It’s faster, more efficient and scale very well with crowded maps. Then, at both the station AI level (local trading) and the faction AI level (inter sector trading), those missions are attributed to the most suitable trading vessels available. It can be compared to a mission board, factories post missions like “need 100 energy cells” or “10 javelin missiles available” to this board when needed. In UG, most of the decision process (where to buy, where to sell) is not done by the ships but by the station themselves. More to the point ships have no guarantee that what they want is still there when they arrive at destination. This is something that doesn’t scale well at all as the computing cost grow exponentially as the amount of traders and factories increases. In X, any of them, each trading vessel scan the whole universe for stations sell/buying what they want. Compared to X, it’s a much more efficient system. What’s more interesting is how the transit of wares is happening. In other words, space trading simulator 101. Factories use those resources to make basic wares that are, in turn, used to make more advanced ones and so on. Raw materials can be found in the right sectors through mining asteroids (3 kinds so far, probably more later) and solar panels (raw energy, basically used for everything). And, of course, sectors lacking a particular product will buy it for an higher price than sectors having too much of it. Trading stations collect wares produced by factories and act as the main trading hub of each sector, they can also act as resource sink if there’s an overflow of a particular product. So ship producing facilities can be put into the galaxy without additional coding.

Except that coding wise, anything in the game is a ware, including ships, weapons and so on. The factories produce wares periodically using resources, very similar to X.

The game has 2 main station types: Factories and Trading Ports. Most of the following is already implemented in my current development build. In this article I will get into details about the economic system used in Unending Galaxy.

Unending galaxy trainer mrantifun