Commodity markets, supply, demand, and relationship to the BGS
- Thread starter Ian Doncaster
- Start date
Ah excellent - I was just going to post asking if the trade routes appear on the galmap
More stuff to investigate 
Yes, they start to appear quite quickly in response to trade activity, without waiting for the Tick or any state changes. Their number increasing as the mission board slowly turns over while trading continues. And as noted above, they also start to decay back to the basic Murder & Mayhem (I like that phrase, very fitting) missions quickly too.
It appears that newly generated missions are taking a cue from recent activity (a hidden system value?). I wonder if it also works for Security related missions; the more you do the more you get?
It's as if there is a "goodness" capacitor that's been drained while your were away. Generally, initial missions are for assassinations in various forms, stealing data from a base, destroying power supplies, illegally acquiring bits and bobs and so on.
If you are a "good" white-van guy who prefers the quiet(?) life of commissioned trade you have to hang around while your virtue charges the capacitor, which enables your favourite missions to eventually bubble to the surface.
This is not an absolute, but there is a definite bias towards missions of violence.
If you are a "good" white-van guy who prefers the quiet(?) life of commissioned trade you have to hang around while your virtue charges the capacitor, which enables your favourite missions to eventually bubble to the surface.
This is not an absolute, but there is a definite bias towards missions of violence.
Random: for specialization there are some fields on the details panel for a station which say "exports" with a list of a few commodites...
From loose memory, i swear i've seen 2 stations of the same economy, in the same system, with different commodities as their exports, this might be a clue on seen production differences. if you haven't looked at this already.
Also would both demand and mission generation be 100% caused by active states? The missions seem to be attributed to these when there is one.. in the past i've seen variation too that could have been related to this but not in the dumb and dumber (or server efficiency) templates world.
From loose memory, i swear i've seen 2 stations of the same economy, in the same system, with different commodities as their exports, this might be a clue on seen production differences. if you haven't looked at this already.
Also would both demand and mission generation be 100% caused by active states? The missions seem to be attributed to these when there is one.. in the past i've seen variation too that could have been related to this but not in the dumb and dumber (or server efficiency) templates world.
Could be. I haven't looked in to where that information comes from.
Demand, yes. Missions ... there's some dependency on states but it's a lot more subtle.
So sorry, forgot the main point. Its in the details section of the system map with the station in focus.
Sorry, no, you were clear the first time - I meant that I hadn't looked into what determined which cargoes were shown in that list beyond the very obvious "they're from that economy"
Can you provide clarification on that position... specifically, are you saying if there is not a "trade route" on the map, then there are no missions available for that commodity?
Simply because, if that's the case, I can produce loads of counterexamples against that, so I don't think it has anything to do with trade routes (In addition, there's plenty of trade routes for which there's almost never missions)
Case example 1: Just found a 180t delivery of silver from an extraction economy, to a terraforming economy, where no such trade route exists.
Case example 2: Wing delivery of ~1800t Gallite to an Industrial/Refinery, where no such route exists.
Case example 3: Delivery of Gallite to Refinery economy, where no such route exists.
Now, these commodities are generally considered imports/exports for their market types, but fact remains there's no trade route, commander or commercial, on the galaxy map, for those destinations.
EDIT: Ugh, sorry, quoting an old post, but I know others seem to consider this a thing.
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No, a trade route on the map doesnt mean there are zero trades happening. It does show up however after running some for a bit. The number of missions did pick up though.
I don't think so - at least, not where the security level change is caused by a temporary state.
e.g. War tends to change security from Medium to Low out here, but most of its supply/demand/price multipliers are 1.0
In case anybody was wondering:
- demand of black markets for stolen goods is exactly demand of legal goods of same commodity
- selling via BM reduces demand of regular market and vice versa.
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@Ian D: - would it therefore be possible to guesstimate demand levels of illegal goods? And prices?
along those lines:
- demand of black markets for stolen goods is exactly demand of legal goods of same commodity
- selling via BM reduces demand of regular market and vice versa.
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@Ian D: - would it therefore be possible to guesstimate demand levels of illegal goods? And prices?
along those lines:
- hydrogen fuel level gives market size
- price of e.g. a legal drug liquor gives price modifiers
- = "narcotics have a demand of xyz and will sell for xyz"?
Yes, it should be - https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/specialisation will give approximate ranges, relative to HFuel, for supply/demand so with that and the state tables you should be able to estimate the black market demand levels and prices.
(I would assume that the black market price curve as demand is met therefore also behaves the same as the main market one for the same commodity, if you were somehow dealing with a heavily-traded illegal good)
so the idea would be:
look up median for hydrogen fuel supply: 42,5
look up median for narcotics demand: 0,25
42,5/0,25 = 100
look up hydrogen supply at station, divide by 100 = approx narcotics demand?
Yes, that should be about right.
Two caveats:
1) A rarely-legal good like Narcotics my sample size in Colonia is fairly small, so the range between minimum and maximum could be a fair bit larger than I state, and the median might be somewhere different in that range.
2) If you're dealing with a Colony economy, use the 0.43 figure for H-Fuel instead. I don't know why.