Hi Mohawk and all,
I wrote something similar in a post before but I want to address it on its own. As it stands resource prices can swing wildly and extremely so for mine able resources like water iron aluminum silicon and carbon. Every resource in the game changes in price the same given that the same quantity of resources are traded and this doesn't at all seem realistic because the price mobility is out of proportion compared to the base production value of the resources. The main ~6 resources (power included) should in my opinion move considerably slower (like 2x for example) in price in response traded volumes of them.
I propose that resources that are produced at a base rate of 1/s or above have 2x less price mobility than resources that are produced at a base rate of 0.5/s and those resouces 2x less than resources produced at the rate of 0.25/s (electronics).
Additionally I believe all resources should have their price mobility decreased in proportion to the number of players in game because as it stands right now price fluctuatians in 8p games are very strong just because the market dynamics are exactly the same even though there are 8 players whereas the market in 1v1 is relatively stale.
I'd appreciate other peoples thoughts on this.
It would be nice to know the number of players that the game is balanced on. Is it 2, 4..?
I agree that it might be best to adjust price movement based on the number of players in the game. 6-8p games are 'kind of fun' but the markets go bonkers and it feels more like an RNG crapshoot than anything more devious and cunning.
I think it might be worth digging down a little bit and discussing the actual in-game situations you're trying to address with this suggestion. Is it to try to be more realistic? Is it to give you more time to adjust to shifts in the market for things like auto-supply? I ask because the initial suggestions don't seem very compelling to me, but I suspect that's because I'm missing something.
It's just that the market is a lot more volatile in 6+ player games than in 2p games. The black market has it's prices adjusted in accordance with the number of players, why shouldn't the regular market be scaled to the number of players as well? the market moves a lot faster in games with many players simply because there are many players, that doesn't seem right. And also, the prices of easier to produce goods are more volatile, why would that have to be? IRL the prices of easily produceable goods are much more stable.
I don't think the calculation for how goods are prices has been shared with us. It could be there is already some kind of buffering done, either based on player count, or total sold vs purchased. Maybe it even varies on goods as well. Maybe the buffer effect just isn't strong enough, or its not even a buffer at all. We don't know.
In some ways, the market is more volatile in 6+ player games as there are more participants. There's a higher chance of, for instance, two or three players in a row buying a bunch of glass for upgrades and driving the price way, way up, whereas in a smaller game fewer people would do that all at once. At the same time, larger games also have a larger absolute number of claims, which tends to have something of a smoothing effect on the market. It's rare for one player to corner the market on any specific resource in a 6+ player game, for instance. I don't know if I'd object to some sort of scaling in the algorithm, assuming, as Tigershawk highlights, that there isn't some there already, but I don't feel a strong need for it personally.
As for the idea that "easier to produce goods are more volatile" to me is a commentary on market activity. Tons of people produce aluminum, and it is useful throughout the game. That means that (often) there is a high amount of market activity (buying and selling, both) around aluminum. This may not be the case for glass. I'm pretty comfortable applying the same algorithm for market pricing to all resources, no matter their complexity. That makes sense to me, and doesn't set up some potential problems around making it safer to build only manufacturing buildings because raw materials are more stably priced on the market.
I'd love to see this. Soren was kind enough to show us exactly how the stock price is calculated; it would be great to see something similar for the resource prices.
My question is, why should the price mobility be relative to absolute quantities, what does this add to the game versus making the price mobility relative to the number of players and to the base production rates?
My argument is that there is more value in pegging price mobility on player numbers and base production rates so that the markets are not inherently volatile by design. It would add some variety to the game without adding much complexity and making the market less hectic.
What are the advantages of pegging price mobility on absolutely quantities?
Edit: I think it may be better to also add resource complexity into the comparison. This would put chemicals in the same tier as electronics because it has 2 ingredients, one of which is needed at a 2 to 1 ratio.
Edit2: I have a general formula for price change:quantity/11 = price change in $. Divide by progressively lower numbers for prices beyond 100$.
The relative mobility of prices would be solved if the market we are selling it to had a stockpile that is slowly being consumed by the Martian colony.
The colony size is scaled up to the number of player and the stockpile level auto-regulate the price volatility.
It also prevent a resource being available even if nobody is producing it. But i don't know if this is a good thing gameplay wise.
I like basing the price on a calculated stockpile. I don't know about the resource unavailable. Maybe that's when the price really shoots up. Makes those shortages and surplusses really mean something, ey?
To some degree this is a matter of preference, and may be worth testing, but increased volatility in games with larger numbers of players does serve a gameplay purpose: it magnifies the rewards for going into a scarce resource or choosing to purely use the market for common resources. There is a strictly limited number of resources in the game, and as the number of players increases, the average number of players producing each one will increase as well. This means that in larger games, general market volatility is ALREADY reduced due to the fact that there are more players in a position to fill any hole in the market. For instance, if no one builds any farms, and the price of food spikes, some players will not have (for instance) enough water coming in to take advantage of that, but an 8 player game should have twice as many players in a position to take advantage as a 4 player game should.
