grapedog wrote: ↑Thu, 14. Feb 19, 22:09
Kazuma wrote: ↑Thu, 14. Feb 19, 03:44
X4 does not utilize profit motivated rational agents. It creates credits from thin air. This is a fact of the game. It's not an interpretation.
Where do you think money in actual real life comes from? At one point when we actually used the gold standard money had backing, but it doesn't anymore. All money now is pretty much fictitious... but everyone agrees with the fiction. If you fabricate too much, you end up like zimbabwe.
I'm nearing 400 hours now on my save, and I've not seen any slowing down, any stalling due to lack of use. I've not seen factories filling up, unable to sell their wares. I've got probably 250+ ships at the moment running around, though a large chunk of them are tied to my now 25+ stations.
I would agree in one aspect of the economy not working. There are not near enough money sinks in the game. The problem you run into is how to you create sinks in the game that are reasonable to mid-late game players like myself, apparently you, and others who have multi-billions of credits... ad balance that versus the guy/gal who just started the game, and has 3 auto-miners they worked really hard to get going.
I guess I'll also agree on the fact that it's not a "real economy", it IS a video game economy. What are you expecting from a video game? I've yet to see another game that handles an economy as well as the X series does in general, while also allowing the player to take such an active role in it, or no role at all. All/most video games have infinite cash, because to put limits on it would be silly and un-fun. Very very few games though allow the player so much hands on control of an economy, if they want it.
So on the topic of currencies, I certainly agree to the point that the physical cash moola' money is a product of pure imagination, backed by belief that it is legal(ally) enforceable debt marker. Historically as governments collapsed it's currency goes right down the toilet along with it and durable / perishable goods prices sore. The strong correlation is that the enforcement aspect has tanked, therefor the belief that the debt marker can be "called in" to exchange for goods also tanks.
We could look at something like the Metro or Chernobyl/Stalker series and see that ammo is the "gold standard". The natural idea here is to "fix" the value on something a majority of rational agents will agree upon 'has value'.
As far as X goes, it's perfectly "ok" for the X game as a credit chit for "work done" - "remuneration owed".
You have brought up a good point, the one concerning the ware sinks. As you said, and we certainly agree very few games attempt to simulate the in's and out's of economic ebb and flow to any real degree.
Soooo, I think I need to articulate my thinking on this a little bit better; as the previous poster commented...
Some background:
The available bulk economy of X does "grow", but it is quite slow.
The bulk ware sinks are the ships lost; the last patch or two actually put a scalar value in which multiplies this sink at the docks. That is that it cost the NPC factions more wares than it previously did (by a fairly hefty factor) to build the same items (including refitting ships). The secondary sinks are the trade stations for consumable 'soft' items. There was already a patch which heavily beefed up the cubic storage space on all these stations to compensate for the larger sink rates.
The real indication that something wasn't right / was never right, was that these docks could easily fill the wares up but not of the correct ware and "lock out" ship building entirely. Actually had this happen once to some ships which were "locked" in a PAR station, requiring another patch to 'cancel' a build / refit.
Additionally there was a patch which "fixed" traders from buying high and selling low, or only making small amount trades (which is still does en'masse)
From where I am sitting this isn't so much of a fix, as it seems intentional to have traders all over the place with measly ware amounts going to and fro' to give the player a sense of "things happening" in the universe. It's just that this shortcut code was also used in the PC auto traders as well as station traders.
Back to ware sinks:
Now the option that is explored and does exist in the mods is just to increase these aforementioned scalars so that the hole is bigger to get the items out of circulation.
Much like the transfer of ownership of the station building missions (to me) are a no-fix, increasing the sinks (to me) is also "going into the wrong direction".
Where I am going to go with this is in the "choice" and "consequence" of the actions a player makes which make up the game play. While X seemingly offers near infinite amount of choice, I would argue that the consequence of those choices in actuality contribute very little to anything remotely resembling an actual consequence therefor there is really no decision process involved.
That is to say, that while you can 'build anywhere' there is very little reason to believe that whatever you build won't make money... or at a minimum churn to break even. So there is no risk involved. There is no real decision to make, because there are no real consequences.
