Just wanted to expand on the issue of the economics of the game breaking down when you have been playing for a long time.
Most of the elements we can spend QP on (VIP, officers, stabilisers, etc) are affordable from in-game income or AP exchange.
The main area where it would be tempting to spend real money would be to increase build speed. However, unlike the things mentioned above, that is way too expensive.
As an extreme example, say I have a ship that is about to complete 48x AES-7000. That’s a lot of investment – 14 months’ build time on top of nearly $11 billion of in-game income.
£11 billion has taken a long time to accumulate, but if I want to speed up production, I have to swap QP for AP at 1:1 exchange and pay 1AP per hour build time reduced. That would cost me over half a million QP to get all those modules built straight away.
If I paid cash for that, at $100 for 1250QP, I’d have to invest over $40,000. I could buy AG for that.
If there were an option to pay 10 or 20QP to complete any unit, then it might be attractive for me to pay a bit of cash to save the months of build time – and it opens the game up to getting income from long-term players (and there are a high proportion of those).
Herod makes a fair point. Perhaps something like 1AP > 50% > 25% > 12.5%> etc until 96 hours, when 1AP then equals 1hour, or when 1AP<1hr according to the first plan, in which case it also defaults to 1AP>1hr
