Possible to mod factions to have finite accounts?

[Falcrack]

I'm wondering if it is possible to mod factions so that they are not cheated in money. In other words, make it so that if a faction runs out of money, they are no longer able to make additional purchases? I am thinking of getting into modding, and if I did, this is one of the first things I would change, but I want to know if such a thing is even a possibility.

Couple other things I would change are to make it so that both players and factions have to spend money to maintain ships and stations, and factions would get a steady income that comes from taxing the planetary populations, so the more sectors they own, the greater their income to be able to support their fleets and stations.

Are the ideas for these mods feasible?

[DeadAirRT]

Finite money isn't a good idea unless you plan on rewriting their logic to consider it

[kuertee]

I reckon a better way to get the same result is to design limits to their production capabilities.
i.e. think of systems that can be built as a mod that will affect production.
e.g. wastage, loss to sabotage, rebellions, manager assassination, etc.

Forget about money. Money is infinite.
But production capabilities have limits and directly impact the faction.

EDIT: By the way, from what I've seen, there are production problems everywhere. They are simply not obvious to us players in normal play. E.g. sacrifice your relationship and destroy key production stations of a faction and you'll see that faction suffer. END EDIT.

[BlackRain]

It is possible, but does it make sense? I think an interstellar empire with many billions of citizens and seemingly infinite production capability (barring outside hostile influences) probably doesn't really need money?

[euclid]

What DeadAirRT and kuertee said, introducing accounts, credits etc. for npc would be a nightmare to do but reducing their production and trade capabilities is, theoretically, doable. However, bare in mind that there are vanilla scripts in place which attempts to stabilize the economy and expansion overall and of each faction. Regulating the production and trade as you've suggested would interfere and could lead to disastrous results.

Cheers Euclid

[escort]

It is impossible, it is hard to balance. Money is just a way to calculate the value of products. With producing, more money need to print to measure the value of new products

[kmunoz]

I'm wondering if it is possible to mod factions so that they are not cheated in money. In other words, make it so that if a faction runs out of money, they are no longer able to make additional purchases?

Just thinking about this in economic terms - quite apart from gameplay mechanics - there are some concerns I'd have about the "realism" of this.

Let's suppose you cap the starting money of a faction, and they can only gain income from selling things to other factions and the player. That would require that at least half of all faction construction (in terms of cost) be for external purposes. Otherwise, the faction will rapidly drop to zero funds. As soon as you introduce a limited budget, you have to pay much more attention to imports and exports.

Second, you'll have to overlook the fact that the station construction and ship building economies of these factions aren't the sum total of their wealth production. They have entire populations behind them that are producing goods and generating wealth, to which these factions should presumably have at least some access by way of taxation. But none of that is modeled in the game currently, so you would have to add it in, if you want a realistic portrayal of faction economies.

Third, those non-station/ship production areas likely vastly outspend, outproduce and outgenerate the production areas that we see in the game. The populations on the stations and throughout the game universe number in the hundreds, maybe the thousands if we're being super generous. But the inhabited planets are in the billions, presumably. But even if they're only in the hundreds or even tens of thousands, their wealth production is going to be orders of magnitude higher than what we have in the scope of the game.

Fourth, there's a problem of scale between faction and player. If you limit the total funds available to a faction, then at some point that number could drop below what the player has. That's an economically bizarre result. Even at the height of the Gilded Age when the wealth of the wealthiest people was shockingly higher than that of even Elon Musk relative to Western countries, the Rockefellers and their ilk could not come close to touching the boot heel of the amount of money available to countries like Britain, France and, eventually, the U.S. But what you're proposing is that at some point during gameplay, the player could become wealthier than all of the multi-billion-citizen-strong factions in the game.

Edit to add two notes:

1) Of course people should do what they want and if they want to mod this in, great. But if the goal is increased realism, my argument is that it does the opposite.

2) If you're already using a mod like FOCW-Corporations, then all bets are off, because that mod or any like it (of which I think there are none at this time?) changes the default assumptions about who operates the "factions" in the game. At that point then you could reasonably argue that each corp has made a few trillion credits, and then start the game from there.