You're comparing a Tier 3 T20 ship to a Tier 5 T21. It's like a T3 T20 to a T8 T20. Of course there is going to be a HUGE difference between them.

It's like complaining that the Zebra is SO expensive compared to you Shrimp.

Doubt it. Unless they supper charge colonies.

A Zebra is 7x more expensive than a Rosy.

Thats a jump from a Tier 1 T20 to a Tier 3 T20.

My point exactly, if they keep the 7x multiplier up, ships will be more expensive than the whole game combined can afford. Not to mention the ships aren't event close to 7x better.

I'm just saying, the 7x Multiplier is weaker than the 7x from Rosy to Zebra. The Zebra may be 20b, and the Pax Levitas like 150b, but the PL is 6 Tiers over the Zebra.

If the trend continued, the Pax Levitas is too cheap. The linear curve says it needs to have 21x the cost of a Zebra. But it's 7x. If the Tier 1 T21 was 7x, then thats on the same track as Rosy to Zebra, but thats not the case.

You can call out tiers all day long. But the tiers are most of the time not accurate. Especially in the Zebra and Rosy case. You can ask a lot of berserker who have used both the zebra and rosy, take phil for example, he finds that the Rosy is better in Pvp than the Zebra, but the Zebra better in Pvai. So how do you justify what tier there on?


One could say build cost, but then again why would something that is equally matched, just in different areas, be 7x the cost?

A new graphic is worth 7x the cost, I guess if you like pixels.


Lets look at the PL, it is probably a somewhat beefed up pax. Not sure why your comparing it to the Zebra in any sense. As its a pax, with a small amount of beefs, not even close to worth 99 more bill( assuming alot of things here)

Why are you all assuming a linear relationship? You can't extrapolate anything from the few data points we currently have. Just drop it till the costs actually do come out and take it up with Jeff then – I'm willing to bet that they will be entirely reasonable, if not as low as you might like.

I've got to say that I agree with Trevor's line of thinking here. Granted, we haven't seen the actual bp, so we don't know what the ratio is between raw cred cost and commods that go into the process, but I can say that I've been playing 3 years - not nearly as long as some, but longer then many, and without some clear new source of income it would be an extremely long time before I can even consider that kind of build.

Perhaps it would be different if the + ships were the ONLY thing we'd have to be building, but in order for a player to stay competitive, they'd need to distribute expenses among all of the different new aspects of T21 acquisition - if we can guess that none of that is going to come cheap - you're talking several hundred bils of farming. Viewing the current dgs, df300-400 does not provide enough income, and even a reasonable number of colonies would take a substantial amount of time to build one or two new items (again, assuming that the new drops follow a consistent build cost increase pattern).

It seems to me, that basically, this would open up a massive advantage among tycoon players who have had a couple years just to farm colonies for creds and gals for commods with little worry about major accompanying building expenses, while leaving the entire newer playerbase spending months of struggling and scraping just to build a couple of pieces of gear which won't even come close to closing the gap between them and the aforementioned tycoon players.

I want these things to be hard to achieve, but making it very expensive(credits+commods) to build isn't the way to solve it.

Sounds great to me ! top 3 teams in wealth will MB those items while all of you other slaves will look from the side and envy us ... With those good new gear we will take even more of your gals and then a beautiful day will come and we (top3 wealth) will own 80% of space and you will have even less chance to make money except selling your drops to us by price we dictate ...

Or lets do it SS way - First you do 150 bil thingy - then we build them and after 2 months you drop the price to 50 bil and tell us rules are changed from this moment on and will change again when we see fit ...

You are inferring too much. We have a very specific and much discussed and agreed upon price structure for all tech 21 objects, and I assure you, the + versions of the ships are outliers. The Pax Levitas is also an outlier. I wanted to have the option for those people who have amassed mass amounts of credits to be able to actually spend them to get some small advantage, but I'm certainly not assuming that everyone will be building tech 21+ ships. Many people might not even build tech 21 ships right away.

My general view on end game is not that everyone should get everything as soon as it's released. Rather, new content should allow for new possibilities, but no one said it's going to be cheap or easy.

Anyway, we have had lots of discussions about what the new stuff should cost and have a well defined and agreed upon price structure. I am not just randomly coming up with costs out of thin air.

Well it makes me smile to know these things were very well thought through.

u think build cost is bad for t21, you've yet to see what the market does with the prices at the retail end! its gonna be astronomical (look at retail price for lion as an example)

Your cynicism is not well placed in this case; your concerns about mudflation we recognise however.

T21 pricing has gone through the following stages: Three re-writes / modifications of material production (aka modules) with background work done on spreadsheets showing accurate usage rates / stockpiles etc (I've mentioned this before); Five meetings where T21 pricing was discussed and not only were credit costs altered, but module pricing as well. For example, T21 Tier 1 modules went down from 10bil each to roughly 5bil early on. The Pretenders Blue Print XML has had three major revisions so far.

In fact, why Jeff is posting this thread is because frankly I burnt myself out on T21 BPs, as the XML grind making them is largely "not very interesting" - the concept is 10%, the rest of the 90% is work - so he's left slogging through the pricing (and getting one Boss AI to work took me far too much time). As I've stated elsewhere - just altering a single object in game (the Assault Behemoth+) took changes to 17 XML sheets (rising to 19 when the visage / sprite is changed). Given the amount of items in the T21 drop tables, Jeff has mentioned the figure of 5,000 lines of XML or so; this was before we added the Tier 3 of T21 items and other new stuff.

Jeff has worked extremely hard getting T21 out the door - suggesting that we're randomly making things up & committing them is so far from the actual process to be fairly amusing. Along the lines of someone looking at the Mona Lisa and saying "Ye, I did finger painting when I was at school, pretty sure I understand how it's done".


@sabre198 - we've deliberately avoided the same production design as UZ ships. The reason a lion costs so much is because production is stalled by a single part (the actual lion commod) - as everyone else has mentioned, the actual cost of production is only 30-35bil (and even then.. you're pricing adamantium at a vastly inflated market price). T21 items / ships don't follow this model - the BPs have limited uses, but the parts required to make them are logical and not based on pure luck.

Wow - thanks for that break down Aurora - that clears up all of my concerns and I think its an outstanding model for gear construction.