Credits are utterly inflated since the implementation of void opals and deep core mining in general. Lore wise, actually a cool thing as with advanced technologies we now are able to amass a giant fortune. The problem? They aren't worth anything anymore. New players can easily get a fully A graded Anaconda within a day and unlocking a hand full of basic engineers in a week will grant them the top power level there is to achieve in this game.
Only ship transfer costs display a somewhat valid credit sink but that's about it. Even the most expensive ships are no longer expensive, relatively seen. To tackle this I propose the following:
- Increased rebuy for engineered modules.
Your insurance grants you your ship as it was when you lost it, a fatal failure in the first place. And you do not pay any extra credits for engineered modules where valueable materials, way more valueable than credits, are spend to even achieve this level of power for each module. It is only fair to pay extra credits for your insurance company for them to replace your modules, engineered.
This works intuitive, like this: Assume a vanilla module costs 5% of its buying price to replace, each grade of modification increases this percentage by 20% and each secondary effect (for example fast charge for shield generators or phasing sequence for pulse lasers) by 5%. This means that a G5 engineered module with a secondary effect will cost 5% + 5*20% + 5% = 110% of its original credit value to replace. The credits are spent to pay their respective workers which gather materials for the company to be able to replace such high value modules.
Keep in mind that this is only accounted for each module so if you only run one G5 engineered module (for example a G5 increased range FSD) your total rebuy upon ship destruction won't increase significantly (maybe instead of 5% you pay 10% relatively speaking).
The aimed effect for this change is to make losing expensive ships more risky and cheap, small ships not so. For example a fully G5 engineered Viper MK III will never exceed a ~3M-ish credits rebuy mark as a fully A rated Viper MK III merely costs 3M credits to buy in the first place. This is intended because engineering a higher class (=expensive) module gives a much higher effect than engineering a smaller class module. Take a C3A and a C8A powerplant for example. Overcharging them both to G5 and adding the monstered effect (which have the very same material costs for both modules) will result in +5.5 MW for the C3A powerplant but +17MW for the C8A powerplant. That's 3 times as much despite having to pay the same amount of materials.
With this pwoer difference it is only fair to scale the rebuys the same way the prices are scaled (non-linear). The result is as already mentioned: high risk for piloting big, expensive ships engineered and low risk for piloting small, cheap ships engineered.
With much higher rebuys the potential loss of a ship displays a huge credit sink that is appropiate considering how fast credits are earned these days.
Additionally let's assume you lost your ship and can't afford to rebuy it completely. You will be able to unselect specific modules as you already can and replace them with stock modules using the already available feature of the rebuy menu. This will significantly reduce your rebuy costs per modules at the cost of losing an engineered module.
Lastly, another sideeffect is that purchasing modules in discounted equipment shops plays a more significant role as the scaling of the rebuy price soley depends on the original starting price. Assuming you bought one module in normal shops and one in LYR space (= -15% module costs) means that you can save 16.5% max. of the initial module price upon paying a rebuy if you bought it in LYR space compared to normal shops, making module buying location much more significant which adds a tiny bit of gameplay depth.
The values can obviously be adapted and changed but I aimed for around 100% of a module's original buying price for a fully G5 engineered module so this whole idea wouldn't work if it would be implemented using a 30% aiming mark as the difference is too low and credits will remain inflated, albeit not as much.
Thanks for your attention.
Only ship transfer costs display a somewhat valid credit sink but that's about it. Even the most expensive ships are no longer expensive, relatively seen. To tackle this I propose the following:
- Increased rebuy for engineered modules.
Your insurance grants you your ship as it was when you lost it, a fatal failure in the first place. And you do not pay any extra credits for engineered modules where valueable materials, way more valueable than credits, are spend to even achieve this level of power for each module. It is only fair to pay extra credits for your insurance company for them to replace your modules, engineered.
This works intuitive, like this: Assume a vanilla module costs 5% of its buying price to replace, each grade of modification increases this percentage by 20% and each secondary effect (for example fast charge for shield generators or phasing sequence for pulse lasers) by 5%. This means that a G5 engineered module with a secondary effect will cost 5% + 5*20% + 5% = 110% of its original credit value to replace. The credits are spent to pay their respective workers which gather materials for the company to be able to replace such high value modules.
Keep in mind that this is only accounted for each module so if you only run one G5 engineered module (for example a G5 increased range FSD) your total rebuy upon ship destruction won't increase significantly (maybe instead of 5% you pay 10% relatively speaking).
The aimed effect for this change is to make losing expensive ships more risky and cheap, small ships not so. For example a fully G5 engineered Viper MK III will never exceed a ~3M-ish credits rebuy mark as a fully A rated Viper MK III merely costs 3M credits to buy in the first place. This is intended because engineering a higher class (=expensive) module gives a much higher effect than engineering a smaller class module. Take a C3A and a C8A powerplant for example. Overcharging them both to G5 and adding the monstered effect (which have the very same material costs for both modules) will result in +5.5 MW for the C3A powerplant but +17MW for the C8A powerplant. That's 3 times as much despite having to pay the same amount of materials.
With this pwoer difference it is only fair to scale the rebuys the same way the prices are scaled (non-linear). The result is as already mentioned: high risk for piloting big, expensive ships engineered and low risk for piloting small, cheap ships engineered.
With much higher rebuys the potential loss of a ship displays a huge credit sink that is appropiate considering how fast credits are earned these days.
Additionally let's assume you lost your ship and can't afford to rebuy it completely. You will be able to unselect specific modules as you already can and replace them with stock modules using the already available feature of the rebuy menu. This will significantly reduce your rebuy costs per modules at the cost of losing an engineered module.
Lastly, another sideeffect is that purchasing modules in discounted equipment shops plays a more significant role as the scaling of the rebuy price soley depends on the original starting price. Assuming you bought one module in normal shops and one in LYR space (= -15% module costs) means that you can save 16.5% max. of the initial module price upon paying a rebuy if you bought it in LYR space compared to normal shops, making module buying location much more significant which adds a tiny bit of gameplay depth.
The values can obviously be adapted and changed but I aimed for around 100% of a module's original buying price for a fully G5 engineered module so this whole idea wouldn't work if it would be implemented using a 30% aiming mark as the difference is too low and credits will remain inflated, albeit not as much.
Thanks for your attention.