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X4 Economy Balance

• XR Ship Pack
  
• XR Ship Pack VRO
  
• VRO
  
• WeaponPack
  
• works with Split Vendetta

This mod will drastically nerf mid and late game player economy (mid game for me starts with your first shipyard or wharf). Money will be much longer important and is way harder to earn in mid and late game.

If you like easy games, this mod is maybe not for you - sorry.
But if you are bored by the fact how fast you can build up your empire and rule the galaxy, this might be a new challenge for you.


Modules and ships have very high margins in X4 and therefore money becomes obsolete in mid to late game, short after building the first shipyard. Nearly all modules and ships have margins of 400-1000%, means that when you sell a module that would cost you 1 million to buy its components, you will get 5-11 million back if you sell it. So 4 to 10 million profit. In my opinion this is way too much and breaks the economy in late game totally. Especially because you dont even need to transport the ships which is a risk for all other cargo.

Fixing this issue is not that trivial if you dont want to break things for the AI.

So this mod does a couple of things to achieve a better mid to end game economy:
Endproducts are modules, weapons and ships. Components are the ingredients of a product.

• All components of endproducts including energy cells, were doubled in price. This means that all components that make up the modules, rockets or ships have become roughly twice as expensive. These are: energycells, hullparts, turretcomponents, weaponcomponents, dronecomponents, antimatterconverters, missilecomponents (4x), advancedelectronics, engineparts, fieldcoils, smartchips and shieldcomponents.
  
• All these components now need twice their base resources (for example silicon or antimattercells) so the components still have the same margin as before (with some little tweaks).
  
• These changes alone lowered the margins of modules and ships to around 50% compared to vanilla margins (not exactly). Still some modules and ships have margins of above 400% (which shows how insane the margins of some entities in vanilla are). So In the next step I increased component numbers of all modules or ships with margins way higher than 100%, to lower them to around or below 100% (for comparison hullparts have a margin of 40%).
  
• To compensate the increased amount of needed components, all refinery modules have an increased productivity of 50%. They also need more energy cells to compensate their increased margin a bit. Overall their margin increased slightly.
  
• To compensate the increased amount of cargo that has to be transported now, volumes of hullparts, graphene, rawmetal and teladianium have been lowered by about 33%. This will not completely balance the changes out, but because hull parts are by far the most transported wares, these changes will at least have some positive effect.
  
• To compensate the increased demand of many intermediate products, at game start all factions (except Xenon) got some additional production facilities (energy cells, turret components, shield components, claytronics and field coils).
  
• All Xenon stuff has not been changed at all.
  
• NPCs will have increased number of mining vessels (+50%) to compensate higher demand for resources

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A ship costs 10000 credits and it needs 10 energy cells and 9 hull parts
Energy cell costs 10 credit
Hull part costs 100 credits

So the ship componets cost 10*10 + 9*100 = 1000 credits
Margin = 10000/1000 = 10 = 1000%

Now with this mod the ship would still cost 10000 credits but the components would cost twice the money.
Energy cells would cost 20 credts
Hull parts would cost 200 credits

So the ship components cost 10*20 + 9*200 = 2000 credits
Margin = 10000/2000 = 5 = 500%

Additionally the mod would increase the amounts of components the ship needs.
So the ship would need maybe 20 energy cells and 20 hull parts resulting in
20 * 20 + 20 * 200 = 4400
=> Margin = 10000/4400 = 2,27 = 227%

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Overall these changes will have some effect on the game economy, especially for the player. I hope it will make the end game more interesting and trading with components still an option compared to selling only ships in late game. Still ships are more profitable of course.
Early game might become a little bit easier because selling minerals and gas might be a bit easier and refining them is a little bit more profitable now. The universe will also have a greater demand for energycells and intermediate products.
The AI will also have to adapt to these changes but I tried to make the changes as AI friendly as possible (thats why I decided for point 1 instead of lowering module and ship prices or just increaseing their component amounts by huge numbers). Still only many hours of gameplay will tell the whole effects of these changes. For sure, more wares have to be transported - maybe this is the beginning of the era of large freighters.
Another side effect of the increased values of wares could be that piracy (not boarding) might become a thing.

Storages:

Storage modules are also very unbalanced in vanilla. A small cargo storage can store up to 25.000 containers while a large one can hold 1.000.000. The price for a large one is not even 3 times the price of a small one while it can hold 40! times the amount of containers of a small one. For liquid and solid storages it is not that extreme, but still far from balanced. A medium solid or liquid storage can hold up to 5 times the wares a small one can hold but costs not even twice the money.
Therefore I changed the following:

• Cargo storage for S modules has been increased to 100.000. M modules can now store 250.000 cargo. L modules are unchanged.
  
• The prices for all M and L modules have been raised. A bigger module is still always cheaper and faster to build for its capacity.

This should also help the economy with the increased cargo volume that needs to be transported due to changes made in the upper section.