What's the appeal of trading games?

[Victor1234]

A Portuguese dude gambling on a ship trading spices in Asia could make a 500% profit from a single trip, but maybe 50% of the time the ship would just disappear and nobody would know why.

Yeah, but is this a TRADING game, or a stock market game now? If the Portuguese dude is on the ship, doing the trading, then it's a trading game. If he's not on the ship and just putting down money as an investment on the voyage and hoping he gets a return, doing NO ACTUAL TRADING because this all happens automatically, is this actually a trading game, or is this a trading company simulator?

Edit: Since we're talking smuggling, I always thought the Pirates of the Caribbean game with New Horizons mod did it best. You have to find an isolated beach instead of the main port, you have to make a contact in the town who'll take over the goods, and then you have to be quick with unloading everything, otherwise the coast guard shows up to try and kill you if you're too slow. Even if you do everything right, sometimes the dude tries to double cross you anyways and keep everything for himself.

So now we're moving into the idea that trading, is, in fact, dead boring, so let's smuggle instead. But the same problems exist: Do we end up playing a smuggler simulator, or is smuggling just a means to an end? More importantly, does ANYONE smuggle in real life as anything other than a means to an end? Who, in real life, is addicted to thrill of the act of smuggling or trading itself, and does these acts for no other purpose other than the sheer thrill of engaging in it? Probably nobody! The goal is always to either acquire the funds to perform some greater, and probably more interesting task, or to retire (meaning quit the game). But you don't need a Quitting Simulator, as the player doesn't need virtual money to quit the game.

So the end goal thus becomes, if nothing else, to have the coolest and pimpest boat. That might have been enough in the simpler days of gaming, but modern players probably demand more out of the game.

I was using that historical example to support my idea that there used to be a lot of uncertainty in trade, which is what I said earlier is what's missing from trading games, not as the pitch for a game itself.

Again, for the second example, I never said trading is boring so let's smuggle, just hayst brought up smuggling and mentioned a bunch of games and how they do it, so I mentioned how this one does it.

Did you have an idea on how to make trading games fun outside of getting more money to spend on other non-trading parts of the game? I could extrapolate from your post that it's boat pimping, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.

 

[Old One]

One thing I liked about Escape Velocity (the first, not sure if Override or Nova did this) you could rent a ton of freighters to make the trading go a lot faster, but all those freighters ended up attracting pirates you'd have to defend the freighters against.

Escape Velocity is a great space trader game. I would not start with Override or Nova; they're simply not as good as the original. The best way is probably to play the original game (via plug-in) using Override's updated engine with slightly better controls.

 

[Norfleet]

Did you have an idea on how to make trading games fun outside of getting more money to spend on other non-trading parts of the game? I could extrapolate from your post that it's boat pimping, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.

No. Trading isn't fun, unless you're taking that money from other players, at which point it becomes about competing against other players, taking somebody else's money. That will never be thrilling against an AI, as either the AI is mierably bad, or just so much better than you that it's purposeless to do it yourself, which is why real-life trading is not about the act of actually trading things, but about making an AI that does your trading for you. Because the actual act of trading is fucking boring, especially when it's disconnected from any other purpose, like, say, boat-pimping.

Escape Velocity is a great space trader game. I would not start with Override or Nova; they're simply not as good as the original. The best way is probably to play the original game (via plug-in) using Override's updated engine with slightly better controls.

Escape Velocity games are trading as a means to an end, the end being boat pimping, though. You don't do trading in EV because you enjoy trading, you do it because you want out of that shitty shuttle and into a pimping ride. Once you have your pimpest boat, you will never touch trading again. This is where EV then falls on its face, where the game fails to acknowledge your ownership of the greatest pimpmobile in the known galaxy or the fact that you are now solo-conquering everything for lulz in said pimpmobile.

