how do you slow down the economy?

[Betelgeuse]

There is some problems in the game right now.

In order to make things hard to buy you have to raise the price, but if you raise the price more money goes into the game.

Ammo and missiles can never be damaged making them easy cash.

There is no difference in price between a weapon you have been using for a long time and one that has been sitting in storage.

There is little incentive to buy later in the game due to you can have just as good of stuff from looting.

Little maintenance just fuel costs which is only an early game problem.


Some potential solutions (may need a mix or even add your own)

Cash sinks: They will always be optional so even if added will not fix the problem.

Reduce the price you can get for selling stuff: the problem with this is that it kills all non intended trade plus encourages people just to farm for items.

Have a no equipment looting system: Greatly limits the kinds of equipment you can get in a given game and forces you to play a "friendly" game.

Crew system: It could be interesting but I haven't seen any subjections that would fit well with the game.

Booby traps: try to loot a station or ship and have X credits/rins taken away

Upgrades to your ship: This could work but there is very little other than equipment to upgrade already. Maybe if some things where gotten rid of like solar panels and drives and handed out to certain ships.

Limit the amount of cash a station has: I do like this idea and remember someone bringing it up before but don't think anything came from it.

[OddBob]

Have a no equipment looting system: Greatly limits the kinds of equipment you can get in a given game and forces you to play a "friendly" game.

I propose a semi-no-equipment looting system that works like this (in a rough order of feasibility):

First of all, if you shoot at a wreck/cargo crate/station ruin, items inside have a chance to take damage. The determining factors on destroying items could be weapon damage, number of items in the wreck, size of the wreck, and size of the items (perhaps there should also be a number of "Free hits" right after it is destroyed that are guaranteed no damage). So a single longzhu in a citadel and you can shoot at it basically all day before your weapons find that little sphere, but a ranx fighter full of akan rounds and every time you hit it some might be destroyed.

Two - damaged armor segments from destroyed ships should not always be repairable to full strength (they should be called "a permanently damaged segment of [armor]" or something. You can make a killing with a patcher arm repairing armors and re-selling them (often even paying the dock to repair them is profitable). THe same can be true with other items. I think a good alternate way to have items take small amounts of damage is to stack stacking -10% bonuses on them. You might loot working, but -50% weapons from a ship, for example.

Three - less equipment spawned as LOOT in ships and stations. An amount or useful/treasure items equal to the value of the equipment will be generate instead. Same chances of the actual weapons carried by ships/station appearing undamaged, just not the extra ones generated as part of the item tables. Cargo crates, spawned derelict freighters etc. can still have random weapons and such in them. You will still occasionally find weapons and shields laying around, you just can't depend on them.

Four - competition. Right now you are basically entitled to every item in system that isn't in a store. If you crack a maraduer base and it has 500 kiloton shells in it, you can take them all to market one at a time and no one will ever mess with your stash - basically you are guaranteed the money

But not if enemies loot ships. If they have a base they might equip the weapons/equipment. Capships might be able to equip weapons on their own (it would take longer though?). There could even be "scavenger" enemies that are fast and try and steal your loot by stealthing up on you and looting the wrecks before you can. It would add a bit of unpredictability to encounters for sure. I think you'd need turrets or a way to order autons to protect objects in order to still be able to have stashes. Mines would come in useful for keeping bad guys out of your loot.

[Periculi]

If you just want to slow down the economy without altering the game engine you can adjust the buying and selling margins from the <trade> tag.

Inside each of the stations that allows you to trade there is a way to set the Buy and Sell criteria.

To make equipment more expensive without changing the base value of the equipment, up the Sell priceAdj margin- it's fairly low to begin with- Commonwealth Station sells at 110% of the base item value, for instance. To make a CW station suck you dry, set that to 800% And then set the buy criteria to 20% so you can't get rich from selling loot.

Now you are faced with the challenge of either finding all your equipment or else saving up for a looooooong time to buy that dual laser.

I like the idea of altering the treasure tables, and that is a very simple section of the code to alter for a wide ranging effect.

Another thing I noticed from adding a huge amount of items to the game is that the loot gives these items now, and they are merely the trade items (useless except for value) from the environmental mod I did.

With a much larger array of items, the loot seems to become less likely to give you what you think you want or need.

[Betelgeuse]

Periculi the only problem with the <trade> tag is that it kills all unintended trade and just makes it just use what you loot. That limits the game greatly.
Do you have any ideas for using the trade tag that doesn't have these problems or a way around them?

Solutions that make people play a certain way isn't something I would like. The great thing about Transcendence is that you can still find new ways of playing even after playing for years. So any solution would need to encourage many ways of playing.

As for altering the treasure tables I do like the idea but there are some problems with it. Encourages friendly station killing (not a large problem due to it being currently rare), ammo and missiles are a great source of income but if you make them non lootable that makes ammo based weapons much less viable, makes getting a certain weapon rare but I personally like that effect.

[Periculi]

The trade tag is the best way to alter and fine tune the market, from what I have seen creating local filters and environmental preferences in stations.

It isn't limited to just one Sell/Buy type of adjustment, so many adjustment levels and types of markets can be created. If you want to keep trading between stations profitable with certain types of items, it is easily accounted for using filters to separate trade items from equipment items.

One of the problems that keeps coming up is the late game lack- and how there are only a few select items to find to go after the Iocrym ship- more late game ship builds would make for some good cash sinks, and offer more ways to play.

More types of weapons, more options in ship builds and effective devices would be a perfect addition. Perhaps an extension of the equipment class that was workable for varying levels and areas of the game that wasn't available by way of loot- more items you must buy, so you need to sink cash into vendors.

