McDuff wrote:Now, remind me again why "it costs money" is somehow "fake" in a game where that is true?

Monetary cost is (in the long term) only meaningful in games that have a clear goal and an end. You must progress this or that fast or lose the game. That restricts your ability to build up an economy that trivialises "cost".

I won't repeat it again, though. We'll just have to disagree after this point. =P

Oh...kay.

So your point is that the economics of the game just don't matter and that's your opinion and la la la.

Well played.

McDuff wrote:Oh...kay.

So your point is that the economics of the game just don't matter and that's your opinion and la la la.

Well played.

expressed in a bit of an harsh way, but i agree, why do running costs dont matter gazz?

That's not what I said.

In an open-ended game you can not assume that the player will have a military fleet that will put a noticeable drain on his economy.

In a game with a clear path of progress and an end you can. Starcraft, GalCiv, or MOO2 are examples for games where such a thing as "upkeep" can be implemented with a meaningful connection to the economy.

If you look at a game like X, all such plans go straight out the window because the military and economic progression are not connected at any point.
In X you could (theoretically) be a famously rich interstellar drug lord and not own a single ship beyond your personal yacht.


Unless you turn LT into a true 4X game (and dictate everyone else's game), the "cost" argument is only based on your assumption of how you intend to play the game.
That's why I used "effort" instead. That's a stable currency in game design and it does work in open ended games.


I didn't say that running costs don't matter. Quite the contrary. I suggested a cost. But the monetary cost is a complete crapshoot.
Way too high for one player and meaningless to the next.

Gazz wrote: Monetary cost is (in the long term) only meaningful in games that have a clear goal and an end. You must progress this or that fast or lose the game. That restricts your ability to build up an economy that trivialises "cost".

But that just makes no sense.

If cost scales with the size of your corporation, cost always matters. It doesn't matter how big you get, the cost will always be a meaningful proportion of your total size.

Cost is not trivial in the real world, even after decades of financial sector explosiveness that's produced the richest people the world has ever seen. If the maintenance cost of your fleet ends up at 10% of its total purchase cost, that strikes me as a budgetary line-item that cannot possibly be insignificant, even for a successful company.

If it costs you more to have hulking great megatankers and capital ships, you won't have megatankers and capital ships lying around for no reason. You won't just idly build a whole bunch of Titans because there's nothing else to do with the massive pool of cash you have lying around. The massive pool of cash will a) be smaller at any given time, and b) have a purpose, in sustaining your ongoing operations and in buffering you against the possibility that something bad might happen and you might find yourself suddenly unable to pay wages and maintain your ships.

The very point of implementing things like fuel, degradation, depreciation, upkeep etc is to create a system that works against having hugely capital-rich corporations with limitless pools of liquidity finding their way into the economic stratosphere and never coming down again. You seem to be objecting to it because there'll be huge companies with limitless pools of liquidity but.... that's the problem it's there to solve.

So I just don't understand how it can still be an objection? It's like saying towels are a bad idea because you're wet.

Unless the point is that you want there to be massive corporations with limitless capital and liquidity floating around in the economic stratosphere who you can never hope to compete with on any meaningful level? But, I mean, why do you want that?

Unless you turn LT into a true 4X game (and dictate everyone else's game), the "cost" argument is only based on your assumption of how you intend to play the game.

Even in your game where you're playing as an interstellar drug lord, the NPCs are going to be playing as miners and haulers and manufacturers. That's where all the ships and guns come from. That's what keeps the economy ticking over so that people will buy your drugs.

So, yes, in that game you, personally, won't be dealing with the mechanics of fleet upkeep - although you'll still have to be maintaining your *own* ship and upgrading it periodically.

But the mechanics are still working, behind the scenes, to create a universe that you inhabit.

Gazz wrote:Way too high for one player and meaningless to the next.

well, we could remove a flat amount of upkeep from the ship the player is controlling, as we could assume that the PC is doing the work himself and does not have to hire abstracted underlings below a certain size of ship
some ship traits like automatisation could increase the amount of upkeep that gets taken from a ship by the presence of the player or just reduce the amount of upkeep needed by the ship

Why does the cost of "maintaining the ship you currently own" end up too high?

Especially if when you first buy it, that maintenance cost is basically zero, and only starts to really kick in once it's old and you have battered its engines over many light years?

Are people presuming that maintenance will be something like "500cr per ship" regardless of the size of the ship?

