Major change in credits with 2.0

I don't know why you're asking such a question. In my opinion, I don't really care. I have loads of credits by the end of the full Vanilla storyline in CF But a massive change in credits is what you would need for one of the best Crossfire ships, with the weaponry costs, + the armour upgrades and power gen, I think by my calculations, they'd be around 35M for a Chimera with 4 gats and nemesis/cataclysm, along with a armour upgrade mk10 and a Power genMKV.

Besides, again in my opinion, I love having heaps of credits to spend in the first place, no matter whether you're a refugee from a blown up station

as Raiden said, for better ships and equipments u need a some more credits:
ship: around 10 mill
power generator: 10 mill
shield upgrade: 10 mill
armor upgrade: 10 mill
better thruster: 7 mill
better guns: 4 × 1,5 mill
cloaking device: 250 mill

u see, it is never enough

And forget about adding a cupholder. That's the most expensive part of your ship. Believe me

I once put a cupholder in a Lagg (when they where THE ship to have) and it set me back so much my ship was grounded until I made the payments...

Plus side about the credits business, it'll make you feel a lot better playing CF then normal Freelancer when you know instead of making a few millions before being bored, you can end up making hundreds of millions and billions

On another plus side, some trades could get you about 10 million a run, makes you even more richer

Hello rockin982,

credits significant increase was needed mainly for multiplayer, where you can have many accounts (on each one 5 characters), then fighting (especially PvP) can cost quite alot money. Next to this you can spent money on already mentioned cloaking device or put them into commodities needed to building clan bases. Multiplayer and SP cannot be separated in this, for SP you can after campaign end try buy some from battleships/dreadnoughts which some (without cloak) need around 250M $.

Quote from Martind Forlon

Hello rockin982,

credits significant increase was needed mainly for multiplayer, where you can have many accounts (on each one 5 characters), then fighting (especially PvP) can cost quite alot money. Next to this you can spent money on already mentioned cloaking device or put them into commodities needed to building clan bases. Multiplayer and SP cannot be separated in this, for SP you can after campaign end try buy some from battleships/dreadnoughts which some (without cloak) need around 250M $.

Quote from rockin982

Ok, so granting that's the case, would it make sense to scale the cost of vanilla equipment accordingly, so that at least there's still some sense of accomplishment with obtaining equipment while playing through the vanilla campaigns?

For example if by the end of Mission 1, I have $200,000 credits, then a $17,000 credit upgrade to the Patriot LF seems awfully trivial, not to mention that it can be bought and decked out before you even begin mission 1. Shouldn't it cost closer to $170,000 in that case? In fact as I come to it, it seems most vanilla items should have their costs increased by a factor of 10 to preserve the feel of the vanilla portion of the game, if that was the intent of the mod. Between quest rewards, trade profits and pods, there's so much money to be made that the player can literally have the best vanilla ship in the game with lvl 10 shields and lvl 9 guns mounted before they even begin the second campaign mission.

The answers so far are not 100% correct.

SP and MP starting conditions are separated and the balancing has little to do with the MP.
The reason for the higher starting money in SP are the many complaints about Crossfire being too hard. We had request to make the game easier, especially on the first few missions.
One way to do that would have been to lower the difficulty again... but since we also had the players which really loved the difficulty and the challenge this was no real option.
So the money you start with has been adjusted to a level where players which require a bit help could decide if they want to invest in better guns or in a better ship... just for the first 2 missions.
This way the people which wanted a challenge could still play at the higher difficulty and the players that required a bit help got what they needed to get through the missions.
Its a solution that satisfies both sides. (we btw. have this higher starting money since CF1.6)

The higher mission payouts were included a bit later when Crossfire got its own story missions.
Since then it was rebalanced a few times.
Main goal here was to reward enough money for the player to try out different new equipment and ships while playing the storyline.
Of course the money you get from the original FL is enough to buy an eagle and equip it with the best vanilla stuff you can find.... but that wont allow you to try other more powerful ships.
An eagle certainly is all you need to get through vanilla FL... but CF is a bit harder than vanilla FL and some players of course complained that it is too hard.... and after mission 13 it gets even more harder.
So we increased the rewards to a level that is high enough so less skilled players get enough money to afford a somewhat better ship loadout.
This allows players to try out different ships and equipment during the storyline and get even through the harder missions this way.

The problem with balancing is that when you increase the difficulty you need something to counter it for the casual players which dont have the best fighting skills.
Increasing the rewards is such a mechanism to balance out the higher difficulty.

Why not increasing the costs for the vanilla equipment and ships?
Because it is very hard to balance due to the storyline.
Players require a specific loadout to be able to play the missions. If an eagle would cost 10mio and its equipment another 20mio you would most certainly run into problems getting till mission 13.
The problem simply is that we dont have a linear increasing difficulty scale which requires a linear increasing loadout requirement. There are multiple jumps of difficulty due to the different NPC levels in the different systems.
Next to that would an increase of cost for the vanilla equipment counter our tries to give less skilled players a head start.

well, you dont always have access to prisons to sell the pilots

and id prefer not to judge about difficulties
I played the original 13 missions in CF with a defender (as soon it was available) but I know the game well enough to do so
players with less experience might need a bit more firepower

its pretty subjective to judge only from the own point of view
some people use the escape pods and make money... others completely ignore this feature... some people even do mining stuff
there are alot more options than in vanilla FL and many different ways to play it.