Pioneer dev forum

Blog post discussing the rewriting of the economy of Star Sector, a top down game.

Interesting. The "approximate" economy algorythm would be good for procedurally generating a stable-ish economy, but it would have to follow the same rules for the detail economy that the player would see. However, the scale of pioneer is so vast that I'm not sure if you could ever put together a true galactic economy that would realistically simulate in real time. Where the player is would need lots of detail, whereas the other side of the galaxy (or even 100ly away) would have the barest calculations. Balancing that so it doesn't collapse when a new galaxy is generated will take some doing. Very interesting thought experiment.

T...it’s also easier to step back and make some simplifying assumptions. The key one is this: a source of supply can meet any amount of demand up to the supply value, without being used up.

This simplifies the algorithm for distributing commodities drastically, since it no longer has to worry about consumers competing with each other for a limited supply. Each calculation of “where does market X get its supply of Y” can be done independently of the other such calculations.

Interesting.

The blog post is pretty close to what I want to do. I assume their universe isn't procedural. The main problem with pioneer, is not having access to all space stations. One could of course compile a list of all space stations in a file upon first time running pioneer. Then that could be used for simulating the economy.

Or only hand scripted systems (i.e. we have them in json) are simulated, and procedural just have a base price (that is the average) + some modulation or just noise.

Dwarden on IRC posted this presentation of the game
"Starsector Review | Explore the Cosmos™ | Ruin Everything™"
https://youtu.be/acqpulP1hLo

Looks like they have so much impressive game mechanics, some of it could fit into pioneer, like "harvested organs" as illegal goods, trade contracts, and much other things, that are more complex.