X4 needs more economic challenge

[radcapricorn]

It "feels" like NPC is cheating? Aren't they running an infinite budget as it is?

[Ezarkal]

It "feels" like NPC is cheating? Aren't they running an infinite budget as it is?

IIRC someone managed to find a bug that allowed you to tap into the NPC's budget, which was somewhere in the trillions of credits. I don't know if it's getting resetted every few hours, though.

[Falcrack]

One must consider that no workforce meaning no production would make the universal economy prone to collapse or becoming degenerate should food deliveries fail. Hence it is a bad idea.

If one wants such a mechanic one would need to completely overhaul how workforce operates. Such as not requiring food and medicine (see my previous post) and also a vastly improved workforce growth mechanic (instead of 0.1-1 per race per minute).

I completely agree with this, I would want to vastly increase the rate of workforce joining stations, just didn't state so earlier. I would prefer also if instead of stations buying food and medicine to supply the workforce, that civilian themselves would emerge from stations in civilian ships, go to trade stations, and buy food and medicine using their own money, and bring it back to the stations. There could be a cool little trade cycle of civilian ships going between trade stations and factories in a sector buying groceries, so to speak.

[Imperial Good]

I would prefer also if instead of stations buying food and medicine to supply the workforce, that civilian themselves would emerge from stations in civilian ships, go to trade stations, and buy food and medicine using their own money, and bring it back to the stations. There could be a cool little trade cycle of civilian ships going between trade stations and factories in a sector buying groceries, so to speak.

Too low level to be simulated. The game is performance issue prone as is due to the sand box nature. Let alone with 5,000 more small ships running all over the place.

Habitation is large, the size of towns considering they house 1,000 people. It is also the future, in space. I would expect supply deliveries to their habitation make the most sense as it exposes them less to the dangers of space as well as allows for the most efficient transport. If they want to travel between stations then they should be using commuter ships such as L passenger transports. They could use these to go to large shopping hubs and leisure/recreational facilities which might only be available/make economic sense at huge stations or one per sector.

[adeine]

This causes problems because then it feels like the NPC is cheating, like X3 NPC Solar Power Plants.

NPCs are already cheating since they have infinite credits. Ideally they'd operate by the same rules, but clearly X4 is not in a state where this is possible. Making the game boring/removing relevance of gameplay elements for the player is not the way to work around insufficient AI.

Right now workforce is basically irrelevant, I assume because AI can't keep up with it. I think a better solution would be to make it relevant for the player while making sure NPC factions continue to work - if this requires some fudging of numbers/multipliers, so be it.

[Imperial Good]

Right now workforce is basically irrelevant

Workforce is relevant. It makes a huge difference in the profitability and efficiency of stations. Some stations like raw material refineries will struggle to break even without workforce as far as value in to out goes.

[adeine]

Some stations like raw material refineries will struggle to break even without workforce as far as value in to out goes.

You can easily make them self sustaining/endless money machines, workforce or no.

[Imperial Good]

You can easily make them self sustaining/endless money machines, workforce or no.

Yes but with workforce they are even better as the same number of modules produce more from the same inputs.

[adeine]

Yes but with workforce they are even better as the same number of modules produce more from the same inputs.

Not the same inputs as you have to factor in workforce consumption, making setting up the station in the first place exponentially more expensive (and rely on more base product).

Yes it's technically worth doing, but hardly necessary or a game changer so not exactly relevant. I honestly mostly do it for immersion reasons as opposed to gameplay benefit. In my opinion no workforce = no production (and then scale up accordingly) would be the way to make it actually meaningful - although obviously we'd need TPs/other ways to ferry workforce to boost new stations.

[Imperial Good]

Not the same inputs as you have to factor in workforce consumption, making setting up the station in the first place exponentially more expensive (and rely on more base product).

Workforce is very cheap to maintain. All except the largest of factories can get away with buying in food from dedicated food factories as producing food at any reasonable scale is enough for 10,000s of workers.

Even buying food from the AI you often can get away with very low buy prices and food has one of the largest min to max percentage deltas.

[RodentofDoom]

X3 was full of 'features'
they cleared out the useless crap for x4

this falls into the area of "personal bias" and that's what mods are for

[spankahontis]

Add taxes (or rental fees) when building in pre-owned sectors. bam fixed.

