I'm no economist, but I thought supply and demand determined prices, not the cost to bring the product to market. [...]
Of course. This is already in those consideration though. You could interpret it in a way like this: "High distance between colonies makes ship contact more rare, so the supply and demand levels experience greater disparity, making the trips more worthwhile."
Now, if fuel only costs 10 cent per AE, then that would be all we need to account for, but in reality (and likely much more dominant as factor in lengthy age-of-the-sail like space trips), the increased gains from high demand need to override the increased shipping/fuel costs that come with greater distance to make such a trip really worth more. (+risk and some other factors, but those are details..)
This is what that equation above was about too. d("demand")+d("risk")+d("fuel/shipping cost")<0 means you get a more worthwhile shipping once the advantage of the first two outpace the greater investment of the third.
..Counts for a mere choice consideration between differently distant locations, just as much as for how pricing develops when technology becomes better.(..or you strap on wasteful engines)
@alex_brunius
Because if in the future fuel costs are added distance works perfectly but time dont. You dont pay 10 times more for a shipping that takes 10 times longer to do the same work. It's common sense.
That is only true in the realm of the same technology where faster is indeed more expensive. If you are slower
and have more traveling expenses (mostly fuel) because of your technology being inferior though, you indeed end up paying more for less speed. So at a tech jump you see the opposite effect, and distance measurement can not emulate that.
It's also desirable for higher tech designs to earn more even in the current model without fuelcosts because the high tech designs is a much higher investment that will be harder to pay off with constant earnings (locked to time).
That the initial technology (/build-cost) investment works to offset this behavior is a valid point, but it is a one time investment at first (making it fade in relevance over time), and then secondly likely not the dominant expense. (shipping
is after all cheaper today than it used to be before, despite of expensive container ships)
The reason why I thought that time would work out as a measurement in Aurora though, is that in Aurora the engines for civils are fixed as always being the 0.5 power factor 25 HS design with a fixed percentage of engine allocation in a freighter too. So the whole "design fast wasteful taxi" thing is factored out in standard Aurora, meaning we never would actually have to face this effect were a fuel wasting 'fighter-engine' freighter would make cheaper trips despite blasting the fuel. What stays then is instead that only overall tech progression can make a freighter faster, and then we see this cheapening effect where it actually also makes sense.(partly because of the reaction time and reduced risk, but mostly because of the also saved fuel)
Fuel would probably be the best measurement of pricing, but it may be difficult or impossible to track for civils in Aurora. So then you have to decide between the other two options of either measuring time or distance.
- Measure distance: Freighting returns (per freighter) increase as technology goes up.
- Measure time: Freighting returns go down as technology progresses.
The second effect makes realistically more sense for the various reasons of the former answer, so I chose to mention that one instead.
Only way to tilt the effect is the technology investment cost you mentioned, but those would have to be quite big in comparison, and it would also be impossible to track them as they depends on how long designs stay in flight (/a tech era lasts), which is different from game to game. Too much consideration in the end, as the effect would be unnoticeable to players anyway. Even the time measurement would just be a make-shift approximation to a realistic answer, as you will probably research fuel efficiency (the realistically most saving factor) at different points to a total engine upgrade (which increase speed and thus would cause the
actual saving to appear ingame). First priority should always be to hold the calculation simple before realistic, and this could come close enough.
Now we are discussing so much about a thing that may likely not even be in the game...