By having price volatility fixed directly to quantity, ignoring player count, you provide a strong first-mover bonus to whoever gets into a given good first. You could argue that this is bad, but I suspect it's good.
Similarly, by having price volatility tied to quantity, not to players, it allows a single player to maintain the ability to have strong impacts on the game. A single player dumping steel can still crash the market. Scaling this by player risks no player being able to affect the market intentionally, and in that world what active things is any given player doing?
I still don't understand why this is desirable. I'd be strongly worried that it provides perverse incentives to build primarily advanced buildings and and just buy raw materials from the market. For instance, if buying water from the market has a reduced impact over doing the same with food, then wouldn't it just be smarter for me to build a triangle of farms (getting up to a 1-to-1 conversion efficiency) and buying water from the market? After all, food is now a privileged commodity within the market's demand algorithm, so in theory I should pretty much always be making a relative profit this way (as the reduced volatility of water should tend to keep its price depressed below that of food).
I still feel like I'm missing something in your argument here.
The way i understand the game, the companies are selling the produced resources to some market. In a 8p game, that market must be bigger than in a 2p or 4p game, there is double the number of production to supply it. A market 2 time bigger is 2 time less volatile to a fixed quantity of resources.
You are right on this, it would be an efficient abuse. The main problem here is the inability to run out of water.
I don't want to repeat myself too much, but i still think having a market stockpile would completely regulate the market and prevent any of those abuse. More than any artificial algorithm could.
How do you imagine all of this interacting with Hacker array? Also that would mess up balance really bad, as Robotics will have their electronics price increase so fast that they'r gonna strat pumping debt quite soon.
I would rather than the prices of other goods be made less mobile. The hacker array would have less effect on base resources and a little less on the rest that isn't chemicals or electronics.
I'll admit that my two-sided market theory is a bit rusty, but I don't believe that this is actually true. By doubling the number of players, you double the number of firms involved in the market, but this doesn't BY ITSELF change market volatility. For instance, if you have a 4 player game of all Expansives, and an 8 player game of 4 Expansives and 4 Scavengers, the volatility of steel should be pretty close to the same as you've got the same number of firms generating supply and demand of said steel. (Admittedly one of the Scavenger players could go into steel if the prices were high enough, but I think you see my point.)
What DOES happen in an 8 player game is that the potential demand side on a number of resources goes way up. For instance, the total demand for power on the map definitely goes up from 4 to 8 players. But for other resources, market size is going to depend on HQ types. 8 Robotics will generate a game with less demand for water than 2 Scientifics will, despite one game having four times as many players.
Adding a modifier to price volatility that is based purely on number of players risks privileging players who are generating demand for under-demanded resources. The only non-Robotic player on the map may choose to forgo making food, and have a huge advantage in an 8 player game vs a 4 player game as the price of food will go up more slowly in one game over the other. I think it's much cleaner, more understandable, AND more balanced to modify price directly in response to actual supply (sales) and demand (buys).
(Another quick example: even if a resource were in equal demand in all situations, reducing price volatility in an 8 player game makes early stockpiling of that resource cheaper. Making up some numbers, if there is a 4-player game where buying 100 glass costs $5000, and doing so raises the price of glass so that buying a second 100 glass costs $7000, but the numbers in an 8-player game are $5000 to $6000 instead, buying up a bunch of glass in the early game becomes a better strategy in games with more players. I'd much rather see strategies be better or worse based on map conditions and other players' decisions rather than just "there are this many players".)
You are right on this, it would be an efficient abuse. The main problem here is the inability to run out of water.I don't want to repeat myself too much, but i still think having a market stockpile would completely regulate the market and prevent any of those abuse. More than any artificial algorithm could.
I don't know that I'm absolutely against a stockpile, but two questions:
1. Does this do anything other than provide a hard limit on how much someone can buy of a resources (rather than a soft limit based on rising prices)?
2. What happens if the stockpile is empty? Can you not buy the fuel you need? Do your blimps all stop? Do you suddenly find yourself unable to make any money because you can't get your resources delivered? Are you stuck forever? I think that a purely theoretical market where supply is infinite makes the game much cleaner to play.
1. It also provide autoregulation of the market price based on the number of player in the game. But it is a dynamic regulation instead of a flat player multiplier. If there is a big stockpile of 8k water, buying 500 of it will only make a little variation. But for a 1K stockpile of electronics, the effect will be much bigger. Since electronics is harder to produce the probability that the stockpile will be lower than water is high. Add to this that the colony is consuming resources faster as the game goes on and you have a realistic autoregulated market for any number of player.
2. This is a tricky question. It is obviously not fun if a player get stuck forever gameplay wise. First of all i can assume that the market would have a certain amount of each resources from the start. This would provide a soft start for everyone.