Many of the ship upgrades could be extended, and I found at least one very handy way to create an upgrade path for device and weapon slots. These fundamental changes to your ship could cost a lot, and they could be what opens the door to higher technology or more powerful devices.

Specialty ship stations- the generic install and remove device screens can be filtered to perform only certain types of installations- not only technology based- to get some devices or systems installed could be moved to a more expensive type of installation specialist.

Propulsion upgrades could be set up to be mandatory, something you need to be even slightly competitive- and they could be scaled with more options.

Reactors could be much more expensive, and they could have some options like extended fuel capacity and efficiency perks. Some larger scales of power could be used, and more output range variety could be available within a game level (early-mid-late)

Most every device in the game that has a unique function for ships- such as the cargo hold, could have scaled varieties and a larger range of costs.

This type of expansion would give you many more varieties of ship builds and many of the items could be left out of the random loot so that you would need to find the station selling these types of items.

[Frits]

Competition seems like a fun idea but all in all i read many complicated ideas and this may not be needed. I thought charging for docking, the amount could be related to the system you're in to make the cost rise progressively. For starters 10 per time you dock at active stations in Eridani, about 250, 360 or 490 in St.K (following the pattern: 1,4,9,16... and all values times 10).

I suppose it's really useful to apply a costfactor throughout the game which no tactics alive can circumvent or avoid. When in the next version it appears players are having a hard time we can simply lower the factor from 10 to 8, or 4 if it's serious and vice versa.
Is charging for docking the best way to achieve this?

[Ttech]

Competition seems like a fun idea but all in all i read many complicated ideas and this may not be needed. I thought charging for docking, the amount could be related to the system you're in to make the cost rise progressively. For starters 10 per time you dock at active stations in Eridani, about 250, 360 or 490 in St.K (following the pattern: 1,4,9,16... and all values times 10).

I suppose it's really useful to apply a costfactor throughout the game which no tactics alive can circumvent or avoid. When in the next version it appears players are having a hard time we can simply lower the factor from 10 to 8, or 4 if it's serious and vice versa.
Is charging for docking the best way to achieve this?

wow, good luck with that. But its a great idea

[Apemant]

Limit the amount of cash a station has: I do like this idea and remember someone bringing it up before but don't think anything came from it.

Isn't this implemented already? Only Teratons and Ringers seem to have unlimited supply of rins, but all other stations can only dish out a certain amount of credits. I know for certain that it works on Commonwealth stations and esp. Thor's Wondrous Devices, as I tend to sell everything there . After certain amount of money, they just say they can't afford buying the next Plasma Torch I'm trying to sell.

Anyway, I don't actually think regular money is that much of a problem... I mean, it shoudl be challenging up to a certain point, but near the end of the game you aren't supposed to struggle with money. If you are such a great uber-pilot you are supposed to make fortune and stop worrying about money.

But I also like that dock fee Frits suggested. Sounds realistic. In fact, I think it should be time-based: the station remembers the tick when you paid your fee last time, and doesn't charge you until X ticks have passed. Think of it as a 'daily fee' or whatever. It also should be trivial to implement (looking at the contamination code) but not sure if it can be done from an Extension. I could try though...

EDIT: ok, here is a quick and dirty extension which just makes you pay dock fee of level*level*10 credits on all commonwealth stations (max once every ten minutes). It'd be easy to expand it to work the same with Ringers, Corporate stations, and basically everything that cals a intXXXOnInit lambda in its intial dockscreen - something that can be overwritten in an extension <Globals> .

Didn't playtest it fully, though. Not sure if it would interfere in a bad way with freeing slaves, decontamination etc. Think it should be fine but too lazy to actually simulate all possible circumstances...

http://rapidshare.com/files/75028788/dockfee.zip.html

[Apemant]

How about allowing you to purchase your own station from the Corporates?

It would be mighty expensive, but it would allow you to store some weapons etc. as mantelpieces. Ahh, my old dragon mentality comes back... I remember when I played ZangbandTK and had all 4 homes filled to the last cubic inch by great items and artifacts... that's why I like Transcendence so much, it's basically an arcade version of Angband in space. 8)

[Periculi]

Ha! I love how good ideas will never die!

Just kidding- we talked about buying into companies and creating stations as options for cash drains in some other places- it's a great idea except the station can't be too awesome or unbalance things.

My thinking on that idea now is to incorporate some fringe of empire or frontier area systems that are basically undeveloped and off the beaten path to place simple stations in like versions of residentials of simple colonies, and of course the influence you have on the type of station built may not exist- the investment group could make the decision and you just get a minor role as a silent partner (to keep the stations from being extra sources of over powered items and armor, like adding a few more Wondrous Devices to the mix)

Player-centric stations would be great, I like the idea- but you know, how about a 'pocket dimension' ? An entire star system that you could collect various types of stations to build for yourself? Nobody can beat having your own solar system-in-a-hyper-bubble, lol!

[Ttech]

Ha! I love how good ideas will never die!

Just kidding- we talked about buying into companies and creating stations as options for cash drains in some other places- it's a great idea except the station can't be too awesome or unbalance things.

My thinking on that idea now is to incorporate some fringe of empire or frontier area systems that are basically undeveloped and off the beaten path to place simple stations in like versions of residentials of simple colonies, and of course the influence you have on the type of station built may not exist- the investment group could make the decision and you just get a minor role as a silent partner (to keep the stations from being extra sources of over powered items and armor, like adding a few more Wondrous Devices to the mix)

Player-centric stations would be great, I like the idea- but you know, how about a 'pocket dimension' ? An entire star system that you could collect various types of stations to build for yourself? Nobody can beat having your own solar system-in-a-hyper-bubble, lol!