Economy questions

[RogerBacon]

I've read the old threads on the economy but they are from 2010 and the information is way out of date. I know for a fact that some of it is wrong as it pertains to DWU. So, here are my questions and observations...

1 Are the price listed for resources universal or per-empire? I think they are universal but that means that if I mine a lot of resources then I drive down the price for everybody (like commodities in real life). If that is true, what good are trade sanctions? What good is embargoing a planet?

2 Sometimes my fuel costs are negative. Is that because I'm selling fuel to independent ships and ships that I've given refueling rights to?

3 In one of hte old threads on economics, players calculated a ship's cost as 8 x total resource cost. When the private sector buys a ship what portion of this money does the state get? I'm really wondering why the stte should get anything since the materials are all mined by the private sector.

[Bingeling]

No hard facts from me...

1:
I am not sure about prices, I assume universal.

Without observing it, trade sanctions should block trade between your empires. If you consider that you isolate an empire from the rest (you surround it, or they are behind you in a corner), you could make it very hard from them to get resources to build anything if you busted every mine of theirs in a previous war.

Blockades should work, but I have only seen its effect once (in Shadows beta, I think). It will at least prevents freighters from picking up resources (and I assume dropping off resources but I did not observe that). I watch a shipyard with a shortage ordering freighters to pick up goods at the blockaded spaceport next to it. Freighters headed there to fetch materials, but when approaching discovered the blockade and dropped the transport order. So the suffering shipyard had a shortage even if there were a ton of the required resources elsewhere. I do think ships went there to refuel, but it is a long time ago, and I was mostly amused at the stupid shipyard booking its resources from one that is blockaded. But if that was fixed, almost all blockades would be pointless.

If you blockade a capital you should mess up an empire quite badly, since it should be the default pickup point for resources for a lot of locations, and the transport orders will be booked to pick up and then be dropped.

2

I would guess you are correct, fuel cost is a balance between what you buy (refuel) from others and what others buy from you, or something. It is really hard to observe, I'd think.

3
I do not know, but this should be testable, if not a bit awkward to test. You know the cost of the designs (design screen). When privates do the first batch of orders in a pre-warp, you know what was ordered, you know the cost of their ships, and you can see the spaceport income you receive. This gives you the ratio between ship cost and your income. Since spaceport income can be quite significant, I'd bet 1 virtual caslon resource on you getting the ship cost.

It is a fee for using the spaceport, and for some reason they agree to base it on resource cost as a representation of complexity to build the ship...

[Aeson]

When the private sector buys a ship what portion of this money does the state get?

As far as I can tell, the state treasury gets the full purchase cost of any private sector ship or station at the time construction is initiated. I tested this with construction ships and mining stations, but I don't see any reason why the same should not be true of spaceports and freighters, passenger ships, and mining ships.

As for why the state gets a fee, I agree with Bingling - it's a fee for the yard capacity and labor required to construct the ship, which gets paid to the owner or operator of the shipyard, and as spaceports, the only stations which by default have shipyard capacity, are state bases, it is presumably the state which owns and operates the shipyards. I don't know what would happen with payment of construction costs if private sector ships were ordered from a private sector station with shipyard capacity.

In one of hte old threads on economics, players calculated a ship's cost as 8 x total resource cost.

If this is the thread that you're thinking of, I'd point out that the third post on the thread (or second response to the thread) has some corrections to the formulae listed at the top, namely that the purchase cost is 10 times the total resource cost rather than 8 times and that the multiplier on ship size for maintenance is 1 rather than 1.5.

I vaguely recall checking this a while back and if I recall correctly it looked as though the 10*[total resource cost] formula for construction cost and the (2*[total resource cost] + 1*[ship size]) formula for maintenance cost got reasonably close to what showed up in the game.

[Hattori Hanzo]

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

When the private sector buys a ship what portion of this money does the state get?

when the Private Sector buy a ship (or when it refit a ship or a station) it pays to the State Sector the whole cost of the ship (or the whole refitting cost).

I have tested it many times and I'm absolutely sure of it.

