[REQ] Reducing player's incomes

[Wazatiste]

The main purpose of this script will be to reduce the huge player's incomes that leads to an exponential wealth, getting the whole game boring to some extent...


How to do that ?

- Adding some french flavor on the X3 Universe: strikes, workers getting abruptly some holydays, deliveries that never come...
- Taxes on the incomes of your factories by the sector owners
- Customs taxes on your cargos by the races who don't like you so much
- Taxes on wealth: When you got 25M+, you're taxed by x% per month
- Insurances on your MK3 ! Protect thoses you love...


Well, that's only some ideas, don't hesitate to throw some in and sorry for my poor english [/u]

[Idea]

I agread with you.
But i would be eseyer to tax only players account then monitor his cargo,profit that UT makes,factory income and to tax all that.Eventuel all money gose to player account.
The altitude of taxes should be connected with player trade rank and notority with specific race.Higher trade rank meens more money the player can make meens ageen that meens higher tax,but higher notority meens lower tax.The racio betwen this two parametars should be 2:1.
Also the tax should depend from patrole ships in the sector.More patrol ships meens more security expenses wich meens ageen more tax.

[X2-Eliah]

What about simply reducing fight mission payouts?
(around 500k for every killed M6, jeesh..)

The normal trading / station building income is rather ok, I think

[Idea]

That would be eseyer but where is the fun in that.It is beter to have feling that govermant exist and that they will take half of money that you earn in the name of taxes.

[fud]

It's a pretty easy solution for me. When I get to that point I start a new game with a different start.

[Wazatiste]

It's a pretty easy solution for me. When I get to that point I start a new game with a different start.

That's a bad way to solve the problem

And the notoriety thing proposed by Idea isn't, sadly, that great as you progressively lose the point of getting less money taken from you.
As a re-use of your idea Idea, we can imagine a discount on the raw materials needed for the stations.
But the government needs to taxe you on the behalf of what you earn, not your reputation.

Got another money-sink idea btw: what about charity giving ? When a race got a station blown up or a sector ravaged by enemy incursion, you could give money to help them, getting your reputation up if you got it low and having one or more stations having your name as a tribute to your kindness

[fud]

They did have the charity thing in Reunion (if you weren't aware of it). It was a great way to spend suplus millions and "buy" notoriety.

The thing with TC though, notoriety is easier to get than money this time. Not that money is hard to get by any means.

[Wazatiste]

I remember, that's where i found my idea


And the rep' gain could be balanced by a rep decrease like when you "forget" to pay your taxes...

[Wazatiste]

Bump, as it doesn't seem to interest a lot of ppl

[brekehan]

Someone simply needs to redo the missions scripts. No missions should pay more than 1 or 2 mill. It accelerates the game to the end point and the end point is boredom.

If you mess with the trade aspect, it just deters the player from trading even more than now. With the missions paying so much, it makes trading worthless.

My idea of a hard game (and the only one that would last awhile for myself) would be to play without ever taking a fight mission and never using auto aim.

I am really hoping someone takes care of the first by modding. Because fight missions are fun, they just pay too much.

[OnlineKenji]

Here is a true fight mission story:

I had about 65 million creds, so I decided to buy myself an M7. Up until then I was doing fight missions and have only ONE solar power plant M to ensure that I always have jump energy.

Anyway, I bought the Deimos (best damn thing ever) all 6GJ of sheilds a bunch of guns, etc. Left me with about 16 million credits.

So I fly my new bad boy to Power Circle... and lo and behold there was a fight mission a "Very Hard" level protect mission - Now, I was already at Assassin or Vindicator fight level at the time so "Very Hard" = about 15 M6s and 20+ fighters on a protect factory mission.

Anyway I wiped them out and captured the last Centaur - The mission still needed it killed even though it was mine so I repaired it and sent it to the shipyard for scrapping (why destroy it for nothing, right ). While it was on its way I took a "Very Hard" patrol mission....

