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Messages - Aeson

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1
General Discussion / Re: Where is Pontus to find the probe
« on: March 12, 2024, 11:15:00 PM »
Pontus is a planet. You can press e to open the intel tab. In the intel tab there will be a number of selections at the bottom of the map. Go to accepted and click on the mission. If you press S after this it will autopilot you there. But it will also produce an arrow for you to follow (and show you where this mission is on the map)

This mission may be hard for you to complete if you're new. Sneaking missions are... a bit difficult frankly. Remember to use the "go dark" ability and save often (it may be frustrating depending on your fleet)
The stealth segment of the tutorial is the data retrieval from Derinkuyu Mining Station. Going out past Pontus to salvage the probe for a Gamma Core doesn't require stealth at all, and in fact more or less requires you to sensor-ping once you get to Pontus in order to actually locate the derelict.

2
It's kind of strange to see people going out of their way to tech-mine ruins. The payoff is relatively low, and it's faster and easier to just explore the whole sector. Pretty much a guarantee to get enough colony items for a seven figure income, that way.

you can do both, though. i've seen vast ruins give a pristine nanoforge or similar on the first month. and meanwhile i haven't found a single biofactory embryo or catalytic core with ~75% of the sector explored.
Maybe it's been changed since the last time I bothered with Tech Mining, but in my experience Tech Mining's drop rates for anything actually useful are abysmally low. It's all well and good to say you've gotten a pristine nanoforge or whatever out of it in the first month, but I've never once gotten anything actually useful out of it - just loads of more or less worthless commodities and the occasional blueprint I rarely if ever actually use.

As far as I'm concerned, Tech Mining's a waste of an industry slot, and developing a planet up to Size 6 just to decivilize it so you can then Tech Mine it strikes me as an enormous waste of time.

3
- I have a Hegemony commission. For whatever reason I also have a Duzahk variant with a bunch of planets in it. I get to colonize these easily.

- Through Protagonist Nonsense/lucky rolls on the gas giants I hazard-pay my way up to all the planets in here being functional. I fight off the Crises, I have a ton of size 6s, etc etc etc

- I then resign my Hegemony commission and declare independence. By all rights, this system should be mine
By all rights, this system belongs to the Hegemony - they have a preexisting claim and you colonized it under their auspices. Reasonably, if you want to take the system with you when you 'leave' the Hegemony, you should have to fight a war or have a great deal of influence in high places.

4
Suggestions / Re: Hammerhead Rear Weapon Arcs
« on: February 28, 2024, 06:41:08 PM »
Apogee is in a pretty similar position, Sunder outguns it by a LOT for the DP.
So? Destroyers generally bring more firepower per DP than cruisers do, and the Apogee also brings a lot of noncombat utility while still managing to be a decent if unexceptional line cruiser.

5
General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability
« on: February 28, 2024, 04:49:26 PM »
Once again: There is nothing in the game that requires you to go after deserters if you don't want to do so or cannot justify it to yourself or whatever. If you feel that going after deserters is evil and you don't want to play an evil character, then don't pursue deserter bounties.

I mean, if you walked into a bandit camp and these bandits were like hiding out there. They would stop you from leaving, because they would know that you were going to snitch on them, probably.
Why are you so desperate to make up excuses for the behavior of the deserter fleets? Scavengers rarely run stealthy fleets, so a typical deserter fleet should spot a scavenger at about the same time that the scavenger spots them, and the two fleets should be able to determine one another's composition and identity at about the same time a little later; the only thing that the deserter should need to do to avoid being reported is to just leave the scavenger alone and maybe maneuver to avoid contact if the scavenger decides to investigate the large mobile unidentified contact instead of being smart and leaving it alone. What are they going to do, report that they encountered an unidentified contact in (system) about a month or two ago and avoided it?

