More complete thought re: colony trade relations

[arquebus_x]

I put in some preliminary thoughts in the Discord channel but I wanted to kind of flesh them out here.

First, a caveat - it may well be that I'm not playing optimally or even well, but after 30+ hours in the game over various saves I'm still running into major energy shortfalls. To combat this, I've been colonizing energy-producing planets (gas giants, landable worlds with lots of energy spots). The problem arises when dealing with the way the game handles trade between the colony and the parent.

I recognize that GR (coming from the SR pedigree) doesn't want to treat colonies as mere puppets that are simple extensions of the parent faction. So they need to remain somewhat independent actors, with their own agendas/priorities/needs. But I think there is some room to maneuver in dealing with the way colonies and their parents interface around resource distribution.

Right now, there are essentially two methods that I'm aware of to get resources from a colony to the homeworld: 1) manual diplomatic actions (request a resource, then match from the homeworld with something needed or at least not overstocked) and 2) Trade Relations governor priority to automate resource movement from colony to homeworld. (The third option, using crates and transports, is essentially just a more complicated version of #1.)

There are some significant drawbacks to both options that make them non-viable over the long term.

1) Diplomatic trades. These can transfer huge quantities of resources. I use them mainly to get energy from the colony to the homeworld and to transport AG and FG over to the colony (which is more rarely needed). However, this is a highly manual process and when I have a bunch of colonies, the majority of my time playing ends up being doing these diplomatic actions. Remember: I'm constantly running out of energy. (In my current save, my homeworld has a deficit of 8M energy per day.) It takes up the vast majority of my attention.

2) Trade Relations setting. This was suggested to me as a possible solution to the constant-attention issue in #1 and it does work, to a degree. The problem is that the trades that get generated going from the colony to the parent are so small as to be useless. I'm getting typically 200K to 500K transferred over every 10 days or so, and I'm running a deficit of 8M per day. This method is getting me a fraction of a drop in the bucket. If I rely on this option alone, most of the energy I'm generating at the colonies ends up being sold off through the Merchant AI to other factions - an order of magnitude more than what the colony is sending to the parent. (I suppose that it is coming back to the homeworld eventually because the homeworld is using the Merchant AI to get energy, but the delay on this process is severe and it's too indirect a method to be satisfying.)

As I state above, I could certainly be playing this game completely wrong, but at the moment GR has become more Energy Crisis Simulator than anything else. While I can still do other things, and the lack of energy only really slows things down (like research) (unless I'm at war in which case it's a real problem for my units), it always ends up taking up about 90% of my attention.

Part of the problem I think is that the game is not especially clear on the way that it generates the trade events, or how it calculates the quantities. As I noted in a bug report posted earlier, there seems to be something weird going on with the Export/Neutral/Sustain slider and the Merchant AI. Furthermore, by all appearances, even if that slider were working as expected, it really only appears to impact the overall trade pressure. That is, it creates a trade interface between the colony and the Merchant AI - it does not seem to have any bearing on the colony's supply of the homeworld/parent. There does not appear to be any way to manage or control how the colony trades with the homeworld. Having played a bit of SR2030, where your control over resource trading is so granular, it's kind of surprising that GR doesn't have an option to direct colony <-> parent trade parameters.

What I would love to see is one or more of the following, in order of (what I think would be) least to most disruptive to implement:

1) Governor priority toggles for "prioritize trades to parent" and "prioritize trades to colonies" that add more pressure to trade resources to the relevant entity. This could theoretically rely on the Export/Neutral/Sustain slider to figure out which specific resources to prioritize, or it could just go based on a simple calculation of "what do I have" and "what do they need" in absolute stock level terms.

2) A taxation mechanic. This would set up a taxation percentage at a colony, either overall or per resource, such that every day that percentage of the resource(s) gets shipped off directly to the parent - do not pass Go, do not talk to the Merchant AI.

3) A second set of Export/Neutral/Sustain sliders. The original set would be used as an outward-facing trade interface, buying from and selling to the galactic market. The second set would be used as a faction-facing trade interface, buying from and selling to only other members of the faction (including colony-to-colony).

The level of granularity of control that the game offers for most aspects of the "bureaucracy" is great. This is the one major area where I think GR lacks the necessary amount of control. As I quipped on the Discord channel, I should be able to treat my colonies the way Britain treated Boston in 1772. (That is, the year before the Tea Party.) On the one hand, GR is great about treating colonies as independent entities with their own agendas/needs, but on the other hand, it therefore has a blindspot about certain kinds of colonial control. Namely, resource stripping. It is very common in space themed 4X games to treat colonies as merely the-homeworld-but-somewhere-else, and I'm glad that GR doesn't do this. But on this resource trading issue in particular I think GR could lean a little bit closer to the standard space-4X trope: I should be able to *require* my colonies to supply the homeworld, for the good of the faction.

[arquebus_x]

Also, I do want to be super clear and honest about this: I really could be playing this very much the wrong way. My energy problems are SO constant and SO severe and last for SO long that it's hard for me to believe that this wasn't a known condition during pre-release testing. This isn't an edge case: it's EVERY playthrough. Since it must have been a known condition, and still the game was released in this state, I have to believe that the devs and beta testers found simple or at least highly effective ways around the energy crisis problem such that it was no longer a matter of attention toward the end of the testing phase. Which suggests there's a solution I haven't discovered yet, even after 30+ hours. I play poorly - it's in the very title of all of my videos. But I don't usually play THIS poorly. If there is a solution to the energy crisis that doesn't require one of the mods, I really hope it can be presented! Maybe there's some aspect of the game that isn't being taught in the tutorials or the manual - some element of the gameplay loop that, if used more effectively, clamps off the energy problem very quickly.

[Balthagor]

We will give this a longer read at some point, but I've opened a ticket for this
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