McDuff wrote: Are people presuming that maintenance will be something like "500cr per ship" regardless of the size of the ship?

im assuming that upkeep is roughly proportional to the size of the ship and by so its amount of (abstracted) crew, the more crew the more pay

Monetary cost is always trivialised whenever you have a system that allows a player to make more money than he expends. This is an inherent problem and not one that Gazz just made up. Unless you have a machanism in place that limits the amount of money a player can have (e.g. fleet size of income vs. expense when it comes to upkeep)--which can feel really gamey the vast majority of the time once you get to the limit--you will have this problem. Even inflation becomes pointless when you own 99% of the system's wealth. Any mechanism that requires upkeep or paying something out will eventually also become trivialised as a result due to the direct reliance on something that is trivialised.

The alternative is to find something of 'value' that can become the cost for certain things such as time (I can't think of any others at the moment but I'm sure there are some). I'm not advocating for time to the be the cost, but it is something that is much more valuable in a situation like this.

This isn't a matter of "Everyone will eventually become infinitely rich so we shouldn't have money". It's more of a matter of "If someone wants to become infinitely rich, either make it so that it doesn't matter to the other actors or make it so that it is hard to attain and retain this money".

Devil's advocate--Why do we even care if the player can become infinitely rich? Why should we stop them?

Realistically, we don't. However, it also depends on how much you want to be able to do within the game. Money is being treated as the 'is all-be all' item in the game. You have enough of it and you can do whatever you want. Once you are able to do whatever you want, what is left to do?

Like I said, you can not assume that everyone will play LT the same way as you intend to.

One could own a large ship to explore the galaxy... but not have any industrial base to support it with a regular income.

And no, I really didn't make that up. =P
X is a prime example but I already mentioned it. In Everquest there is "upkeep", too. You need cash for spells and to buy reagents to (no fail) craft the latest and greatest armor piece from some monster's drop. With the latest expansions that can cost some 10k platinum pieces per. (a lot)
EQ is open ended, too, and there, too, I trivialised this monetary cost. I own tens of millions of pp so this "limitation" flat out doesn't exist for me.


You (McDuff) keep insisting that monetary cost will always matter but that is only true if you assume a whole lot of Real World™ baggage to be part of the game, making it an accurate simulation of working 9 to 5. That may appeal to some but definitely not to everyone. =P

Well in a situation where the crew on board are doing the maintenance, it's almost a trivial implementation given that crew and wages is already a thing that exists.

I'm thinking in terms of material costs. The actual replacement of worn out parts. Not modelled in actual crates of wire and actuators, but it makes sense to me that maintenance costs are proportional to the size of the ship. A big ship needs a lot of materials to fix it. A smaller ship doesn't need any.

If repair costs increase at 1% of total ship material cost per year, with a cap at say 7% or 10%, that makes sense to me. If that cost can be brought down by upskilling your crew and assigning them to permanent maintenance duty, I'm also OK with that.

The point is to provide a system whereby costs scale with size, however it's done. The bigger your ship, the more it costs to run. Big useless fleets are bad strategy. Changing circumstances mean fleets get scrapped and replaced. That's the end goal. Not big flotillas of virtually infinite size because once you've bought a ship it's costless and so you might as well have 60 capitals parked up in a space dock somewhere "just in case".

Gazz wrote: One could own a large ship to explore the galaxy... but not have any industrial base to support it with a regular income.

One of the things I've floated in the past is PC opt outs as a game "difficulty" thing.

Yes some people want an easy mode. That's fine. So they can check the option that says "turn off ship upkeep for me".

Economics modelling for all the other agents still holds true, so you still get the economy working in the background. The player is free to toodle off and do whatever.

This is just "inverse hardcore mode". Rather than starting with a really gamey game that uses plain game mechanics and where the player ends up wearing Infinite Armour and a Sword of Doom because that's how games end up, the game *starts off* as a sim designed to preclude that, and if you want you can turn it off and play as Captain Awesome.

EQ is open ended, too, and there, too, I trivialised this monetary cost. I own tens of millions of pp so this "limitation" flat out doesn't exist for me.

Which is a sign that they designed the economy badly.

What's the point of playing a game where nothing is a challenge any more?

I'd quite like LT to still be a game that's challenging even after my character has been around for years. I don't want to reach the point you do in other games where money just becomes virtually infinite and nothing matters and I can have the biggest and best of everything and win every fight.

And I especially don't want NPCs with a 100 year head start on me to have that option either!

When was it mentioned that crew and wages was a confirmed feature?

I like what you brought up about having a material cost more. This is a good example of something other than money holding the value.

McDuff wrote:Which is a sign that they designed the economy badly.

What's the point of playing a game where nothing is a challenge any more?

No, it works - by and large.

I just played smarter. Supplied a demand that no one had an idea was supply-able. It didn't create a run on that "market", either. I could go back to it and "own" it again if I choose to. *shrug*


And a challenge (military or economic) is not necessarily what everyone will be looking for in LT.
You really really can not assume that everyone will play LT the same way as you intend to.