Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
Economy thoughts
Without further ado, some thought on the economy in Starmourn. See also, my thread on the mining specialization-
https://forums.starmourn.com/discussion/1029/mining-spec/p1
Separate systems:
- Physical shops. (more please) most owned by NPCs Accessible in specific locations
- Trade terminals x4 systems. Accessible only in specific places, except via artifact
- Ship brokerage. Accessible anywhere
- Starforge. Accessible in dock area or from ship in dock (and it's confusing as to where you need to be)(Also, new artifact lets you get supplies anywhere)
- Market (space) accessible from stations, can be modified remotely with artifact
- Refinery/Autofactory. Accessible in specific locations, some things can be modified remotely with artifact (not sure what the utility of this is in practice)
- Junk shops. Accessible in specific locations, or remotely with artifact
- Repair shops. Accessible in specific locations, or remotely with artifact
- Collectibles market. Accessible anywhere
- Promo market. Accessible anywhere
- Rejuvenation (is this part of the economy? It's certainly a mark sink)
- Cosmpiercer. Powers purchasable in faction territory, generally from a station
- Token Equipment. (are the tokens listable anywhere?) Redeemable in specific locations.
- Love shop. One location, with its own currency.
Currencies:
- Marks
- Credits
- Love tokens
- Gear tokens
- Cosmpiercer vouchers
- Ta-deth crystals
I can buy a starship from anywhere, but if I want a t-shirt, I have to be in a specific place.
Some of these are split up- can take market orders from station, but have to complete on ship with goods in ship cargo
Autofactory can be started from ship, but goods have to be in station/planet cargo
Trade skills- high entry cost, low/no ongoing cost. Goods appear magically and have no material requirements.
Unlike some people, I find plenty of mark sinks. Between promo items, ships, rejuv and etc, Poet is almost always broke.
There is a huge disparity in marks generation. Incursions are number one, once you can do the hard ones. There is, at least, a marks cost involved in purchasing ammo and repair kits. As compared with the second best method, ground bashing. Essentially costs you nothing, and nets you 10's of thousands of marks/hour.
Both these activities are reasonably fun (for me). I know some people hate bashing, but I don't mind. Incursions are better, in that there is more effort involved in getting to range and lining up the targets.
Hacking I don't care for, and know little about. Seems mark generation is fairly low, considering the consequences (bounties).
The 'actual' economic activities are all a loss. Having done them all, none of them make money. There is a ton of effort involved, and the upfront costs in getting set up are high. I have another thread on this, and my thoughts haven't changed.
-I will also note that there are Honors available for those who own 10 factories/refineries and that no one can do that anymore, as the cap is 9.
Materials need to be required for everything. I hate saying that, cause I like being able to make clothes out of thin air, but seriously. There should be crates of fabric that need to be bought and shipped about. Gems and metal for jewelry, etc. Right now, ship supplies exist in their own little world, and given the existence of the ship forge, there can never be a shortage of anything. You might pay more, but things are available if people put in the work, or not. The only reason to engage with the economy is to be nice to the new players, or to use the comms for guards and station stuff, that most people probably don't know exists. I would not recommend using comms for more of this kind of thing as a stop-gap, and in fact having to track it to keep the guards paid is really quite annoying. I can see using them to buy station upgrades, but just dumping them into ongoing maintenance is also annoying.
The other problem with this economy set up, is that only the fighting tasks generate any reasonable pay, and XP gains. The thought being, apparently, that things that involve 'risk' are the only valid ways to make money. The economy cannot work this way. There has to be a way to make money doing 'economy' things. Like hauling in rocks and gas. And it needs to earn reasonable XP. Maybe not quite as much of each as incursions, but enough that people are willing to invest time and effort into it.