Also, the "moral" way to deal with this is simply to avoid contact - that's perfectly normal behavior in the fringe, where pretty much nobody is running around with their transponder active and you don't know if that contact's friendly or hostile. You leave it alone, you hope it leaves you alone, and you run if it starts coming for you without identifying itself unless you're willing to risk a fight. Attacking other fleets is quite possibly the worst way you can go about remaining hidden - one of the victims gets away and reports that a fleet of such-and-such a composition attacked them in (system); someone else in the area sees the engagement and reports it; an automated distress beacon goes off; the victims' friends come looking for them, see you, and get away with that information; whatever - and maybe just move on if they're that concerned about it. Attacking people just for coming within sensor range calls attention to your position, and on the whole probably makes it more likely - not less - that someone will come after you.

I mean, the excuse with the bounties. Like you come into a system in the middle of nowhere with a large fleet, then approach the fleet, and then you're like surprised they attack you? Like why would you be there, to sell them flowers? Of course they're going to attack you.
You have as much right as they do to be there, there's several in-game reasons (surveying, scavenging, Galatian Academy missions, possibly hyperspace topography scans) for you to be there that have nothing whatsoever to do with the deserters, and if they just avoided contact what would you have to report? "An unidentified contact avoided us a month or two ago over in (system)?"

Attacking anyone who comes near is about the least moral and stupidest way to go about remaining hidden, especially when there's nothing to keep you in that position after you're spotted. People aren't going to go out of their way to report a fleet that left them alone while they went about their business; they're much more likely to make noise about a fleet that attacked them without provocation, even if it's only to let their buddies know about the danger, and a faction-style fleet playing pirate will draw even more attention from exactly the people that the deserters presumably don't want to come looking for them.

6
General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability
« on: February 27, 2024, 09:01:39 PM »
that's not really that much better... Bounty hunting is literally a job of non-trial serving of institutions by taking money without asking any questions to gun down some people you know nothing about. For all we know Sindrian Diktat deserters could have been the good guys, but the player is so absent-minded they just walk up to them, beat them up. Take the paycheck and leave.
One, you don't need to accept every job that's offered - nothing in the game prevents you from playing a 'moral' bounty hunter who only goes after pirates and Pathers or refuses to work for dubious factions/contacts or whatever other restrictions you need to let you justify your character's actions in whatever moral framework you want to use.

Two, I don't believe that the available evidence really supports the idea that deserters are ever the 'good' guys, even when they're deserters from morally-suspect factions like the Sindrian Diktat. Deserters more or less universally command faction-style fleets primarily composed of combatants, which calls their innocence of their former faction's potential crimes into question - you don't become a highly-placed officer in a military organization without putting in the time, following orders, and developing connections even when that organization holds closely to the meritocratic ideal, and even the commander of the lowliest patrol formation you can see in the game is reasonably a fairly senior officer given the nature of their command - and isn't exactly a positive indicator for their peaceful intentions; hide out in the fringe rather than taking shelter with any major faction other than the one from which they deserted, or even an independent/pirate world, which suggests that no one in the Core was willing to take them in even when we're talking about a faction that has no real need to fear reprisals from the deserter's former employer, as for example would be the case with the Hegemony and a deserter from some random independent world's military; and act like any other pirate when given the opportunity (e.g. attacking independent scavenger fleets that just happen to be in the area). Maybe these were once honorable and upstanding citizens of civilized space who left their former factions when they could no longer reconcile their consciences with what they knew of that faction's activities, but more likely they're amoral/immoral opportunists with just enough charisma to drag many/most of their subordinates along with them when they saw a chance to turn pirate and took it, or possibly even tried (and failed) to become the next Leonis, Loke, Kanta, Andrada, or whoever.

7
Suggestions / Re: Removing free storage
« on: February 21, 2024, 03:49:19 PM »
I do not see any positive gameplay benefit coming from the removal of free storage in abandoned stations, and as far as I'm concerned every game I've ever played that has had a mechanic that allows something to steal things from the player has been worse for it.

If you don't like using the stations, then don't use them.

8
So the thing that you really need to do to make colonies profitable is

1) Start with a good planet. A good planet is one that has farming and a decentish hazard rating such that you don't have to pay hazard pay. There are plenty of these close to the core words. This planet doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to have farming and a decent hazard rating. The IDEAL is low gravity +2 farming, no decivs, domain com relay in the system.

