Income sources are a topic of discussion that has been hot recently but has been a major subject of discussion for the last few patches. I decided to write up a big long post containing my experiences with and thoughts on various forms of income (both personal and second hand through discussion), as well as things I think could be changed to improve the game. I'm going to reiterate some stuff that's been said elsewhere, but I think it is useful to have one thread addressing all income sources since they are all balanced/valued against one another and any discussion will inevitably lead to discussion all of them.
I think it's useful to broadly categorize active income types into three groups: trade, exploration, and combat. Of course there is also passive colony income, but I am going to ignore that for now because I think that aspect of the game (late game) is mostly unfinished, so not worth nitpicking at the moment. I also categorize income sources into: bar missions, intel board missions, and contact missions. I'll start with a tldr overview of my thoughts on those income types and sources, and then go into each one (and some sub categories) specifically.
TLDR:
Types: For me, trade is the most imbalanced income source because it's easy, fast and risk-free. Specifically smuggling where the profit margins are large. Combat is the fun way to make money, but there are still issues with the risk/reward balance that often incentivize me to not take the most fun fights. Exploration is enjoyable the first time but becomes much more tedious and much less exciting once you know what's out there. I also think the risk/reward on exploration is not necessarily where it should be.
Sources: I think contacts are really not where they need to be this patch and there's a ton of room for improvement and expansion of those mechanics. IMO, contacts should be the reliable/consistent source of normal missions. I think the bar should be the equivalent of 'events' in rogue likes, i.e. high variance opportunities that can be cool/interesting and have the potential for very high value outcomes but are as often bad as they are good. Intel IMO should be more about finding open world opportunities to make money like shortages, vulnerable trade fleets, rumored fleet wrecks or stations etc rather than just a source of scripted missions. General mission boards drive you away from interacting with the carefully crafted characters and worlds, which I think is a bad thing. I think giving those sources of income clearer identities would improve the gameplay experience and also give more control over the balance of those income sources.
Trade
Spoiler
The fundamental problem with trade has been that there is little risk, so any attempts at balancing by reducing profit margins just make it more grindy without actually addressing the reasons why it would be preferable to other income sources (low risk). The main solution that has been proposed numerous times is adding combat threats to trading. The obvious solution is just to add some pirate activity (possibly scripted, or just randomly generated) proportional to the value of your cargo under some circumstances, for instance, buying lots of goods at a market spawns a pirate fleet that chases you because it saw you buy the goods and wants to steal them from you. For trade missions where you have a specific world you are delivering to, there can also be faction specific hostilities, e.g. TT fleets trying to stop delivery to hegemony worlds.
In addition, I think there are two major sub-categories of pure trade: open world trade and missions.
open world trade
Legal open world trade is I think is one of the more controversial topics. It's currently not really viable because of very high tariffs. My understanding is that one of the design goals of the game is to not create profitable and legal static trade routes with no risk since that will naturally result in some low risk/grindy income sources which will be preferable to more fun income sources like combat. However, there have been many people that have expressed the desire for that type of gameplay. The way that this could work IMO is that profitable legal trade would require you to find/develop a source of low cost goods through contacts. In practice that would mean having some way to lower tariffs at a specific market which might look like doing a string of quests for a port official (contact) to reduce tariffs so that you can buy goods profitably on that world. I think having it be restricted to single worlds (so only specific subsets of goods, and the quests can be balanced based on the world etc), and having a large amount of effort required through quests, in addition to the suggestions about adding combat to trade would be enough to ensure that legal trade would not be superior to other forms of income while still being viable.
Smuggling is the other form of open world trade which is currently unbalanced, but in the opposite way. You can make massive amounts of money with no risk (and very little effort or skill in general) by buying cheap on the black market and selling to shortages on the black market. The above solution of adding combat threats is I think a very important aspect of making smuggling less OP, but I think there is another issues, and that is that there are some specific illegal goods (drugs, organs and heavy armaments), with oversized profit margins due to much higher base prices. I think there should be some specific risks associated with these goods, for instance, dealing drugs would attract attention from criminal organizations whose business you are cutting into. Dealing in heavy armaments might attract some investigations by the hegemony etc. These risks also could not necessarily directly require combat to resolve, but just force the player to interact with the game world and do stuff that is fun (quests for drug lords to avoid their wrath etc). I think something definitely needs to be done to make smuggling more interesting and make the risk/reward more comparable to other income sources.
trade missions
The second category of trade income is trade missions. I think particularly the bulk transport missions are a problem because they scale directly with your cargo capacity, so if you put 10 atlases in your fleet, you will get massive bulk transport missions which have no risk and huge payouts. You could just add proportionally scaling threats (hostile fleets that attack you) which I think would work ok to tone down the risk/reward issues, but isn't super interesting, although probably necessary. Personally, I think these missions should be primarily contact missions, so that you need to put in some effort leveling up your contact before you can get access to the massive pay days. Having them available freely in the bar is a problem in itself IMO.
