Economy in 5.2+

[Lord Caedus]

This is going to take us quite a bit away from the lengthy discussion we've had here on mining towards something else instead. That being the stupidly high cost of manufacturing cloaks. The required inputs on cloaks are weighted far too much towards Xeno Relics, and the amounts used by the different recipes is firstly, far too high and secondly does not scale in a logical manner. I'm going to take a look at the base costs because it's the simplest way to do it.

Let's look at the light cloak first.

consumed = commodity_industrial, 7500
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 7500
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 5000
consumed = commodity_superconductors, 5000
consumed = commodity_nanocapacitors, 5000
consumed_dynamic_alt = 2500, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed_dynamic_alt = 5000, commodity_gold, commodity_pirate_gold
consumed = commodity_copper, 5000
consumed = commodity_platinum, 5000
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 5000
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 1500

That's a lot of Xeno Relics required to make a single piece of equipment mounted to a fighter. Mining that many XR is prohibitively time consuming because of the length of time required to transport them from their mining zone back to a transport ship capable of carrying that many. But it gets more strange when you look at the "larger" cloaking devices.

Now we take a look at the medium cloak.

consumed = commodity_industrial, 12000
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 10000
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 7500
consumed = commodity_superconductors, 7500
consumed = commodity_nanocapacitors, 7500
consumed_dynamic_alt = 5000, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed_dynamic_alt = 7500, commodity_gold, commodity_pirate_gold
consumed = commodity_copper, 7500
consumed = commodity_platinum, 7500
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 3500
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 3000

This recipe requires more of every other input excluding XR, which has inexplicably gone down and is less needed now.

consumed = commodity_industrial, 17500
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 12500
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 10000
consumed = commodity_superconductors, 10000
consumed = commodity_nanocapacitors, 10000
consumed_dynamic_alt = 7500, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed_dynamic_alt = 10000, commodity_gold, commodity_pirate_gold
consumed = commodity_copper, 10000
consumed = commodity_platinum, 10000
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 5000
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 5000

The large cloak continues this trend of the increase of all other inputs going up, but now XR are back up to the same required input as the light cloak from earlier.

consumed = commodity_industrial, 17500
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 12500
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 10000
consumed = commodity_superconductors, 10000
consumed = commodity_nanocapacitors, 10000
consumed_dynamic_alt = 7500, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed_dynamic_alt = 10000, commodity_gold, commodity_pirate_gold
consumed = commodity_copper, 10000
consumed = commodity_platinum, 10000
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 6500
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 7000

Finally we have the transport cloak, which in fact only increases in cost of XR and Azurite gas over the previous large cloak.

Ah, but Caedus, I can already hear you saying. Cloaks are so expensive in Xeno Relics because we don't want them to be readily available and used by every single person flying around. That's a perfectly reasonable concern to have, but I personally don't think we'd be seeing a large amount of people simply switching over to flying ships with cloaks. Not to mention that there are several factions that can currently simply buy cloaks on their NPC stations, and these factions haven't to my knowledge, been seen to be abusing the use of these cloaking devices. If this isn't the case though, I'd welcome feedback showing as such.

Then we take a look at the jump drive recipes. I'm going to cut out the middle one here, but if you look at the numbers you'll see that it shares the trend of having increased cost with increased capacity.

The smallest jump drive

consumed = commodity_basic_alloys, 10000
consumed = commodity_industrial, 7500
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 7500
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 7500
consumed_dynamic_alt = 7500, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed = commodity_energy_field_equip, 2500
consumed = commodity_platinum, 5000
consumed = commodity_aluminium, 5000
consumed = commodity_silver, 5000
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 3500
consumed = commodity_optronics, 2500
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 1500

And the largest

consumed = commodity_basic_alloys, 25000
consumed = commodity_industrial, 15000
consumed = commodity_robotic_hardware, 15000
consumed = commodity_super_alloys, 10000
consumed_dynamic_alt = 10000, commodity_multiplexors, commodity_bioprocessors
consumed = commodity_energy_field_equip, 7500
consumed = commodity_optronics, 7500
consumed = commodity_platinum, 10000
consumed = commodity_aluminium, 10000
consumed = commodity_silver, 10000
consumed = commodity_azurite_gas, 10000
consumed = commodity_xeno_relics, 5000

Notice that the XR cost on the largest jump drive is the same as for a fighter cloak. Jump drives inherently provide a lot of utility to the ship they're fitted to and can even benefit multiple ships, while at the same time cloaks at best provide utility to a single ship.

Now you're probably asking, what exactly do we change to get rid of these issues. Firstly, I'd suggest the lowering of XR inputs for the smaller cloaking devices, to make them more forth the investment of building. Secondly, I'd suggest that we take a look at the recipes themselves, and see about replacing some of the inputs with others to spread them out across the various houses more, Gallia for example produces none of the input HRCs for the manufacture of cloaks. They wouldn't necessarily need to be replacements for existing ones, they could instead get the option of using one HRC or another. Using Niobium in place of Aluminum or Molybdenum in place of Silver for example. I'd also suggest that instead of having extremely high required inputs, we instead have the "larger" recipes see additional inputs be required that the "smaller" ones do not. High-Temp Alloy, Cryocubes, Tungsten, Optical Chips, Titanium, and Beryllium (I'm sure there are others here too) could all be used to add additional needs for the recipe without increasing the base amount of goods needed to make the equipment. Doing these things would make producing cloaks more viable, increase player activity across regions, and (hopefully) encourage more cross faction play so that people can acquire these goods more easily.

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