Summary
I think everyone here can agree that the "dig up gold" method of obtaining money in CC is well thought out, implemented, and overall fitting to the CC universe (despite some flaws of silly digger AI, etc). Digging gold makes sense, since the whole concept of CC is that you are fighting for a planet's resources.
However, I also think that many people here would prefer some alternative to making money. I know many people make weapons free, or they mod in their own "generators" of sorts so they don't need to bother with money at all.

Goal
This thread is about coming up with a few economic systems to add on to the current gold mining feature. Ideally, the best system would be very fun to participate in (no micromanagement or boring stuff), which generally means combat oriented money making. Currently, the only combat oriented money making system in CC is to take enemy guns and load them into ships. There should be many more ways to actively make money.

My Current Ideas
Capturing, salvaging, official generators, and resource convoys.

Capturing
You know how every once in a while, an actor's gun and backup gun or both arms are shot to bits, rendering him useless? What if, instead of just shooting that actor, you could aim at them and force them to surrender to you. They would become your actor as long as they are within LOS of a friendly unit (if you move them out of this LOS, they return to their team's side). Returning them to space by loading them into a ship gives you a hefty reward for interrogation and ransom purposes, or perhaps recycling/reusing (since they are clones and robots).

Salvaging
While it is currently possible to salvage weapons, the method could be refined. Why not have salvage bins and drones? The bin could be placed somewhere, say at your home bunker. If a weapon is dropped into it, a refund is given. This means you don't need to call in a rocket and load it up, you can just hop back to base and drop off excess weapons.
The second idea, which could be more difficult to implement, is a salvage drone. Basically, a little unarmed drone goes around and any weapon it picks-up/equips is automatically sold. With this, you could tell one to follow you and then walk around defending it and killing people, giving it stuff to recycle.

Generators
While generators are already being modded in, an official generator would be nice. Something that the AI actively sought out and destroyed, and could be replaced mid-game (I suggest via drones that can deploy into full generators).
Some way to keep a battle going after the gold is gone would be nice, and if you guard these well you can fight forever.

Resources (My favourite)
I don't have a good name for these yet, but essentially, this is oil. The idea would be that in a scene, there could be some sort of derrick, drill, dispensers, whatever. If a unit is nearby (standing on a control platform or something), after a while it drops a barrel of oil. This barrel can be sold for lots of money.
Obviously, it would be indestructible (or at least fixable), and you wouldn't be able to build nearby. The idea here is that you can fight over control of the derrick, and you can also hunt down oil carriers to steal their oil. Also, this would make flak cannons more useful for taking down dropships as they try to escape with barrels.
The idea here is that you need to secure the derrick with a few units, and let one "operate" it so the barrels can be produced. I suggest the operator so that you cannot jetpack in with one unit, grab the barrel, and then run away. You'd need to actually fight for control over the entrance, exit, and derrick itself.

Closing comments
Obviously, these ideas would need to be balanced, and could use lots of work. If you have comments on any of these, or your own ideas, I'd love to hear them.

We can already salvage enemy weapons.
Plenty of mods can already directly send actors and their weapons back for a refund.
And if I remember correctly, Control made gibs collectible like shields and you could sell them. That was years ago though.


We technically have a generator as official content. According to the Zombie Cave, it creates half baked zombie clones and bombs. It gibs into a chip worth 5000oz.

As for the oil, make it appear on your back as you carry it.
If it's shot, it explodes.

Capturiing will not work.
These are meat puppets.
Meat puppets only value their life in terms of useful ness.

Just make a salvage/capture dropship that can only lift enemies, give it a ridiculously long range of suction, ta-da.
Salvage ship.

Capturing does not fit the CC universe though. There is no interrogation, the units are straight from tradestar, they know nothing. The other side also doesn't care about a single unit that is easily replaced, ruling out ransom. Not to mention they are brainless, and would not function outside of the brain's control.

Generators might work, but they would need to be very expensive, and you would have to defend them for a long time to get your money back.

As for resources... give me a sec.
After reading through resources again, i'd have to say that it seems like a good idea, adds a king of the hill aspect to CC.

I remember a devlog where Data had a base diagram and oil at the bottom, so I think he has it planned.

Lemme see if I can find it.
Edit: Here we go

That's it?


Hey, cool. Thanks.


To everyone else about the capturing: Yeah, I forgot they were all just clones or robots. Nevermind then

Your salvage bin idea is entirely possible through Lua scripting, I'm certain.
Your salvage drone idea, I'm not so sure about current possibility, but it is a good idea.

Another salvaging idea is salvageable gibs. Basically gibs of something that still have either use or value.
Rocket panel gib shield, explosive robot battery, valuable scrap material remnants, etc.

Your oil idea, that sounds like it could be a great mission or game mode, basically a game of king of the hill applied to a resource war.
But I think it would add too much complexity to always be an additional part of general gameplay.

In Data's interview with Play magazine, he mentioned that the campaign would include artifacts, and I'm assuming those are orbitally returned for money, so there's another aspect of economy in CC.

Capturing doesn't make sense for robots or meat puppets, but it's possible that not ALL actors will be one of those. There could be factions with members that are full people and valued as such, and this capturing could be a part of a campaign mission when at war with such a faction. However I think the means of capturing should not be as you described, but rather, abducting them with a craft as we currently can for their monetary value.

