Overall, we’re pretty happy with the Industrial Commodities system that was added to the game at universe reset. We have some tweaks that we will be making though, both to increase the ease with which newer players can enter the system as well as to bring profits closer to where we wanted them to be.
Industrial Commodities in Earthforce Space
This won’t go live until next universe, but we’ll be seeding Earthforce Space with bases that consume Industrial Commodities. These bases won’t consume as many commodities as the Wild Space ones do, but they’ll consume enough to provide some income to players who aren’t yet strong enough to build in Wild Space.
Consumption Changes
We’re changing how bases consume commodities. Because the consumption rate is constant in the current system, the optimal strategy is to sell just under that rate in order to keep the supply close to zero and the price maxed. This runs into the counterintuitive scenario where selling more commodities will make you less money. If you sell just over the consumption rate instead of just under, you’ll eventually fill up the base and end up making 4 times less (50% price instead of 200%).
Instead, we are going to make it so that bases consume less when they’re almost empty (and the price is high) and consume more when they’re well stocked (and the price is low). We’ve optimized the curve so that you never lose money by selling more. Even though the price will drop as you supply more commodities, your overall profits will still go up. The current consumption rate will be in effect at 50% stock and it will scale significantly higher on the way to 100% stock, as well as very low when close to 0% stock.
Changes to higher tier commodities
We’ve been getting some feedback that the consumption rates on the higher tiered commodities would require too many T1-T3 commodities to reach. We’ll be re-evaluating these numbers and ratios so that we are prepared to make changes to these commodities for next universe. Unfortunately, this change can’t be made mid-universe, but we will make sure to have it in for next time.
Weight tweaks
While we’re happy with the weight of these commodities when moved using bots, we aren’t too happy with how it seems to be inhibiting manual trading. This if very obvious in-game if you do a market check on Steel Girders: there are billions of easy credits to be made trading between the bases but trading in any reasonable volume results in weight that simply cannot be carried. We will be going through the weight stats in an attempt to encourage more manual trading.
These changes to consumption are now up on the test server (test.starsonata.com port 3030) for you to test before they are patched in.
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