Incredibly simple suggestion to help traders (partly inspired by Quill18)

[Creat]

Hello,

Quill18 has mentioned a tiny little improvement he'd like to see that I've also thought about (and hoped for) since much earlier versions: Add an indicator for the price-levels in the shop.

Every item (in particular trade goods though) has a "default price" and it can be more or less expensive to buy/sell it in any station. Weather a price is below or above the default price is obviously very important for trading. I'm hoping you could add a small visual indication for the price as part of the symbol/indicator in the shop. It could be a up or down arrow to indicate a higher or lower price, or something like +, ++, +++ and -, --, --- to indicate a slightly, noticeably, significantly higher/lower price, if you are willing to provide a more precise indicator than just a simple above/below the default value.

This would negate the tedium of having to mouse-over every single item (particularly the trade items) to see the how "good" the price in the current station is. It should also be rather trivial to implement this, so I'm really hoping this can be added reasonably quickly!

Thanks!
Creat

[Silberspeer]

Sounds reasonable, we'll consider it.

[Creat]

That is excellent, thank you!

[James009]

One additional tweak you could implement is an "average purchased price" display indicating the average price you purchased an item was (I say average because you'll likely have stacks of items at different prices). That way if we purchase medical supplies at A and goto B we'll see that we originally purchased them for 149 credits. You could tie this into an early level Trader skill and help make those more beneficial too.

One more thing you could add is a way to see or track economic prices, supply and demand, and things like shortages and surplus from your ship and within stations. There needs to be some way for merchants to plan this stuff out rather then just winging it and going on a journey. Right now the prices feel to random.

On that note, I know you guys are doing an economic patch in the future and cannot wait!

[ForceUser]

Actually if I may a much better way to visualize prices and if they are above or below the average price would be to color code them. By using red and green (or any hot/cold color contrast for color blind assist) you can immediately see at a glance what items are above or below default price.

In the market inventory have anything below default be green and anything above default be red. In the player station inventory have anything that is above default be green and below default be red.

Additionally you can have instead of say +. ++. +++ you can just increase or decrease the intensity of the color, or go from deep red to orange to yellow (for when the price is the same as default price) to green to bright green for very good prices.

This is very powerful though so I would highly recommend you tie this to a skill in the cargo skill branch or even have trader characters start with it.