Something like a fossil that you dig from the ground kind of artifacts?

Not to derail the thread topic, but I would honestly be much more interested in a few missions where victory isn't determined by killing the opponent or surviving, but actually related to how much gold you have mined out.

Like a mission where you have a limited Y amount of time to mine X amount of gold until some map wiping bombardment or something comes in and ends the mission in failure.

This thread just made me realize that we don't have a lot of vanilla game that focuses on the fact that we're totally here for the resources, and that no current missions really bring that idea home.

I assume there will be simpler artifacts that are simply returned for money, in addition to ones that unlock stuff.
Like you, mail, my first thought from that was fossils. I even considered an excavation mission.

An example of an artifact of this sort is the control chip in zombie cave, it's actually worth 5000 oz, although the mission ends when you return it, and the campaign has no continuity yet, so that isn't significant yet.

That control chip might also unlock the ability for you to order zombies when the campaign is complete. After all, it is the the chip that controls a soldier cloning tube, probably like the ones you/midas are using, but makes it spew out the 'half baked' zombies instead.

I think it would be cool if as you are conquering an enemy faction, you could steal their design schematics, unlocking their stuff for your use, maybe even against them.

Here is a not so random idea, and a variant to the oil thing.
It relates to something I saw in a bunker mod of some sort, iirc.
Basically, it was a metal box with 'gold ore' in it, and it spat out a few specs of gold every few seconds.

Perhaps that could be the basis of something much larger.

Have a large 'mining rig', large as in taking up a good amount of space on screen (say 1/4 of the width and 2/3 of the height of the screen if at 640x480 resolution), something with thick metal walls and which extends deep into the ground. The Lower portion of it resembles something like rock that is packed with dense gold deposits. The top part would be small and barely stick out of the ground. Every minute or so, it 'pops up' something like a crate or something that can be 'mined' for a lot of gold, or else produces a (possibly heavy) item that can be picked up and sent into orbit for money. It would slowly 'eat up' the gold deposit over time.
Penetrating the metal walls will 'disable' the mining rig, but allow for direct access to the rock that is packed full of gold. Perhaps make it extra tough rock, so something like a heavy digger or turbo digger is needed to mine it effectively. The mining rig would be high efficiency, so it could produce far more gold over a long period of time than if someone just dug into its secure deposit for some quick money. Or else damaging it could be done to spite someone that has an iron fisted grip of the location, to deny them a steady flow of gold in the long run.

Another variant could be something like a factory. Every little bit it produces something like a crate of manufactured goods, which can be picked up and sent into orbit for money in the form of a 'shipping fee'.

Relating to the above.
A bit of resource management... mine some gold, use gold to by metal ore, get crate of metal ore, take crate of metal ore to a factory module. After a short period of time, the factory module spits out a crate of goods, which can then be shipped to orbit for profit.
A few missions/maps could have the ore be unbuyable, but with quite a few crates (or perhaps an 'ore mine' that produces ore crates) on the map, the overall goal being who can ship a certain number of finished goods first.

Heck, perhaps a map could have no gold, each side starts out with a set amount of gold, and must order (or recover from the middle of the map) raw materials to produce goods for money while attacking their enemy to stop their production or otherwise have to defending their own operation from an enemy attack, creating a balance between working towards the goal and eliminating or not getting eliminated by the opposition.

What's a futuristic profit driven setting without corporate warfare involving actual open warfare? The setting of Shadowrun comes to mind... and System Shock 2, where there were apparently "Cola Wars" and attacks on "offshore bottling plants"... based on the description of a canned drink in the game...


For 'capturing' units for money... several things things come to mind. The 3 R's... Reduce, Reuse, Recycle... although, with clones and robots, it could also be more like Repossess, Reprogram and Resale... So to heck with interrogation and ransoms, the enemy troops become free resources... but not in a Solyent Green way.... except maybe enemy clones captured and recycled to make ally clones...

One mod, I think called the Abductor, was one of the first mods I got...I love anything that qualifies as a flying battlefield vacuum...

On a side note, sleep deprivation does interesting things to the human mind.

Some of those ideas are quite fine rditto, but I don't see why anyone would build a factory on the battlefield and then send the stiff it produces back into orbit.

Capturing units: no
Factory: no
Iron ore: no
Oil rig/mining rig: no

Because they are all too troublesome.

Oil can be added as a new resource, but only if it is obtained or processed easily.

The sellable gib idea is nice, I wonder why it's not implanted yet. Actors from the UniTech mod drop silly things like enemy intel or gameboy which are only useful when sold and turned into money. I would like to see vanilla actors have things like that too, like robots dropping computer chips. Though an average actor costs only 80 oz, I wonder how much would a mere piece of chip cost. Collecting weapons is still much more possible.

And we really, really need a scavenger drone. It doesn't need to be automated. It only has to be a floating unit that can easily travel anywhere quickly. Could be a very tiny Acraft.

Simple. Enemy control codes, sellable to certain "customers" for a modest sum on the dark side of Midas.

We shouldn't have to dig to obtain artifacts.
I mean, I don't want to accendentally encounter an artifact by digging in a specific area, only to get destroyed by my digger.