I’ve been thinking about possible ways of interacting with or building an economy in the game. In most games, a trading post is just one town, or one merchant in a town, or one space station. So then it makes sense that one merchant has some limited inventory, and they can run out, and if they don’t have much left, they raise the prices. In my game, however, it’s an entire planet. Does it really make sense for the player to be able to, for instance, buy enough iron ore that it significantly affects the cost of iron ore for the ENTIRE PLANET? Or buy so much that the planet runs out? It seems kind of ridiculous.
I’d be in good company, though- popular science fiction has a somewhat poor track record for imagining entire planets. How often is there a “jungle world” or “ice planet”, with a single planet-wide biome? Or worse yet, a “city planet”. Clearly, these are just ideas we’ve already become comfortable with from our own world- jungles, glaciers, cities- with the word “planet” stuck on the end. Saying something like, “Oh, this planet imports coal and water and exports uranium and food” seems like a gross oversimplification. Even modeling a planet as having a single political alignment seems silly. Yet in a game with hundreds of planets, keeping track of much more data than that would quickly drown the player in swamps of spreadsheets. I don’t want the game to focus too much on planet management. There must be a reward for exploration, but not a penalty for not wanting to be an accountant.
So, maybe the player shouldn’t trade with his own ship at all. Buy equipment, sure, but don’t start loading grain into your hold. Combat ships are for combat. But maybe you can hire merchant ships, instead. Set up a trade route for them- they go to the asteroid belt to buy some ore, sell it to a refinery for metal, sell that at an industrial planet for mining equipment, and sell that back at the asteroids for more ore, for instance. So there’s the option of becoming involved in economics if you want, but without having to sacrifice your own ability to do things besides sailing back and forth between distant planets. Flying long, repetitive trade routes is the opposite of fun.
Especially since what I definitely want to do is create a feeling of space being big. Big empty spaces, high velocity differences, not just what’s basically an airplane simulator with the sky painted black. So you wouldn’t even want to be a merchant, because those ships are big and accelerate slowly. They spend a long time just going through empty space.
There will definitely be equipment to buy, though, and either new ships, or some way to majorly upgrade the one you start with. I want the player to experience that feeling you get in a pirate game where you finally get to a first rate ship of the line- you’ve finally made it, your ship is visually much more massive than your earlier ships, and you have more weaponry than most forts. You’re slow, but your weapons let you reach out to whatever needs touching.