 

[Beastro]

Is there something I'm missing? There's gotta be some autistic itch that trading scratches.

you answered this in your own post. it's about optimizing to see numbers get bigger, faster. you're not missing some secret layer. if you don't enjoy the sub-genre you don't enjoy it, that's it.

tagging Norfleet because i think he likes this kind of stuff

I remember coming home and seeing my brother playing M.U.L.E. that he'd rented. After watching him for a bit I asked if you can defeat your enemies and what the end goal is. He told me you don't fight anyone and the game doesn't end, you just keep trading and trading and trading.

All I could do was blink and went off to do my own thing until he got tired of it and played the other NES games he'd rented.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, he was wrong, since MULE does end, after 12 months and it spits out your score.

 

[Berekän]

To bankrupt your enemies, see them begging before you and to buy the affections of their women.

 

[Beastro]

Well, he was wrong, since MULE does end, after 12 months and it spits out your score.

IIRC he meant that you can keep playing past that.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Some people just get what's great about these. I would explain it to you too but *rubs hands* it will be $20.

 

[laclongquan]

Possibly the best part of trading is fight against a living economy. Patrician 3 illustrate this case well

Every goods has a series of demands source, and mostly a series of supply source. I dont remember if there's automatic generated goods or not. If there is, it's not very noticeable.
Then daily the demand source cut the amount of goods on market, and the supply source provide goods to market. Like a farming provincial town will have extra grain to sell from the operated farms in the local map, plus a default amount assigned to its status, and local pop will eat some, beer production will eat some, and the rest will be available on market with a price point corresponding to that amount (there's formula to that). If trader/PC and NPC, buy them the price will rise, sell them the price will fall. All organically.
A dock town will consume oil pitch from default status, with extra if there's ships being built, more if there's war happening because pitch can be used for defense. So your HQ dock town generally has high oil price because you buy ships here thus lead to it being built, and high food price (mostly) because you generally build a lot of production facility leading to high number of labours staying in town.

Your trading action lead to visible changes in market and economy, is a big draw of this type of game.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, he was wrong, since MULE does end, after 12 months and it spits out your score.

IIRC he meant that you can keep playing past that.

I dunno what version of MULE he's playing, but in standard MULE, after the fixed 12mo of the game, that's it's over. That's it. The entire map is totally claimed by then, etc. The game just plain ends there forcibly, with no continue.

 

[anvi]

I hate trading, but if there's a 'world' I'm supposed to be interested in long term, then it could really do with a realistic economy. That's one of the things that I liked about early MMOs, the economies worked the same as real life, basic economics. In EQ there wasn't even any trading, but if you did quests or killed stuff in one part of the world, and then took those loots to another part of the world to sell, you could make more money for them. And if something was flooding the market the price would drop. If something was rare the price was high.

As for actual trading I only did that once in an RPG and it was ok because it was a little side game. I mostly see trading in space games and I avoid it when I can. I did it in Space Rangers because it's just a glorified fedex quest, go here and buy this, go here and sell it. There's a thing that tells you the best trades so you just go where it says. Also it's a 2D game so you click to buy stuff, then click 2 or 3 times and a minute later you are in a new region and can sell it with another few clicks. I was ok with that because it didn't take long and it makes big progress in the game. The X space games however... they take AGES to trade and it's super slow and boring and hardly makes any money. I can't do that.

 

[Beastro]

Well, he was wrong, since MULE does end, after 12 months and it spits out your score.

IIRC he meant that you can keep playing past that.

I dunno what version of MULE he's playing, but in standard MULE, after the fixed 12mo of the game, that's it's over. That's it. The entire map is totally claimed by then, etc. The game just plain ends there forcibly, with no continue.

He rented the NES version.

I could be wrong on the details. This was like 1990.

 

[Victor1234]

The mystery is solved, from the official Victoria 3 forums:

 

[Tweed]

How do you guys typically figure out all of the prices at each outpost or station in a trading game? I'm playing Wing Commander Privateer, which doesn't really have trading as its focus but encourages it in the early-game. I just buy one of every item, go to a different station, and write down all the prices I can sell each item for, then repeat. I keep wondering if I'm missing some way to optimize it. You get tips in the manual, like how you should sell minerals to agricultural planets and food to mining stations, but there's gotta be more to it than that. Space Rogue has an NPC in the first system who'll give you some tips if you run a mission for him, which is cool.