 But you should be able to find "no decivs, any farming, at least one or two stable points, closeish to core" juust fine and this planet will make money.

2) Build farming on that planet

3) You're done. Your colony is profitable. You can increase profitability by adding commerce(and dealmaker holosuite, and story points), free port, and light industry to this planet and anything that increases accessibility. And regardless of what your other planets are doing this planet will roughly pay for them.
Mining is often a better early industry than Farming, as far as profitability goes - high-quality ore, rare ore, and volatiles deposits are in my experience much easier to find than high-quality farmland; the Core worlds produce less Transplutonic Ore, Volatiles, and Organics (~50-60 units of each across the sector) than they do Food (~100 units across the sector) so it's easier to for a Mining colony to grab market share; and while the markets for Ore, Transplutonic Ore, Organics, and Volatiles are individually smaller than the market for Food is (~100-125k for each of the former as opposed to ~270k for the latter), a good mining colony is tapping into two or three of those markets, maybe even all four of them if you're lucky, and getting a larger share in each than a farming colony gets of the food market.

Additionally, Farming is a low-grossing industry and as such does not actually benefit that much from Commerce (or the Dealmaker Holosuite), and, while it's not particularly relevant to the question of "can colonies be profitable without items," it is in my experience much easier to find a good to excellent Mining prospect that's compatible with an Autonomous Mantle Bore than it is to find a passable Farming candidate that's compatible with Soil Nanites. Furthermore, I'd say that Habitables are actually fairly mediocre as colonization prospects go - sure, the low hazard rating helps early on and makes it easier for to grow them without spending a fortune on Hazard Pay, but they're incompatible or have negative interactions with most industry items, which means that they're suboptimal locations for most industries, and later in the game maximizing gross income does much more for your bottom line than minimizing upkeep.

9
General Discussion / Re: Some thoughts on the Erad
« on: February 20, 2024, 01:43:54 PM »
Really? I think vulcans are pretty good when amassed. Dominator is one of the forward-shielded ships I had trouble bombing with Doom, regardless of how many mines I spawned, Dominator would just keep chewing through them with vulcans, and that's without the PD skill.
The issue with Vulcans (and other non-hitscan non-AoE point defense weapons) in my experience tends to be tracking. Eradicators do a pretty good job of illustrating this - launch a Salamander at an Eradicator from somewhere in its forward arc and it's pretty likely that that Salamander will make it all the way to final approach even if all the Eradicator's small ballistic slots are filled with point defense weapons; the guns simply don't lead the target enough, or maybe can't train around quickly enough to lead the target sufficiently, to successfully engage the missile until the rate of change in bearing drops significantly, as it does when the missile reaches the ship's rear arc and turns in to begin its final approach.

Also, Doom mines are immobile, and as such they're much more of a DPS test than a general PD effectiveness test.

10
Qauntum Disruptor. The system is called Quantum Disruptor.
It is, and it isn't - Quantum Disruptor is the system's player-facing name, but Acausal Disruptor is its internal name if you're digging around in the game files.

11
Isn't that the fleet that wants to buy something you recovered for Sebestyen?
Yes.

12
I use this Neutron Detector with great success. I can empty even large systems with just one or two rounds around the main star. Small systems just need to be crossed once and they are empty. The Neutron Detector found very often single ships or groups of ships or juicy stations in the outer rims of large systems which i would never found without it.
I'm not going to watch an hour-and-a-half-long video to see what you mean by this, but it doesn't match my experience with Neutrino Detector at all - sure, if I bother using it I'll occasionally stumble across something I wouldn't otherwise have found, but most of the time I'll have found pretty much everything of value in the system just by visiting obvious points of interest, and on top of that a lot of the "value" of the things you can find in exploration is pretty dubious, especially by the time you have a decent fleet and a stable source of income or at least a lot of credits in the bank. 99% of derelicts and blueprints are things that the player probably isn't ever going to use, derelicts aren't really worth recovering for their resale value, and it's really hard to get excited about the commodities and other vendor trash that comprise the majority of what you get by salvaging/scrapping derelicts and stations even before you have a big late-game fleet and a few colonies giving you more money than you can readily spend on anything actually useful.

