Should NPC pay only 10% ship price at players shipyard?

[X_30002000]

Egosoft changed price NPC pays to player when order ships from player shipyard to only 10% of ship cost (it was 100% before). As a result, now it is 10 times more profitable for player to build ships at player's shipyard and sell it to NPC at 100% ship price. Even before player would need to invest a lot of credits to buy ship/equipment blueprints to match NPC ship specs for NPC to order ships, there is absolutely no sense to buy these blueprints now, this part of gampelay is broken. Should Egosoft undo the change?

[Cabrelbeuk]

I didn't know the nerf was that strong.
Is this also the case for Wharf ?

I really liked when i finished my first autonomous Wharf, i really got this X achievment feelings and the Increase income clearly make me felt i came into the next phase of the game : being an actual faction.

I hope a mode will quickly show up.

[debstar2610]

I like the changes so no.
Ores are free and my warf is making huge profits already..

[Fenris321]

Only getting 10% does seem like a bit of an excessive nerf. I get why they did it, but since you can just build and sell the ships in an unlimited quantity, seems like it wasn't well thought out. Seems broken that you can just sell as many ships as you want to the NPCs whether they like it or not.

I can't really speak from experience though. The most I've done with ship building is to make a wharf so I could keep carriers full up on fighters. And just closed down the wharf to everyone but me.

[Axeface]

I dont like the way it was done but something had to be done. I would prefer if we had to pay a license or franchise fee for using other factions blueprints (its quite realistic hmm). I think this makes sense, it would be far more transparent to the player too.

PS: The poll does not offer enough responses and is leading so im not voting.

[Clownmug]

I don't like it. I'm getting tired of all the clicking for building and selling 100x Falx every few minutes.

[Matthew94]

I believe trading mechanics should be identical for both the AI and the player. If there is a large discrepancy between the actions of the player and the factions then improve the simulation to steer the player's behaviour to conform with the factions (or vice versa). Playing whack-a-mole with profit opportunities is a bad idea.

[GCU Grey Area]

Voted no - very glad it was changed.

Had a shipyard in one of my games a while ago & frankly it was absurdly profitable. It was only supplying 2 factions (ANT & ARG) & I had my prices set as low as the game would let me (50%). Nevertheless it was still making about 300 million per hour. I consider that a very bad thing. It made many of my favourite activities in the game utterly irrelevant. I mean, what's the point of sending out a freighter on a trade run with a 500k profit when the shipyard's made 10x more than that before that freighter's even reached the first gate on it's journey? Ended that game soon after, when I realised what had happened & that I wasn't having much fun anymore. Did not built one in either of my subsequent games.

Hopefully this time round in my new Terran game I can build one, have fun with it & it won't spoil my enjoyment of the rest of the game.

[jlehtone]

I don't like the wording of the options. That is an automatic "no".

[sd_jasper]

There should be a 3rd option for more than 10, less than 100

[Lander1979]

Voted no - very glad it was changed.

Had a shipyard in one of my games a while ago & frankly it was absurdly profitable. It was only supplying 2 factions (ANT & ARG) & I had my prices set as low as the game would let me (50%). Nevertheless it was still making about 300 million per hour. I consider that a very bad thing. It made many of my favourite activities in the game utterly irrelevant. I mean, what's the point of sending out a freighter on a trade run with a 500k profit when the shipyard's made 10x more than that before that freighter's even reached the first gate on it's journey? Ended that game soon after, when I realised what had happened & that I wasn't having much fun anymore. Did not built one in either of my subsequent games.

Hopefully this time round in my new Terran game I can build one, have fun with it & it won't spoil my enjoyment of the rest of the game.

I agree with this, and I suspect that this is why I'm a lot happier than a Billionaire...

[Feloidea]

Don't whave a wharf/shipyard yet so I can't say from personal experience, but I recall reading somewhere quite recently (think it was the X4 reddit) where someone datamined that all shipyard (and presumably wharf too) sales come with a hidden .3 price modifier, i.e.: AI only pays 30% of the charged price. So not quite the 10% number being cited here but still a massive discount either way ...

