New currency in Odyssey

Maybe certain equipment will be locked behind your current FPS rank. Like if you want a rocket launcher you have to be rank 4 or something. This way credits are still the only currency but it keeps things a bit more balanced. A commander shouldn't be able to just buy out all the best equipment because they have 8 billion credits. Frontier could even put this into lore by having the Pilot's Federation require as a law that commanders have to be a certain rank to purchase certain equipment.
 
It was always going to be an issue. Consider:

A sidewinder - a spaceship capable of hyperspace - is only worth a few thousand credits.

Which means a firearm, regardless of how advanced it is, couldn't possible be worth more than a handful of credits. Lore wise, there is no explanation for why small arms might utilize unique materials that economically shift their price to exceed that of a starship. Those same materials would, reasonably, be used in startship construction if that were the case.

At some stage, we have to remember it's a game. Just like spawning from the black - instantly - twenty thousand lightyears away, with a ship fully intact if we can afford it, isn't remotely sensible but necessary to gameplay.

What I don't look forward to is the engineering aspect of on-foot equipment. It sucks enough as it is in space, and by the time us console-peasants get Odyssey, the PC crowd will have undoubtedly identified the 85% or so of ground engineering that is utterly worthless. (You don't honestly expect FDev to get it right, do you?) Which means the 'joy' of exploring engineering - that never materialized in the first place - will still be absent.
 
A sidewinder - a spaceship capable of hyperspace - is only worth a few thousand credits.

Which means a firearm, regardless of how advanced it is, couldn't possible be worth more than a handful of credits.
We already know how much "personal weapons" cost to purchase using credits, in bulk, because they're an in-game commodity item (only available from anarchies, dictatorships and other deplorables). I did the maths several years ago now, during a discussion on "how much is a credit worth in today's money". Using the average galactic market price of one tonne of "personal weapons", and some WAG assumptions about how heavy a weapon, with starter-kit ammo and packaging, would be in the 3300s (I guessed half a kilogram), I estimated a single handgun ought to cost you about 2.2 credits. Give the seller some profit margin, and call it 3 credits, retail.
 
The problem with Credits is that to ensure we're conducting business in sensible amounts and not things like 0.01 Credits for a few rounds of ammo you'd need to devalue them by up to 100 times. Which would give many people silly numbers in their bank balances.

The solution would be to separate "Space Credits" from Local Domestic Currencies.

This would mean that our existing Credits remain a universal currency used to conduct bulk trade and buy space ships and their components.

A separate financial system is then used to go down to the supermarket (and gun store!) to buy goods on a personal level.

Of course you would need to be able to convert (at a sensible rate) Credits to the local in system/planetary currency but the fun part could be in building the necessary relationships etc. in order to be able to do that.

I think the reality should be that everyone is able to use their existing credit balance to buy pretty decent stock items wherever they are but this should also allow for engineering mod's, bespoke, alien and possibly illegal items to be parked behind the existing (or new) gameplays similar to what we already use for engineering our ships.

You could also run into local issues such as cash supply and limits on the amount of credits that can be converted at any one time, or even embargoes on going off world with more than set amounts of local currency.

I'm not much into this recipe nonsense so I hope not too much of that!
 
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