ECON Galaxy v0.13.2: A Crew Worth Choosing (Alpha)
The people on your ships stop being a number
A player asked in Discord what the crew actually does beyond pilot and engineer. The honest answer at the time was: of six roles, two carried a bonus, two only qualified a fleet for something, and two did nothing at all. The help article promised effects that no code had ever applied.
This release is the answer to that question, and it turned out to need the data model rebuilt rather than a few numbers filled in. A crew member used to hold one role and one skill level. Now they hold a level in any number of trades, work at most two of them on a ship, and get better at whatever they actually do.
Two things came with it. The hiring board had been frozen since January, offering the same people month after month, so it now refills itself from the places people live. And there is finally work on the mission board for somebody with an empty account, which mattered more than it sounds: most accounts in the game are empty.
What's new?
Seven trades, and people who grow into them
A person holds a level in as many trades as they have learned. On a ship they work two of them: a primary and a second duty, the second at three quarters. Training never lapses, so splitting somebody's attention costs performance and never costs the fleet its permission to go.
Each trade earns its keep in a different way, which is the whole point. There are no percentages, because comparing two percentages is not a decision.
- Captain unlocks the automation that was already in the game. Looping a queue at level 3, running orders on conditions at level 5, and more hulls under one command as they grow. Going over capacity is not a wall: no new complex work starts, and running orders keep running.
- Engineer gates the modules. What a module asks for comes off its bay size and its rarity, so the high end warp drive now needs somebody aboard who can run it, not just the credits to buy it.
- Trader raises a real ceiling on the size of a deal. Still no price edge, because a price edge is a percentage.
- Pilot qualifies a jump. The speed bonus is gone: the same engine does not push harder in better hands.
- Security is what lets a fleet travel into unsafe space at all.
- Tactician and Scientist exist and do nothing yet. They are waiting on fleet combat, and saying so is better than inventing an effect for them.
Work teaches. Every order a fleet finishes pays experience into the trades that carried it, and slowly: about six orders for a first level, well over a thousand to reach the top of one. Anybody may stand any watch, trained or not, because that is the only way to grow a crew instead of buying one. What it costs you is that a trade at zero qualifies the fleet for nothing.
The six attributes are gone. Only two things ever read them: the portrait generator, and the quality score that set a hire's price. So the game was charging a premium for figures that never reached a ship, and advertising somebody as Elite while they were a level two trader. Both read the trades now.
Nobody loses anything in the move. Existing crew keep the trade they had, and every fleet is given somebody in command who can run exactly what that fleet is running today and not a level more. Fitted modules were left alone.
A hiring board that is actually hiring
The board was filled once, on the 21st of January, and never again. Seven months later the galaxy was still offering the same 69 people, minus whoever had been signed out of them, spread over 45 places by a one off random draw. If you went looking for an engineer last week you were reading a notice from January.
Offers now come from the places people live. Every location above a population threshold holds open offers in proportion to how many people live there, and nobody waits forever: an offer that stands unanswered long enough is somebody who took work elsewhere, and it comes down. Hiring somebody leaves a gap that the next pass fills. On production right now that is 44 open offers across 28 places, and the newest of them was written last night.
Courier runs: work you can take with nothing in the bank
Twenty five of thirty one accounts in this game held under a thousand credits, and until now every way out of that needed capital first. The cheapest run on the board asked you to buy 500 credits of water in order to be paid 450 for it. The cheapest engineer wanted 7,680 up front before a fitted mining laser could be pointed at a rock. Being broke was terminal.
Two separate things were wrong, and both are fixed.
Transport runs lost money to fly. The reward was a cut of what the destination pays per unit, against a cargo you buy at the full asking price, which only comes out ahead on a spread of about six to one. Of the offers on the live board that could be sourced at all, most paid less than the cargo cost. A transport run now reimburses the goods and pays a margin for the trip on top. It also tells you where to pick the cargo up, which it never did before: every offer used to read "from -" while the board knew the answer the whole time.
And there was no job at all for somebody with an empty account. Courier runs are that job: the client's cargo, the client's money, your hull and your time. There are 24 of them on the board as this goes out, paying between roughly 1,660 and 9,000 credits, and you need no credits to take one.
The cargo does not come from nowhere, which matters more than it might seem. A courier run points at one real open sell order, and at pickup the faction buys those units at the asking price. The seller gets paid, their stock goes down, the order is filled by exactly what was taken, and only then does anything reach your hold. Writing the goods into the hold and calling it "provided by the client" would have been a printing press competing with the production chains the whole economy is built on.
