Sins Forums
You get (most) income from your longest route, which has to be connected to every planet. What do you do about uncolonizable ones? Do I recall seeing an item in a patch about this, and/or do you have to build something without colonizing?
What are you talking about, the longest route is not connected to every planet, that's the point.
Also in Entrenchment you can build trade ports ins tarbases for uncolonizable areas. However in vanilla your route will go across gas giants, storms, suns, magnetic clouds, wormholes, and asteroid belts. Only Dead Asteroid wills top your route.
ok, ty, but you're still trying to construct one long route for a bonus, right?
the amount of money each port generates is based on the length of the route. if the route has a length of 0 (meaning you only have trade ports on 1 planet) they only produce 1 cred/sec. ports gain something like +0.2 or 0.3 creds/sec for each additional phase lane included in the longest route. on big maps i've been able to get trade ports that produce like 2.6 creds/sec each. thats a really long trade route, 8 phase lanes long.
you have to create a path through your empire with no cycles in it. cycles don't count, they don't add to the length of the route so don't complete the circle if you can avoid it. think about just making one long line. or make a big circle but don't connect the ends.
i don't understand why the cycles stop being counted. it should count your trade route as 'one go around the cycle'. i've had trade routes 8-10 long drop down to 2-3 just because i completed the cycle. stupid...
It seems the more I read about trade ports and how they work, the less I understand it. As an Advent player (primarily), I have to make a decision every game whether to switch a trade port to resource focus or not, or just throw up another Trade port and have one do resource focus for each of my planets (I've read that resource focussed trade ports for Advent ONLY affect the gravity well they are in whereas other factions can have 1 refinery for every couple of planets).
If the income from trade ports is based solely on the longest route, couldn't I theoretically change all the trade ports between the two farthest planets to resource focus and not lose too many credits? Is it better to just build two trade ports in each grav well and have one do resource focus? Clarifications/opions welcomed! Thanks!
-Gil102
i think its better to have no trade ports do resource focus and to just buy the crystal or metal from the black market.
compare:
a crystal world with 4 resource rocks, each producing 0.5 crystal/sec, total resource output of 2.0
a trade port on resource focus will produce either 8% or 15% additional resources at this grav well only. for +8% you've gained .16 crystal/sec, for 15% you've gained .3 crystal sec.
the amount of time it takes to generate 100 crystal from this is either 625 seconds (8%) or 333 seconds (15%).
if you have a regular trade port that produces 2.0 creds/sec you will produce 1250 or 666 credits. assuming you're buying with the quick buy button you're spending on average 500 credits for 100 crystal (more or less depending on boom/crash cycles). so if you had just kept the ports on credit mode you'd be able to buy your crystal and have a surplus of either 750 credits or 166 credits.
bottom line: resource focus is a total waste and is a broken mechanic. it should never be used. it was very much designed for the Sins 1.0 black market system and has not been updated to reflect the current black market system in Sins. just get the credits, always.
ImpurityXIII,
its not a bug. trade routes are the longest path through the graph in terms of absolute distance of node separation. this is why cycles don't count, if you could go around the cycle and count it the distance might as well be infinite.
i know its not a topic that many people take in school, but there's a field of mathematics called Graph Theory that deals with this stuff explicitly. if you're interested in knowing more about the terminology and theorems go check it out, there are some good articles on Wikipedia.
Wohoo, another math geek! People like us got to stick together, that's karma for you 
It's not a bug in the detection... It's a condition of the weighted graph graph problem. A cycle in the graph means that there is no beginning and no end. So the algorithm they use requires that there are no cycles. They can detect a cycle, but they don't want the cycle to count for obvious reasons. In short, it's the science underlying the game.
Transitive,
Thanks for your response. I had considered this as well and the last two games, I completely ignored Resource Focus and didn't feel like I was missing anything. Thanks for making it simple.
-Gil102
Also, every trade port gets more valuable when the chain gets longer. No trade port is worth more than any other. So as long as you have 1 on every port on the longest route, it doesn't matter where you build any future ports (unless doing so shortens the route).
To find the longest route, you can't just think of it as a longest distance thing. You have to think of it as a shortest longest distance thing. You get a bonus for the longest trade route. However, people are smart (think the free market...), and they are going to find the shortest distance between any two given ports. So if you have a circle (a - b - c - d - e - a) filled with trade ports, your longest trade route is 2. The length between a and d is 2 (not 3). However, if you don't put a trade port on e, you increase the length of the longest route, because traders can't go from a to d except by first moving through b and c. At planets like e, it MIGHT be worthwhile to build a refinery. Also, refineries collect resources from grav wells 1 jump away (I think) so you need to take that into account.
To answer an original question, to made the trade chain go over things like plasma storms, you need to build a starbase with trade enabled.
Good thread. I've been noticing that even when I place a SB with Trade into a Star/Plasma/Dead that my line hasn't been passing through that Star/Plasma/Dead into my other planets on the other side. Shouldn't it?
