Hmm.. this is a bit of a complicated thread. For me, I think that many of the ideas are good, but I don't think they should all lump in together with "faction points."
First I'll respond to your thread, and then I'll put my idea out there instead, which comes from a different prism of thinking.
I do not think faction points should be physically represented like currency. Where do they come from? I also don't think a generator should just create these "points" willy nilly. There needs to be a method to madness and a framework of logic that makes sense of where they come from. For example, why should owning a planet have anything to do with having more faction points? Why should water turn into faction points? Why would having a bunch of factories create more faction points? I am imagining people going out, creating giant cubes of factory blocks and basking in the point avalanche. Why should the act of trading produce faction points at all? Might people just sit around trading the same items back and forth? What would that really do for the game to make it more fun? Shouldn't the benefit of trading come from one person offering something you value more than they do and offering them something that they value more than you do, to create a shared wealth increase?
When you look at real economies, capitalism (ie. trading), produces wealth because people specialize. They are able to master making a product or service. They become more efficient. They can also diversify to master other markets. In the economy, markets are also variable. Supply and demand is constantly changing, so people decide to try and create businesses where there is demand and to shrink businesses where demand is decreasing. In StarMade, however, everyone is equal. All bonuses you get are equal to everyone else and cost exactly the same. There also aren't any real significant market fluctuations. Sure one shop might buy for a slightly different price than another and sell for a slightly different cost.. but.. I don't even bother with the shops to be honest.. they are too limited. I can just go mine a little and create everything I need. I cannot get nearly the same amount of items from shops. Also, you can't really specialize or diversify either, because everyone wants and creates the same things. There may be some diversity in asteroid groupings and what they produce, but I don't think it really goes far enough to create a tangible difference.
In many other games, you have a sort of man-power type statistic that builds up the larger your "town" is and is used up when you work toward something or for maintenance of that "town." I think the "faction points" of StarMade are the equivalent to that, because they are tied to the size of your faction and the upkeep of claimed sectors. Though it is very basic. I think expanding on it would fall more in line with the idea of it being like man hours. But how could we use this measure to encourage factions to grow, to encourage specialization and mastery, and to have a system of diversity in the economy?
Though there are many ways to go about this, and many different things we can focus on, I think spending the points toward faction-based
skills is good way to go. Right now it is far too easy to have a home base, which is invulnerable, and then you can claim a system for free..and pay a very small amount of faction points per turn for upkeep.. and then most servers have crazy bonuses for mining, like a
12x bonus for claimed systems (that is a +1200% bonus! for what?!). Instead of having this sort of system, do away with it entirely, separate out the benefits, and give people a progression, with choices to make. Structure spending of "faction points" as "
passive" and "
active." For example, owning more bases uses up more faction points passively for their upkeep. Claiming a system uses some faction points, and then holding it uses an amount of faction points over time too. But then also introduce a tree of "Active Skills" you can "upgrade" by using faction points. You'd want to structure this tree based on competing types of goals. I'll give an example of an "Active Skill" tree. Each "skill" would have up to 5 levels of upgrades and some would be synergistic.
1: Mining and Factory Enhancements
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Capsule Refinery Efficiency: Each capsule refinery on a home base gives 10% more random capsules for each upgrade, to a maximum of +50% with 5 upgrades. Each upgrade costs a exponentially more faction points. These would be fully customizeable, so if a server wanted to make 6 upgrades possible, and each upgrade gave a +100% bonus, they could, which would be equivalent to a 6x mining bonus (from anything mined anywhere).
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Salvage Power Efficiency: Salvage beams would, by default, use more power. Then there would be an upgrade which reduces the power they need and the power needed per grouping.
- Salvage Beam Mining Efficiency: This would be similar to the capsule refinery efficiency upgrade, but would instead pertain to salvage beams, what they actually mine from asteroids and planets, from claimed systems.
2: Base Upgrades
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Base Protection: This would have varying levels of protection, from simply giving an HP and armor boost to blocks, all the way up to invulnerability. When you turn on Base Protection for a station, it would use up faction points passively as an upkeep. The founders or anyone who has access to the faction module could change the level of protection at that base. More than one base can have the protection or have different levels of it. When changing the setting, make it take maybe 20 minutes for it to take effect.
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Base Energy Efficiency: This allows the base to have an increased soft-cap on energy production. Perhaps each upgrade adds 20%, to a maximum of +100%. So, the base would then have a soft-cap of 4 million as opposed to 2.
