It would likely require significant work to create, but it would be really cool to have trade play a more important role in the game. Right now your civilian shipping can trade with NPC races, but at least from my experience it's fairly rare and a fairly small part of your or their economy. It would be much more realistic as well as (more importantly) more rich from a gameplay and strategy perspective if civilian trade between players/NPCs were a more significant part of the economy. Then you could intentionally manipulate it to your betterment and your enemy's detriment. Some ideas include:
- Increase magnitude of income generated by civilian inter-system trade. This could be hand waved by saying that yes you have lots of wine in Sol, but your citizens want to try wine styles from system xyz because it's novel. Ditto for spices, drugs, etc.
- Allow players and NPCs to set prices and quantities of TN minerals they're willing to sell or buy. This would enable a whole new strategic level of play, since you don't necessarily need to have mining access to all mineral types, just allies willing to sell to you, and your enemies may get their Duranium from an ally that you could cut off.
- You could establish (or let happen in an automated fashion) tariffs for trade that isn't with you but flows through a system you control. NPCs could do the same to you or other NPCs
- Diplomacy could be expanded to include economic factors
I suspect this would be a lot of work to develop and bug-test. It also may not be fully do-able without an overhaul of the diplomatic system and/or the AI for NPCs, both of which are probably not imminent on Steve's to-do list. That said, it would be really cool and add an additional strategy and RP layer which I think many players would find attractive, and hopefully Steve would as well.
Note, I also posted this in the v2.4.0 suggestions thread, but please keep any discussion of this idea here rather than clutter up that thread.