[RogerBacon]

Thanks guys. I've read a lot of threads where people say that when they need cash they just scrap 40 or 50 freighters and let the private sector rebuild them. By doing this they can keep their taxes at 0% and grow their populations quickly. I know this game has a ton of exploits but that one just seems really over the top. You'd think scrapping 40 freighters would cause a revolt among the remaining ones.

[Hattori Hanzo]

I always try to keep the taxes at 0% when possible, but I do not ever used the exploit to scrap the Private Sector freighters: when I need some cash I design instead a new Mine or Gas Station model (with more weapons and/or other "special toys") and I refit the old stations.

scraping freighters is too much an unfair exploit in my opinion, I do not like it and I do not use it.

[Retreat1970]

Hey Hattori, nice to see you back. If you're looking for DW2 news, there isn't any. [:)]

[Hattori Hanzo]

hi Retreat1970: I'm still slowly learning DW1, so I'm not in hurry to try DW2.. [:D]

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

I always try to keep the taxes at 0% when possible, but I do not ever used the exploit to scrap the Private Sector freighters: when I need some cash I design instead a new Mine or Gas Station model (with more weapons and/or other "special toys") and I refit the old stations.

scraping freighters is too much an unfair exploit in my opinion, I do not like it and I do not use it.

In my mind that is a worse exploit as it has less of a downside. Resource distribution is not interrupted, and you use less resources as well.

I never understood the need to do blatant exploits in this game, but play like you want to.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

I always try to keep the taxes at 0% when possible, but I do not ever used the exploit to scrap the Private Sector freighters: when I need some cash I design instead a new Mine or Gas Station model (with more weapons and/or other "special toys") and I refit the old stations.

scraping freighters is too much an unfair exploit in my opinion, I do not like it and I do not use it.

In my mind that is a worse exploit as it has less of a downside. Resource distribution is not interrupted, and you use less resources as well.

I never understood the need to do blatant exploits in this game, but play like you want to.

In the case of forcing the private sector to refit ships, is the money gained just the difference in new design price and old design price? If so, an upgrade would only net a small amount and that would be a smaller exploit.
I've never done either as a way of getting money since I usually have tons of it unless I'm a pirate in which case I'm always broke.

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

I always try to keep the taxes at 0% when possible, but I do not ever used the exploit to scrap the Private Sector freighters: when I need some cash I design instead a new Mine or Gas Station model (with more weapons and/or other "special toys") and I refit the old stations.

scraping freighters is too much an unfair exploit in my opinion, I do not like it and I do not use it.

In my mind that is a worse exploit as it has less of a downside. Resource distribution is not interrupted, and you use less resources as well.

I never understood the need to do blatant exploits in this game, but play like you want to.

In the case of forcing the private sector to refit ships, is the money gained just the difference in new design price and old design price? If so, an upgrade would only net a small amount and that would be a smaller exploit.
I've never done either as a way of getting money since I usually have tons of it unless I'm a pirate in which case I'm always broke.

I do not really rank exploits by how much they give, rather in how much it breaks the "idea behind the game". I like the universe simulation, and what happens should make some sense in the universe.

The mining retrofit also fails badly due to the state not being paid for building mines. So why should it get paid for retrofitting them?

If you scrap freighters it makes no sense, if you keep changing your mind about their designs, you can at least pretend that it is due to confusion about optimal designs, and not just due to needing an exploit to get hold of the private sector cash.

I think my colony defense movements has some exploiting effects, but it is just about positioning ships better, and reacting to information better. Unless the AI manages to overload me personally, it is almost impossible to take a front line, valuable colony from me as long as I have long range scanners in the area (on the colony in question, for instance). A human opponent would be able to mess me up with fleets less easily defeated (larger fleets, not separate troop transports).

[Aeson]

the state not being paid for building mines.

This is incorrect. The state is paid the full cost of the mining station at the time that construction is initiated by a construction ship.

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: Aeson

the state not being paid for building mines.

This is incorrect. The state is paid the full cost of the mining station at the time that construction is initiated by a construction ship.

Hm, I never noticed that.

