It is my personal belief that trading in discovery is unbalanced. I am not taking about the routes themselves. I am talking about the ships that haul the goods.
Allot of people complain about cap ship whoring. Many agree that raising the price of cap ships is our only really safe deterrent. It has been countered that the whores will just trade the extra day to get the cap ship. Both groups are correct. It take next to no effort to raise 100million for a cruiser or the like.
Why is that? Because it takes next to no effort to raise the money to fly the trade ship that makes the money for the cap ship. Its true, it takes less then 30 hours for an experienced player to get into the cockpit of a train.
Thats allot of money very very fast. When you have money you want to spend it, thus the big ship.
This is actually fixable. In the summer I played a mod called Shattered Worlds. They had an interesting approach to trade balance.
A Rhino cost you 1,200,000!!! That right, just over a million. It had its forward guns striped (Deemed unnecessary on a freighter) and it had its hold upped to 120.
When I say this thing, I was like Holy frak! But affter playing for some time I saw the beauty in what they had done. Trading was now a challenge like never before. It took me 45 hours to reach a Dromedary, and couldn't have been happier.
They had setup the Freighters like this.
Rhino
1.2 million
120 cargo
Class 1 Turrets
Clydesdale, Mule, Drone
roughly 3.3 million each
300 cargo
Class 2-3 turrets
Dromedary, Humpback
6 million
500 cargo
Class 4-5 turrets
For players flying Fighters the above trade ships were more then enough to support a garage of fighters.
But for those who wanted the big money, there were the trains and transports. A small transport was going to start at 30 million, have roughly 1500 cargo and mount capital class 1 turrets. (essentialy what is our class 7 turret)
With gaps like that between trade ships I believe that players will be less inclined towards the large ships. Only a faction or a team of traders could even afford an advanced train (They had it priced at 900million) which would be required to even attempt to finance a battleship which was being projected at over a billion.
What is the public opinion on a trade system like this?
