IV. Resource Rounds
To effect a real-world overhead to the economic system, a Resource Round will run once a month. If you don’t own a ship, station, rent a room, or earn a paycheck, then this part of the economy will not pertain to you. Every time the round runs, ships/stations are assessed for maintenance, payrolls are dolled out, and rent is collected. This helps the flow of money continue in and out of the hands of players, and returns a higher value on money in general by making it worth something again.
Every month, a resource round report will be mailed to each player, letting them know what happened. If you’re just an average joe collecting a paycheck, maybe you’ll just get a report of how much you earned and how much rent you paid. If you’re a business owner running a ship, you’ll get a report of how much money you have, how much money it costs to keep your business running, the ship maintenance report, and your employee payroll totals. The economy will communicate with you where you money goes, and in that, gives you a clear idea of what kind of profit you have after your round expenditures.
If you have a ship or space station that you or your business owns, you might see a bill like this (and this is only a sample, not what prices will actually be):
- 43 Rooms @ 100 each: 4300cr
- Damage Control Payroll (5 teams @ scale): 157500cr
- Maintenance Costs (total): 583000cr
- Total Cost to maintain SS Shipname: 744800cr
Costs will be broken down, so it will be possible to see where your major costs are going to, as well as if you need to purchase upgrades for equipment that's falling apart. Let's say you purchase a used ship with fifteen years of use and maybe a few million light years on the ol' odometer. Ick and charg'WI don't always give you the best equipment, and as soon as you get to your first resource round, you notice that maybe the shield generators cost way more than usual to maintain every six months. You'll want to pull that piece of shit to an authorized dealer or maybe a not-so-authorized one for an upgrade or outright replacement to keep the maintenance from devouring your checkbook whole.
But this is the beauty of working out an economic system that’s wholly integrated with RealSpace 3.0’s objective engineering. We can actually track states of disrepair and assign values to them. Some subsystems will just stop working no matter how many times you repair it, others may run forever. Maybe Ick will sell you a bum part with a restocking fee of 150%. You won’t know until it’s too late, anyway.
One aspect of overhead that won’t be assessed through the resource round is docking and fueling. Every time you dock somewhere, you might be asked to pay a docking fee, which is due before you depart the station or perhaps you have a shuttle in a landing field that charges for landing. A dockmaster’s console will be publicly available for you to use to pay up your fees, or else they won’t let you launch or undock your ship or shuttle. Imagine the WNO-version of a tire-boot on your vehicle if you don’t pay the fees to depart. Every day or so you spend in dock with the boot on only increases the fee, so paying promptly is a good thing before leaving for your next destination. We’ll do our best to put dockmaster’s consoles in easy access locations so as not to make it difficult to board your ship if you’re on a tight schedule. Fueling is another concept we didn’t use on the old game; if you need to refuel your ship, one of the many fueling stations is happy to drain your wallet to do so. There will be price-tracking, so it’s best to find a nice little spot that sells cheap fuel and use it. The same console for docking will be used to buy fuel.
In the fifth part of this overview, I will talk about everyone’s favorite topic, the black market.