Materials also need rarity adjustments. There need to be cheap, commonly used materials that are super easy to find in large quantity. Rare stuff that's expensive, and hard to find- but which you don't need much of in the recipes. Right now, as Holgorath pointed out, this is backwards. Iriil, which is supposedly rare, is required in huge quantities, and it appears to spawn at exactly the same rate as every other material. Everyone wants it, and everyone needs it, and no one can find enough. Everyone is paying 100 marks/unit or more trying to get some, without any luck cause even at that rate, people aren't interested in mining it. Also, at that rate, all the batteries on the market are sold at a loss, cause that price was set based on Iriil being worth about 40/unit.
Yields are also far too small. As it stands you cannot refine enough material to be able to sell large quantities of things cheaply and make it worth your time and effort. Holgorath indicated mining for 8-12 hours and making 80k marks, and I think that number is wildly optimistic. Even if correct, you can do the same thing in an hour in an incursion. Also, the quantity limits mean you can't refine enough stuff to be able to sell at a price that makes the finished goods affordable. If we paid what materials were reasonably worth given time and effort invested, batteries would go for 2500 marks apiece, and incursions would stop being profitable (and Ship Forge exists, so you can't ever charge more than 450/per)
People need to be able to move cargo from place to place for others. Give the freighters and haulers reason to exist. (And shrink the cargo bay on the Battleship, cause it's bigger than a freighter).
The cargo boost modules are much, much too small.
Drone bay module is good, but dedicated mining ships would be better.
Specializations probably also need to go. I know why the limits on ownership were put in, but we can't keep a full complement of refineries and factories, cause not enough people are interested, and then they freeze and we are short facilities again.
Refining straight up needs to go. Charging miners for bringing in materials is a slap in the face. Scoop the gas into the hold, and then just sell it. Yet another reason to upgrade to a bigger ship with a bigger hold.
It would also be nice if there were a way to easily see how much space in the hold a material was going to take.
Tl;dr Too many economic systems that are not connected to each other in any fashion. If I can walk in a circle and spam freeze and make 10k an hour, I should be able to make at least half that amount scooping gas.
Comments
This is specifically untrue, and I don't know why people keep repeating it.
A batch of thermal batteries requires a grand total of 4 titanium, 2 duramine, 4 diamene, 10 iriil, 2 astrium and 1 stesium as well as 874 marks for autofactory costs, including the intermediaries of paristeel, disheets and HDS. CA currently pays 100 marks per unit of iriil, 80 for titanium, 70 for duramine and diamene, 50 for astrium and 40 for stesium, so that comes out to a grand total of 2754 marks for one batch of batteries. Assuming that you're willing to fly out to Kholod Station for the final autofactory job (but don't give enough of a shit to do it for the HDS/disheets/paristeel, even though you probably should) that rounds up to 207 marks per battery. Current market offers are all 250 per, so they are (or at least should be, if they're using economy bonuses at all) making 43 marks per battery sold, which I feel is a perfectly acceptable level of profit. If you're willing to chase economy bonuses for the intemediaries or even the raw materials (looking at you, Iriil), you can nearly double the profits while maintaining the same standard price of 250 marks per battery.
It just feels like when I'm paying more than twice the base cost of the material with the largest requirement in the process, that'd throw the final cost off. But apparently not as much as I thought.
And, given I can't buy any of the material, it's mostly just me doing the mining, and refining and factory work. And paying all the costs. And investing all the time. And, for time invested, it's definitely a loss. Even if I pay Crazy Jerry to deliver me thermal batteries in space, I'm way ahead doing incursions over doing anything economy-related.
Daily credits. So this is huge at getting people to do things obviously. And once again, the thing to do is incursions. In fact, it's the only reasonable way to max daily credits. Kill 5 targets. Repeatable. Compare this with scooping gas. It's the same 5 scoops of gas or rocks delivered, but the time investment is just so much higher. Even if you 'cheat' at it and bring in scoops with 1 mat in them, it's still more time-consuming than blasting 5 things.
Ground bashing is also repeatable, but you have to kill 100 things instead of 5. For me that's, I dunno, about once an hour, give or take.