So the civilians pay when you order the mine, and the state (player) gets the cash when construction starts?

[stuart3]

The game won't let me order a new mining station if I don't have enough money to meet the construction cost. But if I do have the necessary money, then ordering a mining station does not affect my cash balance in any way and in fact I can order as many mining stations as I want even though I have enough cash to build only one of them. I have always assumed that the reason that my cash doesn't change is that the private sector is refunding the state for the cost at exactly the same time as the state is paying for the construction.

[Aeson]

So the civilians pay when you order the mine, and the state (player) gets the cash when construction starts?

If I recall correctly, the private sector is charged the cost of the mining station at the same time the state is credited the cost of the mining station - i.e. when the construction ship actually starts building the station, not when the station is ordered.

I have always assumed that the reason that my cash doesn't change is that the private sector is refunding the state for the cost at exactly the same time as the state is paying for the construction.

It's true that you don't see any change in the state treasury at the time you order a mining station. However, if you watch the amount of money in the state treasury from the time you order the station to the time that the station is completed, you will notice that the state is credited with an amount of money equal to the cost of the station at the time when the construction ship initiates construction (i.e. when the station icon appears under the construction ship) and that the treasury is never charged an amount equal to the cost of the station at any time. Therefore, I would suggest that the model where the state is reimbursed by the private sector is not a correct model for the game mechanics.

The game won't let me order a new mining station if I don't have enough money to meet the construction cost.

I suspect that this is a minor bug in the game - namely, the game is checking the wrong value (it checks the state's cash on hand when it should check the private sector's cash on hand) when deciding whether or not you can manually order the construction of a mining station. If the private sector runs out of money, then mining station orders will no longer be automatically added to the queues of automated construction ships, but the player can still manually order mining station construction, the state will still be credited the purchase cost of the mining station without ever being charged for it, and the private sector will still be charged the purchase cost of the mining station when the state is credited for it.

Of course, since the private sector's cash on hand is somewhat invisible to the player and is usually, though not always, much more positive than the state's cash on hand, this may be the result of an intentional design decision rather than a bug.

[Bingeling]

I have had a situation where I could not order a mining station even if I had cash. The civilians did not, though (which was not so obvious).

But that may have been changed, it is not exactly a common situation.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

I have had a situation where I could not order a mining station even if I had cash. The civilians did not, though (which was not so obvious).

But that may have been changed, it is not exactly a common situation.

I have had the same situation. The private sector must have the money to pay for it or else you can't build it.

[Hattori Hanzo]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

ORIGINAL: Aeson

the state not being paid for building mines.

This is incorrect. The state is paid the full cost of the mining station at the time that construction is initiated by a construction ship.

I confirm, this way it's exactly how Mine and Gas Station building work

[RemoteLeg]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

I have had a situation where I could not order a mining station even if I had cash. The civilians did not, though (which was not so obvious).

But that may have been changed, it is not exactly a common situation.

ORIGINAL: RogerBacon

I have had the same situation. The private sector must have the money to pay for it or else you can't build it.

It's true you can't queue a mining station to be built via the Selection Panel when the private sector has insufficient funds, but you can still select a constructor and order it to build the station. I think this forces the private sector to go further into the red.

[tortugapower]

Thanks for the thread RogerBacon, and I'm glad this one is more popular! [:)]

I've been debating for a long time with a friend about the universal vs. empire-dependent side of the economy, and his argument remains that if the prices are global, the game doesn't make any sense.

Test scenario: let's say the market is universal, and I blockade someone, but I have an immense amount of resources. Let's also say (presuming that the global price is a weighted ratio of supply/demand) that my empire is huge compared to his. This means that my resources abundance makes my own blockade useless (because my empire keeps the price low). The only way to starve his forces out, is actually to starve *MY* forces out.

So, for this reason, I hope there is market asymmetry in DW2.


(Exploits are exploits; in a singleplayer game, who cares? People who do them usually understand they're breaking the rules of the universe, but there's plenty of reasonable excuses for that anyway: better model realism, role-playing, enjoying the game more... Let's not bog down in what mechanic is more of an exploit, it's a silly question...)