100% agree with Ben. Local markets and hubs are what give an economy real flow. They create arbitrage, transport jobs, genuine risk in moving assets, and a reason to control territory. Strip them out and, exactly as he said, the map goes flat: movement centralizes to a single point, and an entire profit modality, plus the gameplay around it, disappears. In The Citadel, every player hub is separated by a breach region. The breach is the game. Moving both assets and players between hubs is contested, and every resource and item enters the economy by being fought over in a breach. So owning the hub that controls a path, and its local market, becomes valuable. Breaches aren't interchangeable. They differ in resource profiles, map structure, rarity distributions, item drops, and NPC content. Say a mineral only spawns up in the Foundry Descent, while demand for it sits down at the Krath Terminus hub. Now you've got a steady flow of haulers running that route, and that flow spawns its own predators, players who camp it to pirate them as they pass. None of this happens under a frictionless global marketplace. Breaches can also spin up with dynamic modifiers, limited-time events that change the loot, difficulty, or resources of a breach until it closes. That makes it valuable to keep ships staged across different hubs, ready to capitalize on events as they appear on the overworld map. The image below shows the beginning of our world. Eventually there will be numerous hub and breach regions, each with its own content and its own reason for players to explore.