So, this event is going to give a pretty massive discount to carriers, and on the surface level that's pretty cool. However, if you have never had a carrier and see this as an opportunity to get in on one at a great price point please remember that these things require upkeep costs every single week and at the baseline I highly recommend a double buffer before purchase (ie, standard price don't look at a carrier until you have 10 bil, not 5). This is not at all gatekeeping, just making sure you don't make a mistake that'll diminish the fun of your game. General hints (fellow carrier bros, please add on):
- Baseline cost is 5 million, plus 100k every time your carrier jumps
- If you buy all modules, you more than triple your weekly costs (you don't need to buy all modules, but playing with friends makes it a necessity so that they can refit and store ships on it). Some of those modules are also more expensive than a cutter
- Tritium seems fine but gets expensive and honestly is the worse hidden cost vs maintenance. If you want a dank deep space carrier a nice load is 20k tritium, it is going to set you back almost a billion if you buy it (~50k per tritium). Mining tritium is tedious and you're better off doing other high reward activity and then buying tritium straight up (but definitely throw a backup mining ship in your hold in case of emergencies)
- When calculating jumps, the weight of your carrier is a factor, including all that tritium that you have in your hold. So, you fill up all awesome for a deep journey but that tritium is literally getting burnt at a higher rate because of the tritium in your hold
- You cannot remotely load tritium from your hold to your fuel depot, so you can either have someone else (or a permanent carrier rescue/refuel alt) in your carrier if you are away from it (you can however schedule jumps from anywhere in the galaxy)
- They are working on adding carrier interiors, which to me says they would also be working on adding a Vista Genomics vendor – HOWEVER this is not confirmed, so a carrier out in the deep black at this time is not "technically self-sufficient" as far as exploration (so you can get Universal Cartographics but can't die until you get back to the bubble at this time if you want to actually turn in your xenobiology)
- Some of those dank carrier orders you see in the other subs take substantial legwork to set up and plan out (it's not just printing money and the margins are less than you might imagine)
There's potentially more but I just want to throw this out for people who are on the fence about this. I absolutely have no regret about my decision to get one at 10 billion, but I just want everyone to be aware of the substantial costs that can be involved. Just make sure you don't get anxiety from thinking about keeping it around.
My ultimate advice is to calculate the cost of a full hold of tritium (remember to account for modules), the cost of extra modules (an easy 600+ mil extra right there), and then how much dosh you can deposit to keep your carrier online for 2 years so that you're not constantly thinking about it and can just consider that money "lost" (not lost because an FC is a great asset to your game, but just locked away money you shouldn't touch). In conjunction with all that, think about any ships you might still want with full A/D mods and what impact that will be if you don't already have everything you want as far as ships go. Then taking that into consideration, see how the full final cost will affect your wallet and enjoyment of the game/pursuit of things you want to do.
To make this not so dour, here's bro stuff:
- Trade. Find something selling for jack on the opposite side of the bubble, load up, and in almost always one jump go to a system where it sells for the highest
- Mining deposits – park in the system and load it all up. No need to have alternate fits/backup t9 or cutter in the system to go back and forth
- Trade and mining sales extra bonus: your hauler can be kitted out to absolute max cargo capacity because you don't have to worry about jump distance
- Refuel/rearm in non-station systems if you're shooting rats
- Deep space exploration and safety net
- Trade events like this current one are made much easier
- When they add interiors to the carrier it'll feel even more like player housing, except it's an awesome carrier out in space
- You never have to worry about "which ship is where?"
And to reiterate for whichever time it'll be, just make sure it feels like a super fun opportunity for opening up new avenues of gameplay and not something you're going to have to start grinding just to keep around.
o7
