By massive amounts, I'm thinking on the order of a progression like 1B, 2B, 4B, 8B, 16B, ... 1024B for those super rich people who want to be super-awesome. We need some cash sinks that scale up like crazy that people would like to buy with all their hoarded treasure.

Some ideas I had were more ships slots or higher imperial skills. Also maybe the ability to add mods to items in exchange for the item becoming NB, but that's a bit more on the complicated side.

Any other suggestions?

Skins would be a pretty awesome, could make a very expensive way of sinking credits. Would require a lot of work, but then again you could charge a Trill or so.

On the notion of imp skills increasing, hopefully this would be more of on the high end side?

How about purcashing AI bases in certain galaxies? Its not broken, or is it? Would cost about 25b or so, not too much imo.

We will be adding skins, but those won't be for credits. They will be for Space Points.

For Imperial Skills, I was just thinking of adding them available at some Ai base for pure cash as opposed to imperial seals or platinum or whatever, and just having them increase a long way up, but at ridiculous cash prices. I also wanted to put them into the same skill pool so that if you got a few levels of more speed, then a level of more hull space would cost you the 3rd level price.



I think that's actually a pretty cool idea.

How would buying AI bases be balanced.

I'd like to see an eve-like warp system for quick transport. The fuel used could be made to scale depending on weight and the cost of the fuel would be the sink.

It'd also look cool to see a fleet of ships appear.

I'd pay all my moneys for a Gunner beef.

But on a more serious note:

Imperial Tweaking,
Bar Skills
Capital Ship plus versions
Colored ship glows

Can't think of any more atm.

The trouble you're going to run into with these massive cash sinks is that the more things cost, the more people are going to want to stockpile money in case something awesome is released that costs a boatload of money. Honestly, if someone is paying a trillion credits for something, they're going to expect something fairly spectacular.

Again, to be perfectly frank, having excess money isn't so much of an issue so long as the systems behind that money work properly. For example, one downside of having lots of money is that lower priced items aren't sold by those people. Why set up a shop that sells items worth 10m if you make many times that a day? And even if they do, if nobody can find where they're for sale from, it doesn't really matter if they're for sale or not. And even further, if nobody knows that item exists, nobody is going to buy them.

What's really needed rather than money sinks are ways to get the money moving around. Of course, money sinks are always cool, but it's stupid to just put outrageous prices on things, because that is a reactionary response. It's acting as if people will ALWAYS have that much money, yet by doing so, you sustain the very thing you're trying to remove.

Some simple suggestions that could help with moving the money around, that I've heard over the ages, are:

A. Trade Bays that save your buy/sell information, for as long as you own that trade bay. Set the price for something once and it's in there for life.
Aa.A toggle to not show items that aren't in stock. Because the buildup will probably get pretty massive over time.

B. A market system that just tells you which bases in which galaxies sell the item, not for how much. This allows items to be found effeciently, and speeds up the economy.

C. An ingame database, of some sort similar to the wiki. Possibly a direct connection to the wiki, but something more elegant would be even better. Essentially, a way for players to KNOW that that piece of gear exists. If done properly, the market system could serve the same purpose.(IE, sort by tech, damage, DPE, DPS, range, or any combo of any of the stats).



These three suggestions alone would massively speed up the economy all across the board, which would not remove any money from the system, but mitigate the cause of the symptoms.

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Another thing you have to remember is that when people buy something expensive, they're usually not just doing it for kicks and giggles. They're doing it to cut a profit. Be wary when you offer things like buying AI bases, because if it's not worth it, nobody will do it, and if it IS worth it, the money supply will only expand.

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Another problem that is likely causing an expansion of money is the current GG system. It costs nothing, meaning that players that once lost billions of credits a month now lose nothing. On one player it might be fairly small, but globally it likely accumulates to trillions of credits of saved income.

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Something that might suck up a lot of money is specialized use items. Take, for example, the PWI; it costs 25b, but everyone who is anyone has one. Because they're bloody useful. Give people items like this that are insanely expensive but ridiculously useful, and everyone and their grandma will want one. Richer players have more accounts, so they'll have to get multiple copies. Alternatively, massive team built items, like that old wormhole generator idea. Have it cost 250b and allow you to teleport your whole team to right outside your target DG and everyone will be happy, and the universe will lose 2-3t credits...heck, maybe even more than that.

Something you need to remember when doing these things, however, is that you cant have them be based on commodities that players mine/extract. Doing so just moves money around, it doesn't get rid of it.

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Missions that require trading in lots of items are generally a bad idea. If you do the above marketing ideas, it should be completely unnecessary.

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Changing + ship bp's to make modules instead of the whole ship is a very good step in the right direction.