Combat
Spoiler
The problem with combat income is always that there is high risk involved in combat, but high rewards can snowball quickly. Addressing the frequency/accessibility of combat missions is one way to allow for higher rewards without making the game too easy once combat is mastered and risks can be minimized.
I think there are two main sources of combat income: bounties, and piracy
bounties
I've said it before, but my suggestion is to make all bounties come from contacts (and possibly the bar) and completely remove intel bounties. I think intel bounties are inherently flawed because it's so difficult to ensure there are appropriately difficult missions available for any player at any time in the game. Contact bounties ensure that the player can always control the level of bounties they are seeing, and thus that should solve pacing issues. Contact importance can also be used to control the pace of the player gaining access to high reward bounties (i.e. high importance contacts give very high reward bounties but very infrequently, and it also requires time and effort to level up or find high importance contacts, while low importance contacts can be a better source of consistent but lower value bounties). I think in general, driving the player towards contacts is also a good idea because in the current game, it's very easy to ignore that entire system.
I do think that there would need to be some adjustments in the bar missions that give potential contacts to accommodate this. One idea is that system bounties would become bar missions that lead to military contacts, and person bounties become only available after you acquire a contact. I think in general you would need to get more opportunities to find contacts though to make this work, although that could be balanced by giving lots of low level contacts, so that you still need to work hard to develop higher level ones that would give you the best missions.
Another suggestion is to adjust the frequency of high paying bounties so that you could have higher payouts that might encourage more risk taking. Larger payouts for high end bounties would make them much more desirable, and as long as they were a rare opportunity, I don't think they would snowball too hard. I think you could also do more special one-off bounties at different levels of difficulty too (like the crazy end game one off end-game bounties you can get from contacts now, but for all stages of the game).
piracy
For me, the most glaringly imbalanced income source was farming trade fleets. I could easily find a trade fleet with 500k+ value of cargo (heavy armaments + supplies + heavy machinery, and with a shortage the profits can be even larger too) but with a ~100-150k bounty fleet equivalent of guarding ships. The risk/reward is insanely better than real bounties, and it's in hyperspace so there are basically no consequences besides maybe a small rep ding. Even if your fleet is small, you can leave goods in cargo pods in hyperspace and they will hang around long enough for you to come back after selling or storing some stuff. Basically if you can kill a normal hegemony patrol (a few cruisers at most), you can hit trade fleets that pay out significantly more than the highest tier of bounties.
I've made comments about it before, but those trade fleets need defending ships equivalent to a bounty fleet worth the value of the cargo IMO, or at least somewhat comparable. There also could be escort fleets that scale with the number of recently lost shipments or stuff like that. I also think it would be cool if the whole 'intel about trade fleets' bit was a more fleshed out, so there was some interesting gameplay associated with finding targets (maybe from pirate contacts) and maybe even finding or creating moments/windows of vulnerability where there are less defenders for a certain trade fleet etc. Right now you can basically just fly around in hyperspace and you will find good trade fleet targets pretty easily.
Exploration
Spoiler
I think exploration could also use a face-lift. I think it's a bit too easy to get stuff most of the time. There needs to be more action and also more uncertainty involved IMO. Right now, the world feels mostly 'empty/abandoned' where I think it should feel more 'unexplored/uncivilized'. Most of exploration is just finding abandoned stuff and taking it. I think in principle, you should rarely find anything valuable without some strings attached. IMO, you should always be both excited and concerned/scared when you find anything because you don't know what's going to happen next. There should almost always be some risk associated with the rewards.