An elegant solution could be that when a resource go dry (or almost, like sub 200) it is imported offworld at the expense of all the other resources at the current price. Importing resources would lower the price of the resource itself at the cost of a slight increase of the price of all the other resources. That would obviously be automatic and not in the players hand.
I think this is the part I'm still mostly missing from this thread. Prices are ALREADY regulated based on the number of players in the game without making any changes to whatever the current formulation is. If everyone else in the game is building a ton of steel, the price will likely go down as they sell their stockpiles. This is true in an 8 player game, and it is true in a 4 player game. Now, to be fair, it is likely to be more true, and more punishing, in an 8 player game as the number of players who can be producing and dumping steel goes up, and maybe that's what everyone seems to have a problem with. But what I've found is that it's just an increased punishment for bad decisions, and a nice increase in pay-off for making good decisions.
To me, that feels a lot more like a good thing than a bad thing.
one thing is true though, Colony has a lesser effect on the game the more players there are.
This is not true, price fluctuation is actually calculated only by the number sold and buyed. Selling 100 water in a 4p or 8p game will do the same price fluctuation. Leading to a more volatile market for a 8p game.
From a player perspective, not investing in a cheap resource thinking you will buy it from the market for a time is riskier the more player there is in the game. Having food jump from 15$ to 230$ in less than a minute can be a game killer, and you really can't know it will happen.
Of course you want volatility, thats the purpose of the game. I am only saying that the volatility must stay constant with the number of player.
This is the key. We barely notice the colony's effect in a two player game, let alone an eight player game. Cranking up the colony's impact per player will self regulate the market. Increased demand will keep prices higher when the market is getting flooded with something, and it will keep prices lower when someone is buying a certain resource.
Even in an eight player game; each person is 12.5% of the market (all else being equal). Let's say one of those players sells 350 units of aluminum. In these games, the price of that resource would drop from $100 to let's say... $20? That's an 80% crash in the price, when only 12% of the world's production was sold. Seems a little hyperreactive.
This is the key. We barely notice the colony's effect in a two player game, let alone an eight player game. Cranking up the colony's impact per player will self regulate the market. Increased demand will keep prices higher when the market is getting flooded with something, and it will keep prices lower when someone is buying a certain resource.Even in an eight player game; each person is 12.5% of the market (all else being equal). Let's say one of those players sells 350 units of aluminum. In these games, the price of that resource would drop from $100 to let's say... $20? That's an 80% crash in the price, when only 12% of the world's production was sold. Seems a little hyperreactive.
that is exactly my point
Watching a price tank 98% in seconds is a problem, just like watching a price go up 50x in seconds is a problem. This is a problem in 7 or 8 player games, which could be fixed with volatility being tied to number of players.
Hacker array is the fault of a lot of this. Build two arrays, set them to chain-short the most expensive resource, sink 100k into that resource to push the price way up moments before the short effects kick in, then sell for enormous profit and buy all of the things. Game won, more often than not; usually before having reached HQ level 5 (because you don't need level 5 to do this).
It seems logical to me that multiple hacker arrays should only hack one resource at a time. So you can hack glass and steel at the same time, but you can't hack steel twice at the same time. I didn't even assume it was possible to double hack a specific resource until I watched a youtube video of a guy doing it in multiplayer. Sure enough, I did it to the AI, with huge affect. Talk about snowballing. He set a double shortage on steel and put out 8 steel mills. When done, put out 8 glass mills and purchased extra glass with cash on hand to really snowball. A couple more times to a million.
I'll lay an alternative path to controlling the situation out there. Resource prices are capped at the offworld price plus some% to simulate the colony being able to buy from the offworld.
Soren mentioned during one of the twitch streams that Price Elasticity worked sort of like a spring: higher prices move faster than lower prices in response to buying/selling. Selling 100 Water might lower the price from $10 to $1, but buying 100 Water might raise the price from $100 to $120.
You can take huge advantage of this as Scavenger or through Hacker Arrays if you aggressively buy into a resource before a short. Your buying will inflate the price, then the short will magnify your gains. It can be disastrous if someone else unloads their resource stockpile in front of you, but its a powerful tool to keep in your bag of tricks.
Price Elasticity/Depth of Market is an interesting component of markets but I'm not sure how I would change the game in a way that would justify the additional complexity. Buyer's/Seller's Market random events where you could unload a stockpile without moving the price? Reward players for slowly buying/selling with better average prices than people who Shift-dump 1000 of a resource in a few seconds?
I don't think we should be for/against changes based on how "realistic" they are. In the real world, you read over quarterly earnings statements, report positions to the SEC, and file your taxes every year. I hope we can all agree that none of this belongs in a game despite being "realistic".
I am not under the impression we are arguing on a realism basis. I am making suggestion on a gameplay basis. The goal is to keep the gameplay coherent and stable no matter the number of player.
Of course the price variation is not a flat modifier but a multiplicative one. Still that multiplying constant should be function of the number of players in some way to keep the gameplay the same for any number of players.
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