One of the things we've never been entirely satisfied with has been our economy. Our original plan called for a complex supply and demand model based on the nature and size of every port. While this model was sophisticated and interesting, it suffered from one minor and one major flaw. The minor flaw was that players were not as involved in the process as we would have liked; much of the activity of the economy happened 'off-stage'. The major flaw was that the system would require a small army of designers and several years to create all the content, and then the whole thing would still need tuning. For a small company, this was not an option.