Even with 3D printers, there are still plenty of things you'd want to move around:

Original art works
Nanotech (beyond the capabilities of a 3D printer, let's say, and needs containment and initialisation codes)
Military nanotech disarmament codes (for keeping the damn stuff under control)
Latest AI chips or technology (again, assume 3D printers haven't got to this stage)
Precious stones
Antimatter (needs expensive containment units)
Rare food and drink
New materials (a lot of new technology is based on new materials being developed, and 3D printers won't be able to make these straight away)
Alien life-forms or specimens for study
Back-ups of people's minds (rich people might pay a lot of money for you to safely transport a brain-copy to a storage vault in another system, in case of supernova, war, etc)
Passengers! Scientists, VIPs, diplomats, celebrities on tour to other systems ...

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Original post by Punk Designer Edtharan, you have reduced my list down to three things!!! DNA Codes Data 3d Printers I hate to be picky but if that is the case I think I should go for more of the romantic side, for this game is all about trading, and with three types of things to trade (apart from people and the raw materials) then it's not worth making or playing the game! Has anybody else got any ideas, thanks thought Edtharan for the good source of knowledge. Cheers.

There are flaws with "3D printers", and that is their inability to do advanced material handling and treatments, as well as that they are SLOW. They will likely be ideal for small odd ball consumer goods, but traditional "Factory Production" methods aren't likely to go anywhere soon.

3D Printers will likely be used in factories, but things like milling machines and casting are still going to make up a big part of anything strength critical, or really mass produced.

3D Printers are limited in just what materials they can print with, and physics makes it very hard to print in something like steel. If you attempted to bring steel to a point you can 'print it', you're basically shooting very small drops of molten steel onto your target zone. For those that know nothing about metal working, this is going to produce a material that is going to have very random structural strengths, be prone to breaking, easily fatigue (the stress of working over time, eventually leading to a metal snapping. Think bending a paperclip back and forth till it snaps), and likely be full of atomic level stress fractures.

It is also really, really, really SLOW! This is the flaw in any science fiction 'nano fabrication', being able to take any material, and change it atom by atom into something else,... It takes time and a crap load of energy. In the time and effort it takes to produce one perfectly flawless example of your work, traditional methods can have produced 5 slightly flawed but usable ones, and maybe one or two perfect ones.

So, provided your cost of shipping stays low, central factories that ship to near by systems still makes sense for a large number of items. Especially things with a high level of quality control requirements, such as medical or computer supplies. If you have a "3D Printer/Replicator" tech running a small colony factory, he has a higher chance of giving a false positive on QA of a flawed product that he produces for 10 minutes out of the month when compared to the tech that runs the equipment producing the item 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.


Not to mention there will still be a major demand for things like wood and hand crafted items that you just can't produce with modern equipment. Out of all the things I own, some of the most important to me are: A flint knife I crafted myself. A small dagger made from iron I watched a guy smelt in a medieval style smelter, and then shaped by hand in a pattern weld. My wooden longbow I made myself, a number of hand blown glass items, a few fossil stones, and a number of wooden items with amazing grain patterns.

Right so 3D Printers and their information have been put on my list. So have alien life forms and Brain Banks.

If you wish to see my list, your welcome to its at this Wiki.

I would welcome people helping me out here with this list, It is a big list but the art system will be small (having on little symbols for objects instead of seeing the objects)

I have a question indeed, how would be the best way to play this, there are two ways.

Having ships go pick something up, at a cost. Bring it back to the port, and then go back and get some more. Then have another ship get it from the port and go somewhere else to sell. This would keep ships coming back to the main port, and allow more player control of profits, buying here because its cheap to buy now and then selling it there later because the demand has gone up.

Or do I have it so the ships go to a place then go to the drop off place, then come back for upgrades or repairs? I don't like this option very much but from a game design point of view, what do you think? I'm going with one.

Thanks.

Small suggestion.

You should establish what kind of game you want to be played with the items in question. What characteristics do you want the items to have in terms of how the player relates to them.

As a category of stuff to ship, things a player might consume/use.

Medi-packs that grant genetic upgrades, but require the user to augment their diet with new expensive (copyrighted) food ingredients.

A wing of high-tech fighter drones, shipped separately from their brain modules.

Schematics for an improved engine design.

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Original post by Punk Designer Edtharan, you have reduced my list down to three things!!! DNA Codes Data 3d Printers I hate to be picky but if that is the case I think I should go for more of the romantic side, for this game is all about trading, and with three types of things to trade (apart from people and the raw materials) then it's not worth making or playing the game! Has anybody else got any ideas, thanks thought Edtharan for the good source of knowledge. Cheers.

That "Data" category has a lot more to it. If in your world, you ahve faster than light transport, then it would be easier to bundle any communications into a ship and fly that ship to the destination, then transmit that information to the recipient. Data carriers (and secure ones at that) would be the corner stone of that kind of economy.

Think of the movie: "Jonhy Mnemonic". Also, much of the Cyber Punk genera is about information and secret data. Information carrying does not have to be without it's "Romance".

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Having ships go pick something up, at a cost. Bring it back to the port, and then go back and get some more. Then have another ship get it from the port and go somewhere else to sell. This would keep ships coming back to the main port, and allow more player control of profits, buying here because its cheap to buy now and then selling it there later because the demand has gone up.

Having a simple: "Go here, buy goods then go there and sell them" type gameplay is fairly limited.

Since the game is about trading, I would suggest focusing the game on what occurs during and around that trade. IF you want to create a sense of a gritty universe, then you have to look at the social environment of the world.