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Base Energy Capacity: This would increase the efficiency of each power capacitor, to allow less to do more. Perhaps a 5% bonus to the exponential effect per upgrade, up to 25%.
3: Ship Upgrades - These upgrades would pertain to items MADE at a station with the "Active Skill" on. Each item created would retain their bonuses, even if traded, and would cost more to produce.
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Thruster Power Efficiency: You can get -2% power requirement for each upgrade, up to a savings of 10%.
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Thruster Speed Efficiency: You can get +1% speed bonus for thrusters, per upgrade, up to 5%. This would allow less thrusters to produce more thrust. Note: There would be an exponential effect since the more thrusters you have, the less they produce.
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Weapon Grouping Efficiency: This would pertain to the loss of power associated with each extra weapon grouping attached to a computer. Upgrading the efficiency would perhaps decrease the power hike that occurs when assigning multiple weapon groups to one weapon computer. Perhaps it could be 5% less energy required for each.
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Weapon Damage Lethality: Each upgrade would add 1% more damage, up to +5%.
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Weapon Energy Efficiency: Each upgrade would decrease power requirements by 2%, up to 10%.
4: Trade Guild Upgrades - First I should mention that there would need to be more variability in pricing for trade guilds. They should pay a lot less for what you sell, and cost a lot more to buy from. For example, a cannon computer might sell for $4,000, but costs $20,000 to buy. They should also have items that are unique to shops. Perhaps "alien technology" that would include new forms of power systems, weapons, armor, ect., where you could ONLY get them from a shop. A lot of decorative items would only come from shops too. Now, players may create their own shops with LESS of a price difference, to compete with trade stations and encourage more player to player shop trading.
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Haggling: This bonus would be incremental. Perhaps you could save up to 20% when buying from a shop and get up to 20% more for what you sell - This would NOT apply to player shops.
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Threat level reduction: If you attack a trade guild shop, you increase your threat level. This level would slowly go down within time, but you could spend faction points to reduce it right away. The higher your threat level, the more they charge and less they pay you to buy from you. If your threat level is too high, they won't trade with you at all. In fact, they might open fire on you immediately upon seeing you.
Ok, so now here's the kicker. Make each of these Upgrades able to be turned on or off, at different levels, and for DIFFERENT bases. Make each level of upgrade take exponentially more faction points to leave on. Also, when switching to different quality levels, make it have a flat cost to switch, perhaps 24 hours worth of faction points at the new level - this would discourage micromanaging of the levels.
And secondly.. I think this bears repeating, make ships and ship parts created with upgrades RETAIN the upgrades to them. This would encourage people to trade for better quality materials for their ships and to specialize. (And YES, the bonuses would stack with base protection) If a faction is powerful enough, then they could not only specialize, but also diversify. Now, the levels of faction points needed to maintain each "active bonus" would need to be tailored to each server. For example, on a busier server, to have all the bonuses active and a few sectors claimed, perhaps it could take 10 active members to be able to maintain the level of faction points necessary. A less busy server may reduce the requirements. If a faction dips below the amount of faction point generation needed, they risk losing their base protection, claimed sectors, or active bonuses. In the "faction menu" have the game calculate if the player is currently projected to be operating at a loss or a net gain of faction points, so they can easily decide on what direction they would like to go. To give another example, perhaps another server might want to make it possible for even a single man faction to have a high level of protection and productivity.. but they lose a lot more faction points when they die. Diversity is a good thing in a sandbox game like this.
I do have some ideas on bases as well and how they may influence faction points. I think there can and should be ways to make bases actually produce more faction points than they use. I think this sort of system would be great for crews. You'd want to create needs for crews and outputs, that uses up real items, so a base cannot simply sustain itself forever. For example, organic materials from planets would be needed for food that crew members eat. You have to set up serving stations, cooking stations, ect. The happier your people are, the more efficiently they go about their jobs of running the station. If they become unhappy, or starve to death (or are killed by a rival player), then the base starts eating up faction points at a greater rate if base protection is on. I should mention that I am not suggesting we introduce hunger to real players, just their crew members. This would also introduce new elements of gameplay and bring bases to life, as crew members would be shuffling around the halls, working at stations.
Well, that's all I got for now. If anyone wants to give some feedback, I welcome it.