Additionally, carrying around a stack of volatiles so that I can use Neutrino Detector if I want is kind of a big opportunity cost at the stage of the game where I might actually find it useful to locate derelicts or stations that I wouldn't otherwise run into just visiting the obvious points of interest in a system - that stack of 50 or 100 or whatever volatiles is cargo space that I'm not using on revenue-generating cargo/salvage, or on the supplies that let me spend time surveying the fringe, or on the supplies that let me recover from a fight with pirates/remnant/whatever, or on the supplies that let me recondition a derelict that I'm actually interested in recovering at this early stage of the game when my fleet's still taking shape, or on the metals and transplutonics that let me build stable point structures, and it's often something that I'd have to go out of my way to obtain if I want to have it on hand since it's somewhat rare as salvage/loot and generally isn't worth buying as a trade good (at least in 0.96; I haven't tried 0.97 yet). On top of that, volatiles are, at least in my experience, generally a relatively expensive commodity whereas most of the stuff you get from derelicts and stations is low-value junk, and unless you're dragging around half a dozen Atlases or something else like that it's usually pretty easy to fill up cargo space just hitting obvious points of interest in a couple of systems, even if you're a bit picky about what you take instead of insisting on finding a way to sell every last bit of that massive stack of ore that the mining station dropped when you scrapped it despite the ore hardly being worth the fuel, supplies, and crew/officer wages it'll take to move it to the nearest merchant, so I just don't see where the return on what I'm spending, both in volatiles actually expended and in cargo space allocated to the rest of the stack, to use the Neutrino Detector is supposed to be coming from.

13
General Discussion / Re: What do contacts do for you?
« on: January 25, 2024, 07:42:59 PM »
Do I want to concentrate my contacts in a specific faction?
Depends on what you want out of them. Doing work for contacts generally improves relations with the associated faction, military contacts will sometimes provide access to faction-specific ships that aren't normally available on the open market, and if I recall correctly some contacts can also help you mend fences with the faction controlling the world they're on if you managed to really tick that faction off, so if you're trying to remain a neutral free agent then having contacts with "everyone" is useful, and it can also be useful to concentrate your contacts on one faction if you really want to get in bed with them and buy your fleet of Paragons or whatever.

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Do I want to concentrate my contacts in a specific location?
Having all of your contacts in one place is generally more convenient than having them spread out. Nonetheless, five reasons why you might not want to have all of your contacts in one place:
1. To the best of my recollection, contacts affiliated with a major faction (Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon, Luddic Church, or Persean League) are only found on colonies controlled by that faction.
2. Having two or more contacts on the same world increases the likelihood that you might be offered incompatible jobs, for example two or more "attractive" bounties far enough apart that completing more than one of them within the time limit is impractical or a pair of consignment shipping jobs that would require you to have more cargo capacity than you currently have or can reasonably obtain.
3. It's easier to get five high/very high importance contacts on five different worlds than it is to get them all on one or two, and higher-importance contacts tend to have "better" offers.
4. Spreading your contacts out around the sector means that there's "always" one nearby, for certain definitions of "nearby," which can help reduce 'dead' time between jobs or if you just can't be bothered to fly all the way back to Jangala or wherever to see if your contacts there have anything interesting on offer.
5. If for some reason a colony on which you have a contact decivilizes, you lose your contact; if all of your contacts are on a colony that decivilizes, you lose all of your contacts. Probably not a serious concern unless you, personally, do something to destabilize that particular world for a long period of time or maybe if the pirates/pathers get way out of control.

I'm not familiar with the mod you mention, but that might change the above considerations to some extent.

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But I don't know if there is any point to farming rep with them.
In principle, the more reputation you have with a contact, the more likely they are to offer something to you and the better those offers are likely to be. In practice, I don't find it makes enough of a difference to be particularly worth the bother, especially as all contact types, at all levels of importance, often offer jobs that I'm simply not interested in taking.