The obvious exploit is closed too. Consigned cargo is not yours to sell, or a courier run would be a way to buy water at nothing and sell it at 280. Give a run up or miss its deadline and the client's goods come back out of your hold and sit down as station stock where you collected them. Nothing destroyed, nothing created.
One payday, one line
One payday writes one entry per station your crew is stationed at, so each population is credited what its own people earned. Read back as history that was four identical Crew Wages lines every hour, and a day of play buried everything else under a hundred of them.
Rows that share an hour, a reason and a direction now arrive as one entry that opens up, and the paging counts entries rather than the rows behind them. The panel in the top bar reads the same grouping as the page, so the two no longer disagree about how much happened.
The repairs
Less glamorous, and the reason the rest holds up. Everything below was measured on production before it was fixed.
- The crew cost more than the galaxy earns. The fix below turned two prices into one and kept the dearer of them. At 400 credits plus 120 a level the whole player base owed 1,164,480 credits a day against roughly 823,000 coming in. On the first of September the hourly payday could cover 61,640 of 167,660 due, eight employers out of forty one could pay their people at all, and 23 of 27 had under 1,000 credits left. The scale is 80 plus 25 a level now, and it applies to everyone already on a payroll rather than only to the next hire, because that is exactly what went wrong in August: the scale changed and 316 people kept their old number. It also straightened out an order in which somebody at level 8 cost less than somebody at level 5.
- What the old scale overcharged has been paid back. 1,926,670 credits to 26 employers, as one line in the transaction history. Only wages that actually left a wallet count: a payday nobody could afford took nothing, so there is nothing there to return. Anyone already refunded in August for the same wages does not get paid twice.
- Signing somebody cost a multiple of what it said on the tin. The signing fee is described as twelve hours of wage and never read the wage. While the two numbers happened to be a similar size, nobody noticed. After the wage correction a level 4 trader on 180 credits an hour was listed at 20,000 to sign, which is 111 hours rather than twelve. The fee reads the wage now, so it cannot fall behind the scale again.
- The dispatch board offered work a fleet was already on. An assigned card stayed in the backlog, so the same haul could be handed to a second fleet: two crews, one route, one payment. An order now remembers which card it was queued for, and the card leaves the backlog while that queue is still working on it. Once the queue is finished the card comes back, because a station that is still empty still needs the delivery.
- The same crew member cost six times as much depending on where you hired them. A player reported that wages were bankrupting his company. They were: 20,101 credits an hour against 28,903 in the bank, and over a day the wage bill came to 131 percent of everything the company earned while he was trading, running missions and collecting bounties throughout. There was no leak and nobody was idle. There were simply two prices for the same work: crew already aboard were priced on a scale, and the hiring market was priced by a dice roll that never looked at skill at all. He was paying 4,785 an hour for a level 3 that 47 other employers had for 760, and nothing on the screen told him which one he was buying. There is one scale now, and the signing fee reads as hours of the wage, so it says something about the person for the first time.
- And the one scale was still too dear. Putting the two prices together kept the level of the more expensive one, so the bill only looked sane next to what it had been. Measured over a fortnight, everyone playing took in about 823,000 credits a day between them and owed 1,164,000 a day in wages: more than the whole player base earns, leaving the accounts while people sleep. On the morning it was corrected, almost every company carrying a payroll had under 1,000 credits left. A wage now starts at 80 an hour and rises 25 a level, which is an operating cost rather than a reason nobody can afford a hull. A wage is written onto the person when you hire them and never read from the scale again, so the correction was applied to everyone already employed as well. That is the half that was missed in August, when the scale moved and 316 people quietly kept the old number.
- What the old scale overcharged was paid back. Everyone who had been billed on it got the difference paid into their account, with a mail saying where it came from. Close to two million credits went back. Before it, almost every company carrying a payroll was down under 1,000 credits; after it, one was, and that one had never paid a wage, so had nothing to claim. The money was made rather than taken off the populations, because the wages had gone into their wallets and that is the demand which buys your cargo.
- A fleet warped away while a crew member was still on a shuttle to it. The fleet screen said "Cannot leave the dock: Pathfinder has 4 crew still on the way" and the fleet jumped to Alpha Centauri over the top of the message. The rule existed on the undock and travel paths, and crossing between stars took neither of them. Fly To and Warp are disabled while a blocker stands now, with the reason as the tooltip.
- The dispatcher sent fleets to systems a travel order cannot reach. A player pulled an open mission onto a fleet through the dispatch board and the fleet never left Luna, because the run crossed a system border and a travel order does not. It retried every ten seconds for close to two hours. Order chains now track where the fleet stands as they are written, so a stop in another system gets a jump ahead of it and a stop the fleet is already standing at gets nothing at all.
