RogerBacon
Posts: 724
Joined: 5/17/2000 From: Miami, Florida, U.S.A. Status: offline
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Are you weary of having the weight of an interstellar empire on your shoulders? Do you long for a simpler life but shy away from the violence and danger of being a pirate? Introducing… Bacon Free Trader! Set your empire on full auto and take command of a single freighter… YOUR freighter. Try and make a profit buying and selling commodities. As a free trader you have full control over what you buy and sell but don’t think it’s going to be easy. The galactic prices are for the big boys. You don’t have the clout to negotiate deals like that. You will have to find deals on the individual commodities markets where prices can vary quite a bit. Buy low and sell high. Also, don’t expect the state to pay for your maintenance. You have to make those payments yourself. At least gas is free. Access with alt-ctrl+right click menu This is the screen you will see if you are not within range of a commodities market (range = 300) Note that using the right click menu cancels your ship's mission so if you want to check cargo use the existing ctrl+enter hotkey. Also, ctrl+enter will now show a ship's cargo regardless of whether or not it is currently on a cargo mission. This is the screen when trading with a commodities market Details Creating your free trader Select a STATE-owned freighter and use the input menu (ctrl-E with the command !freetrader X where X will be your initial capitalization (i.e. starting cash). The default is 10000. This money will be drawn from your State funds. To repay it (once you have made money) use the same command with a negative value for X. To retire and end your trading career use the same command with a value of zero for X. Please note when starting a new game you will have to wait at least 90 days for the trade system to initialize and up to a year before you start seeing prive variations sufficient enough to make a profit. Also, when founding a new colony a commodities market won’t appear for at least 90 days and maybe as long as a year. Market prices: Market prices are based on the current galactic price but many factors influence the local price. Taxes are paid when commodities are sold but not when bought. So it is more profitable to sell at planets where the tax rate is low. Market Liquidity This is simply the amount of money the market has in which to make purchases. On smaller colonies, and especially asteroid colonies, it may be necessary to buy something to inject cash into the market before you will be able to sell something. Market prices and market liquidity are adjusted approximately every 90 days. Trade History The last 100 trades and/or maintenance payments are listed here. The list is fully sortable so you can quickly find out how much you paid for something. New BaconSettings.txt value // This is the difference between a commodity exchange's buy and sell price. Higher numbers make for a harder mercantile experience. Also, 1/2 the tax rate will be added. Valid range is 0.1 to 0.9. e.g. tradeTax = 0.1 and the local tax rate is 30% will result in about a 25% difference between purchase price and sell price. tradeTax=0.1 A note about how freighters work in the game: Freighters move cargo with little to no economic effect in the game. Their primary purpose is to make sure goods get to where they need to go. Any economic activity is abstracted and can be assumed to be part of the planet’s GDP which creates the civilian economy. So, if you find a way to pick up cargo without paying for it (like ordering an Alt-1,2,3 command to your free trader) just realize that s breaking the abstraction and not really in the spirit of the free trader system.
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