Look at the show "Firefly". In this show, the protagonists are living from day to day and having to delve into the shady underworld and do illegal activities just to survive. Shipping Grain sacks or Consumer Electronics does not seem all that gritty to me.

I would have it that the player doesn't buy the goods that they ship, but take up contracts to deliver the goods. There would be other operators launching their own ships from the same location, and so offer competition to the player (playing a monopoly doesn't offer too many challenges or chances for conflicts). As the player is now competing against other operators for the same contracts, this means they have to offer the best deal on the contract.

This deal does not only mean the lowest price, but it would mean offering the best value for money. The factors that would come into this is where your system could have the gameplay.

Factors could be:

- Lowest cost
- Reliability
- History with that customer (customer loyalty, etc)
- Security and Confidentiality
- Speed
- Distance (can you get to the destination)
- Marketing
- Word of Mouth/Reputation (especially as it relates to the other factors)
- Capacity (can you hold the amount of goods/data/people/etc)
- Defensive ability (for routes that cross into dangerous territories)

and so forth...

Managing ships, then becomes a matter of scheduling them (the number of "runways", when the ships with the particular performances will return, loading times, etc).

The gameplay would be similar to how you describe it: The player builds the runways for their port and buys and outfits their ships (and hires crew?).

Then the player visits the "market" (or uses a social network: See below) and accepts contracts for jobs. they then assigns these jobs to their ships which then go off and try to complete them and then return.

Accepting contracts would be a negotiation between the person offering the job and the player. The person offering the job would post up a contract, the the player would get a chance to modify it and submit it to the person offering the job. IF they accept it, then the player gets the contract. If they don't then another round of negotiation takes place. Other NPCs have a chance to offer a better deal, but the job will only be offered for a limited time. After that time the customer take the best offer on the table.

Contracts would be constructed in the form of a "template" and the details of the clauses handled by variables.

For instance the contract:

- Deliver to the Gilise system, the "Plastic Pink Flamingo Statue"
- Before 30 days has expired
- Up front fee will be 500 credits
- Completion will be worth an extra 500 credits
- Late delivery will cost 2,000 credits
- Loss of goods will cost 10,000 credits

This has 6 clauses.

The first clause "Deliver to the Gilise system, the 'Plastic Pink Flamingo Statue'"

Has the template:
Deliver to the [Destination variable] system, the [Goods variable].

And so on. Each clause has a relationship to the others. For instance the clause "Completion will be worth an extra 500 credits" has an "If clause 1 and 2 are true, then..." type relationship.

Clauses can be added or removed during the negotiation and the variables changed (eg: the reward for competition, the time to complete it in or the costs of failure) as part of the negotiations. Because these would be designed in such a way to be detectable to the program (constructed as code objects that are self checking) determining if a clause is completed or not should be fairly simple.

The last part is working out a social system to allow for reputation and rivalries between the player and the NPCs (other operators and also the clients).

Regular clients should remain with the player, despite a slightly better deal offered by other operators, this way the player can build up regular clients and get better money from them, but if they over step and become greedy, then they could loose this client base.

Other operators should be willing to take a slight loss to get revenge on the player if they do something to annoy them (eg: like stealing some of their clients by offering a better deal than them).

Clients that ahve got a really good deal from the player should be willing to tell other clients about that deal, or if they stuffed up on a deal then this too needs to be able to be transmitted to other NPCs. So the player's reputation needs to be able to be spread from client to client. This could also extend to telling the player about other NPCs, like what relationship that NPC has with the others, or even notifying the player about contracts (especially the clandestine contracts or contracts that deal in illegal goods).

This could be done by having a "Who knows who" list with the clients as well as the strength and type (like/hate) relationship between them. This can be randomly assigned at the start of a game, and modified as the game progresses.

If a client negatively effects another client, then the second client hates the first a bit more. If a client negatively effects a client that they hate, then the relationship is improved slightly. Over time, all relationships slowly move towards neutral.

Clients are willing to take a deal even if it is not the best deal, if it negatively effects someone they hate.

This will end up polarising the client base into "cliques" somewhat, but that is the point of it. If you allow the player to not only interact with this client base through contracting, but allow them to gather information (or even buy that information) about them (I am thinking a "Space Bar" or something), then the player can spend time exploiting this to their advantage (but that is likely to make them enemies...).

This would allow you to simulate most of what would be needed for a trading company sim. There is the scheduling of the vessels, getting jobs, and managing a client base.

As for shady dealings, you might need to work your way into the social network surrounding these clients. These would be the most paranoid of clients, and would not deal with anyone who didn't have the reputation. The more illegal the good, the more paranoid these NPCs would be. This means that each client would need a "paranoia" stat that would be based on the type of goods they are dealing in and their "personality" (the base stats for that NPC).

This of course is only a brief overview of an idea I ahve been working on for a while now in my spare time, and adapted in stream of thought to what you have described of your game design.

You know what's missing? Piracy. What fun is a game if you know your cargo is going to reach the destination safe and sound? Or without the thrill that your base can be plundered at any moment?

Pirates and raiders have been thought of, and I've gone a little further with other random events like solar flares, rebel attacks, asteroid damage, special anomalies (that could result in your ship coming back a few days later with a strange cargo)

But also things like one of your passengers having a bomb on them, or armed rebels popping out of crates, and maybe even your crew turning crazy and killing everyone.

I am working on a little system to hire crew members into ships when they are built, captain, navigation officer, loaders, etc. Choose from robots, clones, humans, etc. All with randomly generated costs, names, stats, etc.


Edtharan I like your ideas and keen to hear more, I will send you a PM...

Cheers, any other ideas for products or use of products?