The obvious workaround so far seems to be building ships by yourself and then manually selling to AI shipyards/wharfs as that nets you significantly more money than having the same ship bought by the AI at your own shipyard/wharf which is a gross oversight.

Personally I can't say if the economy nerf to those ship production facilities was required or if it was too heavyhanded if it were necessary. Considering how I've read them commonly referring to as billions printers I would assume some sort of economy change was in order if making a proper shipyard turned out to be an "I win the economy" scenario. How much the income would've required changing is for everyone else to debate, like I said: I didn't get that far yet so I can't speak from personal experience.

What I can say however is that hidden discounts that can be partially circumvented by just manually selling the ships to the AI factions rather than letting them buy directly from your shipyard/wharf is poor game design and smells of an ad-hoc, low-effort solution.
IF those stations churned out too much money than would be considered reasonable for an endgame economy (or worse, way too much money if a player rushed into it and would be otherwise considering in the midgame by conventional metrics or however that's categorized) and thus unduly trivializing the economy aspect of the game, I'd have imagined the developers ought to rather turn the dial on the demand, making the AI factions simply order fewer ships to reduce any undeesired profitability overhead. That could also be expanded by the AI factions moving any ship production delta into their own shipyards/wharfs, increasing the demand for ship construction wares and giving the players an additional incentive to go into producing those wares for the AI rather than going for self-sufficient mega-shipyards/wharfs.

tl;dr:
Dunno if it was necessary, but the present solution is shoddy and could be improved regardless.

[Matthew94]

Personally I can't say if the economy nerf to those ship production facilities was required or if it was too heavyhanded if it were necessary. Considering how I've read them commonly referring to as billions printers I would assume some sort of economy change was in order if making a proper shipyard turned out to be an "I win the economy" scenario. How much the income would've required changing is for everyone else to debate, like I said: I didn't get that far yet so I can't speak from personal experience.

The problem is that the AI factions have near-infinite money so they can buy your ships indefinitely until they're saturated. The issue is with X4's simulation and giving the AI discounts is just a purely band-aid solution. If the wars are active then you'll still make a lot of money as the ships are replaced, it's just that the rate of income is slower. As with many other nerfs, this is a lazy fix to a much bigger issue with the economic simulation.

[paraskous]

If the 10% equal resource cost plus markup for me it's fine.

[Raptor34]

If the 10% equal resource cost plus markup for me it's fine.

They should make it clearer imo.
It would help if they tell us exactly what resources are consumed to create that ship.

[paraskous]

And additional +5% shipping and handling on top for all the issues I have now with miners.

[paraskous]

If the 10% equal resource cost plus markup for me it's fine.

They should make it clearer imo.
It would help if they tell us exactly what resources are consumed to create that ship.

You can click on the components in order screen but a total would be very appreciated.

[Max Bain]

I like the changes to the economy.
There are still some bugs (like terran module margins are too low as I have posted in a bug report or not working repeat orders and stuff like that) but other than that the game finally feels more difficult to achieve financial dominance. Before you could become the richest person in the universe after a couple of in game days. Now this takes a lot more time and it feels like building up an empire instead of building one shipyard and win.
Egosoft needs to fix the last bugs and then the economy is pretty good in my opinion. I already make several millions (around 20) an hour with just a couple of stations (playing terran).

Edit: its also 30% not 10% the AI pays for your ships.

[mehmeteking]

I believe trading mechanics should be identical for both the AI and the player. If there is a large discrepancy between the actions of the player and the factions then improve the simulation to steer the player's behaviour to conform with the factions (or vice versa). Playing whack-a-mole with profit opportunities is a bad idea.

Exactly this.

[Raptor34]

If the 10% equal resource cost plus markup for me it's fine.

They should make it clearer imo.
It would help if they tell us exactly what resources are consumed to create that ship.

You can click on the components in order screen but a total would be very appreciated.

That too. But I'm talking about the faction ordered ships.