Then you would still have the issue of no running costs for ships, or stations in unowned sectors. So not quite fixed to my satisfaction, but better than what we have currently!

I may be wrong, but I don't think any of what I have suggested would be impossible or even all that difficult to implement. Might require some balancing to find a sweet spot to make it fun and challenging, but not impossible.

I made the argument that staff should have a weekly wage or a small percentage of every ware sold; heck someone made a mod that gave workers a wage in X:Rebirth.
I believe Egosoft members that visit here displayed a disinterest about such ideas, to stick with the one-off payment model for staff.

But I'd love to see Egosoft implement a 'Civilian Economy' that isn't based around ship building. Pops demanding more than just Food and Medical Supplies. Habitation Stations that aren't based around manufacturing, but living space for pops, a Taxes/Rent slider would cover the costs, high taxes make you money but cause residents to leave, lower taxes bringing in more NPCs.
Being a property mogul rather than a factory mogul?

I felt that in X:Rebirth: Home of Light Expansion, those tiny stations around Home of Lights Highway as well as those Terran Habitation Stations could of had purpose other than being mostly things to look at. Those little factories could of been making products for Civilian use; Item Trading could of been so much more than just an instant way to buy low, sell high mechanics for starters to the campaign.

[pref]

Not sure paying tax or any recurring costs would present any challenge. These things just change cost/income balance - might be needed with current game state, i don't know about that, but it won't really add anything to the game imo.

Economic challenge in my book is to be able to use the economy towards a mean, that grants the player bonuses and overcoming it is not trivial/tedious repetition.
Some X3 examples would be setting up a production/trade network to get better weapons for your capships, not just corvette level ones.
Being able to alter the traffic via building the HUB.
Getting specific goodies by feeding specific parts of the economy.
Being able to maintain sat coverage by building the needed infrastructure and so on.

Also having all meaningful production tied to shipyards is a problem as because of this you either get everything in case a SY is well supplied or nothing, not even ships.

The way things stand right now generally there isn't enough control to do anything like that as you cannot even route wares so they serve a purpose.
Trade AI scripts lack proper options and variety.
The only purpose current eco has is to get more money due to player having no way to be more specific than that.
Solving this problem is a prerequisite for any real economic challenge.
Hope this becomes a priority at some point, as the lack of economic gameplay is probably the main reasons X4 gets boring way quicker then X3 did.

[Karmaticdamage]

Wharfs and shipyards are really the problem when it comes to getting too rich too fast. Within one ingame day after putting up a wharf, you can have a shipyard put up, and have every blueprint in the game. You go from having only tens of millions on hand to having FU money in a massive leap. Factions buy ships non stop even at 150% price. It doesn't matter what kind of fees, restrictions, or other handicaps you put on any other aspect of the game. As soon as your wharf goes up, money is no longer a concern.

[photomankc]

I'm going to have to grudgingly agree on the economic challenge. Stations are okay. They make decent money but they take a good long while to start overflowing to you. The money from a few stations will get you in a position to build fleets of L/S and a few M's pretty nicely but I was not rolling in cash or anything. Replacing losses kept the income tied up and several times I would need to raid the funds before they overflowed to get some breathing room. Then you build a warf and suddenly you go from a few million per hour, to hundreds of million per hour even if all you can get blueprints to are S ships and weapons. Now EVERYTHING is chump change.

I really think it should be rare to have the other races buying ships from you and to entice them to do so should require a significant discount of the ship price unless they are unable to satisfy their own orders. Now, unfortunately the other aspect of the economy cuts in here because I'm many days into the game and the factions still have a hard time stocking the shipyards. They seem to slowly deal with the shortages but there seems to always be another shortage waiting in line so they are building using my warf because they have to. I think you could hold it off somewhat by making you wait until +25 relations or maybe even +30 to allow the purchase of shipbuilding modules and ship hull blueprints. That's just a delay tactic but it's been my experience that in casual play, getting to +30 takes a good bit of time. I'm still in the low 20's with a few that are increasing due to trade at 5 days in so that could at least hold back the damn break of cash from the player warf.

I'm not sure it would be easy to make the manufacture of the ships more expensive organically without running into balancing issues with all the other wares. I suppose the arrangement could be altered so that you 'license' the production and your cut is ___% of the sale, and the rest goes to the faction that holds the design. That would at least put some brakes on the cart.