When editing ships, what factors in a person's decision in setting a ship price?

I've seen ship prices ranging from the cheap (most pods and scouts at about $15,000) to the luxury prices of $20-30 million.

I know many game ops don't always go by the percentages listed on the cost screen. Many may go as much as 1000% over cost or so.

Feedback appreciated please as I'm in the middle of editing a game that I hope to soon pass on to a sysop for hosting and I want to make sure the ships are the right prices for what they are capable of given their specs.

Personally I think the amount of turns your are editing for is a huge factor. If your running a unlim like pirates it makes sense to outprice the best of ships. However making that same 250mill or whatever in a 1k turn game is near impossible in a tourney/intense game. Unfortunately in my opinion its a sliding scale (No static formula) and if people have math for it great but 200k at 1k turns is not the same as 2mill at 10k.

In the interest of making the game I'm about to host's ratio of fun > frustration, I've left the ship prices alone... except for two ships.

The Merchant Cruiser, I set the price to $8,000,000 credits.
The Escape Pod, I set the price to $4,000,000 credits.

This way, when a player begins they can sell the cruiser and purchase any ship in the fleet except for the ISS. They can't max it out with shields and figs, but they can get a healthy start... once.

And if they get podded, they can bring their pod to SD and trade it in for... anything, including the ISS if they've already got a commission.

I'm hosting this game for total n00bs who have never even heard of TradeWars before. It's an experiment, so we'll see if it works the way I intend it to... or if I get a bunch of jackholes buying the MerF, blowing themselves up, and selling the quite valuable pods as a cashing method ad nauseum.

-Bridget`

Average edit with low turns I usually go with a standard 100% cost. In an edit like Hell on Earth or Sub Zero, I've edited ships to cost 80 million before. 1000% may not be to high for some edits.

For long term building games, where I do not want certain ships available right away, I really jack up pricing.

That's where it would be nice to have a feature in tedit where you could make ships and planets available on a timed interval.
Example: How many days before ship is available to players? (1 to 100) _

Thanks for the inputs, everyone. All the ships that I'm editing, I want to be available within a reasonable time frame of a 1200 turn game such as a 8tpw 250 hold 100K fig modded IDC for about $2 mill. Stock IDC is about $500K.

I'm almost done with this edit that I'm working on. I'm in testing mode right now, playing 2 bots and have them play the game. I'll put in other bots as well for further testing. I'm working on correcting other edits that I missed and then go from there. This will be a fun edit once I release it to the public.