Daily xeno bounty. Not repeatable, which is fine since you can only do the bounty once, and it's a nice bonus to the other rewards from that.
Two practice performances, not repeatable. I mean, fair enough. Other than waiting on the cooldown, there's no investment other than walking to a bar somewhere.
The economic related ones are odd. So craft 10 items, not repeatable. Easy enough. In fact I do it every day. And then put those items in the incinerator cause I don't need them for anything. My shops are all set up with autocrafters, so there's no need for actual inventory. Which I will say is extremely convenient, one less thing to have to track. But incinerating items does nothing for the economy either, other than the pittance it costs me to craft those things. Submit a design. Only worth one credit, and doesn't repeat.... not a great incentive for designing things, which adds to the game, if not the economy. I'd say, bump this to 2 credits, make it repeatable, but tie it to accepted designs. Yes, you miss out on instant gratification, but you can jump start some credits in a day or three when your designs are approved.
Hack 10 terminals, not repeatable. I hate hacking. I've no idea how this compares to the rest, but it certainly seems like the time investment is fairly large.
Harvest a crystal. Easy enough, but opens you up to PvP. Probably fine as is.
Win a duel. Normally traded between willing victims, but it still gets people involved in PvP and serves it's purpose. Not repeatable, so you can't just kill Bob over and over all day for free creds.
So, I'd say look at the tasks tied to economic stuff, and up the rewards/lower the time investment. Add in something for people who are doing the autofactory thing, not just mining.
Freighters ought to be able to haul goods around. I'd like to see player and NPC contracts for hauling large quantities of goods. The amount of goods could be whatever for player contracts, but the NPC ones would be more like station missions and the amount of goods would be tailored towards freighters and superhaulers. Also, if this route is the way to go, adding a courier style vessel available early would be good.
Agreed on cargo capacities being all out of sorts. The cargo bay mods need to be improved drastically and the combat ships need to have their cargo stores slashed.
Specializations are OK. They're not great. They're certainly not explained well, which could be remedied easily enough with a quest or two. I'm not sure what I would want to replace it. Perhaps more ship types, like mining ships and functional haulers, and content to go with those ship types would illuminate how specializations ought to work, or what ought to replace specializations.
That economy grants almost no experience is questionable. I'm thinking it may be worthwhile to develop a skill for space economy so that doing space economy grants some captaincy but a lot of space economy skill. This is not even half baked, but the point is that captaincy feels like a space combat skill and should be kept separate from space economy.
However, I don't mind that trade skills are reduced to a marks cost per design pattern to create the goods. The upshot would be giving space economy people more to do, but I am not convinced the purely RP tradeskills should have anything to do with space economy. Additionally, the space economy commodities are largely irrelevant for most of the things tradeskills make; we'd need to add more tradeskills for gathering. Would I enjoy the addition of something like botany? Sure. But the list of ways to get materials that are close enough to what the final product might be made of would be long... Easier to leave this as is and abstract the cost of making things as is currently done.
Limiting the economy purely to space also killed any drive for me to partake in. I, like many others, find space to be pretty damn lonely to do. I said it before and I'll say it again, I play multiplayer games to do multiplayer things. Top this off with making little to no marks when mining and scooping gas made me avoid space in it's entirety.
Poet being the prime example of someone who does this anyways brings major profits to players because without them we'd probably not enough supplies in Scatterhome to go do hard incursions which nets us bound credits and roughly 50k-80k marks after deducting ammo and repair cost. This makes it to where players who mine, scoop, and refine which all takes considerable more time and mind numbing effort are getting the shaft. Although recently I just got back into space stuff I only do incursions because I want fun engaging things to do with my time, not suffering to benefit others, especially Solus as a character would not be so altruistic in this endeavor.
