Trading formulas

[Wilhelm]

I've worked out the TradeWars price formulas. (Someone has probably already figured this out, but I didn't see this information out there on the net.) I'm guessing that a lot of TW players are just as geeky as me, so maybe someone will find this interesting.

Each port has a hidden attribute, which I'm going to call Elasticity, for each of the three resources. You can easily estimate the Elasticity if you have a Psychic Probe. Just accept the port's initial offer and look at the probe results, then use this formula:

Elasticity = round((100 / Probe - 1) * 1000)

This gives you a number between about 20 and 110. Once you have the Elasticity, you can use it to estimate the best price for a transaction based on the port's initial offer:

Price = Offer * (1 - Elasticity / 1000) when buying
Price = Offer * (1 + Elasticity / 1000) when selling

But what's more interesting is that you can use the Elasticity and the port's "% of max" value to estimate the price. This is very helpful for figuring out the value of a trading pair from the CIM report.

Offset = ResourceFactor * Elasticity * Percent / 100 + Random(DailyLow, DailyHigh)
UnitPrice = MiddlePrice - Offset (but not less than 4) when buying
UnitPrice = MiddlePrice + Offset when selling

ResourceFactor is 0.3 for Fuel Ore, 0.5 for Organics, and 0.9 for Equipment. MiddlePrice is 25.5 for Ore, 50.5 for Organics, and 90.5 for Equipment. If the calculated price is less than 4, it's increased to somewhere between 4 and 5. Random produces a random integer from DailyLow to DailyHigh. The DailyLow and DailyHigh values are the same for all ports, but they change every day at midnight server time. DailyLow is typically about 0 to 12, and DailyHigh is about 0 to 6 higher than the day's low. This means that trading is much more profitable on some days than others. Also, some days the prices are very consistent, and other days they are more random.

Happy trading!

[Wilhelm]

This is interesting... The daily trading values are based on the day of the week. Monday the range is 0-5 (bad trading day), Tuesday is 7-7, Wednesday 10-11, Thursday 9-9, Friday 11-12, Saturday 11-14, and Sunday 10-12.