Finite Galactic Economy, No Spawning

[Nooop]

Nothing is spawned. AI empires have corporations that try to make profit using game mechanics.

Example:
AI empire wants to build a military ship. Spawn one? No! It collects its taxes and orders a ship from the shipyard company. That is what an empire is supposed to do, collect taxes and build military ships.

The shipyard company now with money from the empire and an order starts building the ship. It now needs to get the materials so it starts buying materials until fulfilled. If it doesn't get fulfilled it will raise the prices. That's what shipyard companies are supposed to do, sell ships and buy construction materials with the money.

The freighter company sees this and will set trade routes between suppliers and the shipyard in it's optimized trade route network (one thing ai should be good at). With the new profits from these trades it will use the money to build new freighters, which is what a freighter company is supposed to do, fulfill price imbalances and buy more freighters with the profit.

The shipbuilding materials station has been sitting on a full cargo hold with no buyers until now. So they lower the prices and stop buying iron. Then they are visited by a freighter destined for the shipyard and it takes it all. Now they have a low inventory and more money. They raise the price of its output and start buying iron. If iron does not arrive, it will raise the price of iron. That's what shipbuilding material companies do, they sell shipbuilding materials and use the money to buy iron. If it has enough extra credits it will found a new station.

Since the shipbuilding materials company has increased its price for iron, freighters are now visiting miners to fulfill the price imbalance. The miner company uses the extra money to build more miners because that's what miner companies do, they sell iron and buy more miners with the money.

The universe could have the Dwarf Fortress backstory generator and each empire starts with one drone at Prime and it builds it's fleets and stations from there. When you start you can choose the age of the universe you want, from just starting to build the first spaceship and empty to developed and full.

[Kamo]

I had a similar idea, that could maybe be implemented as a mod. I even made a dev plan, but it dates from 2019 so it could use an update if a very talented and impossibly motivated modder could try it https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/595687472680402944/598535786585128970/TLd_GalSimMod_devplan.odt 😅
The main roadblock is that the amount of information is huge as it'd need the entire galaxy to be loaded for it to even be possible, and current Avorion can load 50 sectors with 8 GB of RAM out of... around 700 000 sectors (because ~30% are nonexistant rift sectors).
So a remedy could be a system of faction "heartbeats" that basically means the faction updates its ship list with possible new orders and ships and what the player sees while entering a sector is based on the estimated locations of ships scheduled to jump or gate there. (AI-piloted player ships in sectors where the player isn't behave the same way and don't even load the sector, sometimes even in combat, so player empires with virtually unlimited ships could actually work.)

The ships would slowly grow with "experience", there would be various stages of Xsotan infestation (up to "galactic crisis" emergency alliance and refugee ships from destroyed factions), rogue empires turning to piracy, smuggling shenanigans involving Initial D-esque drift races though asteroid fields to evade police ships, NPC empires that would quest and eventually kill the Xsotan Guardian by themselves if the player took too long, and various other features...

[Malicious]

I generally agree. I player-driven economy would be a massive improvement to the emersion and longevity of this game. I do not think it needs to be as in depth as some of the working examples like EvE, but incorporating some light supply / demand mechanics would be nice to see. Make factions actively grow at a given rate based on how much trade they receive from players, or increase/reduce spawn rates for ships based on the total number of shipyards/trade stations a faction might have, so that players can actively push or pull factions across the universe!

Even with things being procedurally generated, just having this dynamic nature applied to active systems only and 'paused' in a data file once the system is no longer active, would add some benefit imo. 

[VaultedX]

Although this would make the game very.. realistic I suppose, It would be WAY too difficult to fully implement in time. Plus the strain that would put on the game itself, as it would have to keep track of EVERY FACTION in the galaxy, on what money they have, what they're doing with it, etc. I just think Avorion isn't the type of game to have that sort of realistic economy