My question is why limit things to space? We've so many planets and areas that are unique enough to be harvestable. This may be the human in me but I would of plundered so much material off these planets and shipped them off to be sold ages ago. We've already got the Ta-deth crystal mining command so all we'd have to do is place resource nodes around for players to harvest or mine. These planetary resources could then be combined with space resources to make plenty of other things ranging from ships, ship components, weapons, armors, clothing, food, and other items. Then just like station missions just hual the cargo off to a place that needs it. Open a commodities market on these stations and have players purchase them to craft.
Let's get into crafted armors and weapons now. Personally I think that we've opted for the path of easiness and convience over roleplay and economy. We literally kill mobs to acquire our gear, whether it be through rngesus or xenos for gear token. I get why some people would like it but it destroys the roleplay of anyone wanting to be a blacksmith. I'd much rather have craftable equipment that takes up resource and player effort be better than spamming 40 gear tokens to get that 9660 PIECE. I'd want to go to a crafter and have to befriend them or pay for my gear. Why? Because not everyone wants to be a combatant and we've taken an avenue of roleplay away from others. Give players the ability to craft gear and use higher quality mats to make strong gear and you'll see a stark increase in the interest of mining, scooping, and harvesting.
Overall you'll never see me doing any of the current activities simply because it does not benefit my character and that's cruel yes but that's just how my character would react. I could and have been living perfectly fine without any space activities. To me the economy simply does not exist nor will it ever until it's changed.
1. My freighter is not a combat vessel. I think it would be nice if, lacking weaponry altogether, it could turn fast. Normally it's a maneuverability vs power tradeoff on other ships: I have no power. I'd like to not move like molasses.
2. Most (>50%?) of the time, I find a decent haul pretty quick. But sometimes I hit an unlucky streak or happen to take the wrong path and it can be a long time until I get a full load of 4 rocks and a gas. If there were areas that more dependably had them, or some similar way of countering unlucky paths, that'd remove those few awful experiences of not finding anything.
Those are the "quick" changes, but #2 in particular brings me to suggest a broader-scale change that might address some of these grievances:
Have NPC (for now :P) planets that buy and sell different resources for different prices.
This makes sense to me. In the original lore description of the different races, there was usually a blurb about what made that race good in the galactic scale. Vonikin Krel make shipsims. Tukkav have great mining groups. I think it would both help the races or planets feel more meaningful if, say, we could go to Uycheon and purchase titanium for 50mk. Far off in the opposite end of the sector, there may be another station buying titanium at 130mk. Space truckers can find good combinations of stations that can turn a nice profit in exchange for the time spent flying around. Pick up titanium at Uycheon, sell it at Krell, pick up iriil at Krell, sell it at Pylos, pick up duramine at Pylos, sell it at Uycheon. Could even have different buyers for finished product too. Possibly at fixed price, so the RNG of personal market orders might still have a more lucrative buyer elsewhere.
But what about targetwarp, Squeakums? Well, one solution is to say targetwarp jostles the cargo too much and you can't use it. A better solution, in my opinion, is to just... let them. You can targetwarp to incursions already. And that consumes the cryosealed tablet, which is good! Maybe people start selling tablets. Maybe people do more caches and cosmpiercers to face the increasing demand for tablets.
What about the current mining system? No problem, that one can still exist. Since there is a reliable alternative source for minerals and gas, perhaps they won't be as hotly contested. If somebody wants to go out mining, there's a higher chance they get a quicker and bigger haul. You exchange reliability in getting exactly the material you want from an NPC "forge" to a cheaper cost but RNG materials (whatever you happen to fly across).
Regardless of whether the NPC forges are added or not, increasing the mineral and gas yields by a significant factor like Steve suggested still seems like a good idea to me.
Finally, I suggested this on discord, but since it's relevant I'll also repeat it here. It might also be a good source of demand for refined goods if the purchase/assembly of a new ship in the shipforge had its marks cost adjusted down, but then required the equivalent amount of marks in finished goods (UMM/paristeel/R-glass/etc).