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Anyways, that's all I've got. Hope it helps.

Great question. Here are some things that would be worth a lot to me.

- Increased worker speed on bases owned by a given character
- Adding a single modification to an item in exchange for neurobinding. Can be a random mod to increase expected cost of a desired one.
- Improved traveling fields to reduce autopilot time (can't equip if some recent-combat criteria are fulfilled).
- Extra Imperial Tweak levels. I don't think you should be able to get past 4 in any of the skills requiring seals without holding the past-Emperor title, though.
- Extra bar skill levels.

Rejected ideas:
- Improved mass-build discount. Just helps the rich get richer.
- Increased ship slots. This'll be much less interesting if/when we move to AI-base storage.

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Cygnus makes a great point here. The Singularity Brake is an even better example than the PWI of something that is amazingly useful but doesn't simply improve your combat or economic ability (though of course it has uses in both cases). I am currently blanking on ideas similar to that, though.

Sigh. I killed the topic.

Let me answer your question with a question: why? If your goal is to deflate the economy, remember that your members didn't get obscenely rich by being stupid; they realize that being rich gives them a competitive advantage and won't voluntarily give up that advantage unless it is to leverage a greater advantage offered by the expenditure.

If its simply to have more things to spend lots of money on, imp tweaking/skills are a good way, as the advantage is a 5-10% increase which probably isn't going to break the game. (Enk correct me if I'm wrong) Unfortunately your idea of scaling the cost with levels is likely to have trouble interacting with the current system of getting imp skills, so maybe different skills? Unless you want it to cost 256b after getting several levels using seals...

I like enk's travel field idea too.

Aye, a travel field type item to cut down on transit would be cool, give it a fair amount of negative attributes though, worse then the cap ship ones.

Opening access to Imperial Tweaking is a brilliant idea. I always personally thought it was silly to remove the skill over level 1from the game but leave it on characters that already had it. Everyone should be capable of being as good as anyone else through work and skill. Make it expensive but make it possible.

Extra ship slots would be utterly fantastic. Even if there is some sort of storage overhaul I would still like to be able to purchase more ships. Most of my chars are currently over their amount and require new slaves to be transferred to them which is just annoying.

More levels in Station Research, Drone Research and Slave Research would also be pretty cool. Thought process here is to allow say FC to keep up with the rising power curve of t21 (they are left behind at t18 max), 3 Scruplings would definitely make an impact, again, expensive

The only thing I could think of that isn't here is the ability to purchase galaxies and AI to be named after you, even tho that is more for the giggles than anything useful.

How about just focusing on constantly releasing high end content that comes in very high prices? Olympus+ ships is a good example - if only the drop rate of those blueprints were higher, since it is only a one-time use.

As to the philosophy behind this question:

The economy of SS is based on the "sinks and faucets" model, which means that there is no closed loop or finite resources, but resources (money, items) flow in from various faucets and drain out through various sinks. The rate at which credits come into the economy is generally proportional to player activity, and players are gaining credits at a pretty fast rate. So fast, that it's like a bathtub where the drain is partially clogged and both faucets are running and the water level is rising simply because there are not enough exits for the water. I believe that a lot of high level players pretty much have everything that money can buy, but they still run colonies and scoop credits.

Just adding more regular sinks to the economy won't help. Even if they temporarily helped, the more things that players want to buy, the harder they will work to earn credits and the water level would continue to rise, even if it temporarily went down. I believe that in order to have a properly functioning sink/faucet economy, we need sinks that are somehow proportional in size to the water level. This is where the idea of unlimited improvements with drastically increasing cost curves come in.

Say that you could get imperial tweak skills 1, 2, 3, 4, etc for 1 billion, 10 billion, 100 billion, 1000 billion, etc. If the average end-game player has only 1 billion credits or so, this option might as well not even exist. If the average end-game player had 1 trillion credits, then probably a lot of people would buy 2-3 levels of this skill. If the average end game player had 1 google-billion credits, then they'd be buying many levels of this skill, because why not? People would essentially be buying as many levels of a skill like this that gives a small but definite benefit as they would consider to be cheap compared to how much money they have and their ability to earn money.

The focus of this is not on medium or low players. It's not to provide competition in what to buy with normal things like your ship or whatnot. But if we can come up with 2-5 things that end game players who, in essence "have everything", could spend infinite amounts of money on for something they feel is meaningful, then we not only help reduce the amount of excess water sloshing around in the tub, but we also give a reason for end game players to continue to want to earn credits and build, and drive the economy.

(BTW, the same game design philosophy behind this question is the philosophy behind the zen skills. I think that overall, they have been good for the game.)

I would definitely like to sink my credits into a fancy warp gate network.

How fancy?