In the latest episode of Inside Egosoft, Joey sits down with Michael and Ketraar to discuss their work on X4: Foundations’ economic simulation. Michael has worked at Egosoft for 22 years across a wide range of responsibilities, but designing and programming X4: Foundation's simulated economy is one of his main focuses. Meanwhile, Ketraar handles many day-to-day support tasks, including conducting tests and taking measures to help balance the simulation.Throughout the episode, they discuss the challenges and complexities of working on X4's economy, the sweeping consequences of relatively minor changes, and how a perfect balance isn't always ideal in the X Universe.Below, you can read several highlights from this episode. To hear the rest of the conversation, tune in on your favorite streaming platform!Leave a comment if there’s a topic or team member you’d like us to cover next.🔗 Amazon Music🔗 Pocketcasts🔗 iHeart Radio🔗 Spotify🔗 Apple PodcastsThe Economy Is the Heart of X4Michael: For me, it's the core that drives the game, that drives ware production, transportation, and consumption.That part is the economy for me. That is how all these puzzle pieces fit together: how wares have to go from one place to the other to actually be in the right place and be consumed there.Ketraar: The way I often look at the economy in X4 is that if you take the human body, the economy is your nervous system, your blood vessel system, and all the things that make everything else work. It is basically the heart, the bones, the skeleton of the X games.Creating Controlled ChaosKetraar: We are not actually trying to balance the economy. We try to create controlled chaos, so to speak. We want the economy to not be balanced. And that is the biggest challenge: you want the economy to be interesting enough or imbalanced enough for players to have puzzles to solve and things to do. But not in a way that things spiral out of control, that systems collapse or suddenly you are not able to buy ships.Michael: The opportunities for players lie in the unbalanced aspects. We do want regional problems – be that oversupply or resource starvation – but we also want to make sure that for a decent amount of time, the game can run without breaking down completely.The Butterfly EffectMichael: I would actually say what makes it especially challenging is the butterfly effect. I would argue that the entire premise of the economic side of the game is based on the butterfly effect. You have a small change and it can snowball into big economic situations.That may be a change that we intend, or we've also encountered bugs where something small happens, and then suddenly you have an economic crisis at hand. Traffic jams can result in increased demand for a certain resource, and that results in even bigger traffic jams, because more traders are trying to fulfill that, and things like that.So it can be quite difficult to predict how things go.Players Shape the EconomyMichael: I think the biggest puzzle piece is actually the player, because every player can have a profound effect on the economy, and at least to some degree the economy tries to adapt. But eventually, our systems don't necessarily keep up with the power and the magnitude of changes that players can make.Ketraar: Any decision you make – you start at a plot that opens a gate, for example, like the Boron plot – and bam! You made an influence on the economy. You shoot a trading ship that was delivering some energy cells. Bam! You influence the economy.As we have mentioned before, you might not notice the ripple effects of that immediately, but two hours down the line, some station has not received a delivery of claytronics. I would say the minute you interact with the game, you are impacting the economy.When Players Become the Masters of the UniverseMichael: Once players have reached these absurd power levels, it's not us doing the balancing anymore. It's them.We have seen so many impressive and crazy save games. People have just taken over every single sector and built mega stations in each one of them, and they run the universe. Nothing we do will really impact them anymore. They decide their own fate. They decide the universe's fate.Ketraar: When the game starts, the economy has about 1,300 stations and about 10,000 ships, roughly. That's with all the DLCs on and stuff. If a player comes along and builds a station with 3,000 modules, that's the whole economy.A War EconomyMichael: The biggest driver of our economy is basically destruction, because that's what makes sure we have demand. In hindsight, we would have liked to have more civilian end products, so to speak.But this was already a big change from the previous games because, in X4, for the first time, we had everything built from scratch. We actually managed to close that loop.You have to go from the low mining resources and everything required for the building, even of the most advanced station modules or battleships.So, yes, it is very much a war-based economy, but we would like to look into ways of changing that at some point.Testing an Unpredictable UniverseKetraar: Due to the complexity and because we do non-player tests – we don't have the time to sit 150 hours playing the game every time to get to that point – we compare what we had to what we have, and then try to decide if it's going in the direction we want.Michael: As Ketraar says, it's a lot of guesswork. We've been doing this for years or decades, so you get better at guessing. The guesses become more educated, but due to the inherent randomness of the events in the game, it's still always just a guess.And there's no absolute “This is 100%. This one change has exactly this one effect.” It doesn't work like that.Finding Satisfaction in the PuzzleMichael: To me, seeing how a process works and then finding ways to optimize it, that is just a very satisfying experience. It's just my internal optimizer running.Ketraar: Sometimes, I play it to make the number go up, which is fun, but sometimes, I also just want to test systems. For example, “Let's just play the game and you are not allowed to produce anything,” or “you are not allowed to capture ships,” or whatever.Because X4 gives you all these possibilities, in the end, it's just: “How do I solve this problem?”Sometimes the game gives you enough problems, but you can also give yourself some problems to solve, and it's very satisfying if you manage to solve that problem.There Is No Correct Way to PlayKetraar: Sometimes when I am around in the forums and have discussions with people, one thing I keep telling people is that there is no correct way to play. Anyone that tells you how to play an X game is wrong. You decide for yourself.You can obviously take inspiration from other people – how to get rules or guardrails, as you say – but I can't stress this enough: nothing we are saying here is law.We say “preference,” and everyone that plays an X game should play them however they want.