Posts: 2,122
Threads: 244
Joined: Oct 2007
Staff roles:
This problem is a combination of the commodity drops from npcs and the prices for those commodities in Cassini, both of which I can do something about.
The reason the prices are high in an absolute sense is that the Cassini bases are so far from the origins of those commodities. The commodities with high prices are being sold primarily to Liberty, but Cassini is much further from their points of origin than Liberty is. Even though the rate of return is much lower to transport gold (for example) from Dublin to Cassini (no sane trader would do this), the absolute price is higher because the end price is a function of time. In algebraic terms, if P is profit, T is time, and R is rate of return (profit per unit of time), then P=TxR. If you hold P constant but reduce T, then R increases, which is the scenario that Baconsoda describes: it is very profitable to loot gold from npcs in Galileo and sell it in Cassini, even though it is a waste of time to take gold from Dublin to Cassini.
I suspect that the commodities carried by npcs in 4.85 are basically holdovers from vanilla almost everywhere, and have never been updated (except where they didn't exist in vanilla). They certainly weren't updated between 4.84 to 4.85 due to changes in the mod's economy. The Gallic npcs loot drops were custom designed with the economy in mind, so there's no problems there.
So, the commodity drops from npcs in Galileo and Kepler ought to be goods that are produced in Kusari and sold to Liberty and vice versa, not items from Rheinland or Bretonia, like gold which is produced in Bretonia and shouldn't be found between Liberty and Kusari. I'll also take a look at the absolute prices and adjust them to be sufficient for loot sales without being too high in an absolute sense like they may be now.
Dab, before you do anything, you need to talk to me first, because I already completely rewrote all the npc cargoes for 4.86 last year and submitted it to Igiss. What we probably need to do is edit which corporations show up in these border systems, rather than trying to approach it from the standpoint of specific cargoes. In any case, I'll take a look at the commodity prices, and that will mitigate a great deal of the unbalanced effects.
Check out my Trade Development Blog
for all the latest news on Nerfs and Final Nails, or to request trade changes.
