Mobile Vasari Loyalists and Playing The Market

An interesting strategy.

Does the black market even work in a way where trading can ever be profitable? Obviously it fluctuates and  some times are better to buy a given resource than others, and the same is true for selling, but I was under the impression that the values are still more or less locked within certain ranges, with the highest sale values always much lower than the lowest buy values.

For this to work, you'd need a free market with a finite amount of resources available, which I didn't think was the case with Sins.

I'm honestly not sure how it works.  Here's the segment from the Gameplay.constants file:

marketDef
sellPrice 2.0
buyPrice 4.0
priceIncreaseAtMaxShift 2.22
minTimeForMarketChange 10.0
maxTimeForMarketChange 30.0
minTimeToCrashOrBoom 2.0
maxTimeToCrashOrBoom 10.0
minLengthOfCrashOrBoom 20.0
maxLengthOfCrashOrBoom 200.0
normalMarketMinShift 0.2
normalMarketMaxShift 0.5
boomThresholdPerPlayer 400
crashThresholdPerPlayer -400
boomMinShift 0.8
crashMaxShift 0.2
netChangeForCrash -0.2
netChangeForBoom 0.3

There was a way in Vanilla to play the market to get unlimited credits.  The market didnt fluctuate unless you bought or sold something.  But if you bought 500 units by holding shift, the price would jump immediately to a place where you could sell 500 units for profit. I discovered this, and used it to great amusement.  Man the rage some dude let loose when I attacked his homeworld with 40 siege frigates 5 minutes into the game.

Well that is the textbook answer, in fact the constant, endless gain of resource allows for a simplified version of a simulated large market to actually come into existence.  If you have smaller amounts of resources, like in starcraft, you have to design an entirely different game that would have a horribly unstable market(and therefore receive imbalanced use).  Also, in the real world it takes time to mine/refine resources(starcraft is a bit of a stretch in this area).  The sins market is a well simulated market for its purpose in the game, as market stability is the only way to keep a simulated "living market" from becoming out of control and speculator heavy.

This game isn't an in depth economics simulator, speculators are not as OP as they are in real life.

There was a neat little game way back called "War, Inc."...which had a stock market.

You played a mercenary corporation and in between contract missions, you could invest in the market.  There were many corporations with different specialties and you could get enough to finance better gear for your unit or lose your shirt and as a result, get slaughtered on your next mission, lose the commission and go bankrupt or get exterminated if you were wiped out.

I always wish Sins had something like this.  The only abuse in that game was you could save frequently and if you lost bad could just restore and try again on another stock.  It was not multiplayer and in Sins, it wouldn't be practical to do that.

@ sinperium

good suggestion.

By adding in corporate entities within factions and neutral entities as well would go far making the game feel more dynamic for single player and multiplayer play.

Anything that increases the options and strategy.  Say you start with a strong neutral corp nearby that you want to use early diplomacy to gain a relatively strong military early game friend.  This would add a lot to the diplomacy aspect for multiplayer which could enhance the overall game play.  That being said, you could also invest in that neutral corporation's competitors so that they gain larger "solar market share" and start to weaken your opponents lucky early military advantage by reducing the economic viability of his asset.  In this way the economic player could change the power of the neutral entities nearby over time, and at a balanced cost.  In this way you could simulate a viable multiplayer and single player stock market that would also have military use as well(friendly neutral corporations would fight with you of course!).

Also, if they added a random function so that some corporations, no matter how much early game money you try to make them friendly won't ever become your friend(via having an insanely high "buyout"), that would add a lot to the oomf of strategy in the diplomacy arena.  An AI being able to "lie" to the player in short, to cheat the player out of credits.  These neutral corporations would have to be relatively worth it however.  Perhaps unique technologies via their unique corporate patents would be acquired as long as friendly status is retained.

sareth has just lost every ounce of respect any sins player had for him.

As far as playing the market. best bet would be tec, after researching the discounts tech with a vasari ally to give you the pricing pact.  Margins would be very low i would imagine...

it should be testable in the dev.exe

@ pbhead

lol, you mean adding in sub-factional play and increasing the viability of multiplayer diplomacy options to increase the scope of strategy in the game discredits me how?  Its a good idea to think about.  perhaps someone will mod it.  after all look who i'm talking too.

Perhaps you could explain why adding in small sub factions named "corporations" wouldn't help the game play.  Having these would also make the eco spot have more ways to spend their money tactically.  Perhaps they could have more efficient unit costs and so feeding the corporate AI a few credits could actually ensure that they have a reasonably strong early game fleet, something that even a good player would have to contend with.

because they would be AI.

Yet another variable, even if its an AI.  I'm not talking about substantial investment, these would look at 200 credits and go, OMG, my AI brain says i could build 2 corvettes for that amount!.  So AI fleets would be large simple minded fleets that had a few more command options then a regular "dumb" ai opponent.

Having them as an efficient source of credit investment to assist in attrition battles.  In this way you would have a smaller fleet yourself, but your AI ally.  This gives you the player more options, especially if these friendly sub-factions have more control options then just the simple "attack here, defend here" options (say you could order the corporations to build LRF!, build corvettes! you wouldn't que them yourself...).  This would this would help the AI be less dumb to fleet composition.