Maybe I should go back to the Sea Dogs games. Not space games, but I remember having a hard time ever getting into those, probably because I completely ignored trading. Those games, as I recall, automatically added the prices of goods in your notebook, complete with how much profit you'd make by selling from somewhere else. That's probably easier than having to write down everything yourself.

With Privateer some items just always sell for more than others so not all commodities are really worth trading unless you have extra space. You already marked the individual buy/sale per commodity so that's p.much all there is too it. Sometimes a planet will sell a commodity at a reduced price or a "rare" commodity and certain bases always pay top dollar for a commodity. I.E. Pirate bases pay more for food dispensers than any other base and pleasure planets always pay the most for contraband. Pity though as much fun as it might be to try to turn a profit selling contraband it's usually time consuming since Pirate bases are out of the way, often sit in the middle of an asteroid field, have unfriendly pirates trying to shoot you, and then you have to deal with ConFed and local Milita to make a delivery.

 

[Norfleet]

Possibly the best part of trading is fight against a living economy. Patrician 3 illustrate this case well

No, no it doesn't. Patrician 3 illustrates the entertainment of building an economic empire. The actual process of TRADING is quickly something you outsource to auto buy/sell at a price line at the hands of your warehouse managers and boat captains. Patrician 3 tacitly acknowledged that actually doing trading sucks, and incentivizes you to quickly move beyond having to actually do any trading and focus on the logistics of a production and shipping network and automating the actual act of trading with warehouse managers. If you're playing the game correctly, the amount of actual trading you, personally do quickly drops off a cliff.

 

[laclongquan]

Possibly the best part of trading is fight against a living economy. Patrician 3 illustrate this case well

No, no it doesn't. Patrician 3 illustrates the entertainment of building an economic empire. The actual process of TRADING is quickly something you outsource to auto buy/sell at a price line at the hands of your warehouse managers and boat captains. Patrician 3 tacitly acknowledged that actually doing trading sucks, and incentivizes you to quickly move beyond having to actually do any trading and focus on the logistics of a production and shipping network and automating the actual act of trading with warehouse managers. If you're playing the game correctly, the amount of actual trading you, personally do quickly drops off a cliff.

While all that are technically true, it require a really really ANAL man handy with comprehensive excel shit. I mean absolute OCD here. Otherwise you wont leave the trading part any time soon~

Fans of trading can have fun for tens of hours while they gradually build up their expertise in learning how to use excel, how to create price list, how to create formula to ensure the autotrading process wont fuck you in the buttholes~

This is like the sentence "playing FNV's best part is building a mod". While that is technically true, we all know we are going to have fun with the existing mods first, for hundreds to thousands of hours, until all the fun run out and we can start paying attention to making mod.

 

[Victor1234]

Possibly the best part of trading is fight against a living economy. Patrician 3 illustrate this case well

No, no it doesn't. Patrician 3 illustrates the entertainment of building an economic empire. The actual process of TRADING is quickly something you outsource to auto buy/sell at a price line at the hands of your warehouse managers and boat captains. Patrician 3 tacitly acknowledged that actually doing trading sucks, and incentivizes you to quickly move beyond having to actually do any trading and focus on the logistics of a production and shipping network and automating the actual act of trading with warehouse managers. If you're playing the game correctly, the amount of actual trading you, personally do quickly drops off a cliff.

While all that are technically true, it require a really really ANAL man handy with comprehensive excel shit. I mean absolute OCD here. Otherwise you wont leave the trading part any time soon~

Fans of trading can have fun for tens of hours while they gradually build up their expertise in learning how to use excel, how to create price list, how to create formula to ensure the autotrading process wont fuck you in the buttholes~

This is like the sentence "playing FNV's best part is building a mod". While that is technically true, we all know we are going to have fun with the existing mods first, for hundreds to thousands of hours, until all the fun run out and we can start paying attention to making mod.

