Economy: Supply And DemandWe improved the economy so that factories create a perceptible supply and demand. This supply and demand is regional and will directly influence the prices of goods. High demand -> high prices and vice versa. Most importantly: You can influence this by founding or destroying factories, so go nuts! Very high demand lets prices rise up to 130% of their base price, while high supply can make them go as low as 70%. Combined with other factors such as reputation or current factory stock, prices can range between ~50% and ~150%, giving you a potential 100% revenue.

IMPORTANT: Existing SavesIMPORTANT: This affects existing saves! The galaxy generation algorithms have changed and sectors visited BEFORE the update still have the factories of the old algorithms. This means that the supply/demand prediction will mismatch around those sectors. You can fix this easily by simply visiting those sectors. Their factories will be updated into the galactic trade network and supply/demand prediction around them will correct itself.
Although, if you've been thinking about starting a new playthrough anyways, now would be a good time.


Trading System UpgradeWith 'Exotic' and 'Legendary' type Trading System Upgrades you can now view above supply and demand fields on the galaxy map for every single trading good. This is a massive help when finding your own trading routes, since you can now see where to go to buy cheap and sell high!


Technical BackgroundIn order to make the above changes happen, we had to do some major restructuring of the procedural generation algorithms. We are now able to reliably predict most of the content of a sector, without having to generate it (thus saving a lot of performance). This is probably mostly important for modders, but it's going to help us a lot with development in the future. Yay!


Faction Territory MapsA feature that we have wanted for a long time and that basically came for free with the above changes are buyable faction territory maps. You can now buy different maps of a faction's territory, making it easier to find the perfect gate route or trade route.

Consumer Station ChangesConsumer stations such as habitats, casinos and biotopes (also: mines, shipyards, repair docks, etc) now behave a little differently. Previously, they just bought goods and used them up to create an end point for goods in the economy tree. Since all they do is buy and essentially destroy goods, players would not get any advantage by founding those stations themselves. In order to remedy this, we allowed those stations to "buy" goods for free, so that players can just pick up those goods every once in a while. This led to a few economical issues and made those consumer stations massively overpowered (imagine getting regular free deliveries of 50 body armors or mining robots).
We changed the behavior in this update. Players now have to pay for the goods bought by consumer stations (if they're configured to buy goods). But when the population of the station uses up the good, they buy them from players first, for a 5% increased price than what the player paid for them. This nets the player a long-term 5% profit from all goods bought by their consumer stations.


Difficulty ChangesWe're changing the difficulty settings. We got a lot of feedback telling us that the game is too easy, and we saw that the current 'Insane' difficulty is actually more of an 'Expert' mode. At the same time we had a few difficulties that seemed arbitrary. The 'Insane' difficulty that you've known until now is now 'Expert'. 'Veteran' got quite a bit harder, and 'Normal' and below difficulties remain almost unchanged. We've added a 'Hardcore' Mode and 'Insane' is now 'Hardcore' with additionally ramped up damage.

Some of these changes aren't final yet, but so far they performed well on the beta branch, so we're setting them live for everyone now and will be listening closely for your feedback. We're planning a few more improvements to difficulties, such as bigger, badder and more specialized enemies. Sadly those changes didn't fit into this update, but you can expect them in one of the next updates!

Bugfixes

• [UBR] Fixed an issue with Trading Posts where prices would fluctuate between it and Trading System Upgrade
• [UBR] Player stations' prices are no longer influenced by relations to other buying/selling factions
• [UBR] Fixed warning message about missing Reconstruction Tokens when on Hardcore or higher difficulty