Hacker Array

Hacker Array
Allows you to secretly manipulate the prices of resources on the market. Shhhhh!
Requirements:
Requires level 3 HQ
Steel	60/60
Electronics	20/20
Hotkey:	SHIFT + H

The Hacker Array is an advanced building. The Hacker Array comes with a hologram permanently applied if the Advanced Sabotage option is turned on. This built-in hologram can be seen through with a Spy, but is not destroyed by Network Viruses (though hitting the hologram with a Network Virus does produce a notification).

You can use this building to make a fake shortage or a fake surplus of a resource. That means that the price of the selected resource on the market will drop (surplus) or increase (shortage) depending on what you ordered in the Hacker Array; however, you need to pay in money to make a shortage or a surplus. Hacking a shortage costs more than making a surplus, and the prices of each will increase with each order given. Hacked shortages and surpluses work the same way as random shortages and surpluses, with the exception of hacks on Power, which will buy or sell twice as many units of power as a random shortage or surplus would.

Hacking Costs

The costs for hacking shortages and surpluses rise independently of each other.

	Shortage	Surplus
	60s research time	30s research time
1st	$2,000	$1,000
2nd	$3,000	$1,500
3rd	$4,000	$2,000
4th	$5,000	$2,500
5th	$6,000	$3,000
etc...	+$1K	+$500

Using the Hacker Array

Because anyone can profit from price changes caused by the Hacker Array, it is most useful to apply a shortage to resources you have monopoly power over and "surplus" resources that disproportionately produce profit for your rivals. However, because the effectiveness of hacks is dependent on the number of players and HQ levels, they will generally be most effective when there is the lowest chance of you having a market to yourself and can thus be difficult to profit from based on being able to sell at a higher price alone.

The Hacker Array's more useful ability is in leveraging shortages to multiply the amount of money you have available. For example, in a 4-player game with everyone at HQ level 5, a shortage would generate an additional 14 units of demand per second over 20 seconds, or 280 extra units. By the end of the shortage, every unit of the resource that you have stockpiled would be worth $56 more than it started, assuming the starting and ending prices fell within the $100-499 range. By investing all your cash into the resource in a shortage, you can quickly make a lot of money, though you do run the risk of someone collapsing the market before you can sell out. Because of this risk, you should be very wary of forcing a shortage of resources that your opponents have produced recently or are currently producing, or if there are spies available to help your opponents anticipate your hacks.

If the resource being with a shortage coming started at $100 and the player using the Hacker Array bought 500 units of the resource right before the shortage started, it would bring the pre-shortage price to $205. After the shortage, the price would have risen to $266. The 500 units would have cost a total of $75460 for the player to buy, but would sell for a total of $105270, for a profit of $26810, after subtracting the $3000 cost for hacking the first shortage. This example ignores all other types of demand that would affect prices while the shortage is taking place.    

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