, and want a supply of them without having to mine them yourself (since your big strengths are hydroponics and solar panels). You find some space dwarves, set up a deal trading away energy and food for minerals, and then go happily about your day.
In the current game, it's not unlikely that they'll simply refuse to trade the goods you want to trade- oftentimes I find that in the early game, a nation will suddenly decide that it only wants food and consumer goods, which is pretty terrible if you're- say- reaching your starbase limit and transitioning from a food surplus to a food deficit. So the trade deal ends, and unless you've been making small trade deals every year or otherwise checking what they want manually on a regular basis, you're suddenly down a pillar of your economy with no chance to renegotiate.
Thus- renegotiating! Let's go back to those space dwarves. When the deal ends, they're in a war, and want a shorter deal to help with their temporary expenses. You both want the food now, but the dwarves are willing to make a lot of concessions if you don't cut off the food supply, and will get rather angry at you if you shorthand them in the middle of a crisis. So now, instead of both of your economies suddenly going under, you can use it as an opportunity- to extort, to strengthen bonds in a time of crisis, or to find a new buyer!
This also helps a lot in peacetime or mid-deal; you might want to upscale a trade deal as your economy grows rather than adding new trade deals while waiting for a 10-year one to run out, or add a new good to it, and so on and so forth. Or you might just want to shrink your trade deal and diversify if you've found a good secondary partner. While you might have to make concessions if you're adding new terms to a deal before it's over, instead of just mutually agreeing to make it bigger, that's a good way to make it so you can trade efficiency for time in a deal with your major trading partners!
Once you have trade deals being easy to make and convenient to use, that's when you start having trade affect politics. You might want to guarantee the independence of a major producer of a good you want, or hold off on attacking someone because you'd ruin your friendship with a major trade partner. Or you might want to play things to your advantage- find a niche in the market, and use that to defend yourself instead of ships, by easily making allies and getting guarantees of your own independence from interested parties. Which is all a lot more interesting than only having subjects and wars as interesting political features!
2. Trading for Extortionists
And this leads us into the second part- trading for extortion.
Trade by force. So, you can trade with people who like you. That's all well and good. But... what about people who don't like you, or who are generally disliked? Xenophobes, Barbaric Despoilers, all that sort of thing. What if you could get trade deals regardless of their opinion of you, if you want to sell them
Just as subjugation wars allow for low-opinion empires such as Xenophobes and Barbaric Despoilers to interact with the subject mechanics more easily, so too could some kind of extortion war let them interact with the trade deal screen more easily. And there's a lot of interesting things to extort, here.
The first obvious thing is that not all extortion is equal, so let's say that a successful or Status Quo Extortion War takes you to the trade screen holding a points reserve with which to extort. Everything (probably minus the things you could've gotten with another type of war, ie system trades, or standard things like mixing monthly and instant trades) is available for perusal, though if you're trying to extort them for food when they're in a deficit, don't expect it to be very efficient! This lets you break into markets and create dependencies when simple diplomacy might fail; if you want every market in the galaxy to be buying SoylentCorp Xeno Yums for your own twisted amusement, then let it be so!
On the other hand, this is going to be pretty overpowered if you can do it to every person individually, so extortions might give your victims a casus belli against you to declare a counter-war, similarly to how your vassals can rise up against you. So you might have two strategies- either be a big enough bully that you can deal with the problems you're creating for yourself, or renegotiate and pay the cost in trade concessions to remove the extortionism from the deal (if they're willing to let the casus belli go, at least!). Eventually, you might be able to transition into a mutually-beneficial relationship, and if your only trade barrier was hostility you'll have a much easier time managing to do that.
This opens up the big wide world of trade politics to people whose definition of politics comes from the spinal cannon of a titan, and that's definitely worth something.
3. Trade for Meddlers
But what if you don't want to force them to give you free stuff, or force them to shut up and take your food surplus in return for those minerals? What if you just want them to get in range of your horrible, clicking mandibles and you're having trouble dealing with their extra efficiency? What should all those poor Purifiers, Swarms and Exterminators do when they have to deal with the horrors of isolationist trade policies that a lot of us know from Vicky 3?
New Vulnerabilities. Well, there's a fairly simple solution to that- put trade on the galaxy map, and make it something that you can attack. There's no advantage in trade if a bunch of space locusts eat all your trade stations! We even have a fairly decent system in place to represent it, what with the existing trade and pirate system and all.
Now, this does have its issues. There needs to be counterplay to interference, and the system needs to not feel really dumb. Which means making it simple, strategically-viable, and predictable.
I would go with a system like this-
-Trade flows from your trade hub (which must be connected to your capital to be active- this is your capital if all other trade hubs are invalid), through trade posts by 'jumping' a given number of systems, to your ally. (The jumps mean that neither you nor the computer have to micromanage exactly whose systems you're having trade flow through.) You have an energy upkeep based on how many trade posts you're using, and how much trade you're using them for. The use of trade posts minimises the number of calculations, and makes it easier to control the flow of trade for both you and your enemy.
-You can build trade posts in both occupied and unoccupied systems, with a trade post limit you can boost. If the borders close, any trade posts inside will be destroyed. If you're paying a maintenance fee in someone else's territory, they'll get the profits. If you have a trade agreement, your trade can flow through someone else's trade posts, which is vital for long-distance networks.
-In peacetime, nations can pirate other people's trade posts, similar to a reverse starbase protection aura. (I don't think this would make sense with a starbase construct, since your border starbases will need to be defended if you're hostile, so making privateer bases in the same way you make mercenary bases or habitats seems logical.) If your privateers are in range of a trade post between valid targets for whatever reason (e.g you're harming relations/rivals with both parties), they'll build up privateer power, presumably based on your investment into the privateers. Privateering range is predictable, so as long as you've either secured your borders or invested heavily enough into protection for your trade posts through whatever means, you'll be able to figure out where to put your trade posts to counter privateers easily enough.
-In wartime, trade posts become an excellent target- make sure that they've got protection! Enemy ships in a system with a trade post might act as a blockade based on their pirate protection strength, functioning similarly to privateers as a means of stealing trade goods; alternately, you can manually destroy them, potentially preventing the trade route from existing at all.
Granted, this is a bit more of a system and a bit more debatably-effective than the others, but the argument is less the specific system and more the general concept of 'have trade route, do attack, fun purifier times'. You could have trade routes function as straight lines between trade hubs and privateers as circles on a map, for example, rather than needing a whole trade post system. But the general idea of 'predictable locations an enemy can target' is something I feel would be very necesary. If anyone else has any ramblings to add, please feel free!
TLDR;
-Trade is fun for diplomacy, and makes niche resource builds more viable! Ways to see who wants to trade what, and ways to encourage the AI to volunteer a deal, are thus good.
-Some empires aren't as good at trade! Ways to force the system open, like how subjugation wars can force the use of the vassal system, thus make the system fun for empires who don't like trading as much.
-Some empires can't trade at all! Ways to affect enemy trade routes, both in peacetime and in war, thus make the system fun for empires who can't use the trade system directly.
-I have thus had a good long ramble suggesting specific ways that these three points might be achievable. sage nod
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