Planet M.U.L.E.

We all know how uber powerful these are. Starve the store, turn mules loose, watch price shoot up, sell to store, make big bucks.

Her are some safeguards against smithore shenanigans that i believe to be within the spirit of the game.

1) If you don't have a plot to put a mule on at the start of your turn, lock the corral up. If you are gonna spring a bunch out, you gotta have a plot open to do it. If you open one up, you gotta wait till NEXT turn to spring mules.
2) If the store is unable to produce mules for 2 auction phases in a row, M.U.L.E. production shuts down.  It will take an entire turn after the store is resupplied or a coral slot opens up for it to start back up again. Sure you can starve the store, but if you then start an emergency, there's a very real chance of players missing out on development, which will mess with the colony.

This alone should fix the smithore gambit.  The only real problem with pulling a smithore gambit is that it doesn't significantly impact development at all.  The store goes omg! low mules, lets raise price so people will sell to me so we can make more, and then immediately makes them and whew! everything's ok again. In rea life it don't work that way. The store wouldn't have bottomless cash.  But that would change the balance too badly if we implemented cash limit in the store.  But also in real life, such starving would hurt development.

And that's what my fixes i propose would do. Give real consequences to the smithore gambit.

apparently, you haven't heard of the US bailout and stimulus shenanigans.

it works exactly this way in real life.

Well, it's still pretty stupid.

And in real life, production can't always be stopped and started on a dime.

So i think it's a pretty good fix, if we consider this smithore stuff undesirable. Make the boost in money now hamper development more, to give other players a reason to try and stop it.