I'm just gonna jump in here and say that i have no problem with auto miners if we have a stock market. If you have 5k iron ore and the market is flooded, so they are only making 1 credit a piece, then you cant buy that cv that costs 300k. I agree they auto miners on servers are OP, but i would expect to recieve that much if i am late game and more of an empire at that point. I haven't caught up with the posts yet so I'll have to go back and read. I was caught up in reorganizing my city that my autominers bought me lol
I just mean for this situation autominers are like printing your own money, if anything is infinite it becomes almost worthless. If the autominers drained the deposit the would be fine. One autominer on a gold deposit and the whole market is shot everyone has money no one needs to sell anything. The trade system on my server ground to a halt when they introduced autominers
i have to say that now that I have read this it makes me happy to think that this exact thing word for word would be an excellent Economy and server type to play with. Something about the autominers makes me wish there were more to it than just fueling and collecting. what about building a drill platform or having the current ones be vulnerable to all fire pvp and pve. Either way, now they are hard to get, so at least there is that. you also have to go collect them, go figure. Either way it is hard to part with them as a builder, I love them. I just wish we could balance them perfectly
So, Players can undercut the NPCs, but NPCs guard the Player from getting Blocked out of the game by other Players trying to cut off Trade... This sounds like a Strategy. Here here. It'd be cool if one could learn & unleash Kung Fu too! I still believe that the Auto-Miner non-depletion of Ore Veins is temporary & someday a new Mechanic that causes the Auto-Miners to physically extract the Ore till the Ore is depleted maybe leaving a hollow hole in the ground may well someday get Implemented... who knows? Maybe the Devs will also find a way for these Ore Veins to also physically Regenerate so Mining HVs don't someday run themselves out of work on Servers that don't occasionally Reset any Planets. (Yeah there's Resource Meteors... aka Resource Bags of Cheetos... ) Now that I think about it, a past Suggestion from @Frankyln about Characters with Professions could potentially be tweaked to accommodate & Embrace this as well... what if everyone can do everything so a lone SP Peep can pick any Profession & still Self Sufficient survive, but a Profession trying to Craft something out of their Forte, like for example, a Commando Tyrax Lightning trying to Craft a Science Station, could get it done but would be kinda crappy at it & would wanna do it only if no other choice was present, but Trading for it would be a lot more attractive... perhaps my badass Weapon Crafting Skills could enable me to Craft Heavy Quality Rail Guns (& Ammo) & trade them for the Science Stations.
You also have to consider in our future exploration into the universe if we ever get npc's that we can hire and command, that would open up ways to run many large scale operations and would require a lot more resources in the end. What if you had to provide food and shelter for each npc that worked for you, where you built a small settlement around your base for your employees/slaves. This along with an increase in NPC factions and funding your search for Empyrion, may require a lot more resources in the end. Perhaps when you plan on searching for Empyrion you have to build a Sat Com station and send out probes into deep space to look for it. At that point you build your version of a generation ship loaded with credits, food and resources and start warping away. Some of the warps could land you quite a ways from the nearest planet which would require you to set your ship on auto pilot for a few min to arrive there. Once you get there you realize that there is nothing of value, so you are forced to sell your wares at the nearest station to keep going. At any point along the way you can settle and plop down a teleporter to visit your base, but that would be very expensive and be more of a mid/late game price only available at rare traders. You would have to find them by visiting stations and spend all your hard earned cash to buy a teleporter so you can still get back home when you want to. Of course, at some point there really is a sprawling metropolis at Empyrion. There would be a lot of historical buildings with rich lore about the universe you are in. (Empyrion is part 2) Just think of the resources it would take to accomplish all this. The Sat Coms at each location and probes, the Teleporters as well as the extra cost of maintaing your small colony. Of course you could always sit back and be a powerhouse and never go in search of Empyrion, but that would leave the player wondering what else is out there. There could be stories about its greatness and beauty that just drive the players crazy with the desire to visit this paradise.