While I see where you graph theorists are coming from, I'm not sure it ever makes sense for you to lose trade income because you built an extra trade port. Maybe the algorithm calculating the length of your trade route should evaluate distance by the number of phase jumps apart worlds are, regardless of whether or not those phase jumps are included in the trade route. That way adding trade ports is always advantageous, it is just more advantageous to add routes at the edges of your empire.
for that to work you'd have to a specific point of origin. Trade Port Zero, so to speak. there's no real way to do this with existing game mechanics. you could borrow the Planet Alliegance mechanic (which is based on number of phase jumps away from the Home World) if you had a way of creating a Trade Port Zero, but other than that its a no go.
also, i kinda like the fact that the current system requires a slightly deeper level of understanding to optimize. its more fun that way. making it simpler and easier would lower the amount of skill based factors in the game. that would cut down the learning curve but also make the game shallower in general. i like it deep.
I understand the basis of graph theory as it applies to trade route detection, but simply because the algorithm to detect the longest path is correct and optimal, it doesn't mean this is the way things should work in game.
The basic premise behind trade in economics is that it creates efficiency.. i.e. it is more efficient for some people in location X to create resource x and trade with the people in location Y for resource y than it is for the people at location X to create both x and y. Basically, when you increase trade capacity, you are "creating" wealth by allowing more optimization of resource production. This also means you are creating more resources per amount of work. In essence, any time you ease trade restrictions (whether it is by changing a law or inventing the rail road), the amount of value gained per amount of work for the system increases. It has nothing to do with the longest trade route.. this is a myth possibly originating with the silk road.
Distance does factor into trade in one way. It increases the cost of trade. If X and Y are very far apart, it might cost more to transport resources between the two than it would for each to produce both x and y themselves. In addition, if x can only be produced at X and y can only be produced at Y (rare resources), then the cost of buying resource x at location Y is high.. and thus more taxable. Thus, the illusion of greater profits from trade over distance. The reality is that adding more efficiency to the system may mean lower sale prices and lower tax income per unit of resource, but it also means a much greater volume of resource is traded.. net tax revenue will increase.
For Sins, all this means is that the trade network system currently makes no sense. Example: you have a network of planets connected by trade routes a-b-c-d-e. As was used in the example posted earlier, d is currently 3 jumps from a. If you then connect e to a giving you a-b-c-d-e-a, d is only 2 jumps from a. In SINS, this means your tax revenue from trade decreases. In reality, this situation would mean the cost of transporting goods from a to d would decrease, meaning an increase in volume of goods transported and an increase in the number and size of competitive traders vying for the market. The increased efficiency of the new route means more people are getting more of what they want than they could before at lower prices than they could before. No matter how you look at it, this increases the net value of the entire system, including the amount of tax the government should be recieving. SINS method is flawed.
The only time that increasing efficiency of a trade network would not result in an increase in income would be if resource production was already maxed out. Without the ability to produce more of x, creating a situation that reduces the cost of transporting x will be offset by the laws of supply and demand.. forcing the price to remain high because supply can't increase. This is far more complex than the SINS economic situation though and can safely be ignored. In any case, it does not result in a loss of tax revenue.
(side note) Those of you who argue for protectionist trade policy have a point.. namely it is possible for one element within a trade network to be operating at a net loss compared to another. The system as a whole always becomes more efficient when trade restrictions are lifted, but certain elements within the network may be less well off than before. This is also well outside the realm of SINS, unless the new expansion takes into account inter-empire trade in a more meaningful way 
I left off my conclusion!
Basically, given what I wrote above, a better simulation would be to slightly increase individual trade port tax income every time a new planet is added to the trade network. This is extremely simple to do from a coding perspective and provides a more accurate representation of the efficiencies of increased trade. For better simulation, the effect of adding planet X+1 to the trade network could result in diminishing increases in efficiency.. to a point.
Even better, this could allow for the meaningful introduction of rare resources. This would give reason for conducting planet surveys.. if you detect a "rare" resource on a distant planet that wouldn't normally be worth connecting to your trade network, it becomes very very worth while to get that resource in your network as it would give a significant boost to individual trade hub output. With this mechanic, you could have viable confrontations over planets with rare resources, instead of simply over someone's homeworld. A "spice" planet could make or break the economy of one player and result in conflict that isn't centered around taking someone's homeworld. The more I think of it, the more I love this additional dynamic. Maybe that's just because I thought of it though.. what do you guys think? It is different than the current system where individual planets can have rare resources that affect that planet alone.. those bonuses are typically marginal. This new kind of resource bonus could be very significant but would depend on the player already having an existing functional trade network, and on trade networks functioning as I outlined. Aha! Even more than just conquering the planet, a player could cut off the trade route to the planet to deprive his opponent of the spoils.. even if he didn't have the ability to take the (potentially heavily) fortified planet at that time.
i think your ideas would apply nicely to a slightly different sort of game. the empire management in Sins is a bit more simplified than what you seem to be describing. if there were actual unique trade goods being carted around on those ships it would make alot of sense to track exactly where those goods are going to and use that data to generate an income rate. as is though there's no real distinction between the trade goods of one planet or another, thus the simplified "longest trail" trade system we currently have.
i'm inclined to agree with you, in principle, that the trade system would be improved by making it more detailed and slightly more realistic. however, given what we've got i rather like the way it is. there's at least some kind of trick to learn in order to master it even if its a relatively nonsensical trick.
