Economic Brainstorm

[OfficialCoding]

Some players can stockpile content of their weekend-game only. Maybe only 5-8 hours per WE or even less.
Other players play over 60 hours a week and maybe even over 100 are possible for some hardcore gamers with no real life.

How to balance that?
The hardcore player should not build a titan that can indefinitely trash one 5-hour player Homebase after the other (or the few outposts newbies managed to build, imprisoning them on HB).

3 hours of play might "unlock the first archivement" - a blueprint a miner (by gaining enough resources).
MrGrey1 has a good example: https://starmadedock.net/content/mrgs-mining-carrier-199.7779/
Not too heavy, but that makes it good as a step-up.
He also utilizes functions which can make newbies creative while not being a total loss if drones bug out.

It would be better that when he loses it, he has another one available within a half hour or 10 minutes and not again 3 hours. Perhaps that can be archived by making the shipyard and factory system on the home-base somewhat expensive, but the miner itself cheap.

We need an insurance for that ship.
He locks the blueprint and when it dies in battle and not by being deconstructed, he gets a new one 10 minutes after ordering one. For ever and ever and ever on.

Only downside on hardcore servers would be losing credits based on what he can give to support this refund (assets, credit hold, poor-people safety threshold), but never so much that he considers making a new account over the penalty in credits.


Next week, he makes a bigger shipyard and unlocks the heavy miner by gaining enough resources for it.
Again, I recommend one of MrGrey1's because it's the heaviest and a good-looking miner available in CC. https://starmadedock.net/content/mrgs-heavy-miner.7717/

If a server choose to respawn asteroids every week and he gets a warning about other players ships which have enough weapons on board to kill him because he set up early-warning-system stations, he can grow from there.


But if the limit is how much a system produces over a hour setup, search and mining time, the 60-hour/week player would get 60 systems worth of resources per week.

The heavy-miner guy evolved during a month of play and now owns the equivalent of 10 heavy miners.
How much should he get per week?

And were should it even out?
One gets maximum 60/1000 systems or 1 quadrillion*billion systems per week, the other one gets 40/600 systems mined down or 1billion asteroid-belts a week?

wtf

 

[MacThule]

wtf

Well, I believe he's talking about basic universal income as a way to even out gameplay at the low end, but it seems... over-complicated the way it's written. His English is good but discussing abstractions in a 2nd language is bitch (I certainly couldn't do it in Russian).

I think a basic income (in-game) would be fine and probably help new players deal with The Curve. Just assume all the players are like investment bankers or own continents on some world somewhere. It alleviates despair for noobs and doesn't really affect others since 10K or even 50K credits an hour over a whole day is something an experienced player can drum up in a few minutes even fresh into a server. (it also acts a source of constant liquidity to the economy)

 

[MacThule]

What about some improvement ideas for the shop interface?

- Ability to adjust whole shop or group (general, ship, station, etc - as with pull groups) buy or sell prices with a single slider to a (integer rounded) percentage higher or lower than the current number. To make shops more accessible and cut tedium.

- Faction pricing - the ability to percentage-modify the buy/sell rates specifically for allies, public, faction members, faction members by rank, etc. (i.e. my faction pays 25% less for everything than the public does, or I charge allies a lot less to help support their efforts).

- Schedule trades in Network mode - Instead of only instant orders allow repeating orders and timed orders, so we can set up regular trade routes and aid convoys.

 

[Sachys]

What about some improvement ideas for the shop interface?

- Ability to adjust whole shop or group (general, ship, station, etc - as with pull groups) buy or sell prices with a single slider to a (integer rounded) percentage higher or lower than the current number. To make shops more accessible and cut tedium.

- Faction pricing - the ability to percentage-modify the buy/sell rates specifically for allies, public, faction members, faction members by rank, etc. (i.e. my faction pays 25% less for everything than the public does, or I charge allies a lot less to help support their efforts).

- Schedule trades in Network mode - Instead of only instant orders allow repeating orders and timed orders, so we can set up regular trade routes and aid convoys.

What about the ability to copy/paste an entire shop setup - either to template, or through an additional window that allows text based input / output? I think the tedium and poor interface for setting up a shop (ie buy / sell prices etc) is one of the greatest barriers to really making use of the trade network etc on any server you set up on.