For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.
New resource distribution and recipe balance
But before the new export system was possible, a mass rebalancing was required for raw resources and recipes.
Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges:
In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before.
The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).
Civ exports
Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export:
All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level.
Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.
Civ imports
The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified:
A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt.
B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too.
In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect.
Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them).
In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot).
The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either.
The (still not ready) "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales.
As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)