Giving an entire city a combat advantage over another could result in a single organization dominating everything because they had gold when org artifacts were released, and everyone else didn't. And when a new org comes out, it'll be substantially weaker because it doesn't have gold or any of the nifty artifacts. It's already quite hard to get an org that is losing fully functional (Look at Glom and Celest). Raising even more the distance between losing and winning orgs would be bad.

I like the mothership idea, but when the mothership explodes, does the power inside just go poof? If that were the case people could just take solo mothership death runs to drain some power... Either make it so it costs a considerable amount of power to make a "mothership" after she blows, or make it so the power goes back to the drained nexus? I think this is a really awesome idea, it allows those without the money to run the little tiny ships in defense, while the rich buggers can turn the tide with their awesome personal ships! estarra! DOOO it!

i'm still waiting for serenwilde controled stations

If it means Glomdoring can finally get it's arena, and we can do community upgrades without doing the middle-man process, I'm all for it.

Basically I'm all for the idea, it sounds neat!

However, I'll join my fellow posters in pointing out that the "conversion" rate is way too low. If you convert credits to DUs at a 1/1 rate, you always need to compare to the credit market as a base. And 1000 gold/credit just IS way too low, you'd have to give city ships exceptional advantages for that expensive a purchase, and we don't want that for balance reasons.

Even if you (rightfully so) argue that cities can decide which price to sell at, so do private credit buyers. Yet we see no credits being sold for 10000 gold like their owners would like to, nor at 1000 gold like their buyers would to. It'll be similar for cities. The price for DUs will inevitably hover at the credit market level, due to the conversion rate, and that'll make purchases via DUs much more expensive than via gold.

At the current market price, 350 DUs would mean 1.4 million gold. Cities are rich, but not that rich...

I can see that price as justified for motherships, those should cost a couple millions, provided they can then be reconstructed for a moderate commodity cost after they've imploded, or even cheaper. But it'll be just too expensive for anyone except maybe Magnagora to build a fleet at such a price.

So, in summary:

- Being able to sell credits to city: Great idea.
- Being able to buy city enhancements via those credits: Great idea.
- Current conversion rate: too expensive, won't work.


And regarding the "who's in charge": Whoever is in charge of credit sales takes care of the credit purchases, and I guess you could just introduce a Development Ministry or something of the like for purchasing and maintaining the gizmos.

I don't think that will provide a long-term solution, unless I am missing something. In the short term this would probably work - cities have lots of gold, potential ships owners (by definition) have lots of credits. Both (due to the novelty) could kill for ships. Large supply satisfies large demand. But what happens next seems totally unclear.

What will be the demand for player ships? And what will be the demand for org ones? Will the org demand be sufficient to keep up with the player demand? Or more importantly (as David suggests): will the orgs really be able to satisfy the demand for gold? We may be looking at city coffers now and thinking "Wow, that's a lot of gold!" but their coffers represent the ages of squirreling away gold, not actual flows of millions per IC year. Consider also in this connection, that unless some alternate form of anonymous credit market for cities is implemented, players will be able to sell only to one or two cities, since they might be enemied to some and others might simply refuse to buy from them because they represent an opposing side, so there's another serious potential distortion.

And if the player demand doesn't keep up with org demand then we'll see the credit market getting hit.

So I think this would be extremely difficult to balance out.

I'm interested by this idea... but I feel you've slightly missed the boat. Especially with regards Magnagora.. where Guilds and City and similar have already bought their organisational aetherstuff.

... also I'm not sure about the rate of demand. Magnagora regularly sells itself out of credits for gold. Certainly that's partly to do with their cheapness.. but it also seems to me that many players still want to trans their ordinary skills before they start buying Aetherships and the like.

That's something I considered as well. I feel the belief at the moment is that the citizens/members of a city/commune expect and feel entitled to "their share" of the commune/city wealth hence we have credit sales at far below average prices (Serenwilde is 2500 per credit for members).

If someone suddenly started taking credits and trading them in for something like an aethership at such a terrible conversion, I'd throw a bloody fit as would most people.

Just a quick idea about the credits->gold thing:

The price at which cities/communes would buy credits can be tied with credit market.

If I want to sell 100 credits for gold, and there are (on credits for sale) 30cr for 4000 and 140cr for 4100:
30*4000+70*4100=407000 gold.

Now, remove like 10% (let's say) and we get about 366000.
I can either try to get the best price on market or sell quickly to the city for a price 10% lower.

It means cities and communes couldn't set the price they want to buy credits for (but could place a certain amount of gold in reserves for that or something).

hmm, then again 400k gold isn't much to a city/commune treasury, but it is a extensive amount for the average player. I would hope that Nations would buy what they needed and stop, thus when a new thing came out, perhaps that +% to mana gem for all citizens for a constant power drain (something I'm sure the viscanti of Magnagora would be interested in with their high power and comparative negative sip bonus for mana) the cities would buy up some credits this way, convert them into DU's, buy what then wanted and stop. This is assuming credits bought this way could -only- be converted into these new units for this use.

I didn't think about PDUs, just credits. Actually... cities could only spend half the cost (if someone sells credits for 300k to the city, in reality city pays just 150k for that). It would mean more city credits for citizens to buy.

EDIT: Actually, no. It could be easily abused.

hmm, sounds very neat, as it would be something that would have to be continually worked for.
i have a question, though.
would cities also be able to purchuse their own city owned clans?

I like the idea of orgs being able to own the ship, it saves a lot of trouble. there would probably have to be a minsiter in charge of these things.

I'm going to have to agree with what others have said about orgs being able to purchase artifacts. An org like Serenwilde that has way more members then say Magnagora or Glomdoring will have quite an advantage. And when a new org comes they won't be able to keep up with those that have already purchased quite a few of them.

Unless of course maybe you limited it to maybe one artifact per org, forcing them to choose what would be the most beneficial to their members. That's got potential

I like the idea, but I see a big problem with it.

1. I like DU's I've always thought cities should have a use for the credit they get other then just selling them back causing the leaders to have tons of uneeded messages about gold deposits...


2. There would need to be a system in place to prevent a person from buying 2000 credits, and then bankrupting the city, and a system to prevent the person who sets the price from stealing from teh commune by setting a credit sale price of 10billion and then running for it.

I like the idea of organizations being able to own some things in truth, but the idea of DUs seems completely unnecessary.

Again, just let them buy it with money. Much simpler, and much easier than a convoluted system that would mess with the credit market.

I'm going to admit that I skimmed a bit, as I'm still at work, but I sense catastrophic economic shifts of unpleasant proportions.

Now, something that would be cool with this DU system would be city/commune upgrades... Extra rooms, more shops, neat areas, etc. But for ships, I don't know...

And the idea that a city or commune could buy something I can't get isn't my favorite. I'm already sad I can't buy an arena!

I think I'd dislike anything that shifts the economy, or does away with our previous need to sell credits way below normal prices, like Rhysus said.

That would be awesome

Cities could actually grow that way. Imagine massive, sprawling areas.

I think the system is neat, but not for purchasing ships and such.