The Currency Conundrum – development log #205

In this week’s development log, we want to highlight a special community milestone and we reveal more details about the upcoming tax system.

Michi (molp)

The work on the administration center continues (Part 1, Part 2).

This week I laid more groundwork for the election part of the admin center. At the end of an election all the votes of the upcoming term are counted, a winner is determined and constituted. Then the upcoming term becomes the active term and a new upcoming term is created. The player winning the election is notified and the outcome of the election is sent to the planet which in turn notifies all site owners of the planet about it. So far so boring, but here is the interesting part:

As you might know, the corporation of the newly elected governor determines the currency in which the production and local market fees are levied. That has a serious implication for the core faction worlds where new players usually start. If, for example, a corporation from the Insitor Cooperative gains control over Montem, all productions orders will have to be paid in ICA instead of NCC. That poses a serious problem for newbies, since they don’t start with any amount of money of that currency. They would have only a few options to fix the problem:

• Trade currency at the foreign exchange. This is limited to PRO licencees.
• Fly to Promitor and sell some goods at their commodity exchange. Flying around to just sell a few items is really expensive.
• Setup a local market contract in ICA and hope someone accepts it. Also limited to PRO licencees.

All these options are suboptimal for newbies and even for some more experienced players. So we decided that we need some rules to mitigate this.

1. On the faction core worlds, the currency of the local market, production fees, etc. will always be the currency of the faction. The height of the fees etc. will probably be limited.
2. In faction space, the currency will also always be the faction’s currency.

What do we mean by faction core worlds and faction space? The faction core worlds are essentially the starting locations. Faction space contains all systems within one or two jumps of these planets. Up until now, we didn’t really show which systems belong to which factions and that will change with the Expanse release. I didn’t manage to finish that part in time this week, so I’ll probably post a screenshot next week.

Julian (Mjeno)

Alongside my usual tasks (mostly support and community management at the moment), I continued on with last week’s end-of-year plan, which I will pitch to the others tomorrow. I had some smaller special things come up like investigating a small anomaly in our payments, but I won’t bore you with the details. Instead, I’d like to highlight someone else’s achievement this week: The game has officially seen its first Water Reclaimer, which is a monumental feat.

As you can see, creating this commodity requires the involvement a vast number of different industries. We initially put it into the game in order to give veteran players something to work towards while we are still fleshing out the actual late-game. We set up a Market Maker which buys the WR for quite a significant sum:

Five WR have been sold so far, infusing the game with so much new cash that we’re actively discussing with the sellers how to best distribute the new money across the universe without breaking the economy. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: We’re thoroughly impressed, congratulations to GDP for this achievement! If you want to read more, here is a forum post about it.

See you next week!

As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!