Game 325: Star Trader

Download my fixed codebase of Star Trader here:
https://drive.google.com/uc?authuser=0&id=1U0PLl7an_7t7Lwt9Rbn6adIPfD0zKbx2&export=download

Download a compatible BASIC interpreter here:
http://www.moondew.com/basic/

 

Elite, the next whale, is seminal, combining two precedented genres - space combat and trading - and establishing the open world space combat trade sim template, which to this day is niche but nevertheless in use by games such as Egosoft's X series, No Man's Sky, EVE Online, and of course the Elite series itself, now owned by original co-creator David Braben's Frontier Developments. SunDog: Frozen Legacy attempted something similar earlier the same year, but with less success, doing neither aspect particularly well, and also blending Ultima-style world exploration in a way that far overstayed its welcome, becoming more of a hinderance to gameplay progression than an interesting element in its own right.

The space combat precedent to Elite is clearly Atari's Star Raiders, and possibly a bit of Star Wars for its vector graphics. Space trading had been done (rather badly) earlier by Broderbund's Galactic Trader, which I had speculated, and still do, may had been influenced by the 1974 BASIC game Star Trader, which is known to have inspired the Drug Wars family of trading games as well as the multiplayer game Trade Wars. I don't know if any of these early space trading games directly influenced Elite - Wikipedia alludes to the possibility - but either way, Star Trader seems too important to ignore.

Star Trader's original HP BASIC code has been preserved, but it initially displayed some formatting errors when run with Tom Nelson's interpreter. I have tweaked the code for better formatting, but it isn't perfect. I have further tweaked it to allow solo play; the initial program required at least two players. To use it, download and extract the interpreter, my code, extract the two files into the same directory as Basic.exe, and drag the file $TRADER onto Basic.exe (or run "BASIC.exe $TRADER" from the command prompt). Ensure Caps Lock is on.

In solo mode, Star Trader provides you with two trade ships, each commanded separately and with its own inventory, and four planets to visit and trade on. Two-player mode has eight planets, and three or four players get twelve. I played solo, and named my ships the MARY M and the NITE W.

One of the common features of these games is the concealed price information, forcing you to look at regional pricing to figure out where each good can be bought low and sold high, but this isn't the case here. All goods fit into two categories - raw material, and product. The consistent rule is that raw materials - uranium, metals, and gems, are bought cheaply on "undeveloped" worlds and sold at a profit on "developed" ones, while products - heavy equipment, medicine, and software - are the opposite. In a solo game, SOL is the only "developed" world.

Your ships start off loaded with products, so I sent mine to the nearby worlds of REEF and KIRK.

 

Although you can count on making a per-item profit with every trade, you can't count on consistent supply and demand. Here, REEF only needed 3 of my 15 heavy equipments. For this, they offered $12,700, which I was able to barter up to $14,100.

The trick to bartering, I discovered quickly, is to divide the offer by 0.9 and round down to the nearest $100. It works every single time.

 

When buying goods, you can get a bargain by dividing the asking price by 1.1 and rounding up to the nearest $100. Software and gems, incidentally, take up no space at all in the hold.

 

I effectively traded 17 products for 14 raw materials at a gain of $36,800.

You then have to decide where to send the ship next, and annoyingly, the game doesn't update you on your ships current cash load and inventory before asking. The straightforward decision, which I took this time, would be to alternate between SOL and undeveloped worlds.

What I eventually wound up doing, after an unprofitable return to SOL where I was carrying too many unsellable products rather than the raw materials they needed, was to only return to SOL whenever my raw materials manifest was larger than my products. Otherwise, I'd go to one of the other undeveloped planets. It was also clear that each system's supply and demand was persistent and growing over time; otherwise it would have made sense to just go back and forth between REEF and SOL ad nauseum.

Generally, I made cash profits in the range of $30k to $70k with each trip, selling my needed goods high and buying up planetary goods low. There were only a few trips where I lost cash, all of them at SOL, where I bought many more goods than I was able to sell. Incidentally, the most profitable trips of all were also at SOL, when their raw good demands happened to align perfectly with what I was able to bring from the outer worlds.

At SOL, you can also deposit your cash in the bank, and I did this with every visit, depositing every dollar to maximize interest. As I was already making a cash profit with each visit to the outer worlds, I did not once find myself unable to snatch up cheap goods on the proceeds from sold products. In fact, only one trip, to REEF near the end of the game, even had a disappointing yield.

Eventually, January 2075 rolled around. REEF upgraded itself to a class II world, switching its economy type, but it didn't matter. The game was over, and I had myself a tidy capital gains of $889,484 up from my initial investment of $280,000. Perhaps I could have optimized my strategy better by taking into account supply & demand trends as well as prices, and by taking route paths into consideration (the KIRK-SOL route was very long, and HOOK was far from everything), but I was satisfied.

 

GAB rating: Below average. Star Trader is just too simplistic to be all that enjoyable. At least it's brief, and not a broken mess like Galactic Trader. Maybe I'm not giving it a fair chance by not playing in multiplayer as intended, but I have a hard time imagining that this accomplishes much more than just boring multiple people at once. The only real strategy I can see, apart from just being better at math than your opponents, is to interfere by screwing with the supply chain - e.g., unloading gems at SOL so that your opponent can't sell his there. Even this doesn't seem like a viable strategy with any fewer than four players, as with 2 or 3, there are exactly as many developed worlds as there are players.

I kept a trading log of my session. Note that the final column, representing total cash, does not include the value of goods nor of interest earned.

MARY M	System	Δ Raw	Δ Prod	Δ $K	Σ Raw	Σ Prod		NITE W	System	Δ Raw	Δ Prod	Δ $K	Σ Raw	Σ Prod	Σ $K
1/1/2070	SOL				0	35		1/1/2070	SOL				0	35	10
4/12/2070	REEF	14	-17	36.8	14	18		6/22/2070	KIRK	18	-21	40.5	18	14	87
7/16/2070	SOL	-14	36	-28.3	0	54		12/13/2070	SOL	-18	26	16.4	0	40	75
3/8/2071	HOOK	19	-25	65.6	19	29									141
4/3/2071	KIRK	18	-22	52	37	7		4/8/2071	REEF	20	-21	67.2	20	19	260
								8/3/2071	SOL	-17	33	-15	3	52	245
								3/18/2072	HOOK	20	-26	69.2	23	26	314
9/17/2072	SOL	-35	47	88.3	2	54									403
12/28/2072	REEF	0	-5	30	2	49		3/29/2073	KIRK	18	-20	43	41	6	475
								9/27/2073	SOL	-36	48	90.1	5	54	566
10/26/2073	HOOK	20	-21	39.2	22	28		1/22/2074	REEF	13	-6	10	18	48	615
								12/13/2074	HOOK	21	-21	36.9	39	27	652
12/14/2074	KIRK	18	-22	52	40	6									704