What goes into making a ship more or less expensive?

So one of the things we take into account is the performance of different things compared to each other. There's a couple things going on. One is the quantity of items that go into it. And the other is kind of the performance of the ship. In the end, we want a better performing ship to be more expensive. That just makes logical sense all across the board, right? Typical game design 101. It's almost typical life 101. A lot of our stuff is translating life into what a video game would do.

So what we end up doing is taking things like how many weapon hardpoints this ship has and then relating those into part of the value of the ship. So a ship that has more hardpoints ends up costing more. Or a ship that has more power plant sockets, that will go into consideration. A ship that has more seats for crew members, right? A ship that has more room for cargo. All of those things get abstracted into kind of these value points that at the end of the day can put actual value numbers on each of these ships where otherwise they couldn't be compared. Because it's very difficult to, say, compare the value of a shield generator to the value of 20 cargo slots on your ship. That's kind of tough stuff to do. So what we do is we abstract that away, we turn it into value, and then we compare those things to each other. And then we also put in how much material costs we think will go into those ships, and that's how we get luxury ships like the Constellation Phoenix costing a lot more, because the materials that go into that end up costing a lot more.