Then in general... corp size, turn base, planet speed, MBBS, ptrade %, steal from buy, planet
production, and what planets pop with. Add in the price of alien ships too, I guess.

You could get a general settings-based approximation of a "cash base" and then use that to
determine the suggested values of hardware.

just a word of caution - don't do the math *too* precisely or you can take away a strategic decision point in the game. if there aren't moments in the game where the economics of eprobes can provide an advantage, then why have them? after that it just becomes play style to eprobe, because the pricing makes the decision to probe a 50-50 proposition and winning becomes a matter of luck rather than strategy.

Fighters and shields using a long-period cyclic cost formula. Maybe something similar might work well with eProbes?

or just make it simple , those sysops who don't like eprobing .. can just set the eprobe price to 65k each and watch the players walk and holo to get the data.

It doesn't get any simpler.

Give me a day and I'll hack together an edit that can do this, so people can experiment.

Wayne

It would make some sense if everything did that actually. Periods of inflation and deflation of the markets.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Would you be open to adding a configurable setting, as someone mentioned earlier, that would charge x turns per etherprobe use? This would make you choose between one activity (making money) and another activity (probing) with the same, limited supply of turns.

As a way of making it Simple for the sysop's sake, what about this: Tie the e-probe turn cost value to the Etherprobe Delay setting. I use Ship Delay to make ship choice matter in live, manual game play (i.e. a T'khasi can actually outrun an ISS when being chased) and I like how it interacts with turns per warp and turns per day in conjunction with max time online. Why not have the same tradeoffs in probe use? I use Etherprobe Delay to keep people from going totally nuts with Etherprobes, in conjunction with a time limit in the game, but I like the idea of having it cost turns too. What about something like this:

Etherprobe Turn Cost Setting: Auto (if Etherprobe delay is off, 0 turns are charged. If Etherprobe delay is on, charge EtherProbeDelay*0.5 turns per sector that the probe travels; round up any fractions) (the default)
Etherprobe Turn Cost Setting: Manual (allow sysop to manually set the Turns per Sector Travelled by the probe - it should allow decimals, like .30 or 1.1)

What I see with the gridding players do now, e-probs are ineffective. In order for a player today to get a port report is to have actually visited the sector, for the most part. I don't see that a change is needed.

They are still tracking players with port reports, but the cost is actually having to have visited the port. Team mates can still pull CIM reports and I'm assuming today's helpers can synchronize those CIM reports.

So, port report hunting will still happen, but the price paid is the turns to visit the ports. I feel that's fair.

Eprobes are enormously effective early on. Once the grid is locked, they become useless. This means
you need to roughly figure out how much grid will exist over time, and probe appropriately.



Eprobes mark sectors as "explored" and thus they show up on CIM.



Everyone who visits a port will put a fig down, provided they have even a modicum brains about them.
This converts CIM hunting into traditional grid warfare, making CIM hunting useless. There's no reason
to do that when you can simply rebalance eprobes cost. I've already gone into how you can do that.