Posts: 2,122
Threads: 244
Joined: Oct 2007
Staff roles:
Up to now I have focused on commodities that are produced in a very limited number of locations and sold to many locations. But what about something like Prisoners, or the new commodity Criminals? Both of these should have origins at many bases and only be transported to a very few bases. Prisoners are transported from battleships to prison stations, and Criminals are transported from police outposts to prison stations. There are two major balance issues in these cases. I will primarily discuss Prisoners in this post, but the same strategies apply to Criminals, and the Zoner Passenger routes.
First, transactions with Prisoners and Criminals should obviously involve local House economies instead of inter-House trade. In order to set that up, the first step was to create a list of all police outposts and battleships, and then pair them up with the prison station each one is closest to. This creates local markets in each House that funnel trade to the House prison.
There are some tricky aspects to this. It turns out that the battleship in Colorado is actually closer to Fuchu Prison in Shikoku than to LPI Huntsville in Texas. In the previous mod version I accounted for this by adjusting the prison prices for prisoners on a sliding scale, but in the current mod version I duplicated the Prisoner commodity so that there are two commodities, and that made balance much easier because I can simply use one Prisoner commodity in Kusari and the other in Liberty without any risk of cross trade. The same is true for Criminals.
Once all the battleships were paired with their House prison, I calculated their travel times. I then sorted them into descending order by travel time, so I could see which battleship is the furthest from its prison. That farthest battleship became the lowest cost "producer" of Prisoners. Using the travel time from that far battleship to its prison then set the "consumption" price at the prison, as described in past posts.
At this point, the pricing math changes from what it is for most commodities. The "production" prices for all the other battleships in that House are calculated in reverse from the price at the prison. Using the travel times for each of the other battleships to their prison combined with the c/sec profitability calculated the amount of profit for each of those transactions. That amount of profit was then subtracted from the prison station price to calculate the "production" price for the other battleships. So instead of the price formula being
Consumption Price = Production Price + Profit
the formula instead is
Production Price = Consumption Price - Profit
Remember Production Price is the price at the battleship, and Consumption price is the price at the prison. So the calculations proceed like this:
Prison Price = Price at Furthest Battleship + Profit
Remaining Battleship Prices = Prison Price - Profit
This is why the price of Prisoners and Criminals varies so much throughout each House. The closer the battleship or police outpost is to the prison, the higher its price must be in order to maintain a constant c/sec profitability for the commodity.
A side effect of this set-up is that it is possible to transport Criminals and Prisoners between battleships and police outposts, and even to the prisons of other Houses, but the profitability is fairly low for those transactions. When I was balancing all of this with just one commodity, the balancing was very complex and tricky, but having two commodities to alternate between the prisons extremely simplified the process.
This concludes my series of posts explaining commodity pricing, since I have now covered all the basic mechanics involved in the process.
Check out my Trade Development Blog
for all the latest news on Nerfs and Final Nails, or to request trade changes.