In general I reckon they should be cheaper for everybody - before they were announced, I expected them to cost MAYBE one billion to buy, then another billion or less to outfit, but of course they cost at least five times that and have constant "running costs" on top of that!
If they'd come out as I expected, RELATIVELY cheap and with no running costs, they'd be a nice target for the games' "endgame", when you have all the ships you want fully outfitted and decently engineered...
However as they exist in the game, they're really only something people who still plays the game near constantly for many hours a night can afford to buy and crucially pay the running costs to stop them being "decommissioned".
Personally I only get a fraction of the time I used to to play any games and generally play whatever games I'm playing in "binges", game X for a week or three, game Y for another week or three etc
I used to play Elite more regularly, but I played it for a few weeks about a month ago and must get back to it, while I hadn't touched it for a few months before that...
A few years ago when I could put more time into the game, I still couldn't make rapid progress or the sort of money necessary to buy, outfit or crucially maintain a fleet carrier, I mostly spent my first two or so years in the game flying the starting Sidewinder A rating it, then flying and A rating a Cobra III, Asp Explorer, Python then briefly in a Krait mark II...
Then the following two or so years saving for, buying and slowly outfitting an Anaconda, while saving the money and earning the rank for a Federal Corvette.
I had only just bought the Corvette and become Elite in trade when there was a particularly lucrative CG paying hundreds of millions of credits for data a year or so ago which saw me go from having generally 100-300 million credits in my account to suddenly more than 1.6 billion!
I was suddenly "rich" and could buy any and all ships I wanted, I pretty quickly A rated the Corvette though haven't done much with it since, while I have about 1.2 billion sitting in my (unfortunately not real) bank account.
And though was suddenly "rich", I still wasn't close to buying a fleet carrier as they exist in the game and still can't think about buying one!
In recent months, I worked hard to get my combat rank high enough to unlock Lori Jameson and more recently have been planning to do my first bit of long range exploration in my mostly combat and mission focused, though quite long jumping Anaconda - I don't have the time, energy or crucially, the materials to fully outfit and engineer a new exploration only ship
.
Anyway, as said, as Fleet Carriers exist in the game, they're FAR from my plans, but if the Devs slashed their prices and got rid of their damn running costs, I would certainly think about buying one! .
So long story short, please Devs , drop the price and cost of buying and running a fleet carrier in the game and make them something us mere mortals can even think of buying and using!
If they'd come out as I expected, RELATIVELY cheap and with no running costs, they'd be a nice target for the games' "endgame", when you have all the ships you want fully outfitted and decently engineered...
However as they exist in the game, they're really only something people who still plays the game near constantly for many hours a night can afford to buy and crucially pay the running costs to stop them being "decommissioned".
Personally I only get a fraction of the time I used to to play any games and generally play whatever games I'm playing in "binges", game X for a week or three, game Y for another week or three etc
I used to play Elite more regularly, but I played it for a few weeks about a month ago and must get back to it, while I hadn't touched it for a few months before that...
A few years ago when I could put more time into the game, I still couldn't make rapid progress or the sort of money necessary to buy, outfit or crucially maintain a fleet carrier, I mostly spent my first two or so years in the game flying the starting Sidewinder A rating it, then flying and A rating a Cobra III, Asp Explorer, Python then briefly in a Krait mark II...
Then the following two or so years saving for, buying and slowly outfitting an Anaconda, while saving the money and earning the rank for a Federal Corvette.
I had only just bought the Corvette and become Elite in trade when there was a particularly lucrative CG paying hundreds of millions of credits for data a year or so ago which saw me go from having generally 100-300 million credits in my account to suddenly more than 1.6 billion!
I was suddenly "rich" and could buy any and all ships I wanted, I pretty quickly A rated the Corvette though haven't done much with it since, while I have about 1.2 billion sitting in my (unfortunately not real) bank account.
And though was suddenly "rich", I still wasn't close to buying a fleet carrier as they exist in the game and still can't think about buying one!
In recent months, I worked hard to get my combat rank high enough to unlock Lori Jameson and more recently have been planning to do my first bit of long range exploration in my mostly combat and mission focused, though quite long jumping Anaconda - I don't have the time, energy or crucially, the materials to fully outfit and engineer a new exploration only ship
.Anyway, as said, as Fleet Carriers exist in the game, they're FAR from my plans, but if the Devs slashed their prices and got rid of their damn running costs, I would certainly think about buying one!
. So long story short, please Devs , drop the price and cost of buying and running a fleet carrier in the game and make them something us mere mortals can even think of buying and using!
Yes, you are the only one.
You (and I as well) get the same carrier services on console that the PC players get on PC
Why it should cost less?
Odyssey players that activate on-foot services on their carriers pay extra (My XB carrier has 26,700,000 credits as weekly upkeep while my PC carriers have 34,500,000 credits as weekly upkeep)
Weekly carrier upkeep can be earned in two hours max. No permanent slaving required at all. And the 5 billion entry fee plus another 3-4 billion for enabling services is fine and should stay. For a mobile station that can have all ship services except a mission board and quite a few ground services too, that isn't too much at all. And let's not forget ~20000t cargo capacity.