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I understand they give out quests, but can't I just get quests from randos in the dockside bar?
Yes, you can - to an extent. The difference is that a contact is always there, usually has at least one job offer per month (though not necessarily one that you're interested in), and is somewhat likely to be offering something better (at least if they're high or very high importance) than the 'rando,' plus there's the Omega bounty that Megas already mentioned.

Additionally, getting jobs from contacts isn't mutually exclusive with getting jobs from bar encounters, so if you're reliant on quest rewards to pay the bills or build up a war chest or whatever, well, having a few contacts who you can ask for work will on average get you more work per time period than just relying on bumping into the right people at the local bar.

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And does the faction matter, besides getting rep towards the faction?
Faction matters for what kinds of blueprints they'll let you use when manufacturing (from military contacts), what kinds of discounted ships they'll sell you, and what kinds of ships you'll fight when doing deserter bounties.
It can also matter in that some missions offered by military contacts - spy satellite deployment, agent extraction, raid, bombardment - won't target colonies controlled by the faction with which the contact is affiliated, at least in my experience. Not really a big deal since there's no penalty for declining a job and you can usually pay a story point to dodge some or all of the faction-reputation hit for performing such a mission, but it might be something to consider if there's a faction that you for some reason really don't want to tick off.

14
General Discussion / Re: Atlas and Prometheus (mk.I)are gods.
« on: December 20, 2023, 11:57:47 AM »
S-modding Insulated Engines on a Prometheues lowers sensor profile from "basically a space station" down to Phaeton levels, a logi ship two hull sizes smaller.
S-modding Insulated Engines on an Atlas/Prometheus reduces its sensor profile to 30 (150 base for capital-size, doubled for civilian-grade hull and reduced by 90% for s-modded Insulated Engines) - the same as a frigate that doesn't have anything modifying its sensor profile.

In order for an Atlas/Prometheus fitted with Insulated Engines to have a "Phaeton-level" sensor profile, you either need to be comparing against a Phaeton with both Militarized Subsystems and non-s-modded Insulated Engines - the Phaeton has a "natural" sensor profile of 120 (60 base for destroyer-size, doubled for civilian grade hull), which can be halved to 60 by either Militarized Subsystems or Insulated Engines and halved again to 30 by whichever of the two you're not using for the previous step - or you need to be comparing a stock Phaeton (120 sensor profile) to an Atlas/Prometheus with regular Insulated Engines (150 sensor profile - 150 base for capital-size, doubled for civilian-grade hull and halved for non-s-modded Insulated Engines).

15
General Discussion / Re: Atlas and Prometheus (mk.I)are gods.
« on: December 17, 2023, 01:27:51 PM »
If every exploration mission didn't need to be bristling with guns to fend off the ******* scavengers turned pirates we'd be flying nothing but pristine Shuttle(S) and Apogees!
If you're not concerned about combat, why would you use an Apogee rather than an Atlas/Prometheus with Surveying Equipment and High Resolution Sensors? Neither Surveying Equipment nor High Resolution Sensors care about the Civilian-Grade Hull penalties, the bonus from capital-grade HRS is enough better than the bonus from cruiser-grade HRS that the difference between the Atlas's/Prometheus's 75 sensor strength and the Apogee's 90 is never really going to matter, the Atlas and Prometheus have better logistical statistics and smaller logistical footprints than the Apogee, and at the cost of a single skill point they're also as fast - and, if you don't care about combat, you're probably going to spend a skill point on Bulk Transport anyways, because what else are you going to spend it on?

Also, I see very little reason to think that the Kite (S) would be a particularly common choice of personal flagship even - perhaps especially - if combat wasn't a consideration; they're basically the worst ships in the game for any purpose other than having a low-DP flagship that can fit an Operations Center. Even if you're just looking for a personal shuttle / space-yacht, the Kite (S) has the problem of having worst-in-class fuel-range without any particular redeeming features beyond its Codex entry calling it a "collector's item."

Beyond that, I don't find that exploration fleets need to be "bristling with guns to fend off scavengers-turned-pirates" - it's usually easy enough to avoid other fleets when you don't want a fight.

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