The infinite demand void of the origin stations is distorting the economy

[Salbris]

The problem is that we are constantly asking for bandaids to a problem that hasn't even fully developed yet. If you suddenly remove AI vendors then people will be faced with an extreme increase in grind (as they can't reliably sell things from the research grind). We also lack any other resource sinks that can replace the AI vendor. Maybe when capital ships and sieges are introduced they can try removing them but until then it would just be project suicide.

This is what I mean about waiting. There are some very drastic feature changes on the horizon.

 

[Salbris]

AI vendors have a place because (new) players do not know or use the options they have to advance the skill tree well. It is very, if not totally, unclear to most new and even some more tenured players that you can craft a ships components, loweing the build and ore cost for that ship inthe process AND advancing your tech tree using the points you gain from that crafting.

This might be true if it didn't require hundreds of parts to get to the next research (when a ship needs dozens). Hard to do the math on it but I'm about 80% sure there would always be hundreds of parts sitting around in everyone's storage that they can't use.

 

[blazemonger]

True as long as you count by the 7 point/second you get from a chair,. It may not be correct when you look at how crafting more advanced/useful stuff will give you more points anyway.

I do see the point though and maybe in this light it shoudl also be a combination of balancing the way progression.. progresses

Personally, I much prefer the passive time based (skill) training for games like this, it really makes more sense but with a B2P model that is really not an option.

 

[Salbris]

True as long as you count by the 7 point/second you get from a chair,. It may not be correct when you look at how crafting more advanced/useful stuff will give you more points anyway.

I do see the point though and maybe in this light it shoudl also be a combination of balancing the way progression.. progresses

Personally, I much prefer the passive time based (skill) training for games like this, it really makes more sense but with a B2P model that is really not an option.

Let's do some math. Let's assume you want to buy a Marmot-ST and you have all the T1 equipment unlocked and you want to unlock Mining lasers.

You need to go through cockpits, material point scanner and finally mining lasers. I tried and tried to get the numbers for these but unless someone on discord sees my request and sends a screenshot I'm going to have to do some educated guessing: Things around this seem to be about 2k yellow and gear each and around double in red. So something like 12k red, 6k yellow, 6k purple, and 1k blue (for the mining laser).

A marmot has 10 T1 box thrusters, 20 T1 manuevering thrusters, 3 T1 Fuel Chambers, 3 T1 fuel rods, 4 T1 Generator Units, 1 of each of FCU, MFC, Resource bridge and 10 batteries (which are bugged but let's count them) and a bunch of things that either give no points or very few points.

So those parts total 820 red, 1960 yellow, and 2560 purple.
Edit: Missed the FCU and resource bridge in my calculations.

So you would need to build 3-4 marmots just to grind to get mining lasers. You'd still have to buy many more ships just to get ore collectors and all the other things you want. Doesn't seem practical to me.