Economy, Progression and World Updates

 

Economy, Progression and World Changes

The Dynamic Economy

My ultimate goal for this game is to create experiences where your story, as the player and the stories of all the NPCs and factions in the game are intertwined and interconnected through economics and politics. The stories I imagine being able to tell about this game are not scripted storylines or fixed narrative beats but rather unique adventures that place you as just one piece of a massive ever shifting landscape in which the economic, cultural and political goals of every person in the solar system are a part.

I love experiences that let me dig deeper into why things are happening and that hold many layers of activity to be explored, understood and mastered. It feels so much more satisfying to succeed in a game when I know that it hasn't been rigged to let me win and that although I may be the protagonist, there's a much larger world swirling around of which I'm just one small part.

This is a large and ambitious task and allowing game world economy to determine the cost and availability of goods is a major first step in achieving the vision of Retrograde: Legends. Whether ships can afford refuel and repair in an area might change the outcome of a war. A breakdown in agricultural supply chains might effect the health of a station's population, causing its factories to output their goods at a lower rate. World events, conflicts between factions and missions available to the player will all be influenced by the price and availability of goods.

This system is still in very early stages and needs a lot of improvement and additional functionality but already is showing interesting signs of life. 

My eventual goal for NPC Factions' system wide strategies are also based on the economic systems I've described above. Factions take economic factors such as surpluses and scarcities in all of their stations' manufacturing outputs, raw materials production and taxable incomes of population centers across the system to determine whether and with whom to go to war. By tying war and peace and the gameplay possibilities associated with them to the economic life of stations, the actions that you take in the game can make a big impact on the story of the entire Sol system.

Some of the biggest progress towards the dynamic economy in October and November happened inside Retrograde's stations. Stations have a variety of facilities that enable services like repairs, trade and refueling. The three most important types of station facilities for the game economy are Population Centers, Factories, and the Trade Hub.

Simplified flow chart illustrating how raw resource production facilities, population centers, factories, trade hubs and merchant ships all interact to create emergent economic activity.

Population Centers and Personal Consumption

Population Centers house segments of the station's population. Each Population Center has a socioeconomic level, average income, health, happiness and a stockpile of goods. The population requires a set of goods based on its size and socioeconomic status. Goods from a population center's stockpiles are consumed each day to keep its inhabitants alive.

If a population center's stockpiles run low, they must purchase goods from the station's Trade Hub. If they can't acquire those goods, happiness and health begin to drop. The bigger and more affluent a station's population is, the more pressure is put on that station's economy to keep its population fed and happy. In the future, these traits will effect a station's factories' production and even lead to revolts if the people become too unhappy!

Trade Hubs

Trade Hubs are the central point of economic activity in any station. Merchant transports docking at a station sell their goods and buy new goods at the trade hub. All buying and selling of goods between different station facilities goes through the trade hub as well.

Trade hubs determine the prices at which items are sold at their stations. The logic driving the pricing determination is much simplified from real world microeconomics but attempts to select a prices for each item that will yield the largest profit to the trade hub while remaining affordable enough to incentivize continual purchases by factories, population centers and merchant vessels. 

The system isn't perfect yet but is already showing signs of self stabilization and price differences between stations in response to supply and demand deltas. The next steps for trade hubs are to improve the UX of the buying and selling experience for the player and to continue to hone the correct weights and dampening modifiers for how much prices can change in short periods of time. These massive price fluctuation safeguards are temporary stopgaps. The game's economy, factions' monetary policy and the eventual world event system will be able to incentivize conflict or increased trade as pressure valves on overactive or underactive local economies.

Factories

A station can host a number of factories producing useful items, like weapons, fuel, construction materials or electronics. Some items are required by the  population to survive, like food and clothing. Others are useful for upgrading ships or needed in order to repair damage after a battle. Regardless of their use, all items in Retrograde are built in a factory somewhere. 

Factories have a number of production lines. Each line has a recipe requirement in order to build its item. For instance, an electronics factory has a production line producing wiring that requires copper and silicates to run while a fuel refinery requires water to convert into hydrogen fuel.

Factories purchase their input goods from their station's trade hub. This means, for instance, that if a station is low on water its production of hydrogen fuel will suffer which can lead to interesting scenarios and choices for the player as ships in the area can't get access to fuel. 

The next steps for factories and manufacturing is to allow the player to craft items at factories themselves. Crafting items will be helpful for creating the materials needed to complete an upgrade without having to fly around the entire system or for taking advantage of cheap material prices at a station to build valuable goods to sell elsewhere without needing an NPC factory as a middleman. Crafting will come with a cost and taxes.

Conclusion

That's all I have for now! There are many more changes and improvements in the game that I haven't mentioned here that we'll talk about in a future post. If you've stuck around this long, thanks so much for reading!