Not to mention while doing stuff like launching Exploration Probes... those Probes might find & encounter some mean nasty dudes, who will then promptly have their Attention attracted... leading to Combat & the damages & attrition that comes with it... & Repairs take Resources to get done. (& not just Repair Bay Power Costs which means Fuel Costs...)
Yah kind of like going Deep Sea fishing in Australia on a rubber raft. You might pull in a few sharks haha. Next thing you know you just sent a dinner invitation to the Yuuzhan Vong, Reapers or reeled in the Alien.
Or who knows? Maybe even a Space Kraken! ... Hmm... I wonder what kinda Price "Space Kraken Beak" would fetch...? Could be an interesting Fishing Expedition... best have help with it. I wonder if @Captain Jack II would Sail with me on such an Expedition even while knowing I can be awful good at the Super Dying Skills?
I wonder if an AI controlled market would solve multiplayer issues of supply and demand. I also think that the devs have countered a lot of 'grindiness' in the game with options, eg I play hard but have progression 'fast' and npcs 'medium', and I can't see why new mechanisms can't be controlled this way. I also wonder if player status could be made more interesting via the marketplace, eg increasing pilot status, even intersystem pilot status or certification. This could be an supplementary levelling up experience though it could flow onto the existing blueprint access and levelling up mechanisms. Someone who follows the career path of a warrior might have different levelling up requirements to a trader or other professional.
I would also like to see a 'totalwealth' parameter added to the game which totals the wealth the player has accumulated in their inventories including cargo boxes, as well as building and ship assets. Perhaps experiences can be valued and added eg, no of kills, planets visited etc.
What does & does not Qualify as "Wealth"... no one will ever agree on it. For example, I refuse to consider Gold, aka 'Concentrated Conceitedness', a form of Wealth.
It's only a game. I agree there would be some disagreement over a wealthometer. I would like another way to measure progress in the game. I play each game to a certain point then get bored and start another game, often two or three a week, and have no real way of comparing progress from game to game - it has something to do with the lack of objectives once I get the rare minerals and take down a POI or two. Since, via the trading system there are already values allocated to items, a simple tally of inventories etc should be easy. It would get more difficult when you try adding in experiences, but some experiences are already 'valued' such as farming and mining.
Even there I wouldn't agree. You measure Progress in 'Materialism'... I measure it in how powerful i've become, how much Military Power i've got ready to go, & how much Ass i've kicked. One bugger about 'Wealth' is it falls into the jurisdiction of 'To each their own'... similar to stuff like Food Taste, Opinion, Building Style, & such. To have one single type of Wealthometer would Suggest there's only one right way of things to the exclusion of all else... & to think of something like that sitting in a Sandbox Game... Somehow I don't see it working.
We are re designing our server to make up for all these shortcomings with class system, events, battle royales and a full fledged economy if it isnt already added by then. We set it up so players have to trade between factions to get resources and are building a central city to conduct trade and meet other players. All teleporters meet in this city from different sectors in the galaxy
At this point if i could ask for one things from the devs i would like them to release some kind of mod api. There are some brilliant modmakers out there that could probably let us play the game however we want. Economy overhauls, pvp balances, build tools and textures are all things that could be customized to suit our tastes and let the devs just concentrate on the core mechanics. They are never going to make a game that will give everyone everything they want. Open it up to modders and let some people help the development for free
Ironically, it's rather hard to make a Mod API for a game still not even done with all its Core Mechanics & System Implementation. Modding tends to be best waited on till Beta... well, at least major Modding...
Maybe, but alot of alpha games allow modding, some of those mods end up fixing game problems the devs havnt got around to. Some mods are popular enough the mod, or a part of the mod, becomes part of the game itself. It just seems like free development manpower
Indeed, if they would just let us change block/device stats, that would be amazing (and I'd definitely make a Realism & Balance Overhaul mod).