I don't think you would need a trade point zero. Every pair of grav wells has a distance between them, and you would just need to find the pair that maximizes that distance. It'd actually be very similar to the way it's done now, it would just assume, for path-finding purposes, that all grav wells have a trade port.
However, I don't think the way it is now is necessarily nonsensical. The reason trade becomes more valuable as the chain gets longer is that it's riskier for the trade ships to travel the entire distance between ports, as they are more likely to get picked off by an enemy fleet (and econ 101 says >risk = >reward). There is some problem when you think about the fact that they only travel through planets with trade ports, but the opposite problem is actually worse. What if you had a ring of 6 planets, each of which had a trade port except for one. If you own this planet, it seems obvious that the trade should flow across it to decrease the distance between the two ports at the gap. However, if this is an enemy planet, clearly the trade ships should just go around. However, this actually puts you at a disincentive to even take over the planet, and that's just ridiculous. It seems like the way it's done now is kind of the lesser of many evils.
i think in additional to graph theory, there also the consideration of the size of the planetary gravity well, the larger the gravity well, more likely it will avoid it, however, if you trade ports across the systems, your longest trade route would be thru the star system
to me, i don't really care, I just build my refineriy and trade ports and let the computer do the math.
I don't mean to suggest anything as complicated as tracking specific trade goods on trade ships.. The simple version is simply to replace the longest route system with a number of connected trade ports system. This simulates the reality that increasing trade allows for increased specialization and efficiency at every point in the route. The more advanced idea was to include so called "rare" resources on certain planets to simulate the reality that certain goods can only be produced in certain areas, thus making them much more valuable to your trade network. All these special planets would do is provide a more substantial bonus to the trade income of every trade port.. instead of the marginal increase that adding a new planet to the network would otherwise provide. No tracking trade resources or anything complicated like that.. the system is only marginally more complex than the existing one in that these special planets with rare resources would be more valuable than other planets (similar to how planets with artifacts are more valuable), thus making them higher priority targets. Cutting off the trade routes to such planets would simply involve destroying trade ports in neighboring systems.
On the other hand, I'm not so much of an optimist as to believe that SINS will ever use such a method. The existing system isn't perfect but it isn't really badly broken either.
I put a trade port on every planet (sometimes multiple trade ports) in Vanilla Sins and my trade path is always the longest 5 paths and updates whenever i add a new trade port to a longer route. Have never noticed any problems that you guys are talking about.
Also, about the resource focus, if you search and find a resource bonus to the planet and it has 3-4 of that type, stack some trade ports and set it to resource focus and you just cranked up the amount of resources from that one planet significantly. Ive had 4 mineral nodes with base ~2.0 or so income from them combined and then add the resource discovery of say 20-30% mineral extraction bonus and then add 3 or so trade ports on resource focus for huge boost to mineral income.
In general, though, I usually ignore the resource focus until I make a discovery like the above. Most of the time, it's just a waste or time for 2-3 different nodes with no bonuses and eventual fleet tax on top of it.
if thats what you meant then a system similar to that is already in place. ice worlds in particular are likely to come up with Massive Pure Glaciers, Megafauna, or Helium Rich Atmosphere. these are bonuses to trade port income at that planet. quite large ones actually. furthermore, you might discover a bonus you didn't have before if you do planet exploration. exploring doesn't just look for artifacts it can also find planetary bonuses.
with regards to the "largest number of connected ports", i think that could actually be done pretty easily using another theorem of Graph Theory. in a graph the Euler Number is the degree of each node. degree refers to number of edges connected to a node. Eulerian graphs are of equal degree so the Euler Number is trivial to calculate. you'd have to do some kind of averaging to come up with that number in an irregular graph like we have in Sins, but it could be done.
that type of system would make "hub" worlds the most valuable. building a trade port at a hub would increase income by alot because it would increase your average degree by a good amount.
interesting thoughts. im sure there were plenty of perfectly good ways the system could have been implemented.
To summarise just a simple question:
Now:
Yes if the asteroid/planet does not have a negative impact on the route, then it is good to build a tradeport there. All trade ports in the empire make as much money as the longest traderoute allows. With exception of starabse tradeports which make more than regular tradeports (about 30% more for lvl 1 port), but are still benefited by the longest route.
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