Once one gets to where one is trading in every market, there will be that point where the closed system only rises and falls based on the pseudo random conflict initiator script between the factions or a xenon incursion. The xenon incursions may as well not even be in the game... the impact is so marginal.
Anywho, we increase the sinks; ok fair enough, this puts more wealth into the players pockets, so the player continues to expand and eventually catches up to the sink attrition level... the only thing that has happened is that the players economy has more credit depth,
but the interactivity of the economy hasn't changed not one iota.
THAT in a nutshell is my point. You get richer quicker, but so what? Where does the wealth take you?
The players greater wealth puts more player ships in the game, which hits the overall performance of the game, each ship being added reduces the importance of the previous ships, the
player simply grows geometrically rather than linearly because the sink scalars set the rate at which the player CAN grow.
It is all player centrist as that is the only entity which uses credits.
In fact, I very much doubt Egosoft really wants to do this; because it just accelerates the rate at which the player can consume the credit gated content. Which means they end up on a "power creep" / "cost creep" expansion content scheme / road map rather than producing "more interesting" content.
This is due to all the other economic factors being very 'fixed'.
Conflicts are limited, stations are not destroyed in these conflicts, trade routes are never cut off, there are never any more than a couple dozen (at most) ships lost in a conflict. Trading docks are also fixed at a scalar sink, so that is static.
All these player ships are now a game play penalty because of the limited interface, limited systems to migrate crews, limited systems to manage ships; and the whole thing just turns into a cluster f**k sooner rather than later.
Like I said before, there is nothing you are going to do with 1 billion credits that you couldn't do with a couple hundred million. Even building stations, you won't be able to spend all the money faster than you make it, maybe you can produce in parity in a self sufficient loop... but without the player shipyard, that's pointless.
... and at best, that enables the take over the X verse game play end game... which is a foregone conclusion as you should be able to field several dozen destroyers and walk all over the NPC factions with less than a billion credits... thinking you can field 42-ish destroyers at a billion credits...
Now in your case specifically, with 25 stations, I HIGHLY suspect your buying in most of your construction wares, which is actually driving the circulation in your economy. If you where to build most if not all your own wares, the economic "freeze" would happen at an accelerated rate. Because your the games biggest consumer is why you have not made a couple billion yet. Your consuming all the wares. Can't get rich if your writing all the checks.
To me it makes more sense to have a more complex set of rules governing the exchange of wares, rather than sinking endless wares to inflate the players wallet.
The old term 'ludo-narrative-dissonance", comes to mind. That is, it makes little to no sense to fabricate ware materials in Argon space, transport them 2 jumps way to a HOP dock, for them to make ships, to kill Argon with, and take absolutely no penalty (as the player) for doing so. Essentially selling arms to both sides of a conflict. Comfortably maintaining a perfect relationship with both.
Now what sense does that make?
It's a fundamentally broken system. About on the same level as playing as Link in Zelda and touching lava and loosing half a heart. Yes, for sure, it's a game, not a hard core simulation. It's in this same sense that X is a game, not a hard core simulation.
THAT to me IS the fundamental problem. The economic system we do have, is so primitive and under-developed that ware sink is, the only short term option. Simply because the more robust and interesting aspects of an economy / trade simulation simply don't exist.
For a great example of this done right, check out Star Traders Frontiers. Old review before it was released...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJxmand-0Go
The ideas seem to be there:
Thing is, with the skill books, and the crew running around, the idea for the game to be more than what we have already seems to be there. Just very little of it was actually completed. I figure the game we actually got was maybe... 60 percent done? Maybe?
Now don't get me wrong, at 400+ hours I got my monies worth. I'm just not holding my breath that X becomes anything more than what it is, today, for at least another year if it ever gets there.
By then I'll have my Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlords and very likely not care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqYIR1lZVaE
and since this post was about going from 100 million to 1 billion I was wondering what you were suggesting. I totally get what you're trying to do though, and I think you'll be needing mods to make your build fun because in the game's current state there is no threat big enough to challenge you. You'd need a venture invasion force from another player for a challenge 
I mean... in my X3 game I'm hauling around in a Narn Heavy Cruiser, escorted by Last Starfighter Gunstars / Star Furies and A - Wings. 1 - Ship just isn't going to cut it.