Now I do not know if you are familiar with "Very Hard" patrol missions once you're at vindicator fight level... but long story short.. I ended up killing about 9 Xenon Ks, 20 Xenon Ps and roughly 50 or so L, M, and Ns.

It took a long time (about 50 minutes or so) but at the end my captured centaur was at the shipyard and it was time to cash in my missions:

Selling Captured Centaur : 6+ Million credits
Very Hard Protect mission: 4.9 million credits
Very Hard Patrol mission : 73 million credits

Going from 16 Million credits to over 100 million credits in about an hour: Priceless

[Crush]

More money is good! It makes the game more fun and there are more choices with what to do with your cash. I like it better than waiting for days just to buy another M6 for my little fleet.

And how do you have your Deimos set up? I somehow can't manage to defeat a K in it.
Mine has the Ion Shard guns in main turret, HEPTs and PBEs in others.

[brekehan]

Yea sure, more money seems great when you are new, however, later on when you start doing fight missions and receiving 600-900 million a pop, it gets a little silly.

If you enjoy getting everything handed to you on a silver platter, then that's OK. You can play that game, but other like to be challenged.

These payouts for missions take away all the other aspects of the game.

Why build stations and a trading network that takes hour and only brings in a few million an hour when you can just do fight missions over and over for trillions?

Why preprare a fleet for piracy, and spend hours killing ships for thier crago, loading onto your TL, and offloading it at demanding stations, when you can just take a fight mission for 100X the payoff?

Why do the plot missions hoping to get that cool ship out of it, when you can just buy it yourself in 1/30th of the time with the payout from a single fight mission?

Why capture? Just go buy all the ships your heart desires with fight mission payouts.

When I got 600 million in less than an hour, from a mission, it pretty much ended the game for me. There are no challenges that require those kind of assets to overcome.

[OnlineKenji]

The Ks were easy, just dont' approach them from the side - side turrets = dead deimos - come at them from the front then get right up on top them and let the lasers fly. I do not have all Ion Shard in the front. I have 2 PSGs, 4 Ion Shards, 2 Hepts (yeah I know). On the top and bottom I have 2 flak artilery arrays, and on the sides I have concs and hepts.

As for the percieved ease. Its not really easy. A system full of enemy ships isn't an easy task, you need to constantly have bigger and bigger ships to continue on the fight path. Plus the Very Hard missions aren't usually that frequent, it takes a lot of flying around for me to fight one.

And yes, I agree, why would you do those other things like trade and factory build. I haven't this game, and this is the first time that I've been able to just fight until my heart is content in an X game. It had always reached a point where I was too strong for anything in the regular sectors but not strong enough to comprehensively take on the Xenon or Khaak sectors (few exceptions for the small ones with only 2 or 4 capitol ships)

I disagree with your statement about doing the plot missions. Even with all the money it is still fun to do the plot missions when you're looking for a change or when you can not find a good fight mission or you need to build up enough rep to get the lucrative fight missions.

I will admit that 73 million credits in a single mission is a just a bit much, but it isn't an easy task to succeed at that mission so the payoff is mostly deserved.

[Crush]

At least now there's a choice. In the previous games you had to trade and build factories to get any decent money. Now I can just go kill some stuff and be happy. I don't want to spend hours sitting at the screen waiting for some UT to go around doing its business.

If you don't like the fight missions, don't do them, and take the hard path. That's the choice we now have.

[brekehan]

At least now there's a choice. In the previous games you had to trade and build factories to get any decent money. Now I can just go kill some stuff and be happy. I don't want to spend hours sitting at the screen waiting for some UT to go around doing its business.

If you don't like the fight missions, don't do them, and take the hard path. That's the choice we now have.

Please go argue in the regular forum, this is the scripts and modding forum.

I don't have time to waste arguing with every noob about stuff that shouldn't even matter to them.

What do you care if someone writes a script or a mod?

Or are you just wanting to argue with anyone why will bite?

[BillSheil]

Agreed brekehan.

