Matrix Games Forums

More question hanging around, not too convinced from older post.
Especially the Trade Bonus is unclear.
Just being in FTA agreement does make extra income out of nowhere?

To the begin with, what is exactly the trade?

Lets say there are two empires in one corner of map, Apple Empire and Orange Empire.
Apple lacks steel. Orange has enough of it.
If Apple civil freighter picks up steel from Orange empire space port (do they?)
or mining station(I've seen this), does Apple civil sector pay the money to the
Orange civil sector?
If this is so, is this gross sale/gross purchase implied in GDP in balance sheet in F6 window?

So back to FTA or Mutual Defense Pact, which give 20~30% 'Bonus'.
Or is trade some abstract idea where both parties gain out of nowhere?

I don't know, but if you look at base inventories, you can see owner flags. So I figure the trade happens when either the goods is "reserved", picked up, or delivered.

And as far as I have seen foreign freighters come to my space ports, and my freighters fly goods from my spaceport to their colony. I am not sure the civilians works for one empire only. I should study those buggers even more carefully [:)]. I think I have even seen goods belonging to different empires in the hold of the same freighter, but that may just have been me dreaming...

Yeah, civil sector is really interesting thing.
Someone said its little like SimCity in space but it truly is. Minions doing their own business.
Could be fun if some civilian started assembling mega space bound structure colony if technology advance enough.
You could get extra strategic(research) and income from there.

But trade 'Bonus' sounds really superfluous and fishy. Are there some kind of alchemy going on?
Usually in free trade agreement means strong company gets stronger = rich gets richer poor and week gets more so.
So this seems like there's no bad effect and only good things happening just from declaring
'ah we are good friends so we do fta! ta da~n'
yeah...

The percentage increase on free trade bonus seems bogus, yes. But I guess it is an abstraction of "we trade freely, so we both prosper". They call it the same trade bonus, but rather than toll it is now rather increased revenue being taxed or something...

What really annoys me is the defense pact only being a glorified free trade agreement.

Not really. Free trade simply eases the burocracy and makes trades more efficient. Ofcourse it should increase revenue And for every big company hurting ones empire there is 20 fresh new companies in a new industry that benifits from the free trade.

So I guess I can interpret free trade agreement as

Between two parties which trust each other well enough, trade process can get more efficient and increase in volume from
trust between two parties, since it takes trustworthy partner to do a good business.

Like this...? I guess I'm convinced now.  Thanks for inputs both of you! ^_^b