- An order that ran stays in the way of the ones that have not. The queue kept every step it had already worked through, and the fleet switched itself off at the end of the list. Handing that fleet new work appended it behind a wall of finished steps on a fleet that had stopped, so nothing left the dock. Finished steps now leave the queue and are written to history: what they were, what they achieved, and what the game said at the time. Looping queues keep their steps, because there the list is a program rather than a run that ends.
- The next stop belongs to the system the jump ends in. With "Warp to Sol" already in a queue, the next stop is a berth in Sol, but the editor kept asking where the fleet stands right now and offered the berths it was about to leave. The editor now names the system it is planning in, next to the field.
- A run nobody could finish, with no sign of why. A run had expired and the card said nothing about it: no deadline, no warning, and a hand over button that invited a click which would quietly fail the run. The only clock on a delivery was the board's, so a run taken twenty three hours into its listing gave you an hour to cross a system border. A run now carries its own deadline from the moment you accept it, which is what the details panel had been promising all along.
- Three pages had no way back. Commodity detail, notifications and the old ships dashboard rendered with an empty tab bar and nothing lit, so the browser's back button was the only exit. Habitat detail was a quieter version of the same thing: the busiest area of the game showed its bar with neither tab marked. Missions have also moved out of Warfare, where they had been filed by alphabet rather than by what you are doing.
- The same haul could be handed to two fleets. The dispatch board had no link from a queued order back to the card it came from, so a card somebody had already taken sat there in the backlog: two crews, one route, one payment. A card whose orders are still running is off the board now, and it comes back if the queue leaves the work unfinished, because a station that is still empty still needs hauling.
- A run that ran out of time said nothing. An expired run is swept off your list, and only the log heard about it. Your card stopped changing and nothing explained why, which is the silence the sweep was written to end in the first place. You now get a notification naming the run and saying the offer has gone back on the board.
- The guided tour walked new players into a locked door. The tour is older than the first job and never learned about it, and its fourth stop is the habitat, the one door that stays shut until your first delivery is paid for. You could end up with the tour on screen and its next step bouncing you back to the mission board with no way out, because the guide always points at the first step you have not finished and that step could never finish. While a first job is open the guide shows that one step and nothing else, and the tour comes back once the cargo is handed over.
- The Explorer path could not be started, let alone finished. Its three counters, locations visited, systems visited and distance travelled, sat at zero for every player. Not even "Visit 3 different locations" could complete, and the Explorer ranking sorted a constant. The counting was wired to a place that stopped handling arrival a long time ago. A voyage now counts itself where it ends, and a jump counts exactly once no matter which route finishes first.
- The research tree sold bonuses the game never applied. Seven of its 48 capabilities do something. The rest stood next to them at the same price: Cargo Expansion cost credits and research data, and the cargo hold stayed exactly the size it was before. The tree is allowed to show more than the game can do yet. What it is not allowed to do is charge for it. Anything that does not apply is marked as planned now and cannot be researched.
- For six days not a single pirate attacked anywhere in the galaxy. The ship hulls were renamed at the end of August, and in two places the game kept looking for the old name. It found nothing, wrote a quiet line into the log and sent nobody out. The last pirate in the galaxy was created on 27 August, none followed, and the unsafe systems emptied out. Anyone flying through low sec in those days had the quietest space this game has ever had, and none of it was intended. Both places now name the hull as it is actually called. Ten minutes after the fix went live the first ones were back out there, twenty minutes later the unsafe systems were populated again. The same stale name sat on the core system enforcers too: an illegal attack in a core system would have been answered by nobody. It never showed, because nobody started one in those days.
Why this matters
The pitch for this game is that you build a company that runs without you. A company is people, and until this release the people were a number with a job title on it. You could not tell what you were buying, what you were paying for it, or what anybody would ever become.
Now hiring is a decision with something behind it, the board you hire from is alive, and the crew you already have gets better at the work you actually give them. And if you have no money at all, there is finally something on the board you can take.
Where this is going is on the roadmap.
Alpha note
This is still alpha. Features are not final, balance is a work in progress, bugs exist. The learning curve wants watching in particular: about six orders for a first level and well over a thousand for the top of a trade is a guess at what feels right, and only operation will show whether it does. Two of the seven trades do nothing yet and are waiting on fleet combat. Feedback is welcome, ideally on Discord.
Get going
Open your fleet screen and look at who is actually aboard, then take a look at the hiring board in a place with people in it. If your account is empty, the mission board has courier work on it that costs you nothing to start.
ECON Galaxy. A solo developer project. No lootboxes. No drama.
Version 0.13.2 is live. The full roadmap shows where this is going.