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It's a good thing if the contracts system is over-rewarding you slightly at the moment. This is what we were aiming for during balance testing actually.

That may sound weird at first, but remember there are other things that will require funds, which are still not being accounted for. Hiring/assigning crews, R&D tech purchasing, and some other stuff that I'll talk about later… Those things will all require funds in the near future, so if you've got a surplus now, that's a good thing in the long run.

And in any case, even without these upcoming cash drains, this is the first iteration of budgets in the game, and we much preferred to err on the side of caution here and over-reward a bit, than leave you stranded without means of continuing as a consequence of under-rewarding contracts.

We did, IIRC, 5 or more passes over the contract outputs during experimental testing. First to achieve consistency (the earlier versions had some contracts rewarding orders of magnitude higher or lower than the average), and after consistency was reached, we carefully tuned the costs of parts (probably still missed a few, but we did go over hundreds of them), and made sure that if you played it right, cash wouldn't be a restrictive factor.

Game balance is a finicky subject, to say the least, and it's not an exact science. There aren't any calculations or methods you can use to pre-analyze the resulting fun-ness of a game mechanic other than sitting a large group of people down to playtest it, give feedback, tweak something, and repeat until most agree you've got something that works. This is true of any game in fact, but it happens mostly behind closed doors, during early closed beta mostly, and some final adjustments over open beta. In our case, there is no such thing. Our closed testing is to speed up the discovering and fixing of bugs, but the final release isn't really final at all.

We've been following the community closely these last few days, picking up feedback from everyone to see how the balancing is working out. We've seen some players who did get stuck with no cash to continue, and many others who have made enough to not have to worry about it. That's not bad at all from a first iteration.