I always thought that was good fun back in the day. Some strats just aren't really that great for building missiles early, and having them available on the public market was a nice way to counter that and make those strats more effective in early wars.

I have a feeling I understand (without knowing for sure) why they were eventually taken off, and I definitely do think some of the same issues with having missiles available on the public market could become issues again. I still think the idea holds some merit though.

Things like devaluing warfare tech and the availability of missiles to early suiciders would definitely be some major cons for this idea - but I still think it's worth considering.

This is probably one of those "little things" though, that can be put very far back on the back burner. I just wanted to post it before I forgot about it.

i think it would totally mess up war balance and whatnot; seems to me that you could simply stock missiles and then missile kill an alliance

i guess that would make SDI more worth getting =/

Perhaps if the same missile/acre cap was in place as there is for warfare tech based production, it would be more feasible?

...or if the floor price for missiles was sort of expensive...like several hundred million dollars per missile...you could change floor price based on missile type (cruise missiles would be less expensive than nukes). Also, you could limit how many missiles each country can put/have on the market at any time.

There needs to be an added penalty for selling missiles. Maybe an extra turn to put a missile on the market, or maybe a public news item about the transaction, including the identities of the buyer/seller...

At the time, the issue wasn't debalancing war. The issue was that at that time demo casher was already insanely broken. Also it made suiciding a lot easier. Additionally this would probably make an FS even stronger because you wouldn't necessarily need to run a tech based country to run missile launches for readiness and your countries wouldn't run out of missiles as soon (because you could buy them).

Fun idea. I remember this in 2025 10+ years ago.

A couple ideas:
1) the buying and selling of missiles could be limited to only certain govt types. You know, the "evil" ones: C, F, T, and I. The "good" govts could get a boost to SDI so they're not totally screwed.
2) missile sales could be restricted to the black market. Maybe spies and/or spy op reports could also be sold on the black market. Countries in GDI could not see or use the black market and using the black market would prevent a country from ever joining GDI. On the other hand, GDI members could get their own special market with reduced fees (but no missiles or spies). A general public market would be available to all players.