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Star Citizen Economy – Ship Pricing & Persistence

Welcome to some more Star Citizen with a look at the Economy, ship pricing, physicalized inventories – This is a summary of Calling All Devs – The Economy of Spaceships

Ships & The Economy
Eventually the economy will be dynamic, and ship prices will vary, Alpha 3.3 had Teach’s ship shop and 3.3.5 had New Deal for ship purchasing.

They are working out what sort of time they want to take to earn ships.

They don’t necessarily look at the costs in UEC but say this shield generator should take 3 hours to earn.

These are extremely rough averages as player skill and loadouts will be different. As will be the mission that they take.

At the moment due to aUEC and aUEC purchases being regularly reset it causes some balancing issues.

Some players think the prices are too high due to this others too low in a more general once the game is live they should be harder to obtain.

The prices we have in game as of 3.3.7 are still what they envision the sort of starting prices when the game gets full persistence, basically balancing it for the future.

There are a lot more building blocks to the economy coming & they wanted to aim for what the game is going to be.

They are looking at ways to mitigating these values in game in the short term some how to enable players to more easily earn them without too much toil then reset, potentially having money earnt be accelerated.

Stanton is meant to be a low risk, low reward system and they are aware that the rewards currently don’t really make obtaining ships very viable without having a cargo hauler or miner.

I just want to say that I find some of that explanation a little hard to swallow. When just in the short term reducing the aUEC value of these ships in the short term and having it in the patch notes, these ship are several times cheaper than they would be currently to reflect the 3 month cycles. That is just 1 value per ship…. Surely.

They did go onto say that they rely heavily on player feedback for the economy, how does it feel, what is the actual performance and experience like. They want players to find out and explore, some of the apps and info that players have collected are very accurate, some are not.

When costing out a ship they take into account performance of the ship and the items that go into it. Better performing ships will typically be more expensive.

How many hardpoints or ports or seats, cargo space, these all get used to calculate value.

Those values get compared to the values on other ships, they then add a materials cost of what went into building the ship, the Phoenix and 890j will be much more expensive due to the cost of these materials for example, Drake ships maybe cheaper.

So the individual materials will be priced for each individual item and what went into that item, this could be manufacture time too, facilities used to make it, the hull of a ship is just one of these items.

You could break down every finished ship into the value of raw materials, labour and the processes used to convert those materials into the items and ship.

 

Physicalized Inventories
They are moving to having just what your character has on them as their inventory, items will have to be stored in places, so no more magic bag of holding where you have all your guns on you and all your armor sets.

Ship storage and lockers there as well as your hab will be some of the places you can store and switch gear.

Global Persistence which is tied together with server streaming and meshing are being looked at. Sections of the universe and systems that are not being used will be saved and streamed out, then streamed back in again when needed.

This means if you leave an item at an outpost, it will persist there.

They are working on the tech for these features now, including the code behind persistent lockers, characters carrying items and putting them away.

These are all building towards one of the major pillars of the game, full persistence which will have everything tracked and should mean we potentially don’t get database resets anymore or at least not so often. Physical inventories are planned for Alpha 3.6 coming June 2019.