The current state of the exponential level scaling in X3TC is like getting the BFG at the end of the first level of Doom and all of the boss monsters squeezed into the second level. Whether you can handle it or or not, it makes the game shorter and doesn't actually do anything for the pace (expect superficially). Of course there's always a few people who think that would have been an improvement on the boring game that Id released or make an argument that you need the BFG at the end of the first level so that you can fight the bosses in the second.

I'm looking now at the director files (especially OBS.xml and constants.xml which control the level scaling) and the logic seems pretty backwards in terms of maintaining game balance, but in their defense most of the files are actually marked as being in "testing" or ""development" status so we could put this down as incomplete work that wasn't originally intended for release but for deadlines.

Mostly though I think the problem is that the challenge/reward scaling is biased towards the missions generating X3R style Xenon Invasions at the high combat ranks, something that makes them overscaled at all levels. With station missions being so frequent this is what leads to the exponential explosion in game progress.

In fact I think ES would have been better off leaving the routine station missions to generate routine assignments and brought in a seperate source of missions for the infrequent high level scaled combat. Nobody really benefits from having several massive level scaled missions spammed constantly in every sector. Even if you want to do them it still takes a lot time to complete them so don't really benefit from multiple missions being constant availability, it just makes you lazy. If you don't want to do them, tough, there's no choice since that's all that currently gets advertised.

I'm trying now to put together a framework of rescaled MD files with two main parts:

• a) Rescaled routine station missions that provide a decent amount of early reward and progress but with weighted level scaling so that at higher levels they don't unbalance the game. Highest level of opposition for the hardest missions at the highest combat ranks would amount to a couple of reinforced M6 patrols/raiding parties. Still good for combat veterans who want to take a spin in the cockpit of a M3 or M6 but not intended to generate major fleet actions.
  
  b) New fully level scaled but infrequent (possibly time controlled) XI type missions.

I'll try to get a WIP tested and out by the end of the week. Hopefully Egosoft will make it redundent quickly in the next patch, but I'm a little worried though that they may balk at the prospect of properly rescaling the missions precisely for the fear of a backlash from casual gamers so it may end up as a permanent mod.

[brekehan]

That's cool. Even if it is not adapted by ES, at least we will have an option. I apprecaite you taking the time to look into it.

[Crush]

At least now there's a choice. In the previous games you had to trade and build factories to get any decent money. Now I can just go kill some stuff and be happy. I don't want to spend hours sitting at the screen waiting for some UT to go around doing its business.

If you don't like the fight missions, don't do them, and take the hard path. That's the choice we now have.

Please go argue in the regular forum, this is the scripts and modding forum.

I don't have time to waste arguing with every noob about stuff that shouldn't even matter to them.

What do you care if someone writes a script or a mod?

Or are you just wanting to argue with anyone why will bite?

I'm not saying that a mod like this should not be made. Go ahead. If there are cheat scripts for super-easy mode, there should also be hardcore scripts for people who like it the hard way. I'm just expressing my opinion saying that I like the choice the game offers now.

[Graxster]

If you can do that, Bill, I'll be one of the first to download it. The missions (and indeed, even the plot missions) are insanely lucrative, IMO. I finished the Terran plot, and ended up with about half a dozen free ships they gave me, including a sweet M6 (Vidar). In X3R, all you ever got was the starting Buster! (except when you did the Bala Gi missions and got the Hyperion, but that was well after the game was old)

So here I am with all these ships, haven't even started Trading yet, and decided to check out an assassination mission, and the guy pays me 2.5 million cr to kill a Pirate Centaur! There's just way too much money being handed out for the kill missions. I also think most of the timers are way too short. I had an offer to build a station, and the guy wanted it built in 11 minutes! Heck, just getting a TL to dock at a shipyard takes that long.

As of now, I'm starting my game over and choosing the "Custom" option, and writing a script to destroy all the free ships. Not going to take any overpriced missions either. Maybe it'll be more like X3R that way, lol. Well, that's my 2 credit opinion. Glad to see someone's working on this!

-Grax