Hello,

I was watching the latest stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27aTgU732_I) by TheCaptain, and he mentioned the idea of delayed buying of materials prior to a shortage occurring.   I have been thinking about it, and had some ideas I would like to share.

The main issue is the instant availability of goods if I buy 100 aluminum, I can instantly sell it again as soon as prices rise.  You could argue that is how the stock market works, but let us say it is not yours to sell until the resources have been delivered.  If we consider the in game mechanics (assuming teleportation has not been patented, or a building is not connected to the player's colony) resources have to be sent from a mine/production center to your base using a vehicle.  What if it purchased goods were sent from the map colony?  This would cause a delay in the availability of resources and could also potentially be slowed down using a magnetic storm by parties invested in a shortage.  To prevent the damage from being too serious, you could argue that the goods were insured for delivery by the seller (the colony) and have them resent.  This would slow down colony upgrades as well, and possibly other construction as a side effect though, but only a little.  This would provide a slight advantage to building close to the map colony though, but at the cost of resources being close by (in many cases anyway).

The other idea is having a quantity associated with each resource, considered the colony's stockpile.  The colony would consume/produce a minor amount and when a shortage or surplus occurs this would be the result of the colony producing/consuming more.  This would mean there is a limited number of resources available to be purchased.  This number would also be affected by the behavior of the players.  If everyone keeps selling water, there would be quite a surplus that could be purchased.   This could be used to block other players from getting required resources (no offworld for you!) but would be expensive to keep the resources unavailable.  Or since the map colony does not have the resources, it would need to be shipped from another colony(either instantly or by vehicle), justifying the shortage and increased cost.

I am certainly not a pro player and have not been here since the beginning, so I'm not aware of all the changes that have been made in the past.  So I apologize if any of this has been discussed before.