While a staple of nearly every game in this genre, the automation/trade route features are always very hit or miss even without getting into the actual money part of whether when it works, it makes or loses you money. I forgot how P3's is, but the Guild's was always bugged, Trade Empires was functional but didn't have many options so you still had to micro and ditto for Merchant Prince/Machiavelli.

By contrast, it works fairly well in Guild 3, but the game feels very sterile as a result because the other aspects of what you'd spend the money on are terrible. It's probably the first game where I've felt worse from watching money effortlessly roll in.

 

[blessed king of longing]

One thing I liked about Escape Velocity (the first, not sure if Override or Nova did this) you could rent a ton of freighters to make the trading go a lot faster, but all those freighters ended up attracting pirates you'd have to defend the freighters against.

nova did do this, and you also had to be careful that your daily escorts don't cost more than you have when buying goods or you lose them and what they're carrying

 

[Old One]

Escape Velocity games are trading as a means to an end, the end being boat pimping, though. You don't do trading in EV because you enjoy trading, you do it because you want out of that shitty shuttle and into a pimping ride. Once you have your pimpest boat, you will never touch trading again. This is where EV then falls on its face, where the game fails to acknowledge your ownership of the greatest pimpmobile in the known galaxy or the fact that you are now solo-conquering everything for lulz in said pimpmobile.

I never cared for the pimpmobile parts of the game; it's all about the trading for me.

Obviously you want to get out of the shuttle as fast as possible, but as soon as you get any other ship it becomes a lot more fun. Not only that, there are lots of trading missions, and there are different kinds of trading to do since you can be a fast small-cargo trader or a huge, slow bulk trader. With bulk trading you can make unfathomable amounts of credits, but you also have to assemble a fleet of cargo haulers which will inevitably attract pirates, which is usually the reason you end up getting a warship at all: to defend your freighters.

The storylines are there whenever you've amassed an enormous fortune and you're ready to progress to the end of the game.

 

[laclongquan]

While a staple of nearly every game in this genre, the automation/trade route features are always very hit or miss even without getting into the actual money part of whether when it works, it makes or loses you money. I forgot how P3's is, but the Guild's was always bugged, Trade Empires was functional but didn't have many options so you still had to micro and ditto for Merchant Prince/Machiavelli.

By contrast, it works fairly well in Guild 3, but the game feels very sterile as a result because the other aspects of what you'd spend the money on are terrible. It's probably the first game where I've felt worse from watching money effortlessly roll in.

Patrician 3 and Port Royale 2 auto-trade work for some cycle until the delays build up and create misstep. Thus even with a working auto-trade, you still need to check in town to see if they work in time. The delays can come from a pirate capturing such trade ships, or the distance make the schedule opening up a misstep after every few cycles etc and etc...
So to fantasy of building a working schedule and duplicate it then leave them running to make money is just that, a fantasy~

 

[JarlFrank]

One thing I liked about Escape Velocity (the first, not sure if Override or Nova did this) you could rent a ton of freighters to make the trading go a lot faster, but all those freighters ended up attracting pirates you'd have to defend the freighters against.

I like trading when it's a thing you can organize at a global level, running several convoys etc.
But I'm not a fan of playing as a single freighter pilot who has to personally load his ship and go on trading runs on his own.
Same thing with those survival games where you build and craft a base on your own, but I love RTS games like Age of Empires or Stronghold.

Trading and survival/craft games feel like you're playing the role of a single villager in Age of Empires. It's exciting when you manage a dozen villagers but it becomes tedious if you play the role of a single vil.

 

[Old One]

I like Patrician 3 a lot too, but I always had trouble controlling the sea battles. If that part worked better it would outstanding.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

Playing Uncharted Waters on DOS along with learning how to use a simple Curses-based spreadsheet program. By the time I'm done I'll be autistic enough to breeze through Elite and Patrician.

 

[Norfleet]

I like Patrician 3 a lot too, but I always had trouble controlling the sea battles. If that part worked better it would outstanding.

The sea battles aren't hard to control unless you're trying to deal with multiple units. Equip only one ship to fight, have the others immediately book it off the edge of the map.