The thing is, AI isn't terrible with attrition as long as its not costing you a ton of cash.  This addition would just add another level to the game, imo. 

Also, the sub factions need not necessarily be only AI.  Imagine what could happen if sins actually had sub empires within the grander empires that say your kid brother or your girlfriend could play?

Co - Op sins in one empire could be possible, without having to have say 6v6 games added to multiplayer.  These small factions would never be capable of having a lot of logistics slots to keep the game from minidumping.  Something to possibly look forward to in sins 2, imo.

So if you don't have a co-op friend playing with you, you would have an AI variant.  The sub-faction play could largely be limited to your sub faction friend, turning them for or against the main empire.  In this way the sub faction player could assist the main faction player by over time creating another possible power bloc.

the game would then have an entirely new level of play.

Personally, I would prefer this because my girlfriend would rather play with me and assist in my RTS domination.  This could also lure in new players into playing competative online matches by becoming someone's "second", and perhaps this second player could take over if the primary player minidumps!

actually the more i think about this idea the better it sounds.

I wouldn't say that I lost respect for him, though I now question what he finds doable.

Aside from that, making a mod to do that would be insane.  While it would probably be doable on some level, the buff chains would be painful.  While you could *probably* do it, you'd probably need a buff computer to do it and frankly, at that point, you'd be better off making a program that would effectively stamp out the NAND gates for you. 

For instance, I previously considered the idea of giving the Dunov a passive that would allow it to function as a gigantic trading vessel.  Because it would have to generate a unique ID so multiple Dunovs don't interfere and you'd have to have slots for each one, you'd have around 60,000 buff files.  While that's "possible" for a program to do, that would be insane for a human to manually create.

Buff computers are pain.  Lots and lots of pain.

Lol @

i can see where you have a point, i'm no programmer!

Its easier to discuss as an idea then to do, i see.  Man i can't wait for programmer efficiency technology increases to allow for that level of programmer production capability. 

In all honesty, making a program that would convert diagrammed buff chains into actual buff chains is entirely possible, but programming the GUI for such a thing would be a pain.  Doable?  Yes.  Am I going to?  NO!!!!

Fact is, there's a post on modding Rebellion that I've been working on and includes instructions on how to use the additions to create logic gates and more elaborate buff chains.  Hopefully there'll also be a bit of a demo mod to demonstrate some of the things as well, though there's no way I'd ever go into detail of actually creating a buff computer unless I had a really good reason to..  Just too complex.

When discussing things at the theoretical level, even buff computers are easy.  With my above Dunov example, you would have to randomly generate (through weapon chance buffs) a number.  For convenience for the way the world works, let's say that we're going with a 32 bit integer (yes, buff computers would be in binary).  Now, you could potentially have 160 Dunovs at once, so you have to account for all of those potentially.  That means buff chains to store each one.  You'll also need buffs for memory so that it can store the ones it has.  You'll need equivalence buffs chains to compare each digit.  The comparison of a single bit against another single bit requires IIRC 13 buffs.  We're dealing with Ints here (reason for such large numbers is because there's no way to generate a global ID, we just have to pick a stupid large number and find a random one between zero and that number).  Ultimately, it's an absurdly complex process that isn't something I'm going to do any time soon (or ever).

Theoretical buff computers are simple.  They're basically just logic gates hooked together with some memory buffs set aside.  To compare two ints, compare all their digits (one's place against one's place, two's place against two's place, four's place against four's place, etc) and then AND gate them together.  Because you can't AND more than two things at once with buffs, you have to have a bit of a pyramid.

Oh, and to top off everything else, running lots of buffs works excellently in parallel but suck oh so much if you try to do so in a series.  It's just the way the engine operates.

This is why we need robot zombie programmers.  I whole slave class of them for 1)programmers to enjoy whipping while they massage their GOD complexes 2) to do all the really boring programming shit that needs to be done 3)who doesn't want to live in a world where a robot zombie programmer exists?

If you could design those, volt, and then sell them you would become uber rich!

Hmm..  I'll explain via PM..

Wait...someone trained sareth to work with nuclear materials!?

We're all doomed.

Specifically in running nuclear reactor aboard a naval warship.  I got smart and learned that the engine room is the worst place to be.  So then I went sonar and had a lot more fun.  I'm also highly trained at understanding dolphin song, the one bit of happiness to reach that underwater submersible tube of unhappiness known as a fast attack submarine. 

If it makes you feel better, sinperium, i know how to make a nuclear reactor using radium and could do so in my back yard, all i need to do is brush up on my radium acquisition techniques since the darned FED made it harder to acquire when they outlawed radium in home smoke detectors.

It would be nice to have a free power source ftw!  i worry about the safety protocols, but hey they practically run themselves! 

If i could get my hands on enough precipitation materials I could take raw uranium ore and get some uranium 238 to provide the radiation source(this might take a lot of my lifetime).  Then get some 99.999% pure graphite I could make my very first ghetto reactor, with some nice well placed cadmium rods.

I'd be carpetbombafermi 2.0

Be very afraid!  MUHUAHUAHUAHUA!!!!!!!!