Make ships carry a maintenance cost

[hakkarin]

People keep arguing about the role of small Vs big ships and some complain that it's not logical for only big ships to always be best. I believe there is a simple way this could be fixed though: Just make ships carry a maintenance penalty that is paid for by the faction that owns it. This would of course require that a few things be added into the game:

1. That each type of block is assigned a value that decides how much it costs to maintain it when used in a ship or a station.

2. That factions be given their own credit account (I actually made a thread a long time ago here where I discussed how faction credit could be handled: http://starmadedock.net/threads/some-suggestions-to-make-the-game-even-better.5864/ ).

3. That the economic aspect of the game is expanded so that players and factions have more ways to make money.

Thoughts?

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

Both the Curious Fuel Survey and current thread on Gigantism have quite a lot of discussion going on about maintenance for larger ships. I have not, however, seen something along the lines of a credit account, and I have a couple of thoughts on it.

I want something new to do with faction points, believe my I do. I think that being able to spend them on things like consumable, possibly time based buffs would be AWESOME.

But tying faction points directly to player ship size or the number of ships a faction can wield through faction point cost (or its credit equivalent) makes me sad. As I tend to keep to a very small faction (1-3 peeps) I dont want to have a hard limit on the number or types of ships I can wield just because I dont play with other people.

Additionally, with the server I play on, credits can actually be HARD to come by (I know, but it's true. It requires either flawless execution of nabbing credits from pirate stations or defending the few trading outposts that are out there and buying from them whenever possible in hopes of them restocking their credits before their stock ends up completely full from you selling to them). Now, this is a server setting, and something our admins can control, and I like the idea, but it would need a little tweaking first.

IF maintenance costs are implemented, it should also be based on how often/hard a ship is used, maybe tie it to something like amount of power consumed? Maybe just repairs on power capacitors at something like a .00001% of total power used during any event is the cost of repairs. That way, even flying costs you SOMETHING, but using weapons, effects, radar jamming, etc, is going to cost more.

 

[BDLS]

Would be a nice server.cfg variable.

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

I have to thank you hakkarin for your post, because it gave me an idea for faction-based abilities that I had to write up immediately, linked in my sig.