One big thing is that all the stations are abandoned. It would be cool if there were also active stations scattered around, particularly if the active stations had better loot but with defenders. Abandoned stations could be mostly lower value (maybe with some variance to give occasional scores) IMO, or they could be frequently booby trapped, or even occasionally defended by remnants/drones. Finding a TT research station with some angry mercenaries defending it, and then beating them to steal their cutting edge stuff is much more exciting than finding a loot piñata abandoned station. You could also add some more interesting decisions, like finding an independant orbital habitat and choosing to raid it and ruin/hurt your rep with the indies for fat loot, or maybe take a quest from them etc.
I also think that the systems with lots of scavenger flying around should be more common. Having to contend with scavengers who could be hostile makes exploring/scavenging much more interesting. I think most instances of abandoned/derelict ships and stations should have some scavengers around if they are not pirate traps or something like that.
I also think adding some variation to exploration missions would be good. I.e. instead of just a 'scan this thing' fetch quest, you get some dialogue like 'we lost contact with out probe, go find out what happened', and then there's a chance of it being a fetch quest, or an ambush or a quest chain with more steps etc. That would also make more sense coming from an exploration contact rather than an intel board mission.
I'm not sure what can be done to improve the planet scanning aspect of exploration. Maybe having exploration contacts looking for certain world types (and willing to pay a premium for certain scan data) would be cool. You could also have contacts that you can pay for tips about stuff you might find, i.e. rumors of abandoned ships/stations, or reports of habitable planets. Depending on the reputability of your contact, these reports might be more or less accurate... or they could even be traps!
Income Sources
Spoiler
The Intel Board
I've discussed this a lot now, but I'll say it again: I think most missions should be moved to contacts and the bar, and the intel board missions should be mostly about rumors/information about open world items and events. Stuff like trade fleets, abandoned ships/stations, system bounties, pirate stations etc are what belongs there IMO, not specific missions/quests like person bounties. I think contacts give more control over the balance and pacing of missions, and both the bar and contacts feel more personal/immersive. I think it also just makes more sense for individuals to be giving people they've worked with missions, rather than giving them to random people by publicly posting them.
The Bar
My biggest issue with the bar is that it becomes very static and predicable once you learn the small set of missions you can see. As I said earlier, I think that the bar should be more akin to 'random events' than a mission source. I think that 'standard missions' like cargo transport and bounties should be either entirely relegated to contacts, or the bar versions should be much more spicy. For instance, maybe bar cargo missions have a much higher chance of ambushes/attacks, or bar bounty missions don't give you any intel on the target fleet and there is a higher variance in target strength. To me, bars are thematically more about random/exciting stuff happening where you never know what the outcome will be. Even something like the ship heist mission feels like it should have a much wider array of outcomes (maybe sometimes you fail entirely, or the ship is damaged, or maybe it's not even the ship that was advertised etc.). I also think that a larger pool of possible missions could make the bar feel more varied, and I'm sure that sort of stuff is in the works already.
I also think the bar events that give you monthly income for colony production should be contact missions instead and should be more clearly advertised/described.
I guess the other function of the bar is a way to make contacts, although you expect the average contact in a bar to be a bit lower in importance. I still think those first contact missions should be a bit more random unpredictable, and you should only get reliable/standardized missions once you've developed the contact. I also think there should be more ways of developing contacts besides the bar.
Contacts
Like I said, I think contacts should be the main source of missions. Particularly since they provide a believable in-world mechanism for missions to scale with the player appropriately.
One major issue I had on my first play through was that I just didn't find good contacts for a long time because I was doing mostly intel board bounties, which quickly out-scaled the bar missions that would give contacts. I think that low importance contacts should be much more common and easy to acquire, but should give low value missions. Also, removing intel board missions would force you into contacts to get good missions, which I think is a good thing. Then there should be a mechanism for leveling up contacts (maybe they have special quests that you can do to improve their importance) or having them introduce you to more important contacts etc. To me, that is a much more natural way of limiting/slowing the progression towards very good contacts and missions without just having very low chances of meeting a high importance contact.
I also think there should be more ways to get contacts besides going to the bar, for instance, maybe doing system bounties, or relieving a shortage of goods might give you a contact opportunity.
Another issue I had with contacts was that the difficulty of missions felt inconsistent i.e. sometimes the 'harder' bounty felt much easier than the 'same difficult' bounty.
I honestly don't have much experience with trade contacts, because the normal bar missions were just as good and easier to find, so I think that could be improved. But I am also definitely a combat oriented player so my experience might be a bit biased.
