A method for economic balance in Euro Truck Simulator 2
In Euro Truck Simulator 2 you start off as a driver with no truck or money, take jobs, save up, get your own truck, buy/upgrade garages, buy more trucks and hire a fleet of drivers to work for you. There is little to spend the money on, other than more garages and more trucks, which means means more employees and more money coming in. Once you get a certain amount of employees it becomes so unbalanced that money becomes pointless.
There is a config setting `g_income_factor' that affects how much jobs pay. Set it to 0.5 and all jobs pay half as much as they normally do. There are mods that set it to various values to make it more challenging. The problem with setting it to a low value is that it makes the early game too hard. It can take way too long to buy the first couple trucks and start hiring people.
So my strategy is to change `g_income_factor' as I play. I start out with it as 1 (full income) and every time I buy a new truck I change it. I set it to 0.85^(the number of trucks in my fleet) . That way the more employees I have the less each makes and the less I make from my own driving. It also introduces a trade off to hiring new drivers. Is the new driver going to be worth the reduced income from the rest of my fleet? It reverses the dynamic where in normal play the more employees you have the easier it is to get more to a dynamic where the more you have the harder it becomes to grow.
Neat idea. I don't play Eurotruck but watch a rather unhealthy amount of it being played by Squirrel. ;) And as a result I know it's pretty modder friendly, so have you looked into implementing a mod that auto-scales that income factor as you play? Is that possible to automate based on events like buying new drivers, new trucks, new garages, etc? Because if so, I could see this being rather popular since that is a rather common complaint about the late game.
Squirrel is great. I love watching his videos. He's actually in the game as one of the characters you can hire (Paul F.), Squirrel hat and everything.
I haven't yet looked into whether or not it can be done as a mod. I don't really have experience with modding. If ETS2 mods have access to events for buying trucks or hiring drivers* then it should be a pretty easy mod to make.
* I base it on number of trucks owned since there is a difference between owning zero trucks and owning one truck that you drive yourself.
I looked into it. It looks like ETS2 mods don't support scripting, unfortunately, so dynamic changes like this are out.
Aw that sucks. Especially since this seems like a really good solution to the problem, but having to manually change the value throughout each play through seems a bit annoying.