That said, I have nothing against the introduction of smaller personal carriers with less functionality that are cheaper.
That said, I have nothing against the introduction of smaller personal carriers with less functionality that are cheaper.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
When first announced, before release, the upkeep ona fully loaded Carrier was 147M Cr. per week. We already have the cheaper upkeep costs.
An explorer might have difficulty dealing with the overheads but anyone interacting with civilization should have no problems.
I'll likely be running 4 carriers by October and don't see any sort of cashflow issues coming.
As Robert stated these are the cheaper prices and if anything should be raised.
I'll likely be running 4 carriers by October and don't see any sort of cashflow issues coming.
As Robert stated these are the cheaper prices and if anything should be raised.
yea....but carriers used to also be fleet ships that were maintained by multiple players and had cool support ships (that kind of look like they are the noses of the current carriers). So basically 10 times cooler for about 10 times less of the playerbase.
So the current rate is about even for the amount of cool that they are.
explorers didn't make 5 billion exploring alone. it takes but only a few weeks of distasteful (and kinda relaxed) non-exploring after getting your carrier to have enough upkeep to last you years. years. If you topped up now you wouldn't have to worry about upkeep until the game was shut down. Upkeep is a non-issue for anyone who has managed to get a carrier ...and only a thing non-carrier owners complain about.
Still requires returning to civilization. Something not all explorers seem prepared to do.
After years, you have to hit up some civilization. If that's beyond what you're willing to do in the game, then maybe owning a carrier isn't for you and you should just visit one of the many scattered around the galaxy operated by explorers who can.
Not every means available to players to play the game is a viable way to play the game. It stands to reason that if they were willing to dirty themselves with non-exploration to get the carrier, then they should be capable of returning to do a week or so of it again every couple years. someone refusing that is just being unreasonable. Unless they received their carrier out in the black via some means nobody else is aware of.
edit: seriously, i would think explorers would have a much bigger complaint against tritium mining than having to care about upkeep. Compared to tritium mining, being forced to explore only in VR at ultra settings on a rtx 1600 would be the greatest thing ever experienced in the game.
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Frontier likely realised how trivial it would have been to circumvent any Squadron membership threshold required to acquire one, that lots of players would want be the Squadron leader controlling the Carrier rather than just a Squadron member, as well as acknowledging that many players don't play in Squadrons, nor want to have the Carrier controlled by a Squadron Leader who could kick them on a whim after having helped fund the Carrier in the first place.
It was confirmed, prior to the announcement of the change to personal Carriers that a Squadron with a single remaining player would still have the Carrier as an asset.
Lots of unnecessary Squadron related drama avoided this way, and Squadrons can call on multiple Carriers, not just one.
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"Exploration isn't a viable way to play the game"? Just Wow!
I'd suggest getting out more but you'd probably think that 'wasn't viable'...
where did you get that from what I said. Getting a carrier and then taking it out and never (literally never) returning to civilization may be a non-viable way to utilize carriers and thus play the game with them. That's what my statement described.
I suggest reading before knee jerk reacting.
I dont think they were worried about individual commanders running them without a squadron. What would they care if someone was willing to do the work of 5+ expected commanders alone to acquire a carrier? Any individuals complaining would be complaining about something they shouldn't be doing not being easy and fun to do, which fdev would just respond with "duh" and move on.
They realized that the market for squadron run (and balanced) carriers was a tiny - an almost non-existent fraction of the market as would be for individuals (and balance to individuals) carriers and since the dev cost is roughly the same either way, (since i doubt they would have implemented the support ships in either scenario), it makes far more sense to position the new feature in a way that gets them more return for investment.
What's not really known though is what the abilities of carriers could have been if it had been left as a squadron feature balanced as such...it would make sense that they would have different powers and functionality within the game to balance that extreme cost. Which is why I assume they would have been cooler to make up for the 10x cost in upkeep. Just something likely experienced by a fraction of the playerbase that gets to experience carriers now.
edit: i'd imagine they would have been able to interact with powerplay or perhaps even the bgs directly. To facilitate gameplay around player created factions and powers. As squadrons would naturally center around those activities.
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Or like me you can install Universal Cartographics on board your carrier and pay your weekly costs via discoveries. I've been on a long term exploration hike since last year and manage my weekly costs no problem.
I was wondering if that would generate enough to keep a carrier going. Good to know.
The bad thing about this is they also dropped all the squadron functionality which would have been really great to have as an option for cooperative play. Like allowing shared ownership, and making it possible for multiple people within a squadron to for example schedule a jump, or to pay into and share the upkeep costs. Or access it as a storage space. Basically all the benefits of a "mobile base" went away. And then on the other side of this they left all these personal carriers as persistent assets clogging up everyone's game, even though at this point they didn't really need to be persistent anymore since they weren't serving a vital multiplayer purpose.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
I don't know the answer to that, but I personally don't think FC's and their upkeep should be cheaper.
