First, let me say I am a PS4 player with no access to the beta and therefore, the data provided here is what I have relied on from YouTubers who have had access to the beta.
Let us look at the perceived issues from the Elite Dangerous community so far:
The initial purchase price of a fleet carrier, in my opinion, is about right at 5 billion credits. But then it all falls apart. I, like many others, believe that this is because FDev wants the fleet carriers to be a credit sink. But I believe they have it aimed incorrectly.
The full purchase price for a fully fitted, but not fully stocked, Fleet Carrier would be almost 6.4 billion credits with weekly upkeep of £147 million.
At first glance, that does not appear too bad, until you consider that FDev are reported to also be reducing triple Low-Temperature Diamond hotspots when fleet carriers go live. My current estimate would be about 3-5 hours of pure grind per week, after the triple LTD nerf, for the upkeep cost of a fleet carrier.
You tuber Yamiks also said that the “huge debt” mentioned by FDev, before your fleet carrier goes into a shutdown cycle is just 300 million, or just over 2 weeks of upkeep costs. I am not sure how accurate the figure of 300 million is as he didn’t say where this came from, however. But if this is true, taking even a short break from the game will severely affect you being able to keep your carrier running.
Now, keeping the price and running costs high makes sense as you wouldn’t want 5 new fleet carriers sat in a popular system driving commodity prices down due to wanting to undercut each other with their commodity markets. However, they also stated that these Fleet Carriers should be available to everyone. So they can’t really go back on that without some serious repercussions from the player base.
What fdev needs to do, is use these ships to start off a proper player economy. And they may need to rethink their current strategy to achieve this.
Firstly, I think there should be a two-tier system for player-owned capital ships.
Player-owned capital class fleet support ships, and squadron owned capital class fleet carriers.
With a player-owned ship coming in vanilla only. Containing, a shipyard that can be used to store or retrieve your current ships. You cannot buy new ones. But it would let you store all of your ships if you so desired, as long as you have the storage space inside. Basic services as standard. Engineering Workshop, Advanced Maintenance, Outfitting (but only of modules stored in your support ship), a crew lounge, and storage. The storage would be for ships (calculated on ship mass), modules (also calculated by mass) and cargo. Up to a total of 6000 tones. These would be personal support ships and would not allow interaction by other players. They would also be instanced with the player. So when the player leaves the game, their support ship also jumps out. Because they are smaller than a fleet carrier, there would be a 15min warm-up, 500ly jump range, and 15min cool down. Making this support carrier far more versatile. The cost for one of these support ships? I would suggest 2 billion credits standard price. With a weekly upkeep of 25% of all credits you earned that week.
And then squadron fleet carriers. Larger capital class ships that do, indeed, support a fleet.
With little change on the current fleet career mechanics in the beta they just need to change them to being tied to a squadron and not a player. There would need to be a squadron rank of carrier commander to assist with fleet carrier maintenance.
They should also then allow cartographic in these carriers. With an option of cashing in the cartography data at a reduced amount to the carrier, or the full amount in the bubble. Lets say, for example, back in the bubble you would get 100% of the data price, but to the fleet carrier cartographics, you get 50% of the selling price, and the squadron gets 25% meaning there is a loss of 25%. I think some would take this hit for the deep space exploration.
I cant see many more players breaking off and forming their own one-man squadrons, well, not unless they have the time and dedication to put into the upkeep. And the personal fleet support vessel will allow a lot of players the flexibility of a capital class support ship at a fraction of the price of the carrier. Ok, so it will not have any general services apart from the crew lounge, but if a player wants access to those things, they should join or form a squadron.
This is not an ideal system, and I am sure many people could improve on it if they put their ideas forward here. These are just my thoughts at first glance. But I believe it would please many of the player base more than the current FDev proposed system.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Well, that’s my 2 credits worth. What do you think?
Let us look at the perceived issues from the Elite Dangerous community so far:
The initial purchase price of a fleet carrier, in my opinion, is about right at 5 billion credits. But then it all falls apart. I, like many others, believe that this is because FDev wants the fleet carriers to be a credit sink. But I believe they have it aimed incorrectly.
The full purchase price for a fully fitted, but not fully stocked, Fleet Carrier would be almost 6.4 billion credits with weekly upkeep of £147 million.
At first glance, that does not appear too bad, until you consider that FDev are reported to also be reducing triple Low-Temperature Diamond hotspots when fleet carriers go live. My current estimate would be about 3-5 hours of pure grind per week, after the triple LTD nerf, for the upkeep cost of a fleet carrier.
You tuber Yamiks also said that the “huge debt” mentioned by FDev, before your fleet carrier goes into a shutdown cycle is just 300 million, or just over 2 weeks of upkeep costs. I am not sure how accurate the figure of 300 million is as he didn’t say where this came from, however. But if this is true, taking even a short break from the game will severely affect you being able to keep your carrier running.
Now, keeping the price and running costs high makes sense as you wouldn’t want 5 new fleet carriers sat in a popular system driving commodity prices down due to wanting to undercut each other with their commodity markets. However, they also stated that these Fleet Carriers should be available to everyone. So they can’t really go back on that without some serious repercussions from the player base.
What fdev needs to do, is use these ships to start off a proper player economy. And they may need to rethink their current strategy to achieve this.
Firstly, I think there should be a two-tier system for player-owned capital ships.
Player-owned capital class fleet support ships, and squadron owned capital class fleet carriers.
With a player-owned ship coming in vanilla only. Containing, a shipyard that can be used to store or retrieve your current ships. You cannot buy new ones. But it would let you store all of your ships if you so desired, as long as you have the storage space inside. Basic services as standard. Engineering Workshop, Advanced Maintenance, Outfitting (but only of modules stored in your support ship), a crew lounge, and storage. The storage would be for ships (calculated on ship mass), modules (also calculated by mass) and cargo. Up to a total of 6000 tones. These would be personal support ships and would not allow interaction by other players. They would also be instanced with the player. So when the player leaves the game, their support ship also jumps out. Because they are smaller than a fleet carrier, there would be a 15min warm-up, 500ly jump range, and 15min cool down. Making this support carrier far more versatile. The cost for one of these support ships? I would suggest 2 billion credits standard price. With a weekly upkeep of 25% of all credits you earned that week.
And then squadron fleet carriers. Larger capital class ships that do, indeed, support a fleet.
With little change on the current fleet career mechanics in the beta they just need to change them to being tied to a squadron and not a player. There would need to be a squadron rank of carrier commander to assist with fleet carrier maintenance.
They should also then allow cartographic in these carriers. With an option of cashing in the cartography data at a reduced amount to the carrier, or the full amount in the bubble. Lets say, for example, back in the bubble you would get 100% of the data price, but to the fleet carrier cartographics, you get 50% of the selling price, and the squadron gets 25% meaning there is a loss of 25%. I think some would take this hit for the deep space exploration.
I cant see many more players breaking off and forming their own one-man squadrons, well, not unless they have the time and dedication to put into the upkeep. And the personal fleet support vessel will allow a lot of players the flexibility of a capital class support ship at a fraction of the price of the carrier. Ok, so it will not have any general services apart from the crew lounge, but if a player wants access to those things, they should join or form a squadron.
This is not an ideal system, and I am sure many people could improve on it if they put their ideas forward here. These are just my thoughts at first glance. But I believe it would please many of the player base more than the current FDev proposed system.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Well, that’s my 2 credits worth. What do you think?
Yeah I think fleet carrier mechanics are a bit boring too, like those huge Guardian things that just made you visit those same old planetary sites, could have had "Buy Horizons" sign on it