So
Jojomo - when you think about game design as a whole, economics have to factor in
pretty significantly, on a number of levels. Everything in games is a trade of some sort. Someone is providing something, someone else is consuming it. It's not limited to money and materials like most would think.
At a very high level, one has to consider what the actual, human player is willing to exchange with the game. How much time, is too much time? We all have a limited amount - the game needs to deliver as much engagement per unit time as possible.
When you focus back on in-universe wealth - Credits, Net Worth, or material stockpiles - there's sort of a cyclical relationship. Things that give wealth and prestige are of value to players and make them more willing to seek out more sources of wealth, power, and prestige. Thus, you could call this a 'game loop' - a cyclical relationship of player investment, and the game rewarding the player such that more investment occurs.
Now, enough of my game-design-nerding. You're probably more interested in the ability to obtain blocks, credits, and personal value, as well as useful starships.
First -
I have plans for players to do certain things to get useful, pre-built starships. One of the things I think StarMade actually does wrong, is
forcing the player to build everything. Yes, StarMade is a game about building ships - that much, I'll never question or complain about. That being said, we build ships to do things. By having players do things, they can get stuff with which to build their own custom ship (or, outfit their existing ship) to do something better. This 'ship -> action -> upgrade -> action -> ...' loop is something that
is an absolute priority for MicroMade 1.0.
Next - right now in the game, there's two ways to get 'wealth' (by which I mean materials and/or credits): mine them, or sell something you have at a vastly marked up price, to get credits to buy more stuff that you re-sell at a marked up price. Neither of these ways are very engaging on their face, unless of course you're into that sort of thing.
A solution to the 'boring wealth grind' problem, is to provide players with more 'active' wealth-gaining options. By 'active' systems, what I mean is: the player does something in order to receive a payoff. Some of this has already been initially implemented - the Bounty system lets players sacrifice net worth gained by playing on the server or defeating other players (to be implemented) to put out a bounty on a target player, that can be claimed by someone else who wants to. In this way, not only is the bounty issuer trading their net worth to see their feckless opponent shot down, it's providing an incentive for actual PvP combat.
This is also why some people say, 'add a quest system!' Quests are a compact, well-understood way of saying, 'if you do this thing, I'm going to give you these rewards.' It gives a clear activity that the player can do, for a reliable reward. That's why a quest system of some sort is almost certainly going to happen - doing quests, makes the player better-able to do more quests. Even
EverQuest got that right!
Now, with all this talk of giving the players stuff, that leads to a concern - inflation. Having stuff be too common either devalues the items, or having money be too common devalues money (which, includes Net Worth by proxy.) Having Net Worth be less-accessible than credits helps, and makes having Net Worth be inherently more valuable, but it doesn't help if stuff you need to buy is too expensive, because money itself is worthless.
Unfortunately, this is where dragons lie in my ruminations. To my knowledge, StarMade has no easy way to adjust an item's overall price on-the-fly, or I could write some sort of supply-and-demand analysis daemon to do precisely that. Supply and Demand is a known problem - especially in the real world - and is one that I'll have to put serious thought into solving.
Long story short? Well, I've got no 'clean' conclusion; if you made it this far, it proves that A) you're patient, and B) you now know some of my thoughts on the economy and what game systems need to be included to make the game more 'worth it' to the end player. This didn't start - and likely didn't end - with the thoughts you intended, but really economy is baked into game design inherently. The trick is to learn how to decouple aspects of the economy from each other, such that I can divide and conquer - make one system awesome, test it, get it in, move on to the next, rinse, repeat, victory.
