Mano ships upkeep

Welcome to my second mod for X4, that actually uses scripting rather than extending static XML's as I did with Mano tokenized ship modifications - if you want another money sink that gives you an edge over other ships, do try that mod! After this mod is done, I will move onto my next one - station upkeep.

I am no economist, nor a person that is good with numbers - values used in mod might be extreme, might be too tame, adjust it to what you think makes sense.

Share your experiences in comments section, that would allow me to find consensus on best numbers for others to use.

Why I created this mod: once player becomes self sustaining, there is not many places where money matters any more. With this mod, you will have to pay upkeep, it is somewhat configurable, so don't forget to read spoiler block down in this description to tailor experience to your liking. No longer can you just slap 100 small ships and forget about them, as upkeep might become too much to handle - makes you think a bit more before new purchases.

Mod list that I was testing this mod with is found on Mano tokenized ship modifications mod pictures. Major mods worth mentioning VRO, DeadAir scripts, Reemergence.

How upkeep is calculated

Each ship has to be defined properly in `wares.xml` with their `averageprice` set - this is the base number we will base upkeep from. It means that this mod is compatible with other mods as long as they define their ships properly that aligns with vanilla ships. You can configure % of this average price value - consult spoiler block in this description. Default upkeeps are:

Small ship - 30%

Medium ship - 20%

Large ship - 10%

Extra large ship - 5%

Each upkeep cycle by default is 10 minutes.

Empire size additive

I took idea from Stellaris, the bigger your empire - the more upkeep grows. By default it can increase up to 250%! Each ship regardless of their size increases this by 1%.

Death spiral

By default this feature is disabled, if you want to be kept on the edge even more - enable it. This will make it so even when you fully pay upkeep after you did miss a few, ship loss % is only decreased by 1% per successful payment.

I missed my 10 payments, ship loss is at scary 10% for each ship. So if you have 5 ships, each separately can be destroyed with 10% chance.

Managed to get money for next payment, yey! But ship loss chance is only reduced to 9%...

That means I need to cover next 9 upkeeps to reduce it back to 0%.

Don't miss the payments. I consider this as an alternative game ending feature, that will make you loose everything if kept unchecked.

Loosing ships

I tried to identify best incentive to keep paying upkeep, so you would not end up just sitting wi