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[nomadic_leader]

and you notice you don't actually pay them any money besides the up front cost of their physical bodies? and now their overhead is included in the 'supplies' overhead cost of your ships for like bowls of gruel and watered down tea?

so yea, they're slaves.


the game Endless Sky (EV clone) is a little more clever about it: you have to pay crew salaries which are automatically deducted from your credits each day, and anytime you buy/sell an outfit (like a turret or something) that requires additional crew, those men are also hired or fired. And when you lose them from boarding other ships or they die in fights, you have to pay reparations to their families.

But in starsector they're slaves.

[Megas]

With the way 0.7 and 0.7.1 works, if you do not use Black Market, you will struggle (more than you need to).  In the early game, or anytime you want to play without commission, where do you get combat ships and the weapons to use them?  Open market sells nothing but civilians (and a few hybrids) for ships, and mostly low-grade kinetics, Annihilators, and Pilums for weapons.  If you want a wide variety of combat effective gear, and you cannot use military market, and you are not strong enough to kill and loot most fleets, your only recourse is the black market (or the suicide exploit).

0.7+ is not 0.65 where you can be friends with all non-pirate factions and access military markets after a few fights and levels.  Commissions have put an end to that.

If you refuse to use the Black Market, you are giving yourself a challenge, not unlike wanting to join the Pirates and pilot their (D) ships.

I do not know if this is intended.  If anything, there is not enough incentive to use open market, especially for non-Hegemony games.

It seems your problem is personnel are immune to disruptions.  That does mean if you can manipulate stability greatly, like at Qaras, you can exploit a buy-sell loop once every several months and make a killing.


P.S.  At least you cannot space crew anymore.  I miss that feature.

[Weltall]

The game is still expanding. It has been mentioned as I have seen that the economy and the whole economical system is nothing more than barebones, so the game will have that in. It has not been worked or expanded and I am guessing that will happen only after the 4th inactive skill tree will come in the game.

For the Black Market, it is mentioned in the Starsector page that it goes hand in hand with normal market. You can make easy gain with commodities that can be bought low and sold high. FOr example one of my fav commodities being heavy machinery, they can be bought at as low as 40 and sold easily as high as 500. Of course at times you only find them for around 100, but also they can be sold at 900 at times.

If in the good chance you buy 1000 at 40 and sell them at 500, you will pay about 100000 and sell them for 250000. That is 150000 gain in the open market, where in the black market you could make about 200000 gain. Trading needs patience and at times, at least for me, buying large amounts of commodities at low prices, when there is no demand for them and stashing them in my base. When I see a really good price for that commodity, I run to my base, load the cargo and go to sell it.

By then the black market is not something you need to make a gain. The black market is there to make an much bigger gain. I will say this; In Ironclads the tax is 10%. Except if I am forced to sell in the black market, when the faction I will sell to hates me, I find no reason to sell in the black market. Making 900000 vs 1000000 is unimportant, when I reach that amount of money and I know I can repeat another good trade and make another 900000. But if it was 700000 vs 1000000, now that would make me try to sell it all in the black market and if I could not, I would sell 40% in the black market and then rest 60% in the opn market, trying to lower the loss.

[nomadic_leader]

i wish we could still space crew too It raises alarm bells when developers get these scruples. This is an RP game, it should let you have the choice to be good or bad. There is no good without free will.

And yes it is my problem that there are no disruptions for crew.  Other commodities have them? Why not crew? I make tonnes of open market credits with barely any ships by just roving form system to system and finding whatever disruptions there are and then doing intrasystem trading to meet the demand, then I move on to the next system.

basically i think it would be fun to be a slave trader, but i want to make money doing it.

[Weltall]

Slave trading should happen only with crew you captured from battles. That or if you tried to buy a large amount of crew and then sell them off as slaves, you would be marked as someone that does that and you would be unable to get crew. That and even your own crew would grow uneasy with you and CR and repairing after battles should become less and lower. Now that would really reflect your actions of trading crew as slaves to make money. It would result with you being unable to get any decent amount of crew and your ships would never have full CR. <- I think that would end up with crew trading as slaves as a choice no one would want to do XD

[ValkyriaL]

a good way to make money is to, actually sell crew, you buy a WHOLE bunch of green crew, and you keep playing normaly, these crew eventualy end up as a lot of veterans and elites, you then sell those for 240 and 360 credits each and repeat, also gives a use for Troop transports, just carry a whole bunch of crew in them and trade them away when they "get fat and juicy", and keep just enough veterans and elites to keep your ships at top performance.

[TrashMan]

There should really be a limit to what you can buy on Black Markets.
Yeah, you should get better stuff than on civilian markets
I can see some high-end weapons getting in there (rarely)

But buying a state-of-the-art prototype battleship is just silly.

The black market for ships should not offer anything bigger than destroyers (and even that is pushing it).
Too big, too expensive, too well guarded for that.

[Cik]

black market is pretty nebulous. under certain definitions having larger ships there doesn't really break credulity. black markets can mean quite literal black markets in which case hand weapons, drugs etc is pretty much all they should have, but on other stations like say the achaman enterprise or port tse, black markets could mean mercenary freeports, resellers that are operating under the radar, etc etc.

you'd have to define black market way more stringently for ship sales to stop making sense.

presumably, hulls are salvaged by all sides after a battle, including by independent freecaptains etc. i am sure there are people rebuilding them which is how they show up on black markets, outside of state control. not to mention mutinies, ships that flee from battle and then never show up to their home state again, etc.

[TJJ]

If phase ships had no passive flux dissipation, but vented at double rate?
I think that'd make the AI less annoying to fight, but wouldn't hurt the typical human strategy.

Also the activation cost on the cloak needs inverting; larger on the small phase ships, smaller on the large phase ships.

[speeder]

By the way, about crew trading:

The economy actually uses crew too, if you manage to deplete all the crew on a market, it will produce less goods, if you manage to really wipe out the market crew entirely somehow (really hard to do...), you can freeze almost all the market production (some stuff is made using the population, instead of crew, for example the food farmed from a planet field)

Likewise, if you notice some place is lacking crew, and you give it more crew, it will increase production (if raw materials are available)

[Megas]

a good way to make money is to, actually sell crew, you buy a WHOLE bunch of green crew, and you keep playing normaly, these crew eventualy end up as a lot of veterans and elites, you then sell those for 240 and 360 credits each and repeat, also gives a use for Troop transports, just carry a whole bunch of crew in them and trade them away when they "get fat and juicy", and keep just enough veterans and elites to keep your ships at top performance.

Unless you build for it (i.e., max the skill that increases crew XP), you only train about a few thousand elites, enough to fill two or three Starliners once, by endgame (level in the 50s).

[TrashMan]

black market is pretty nebulous. under certain definitions having larger ships there doesn't really break credulity. black markets can mean quite literal black markets in which case hand weapons, drugs etc is pretty much all they should have, but on other stations like say the achaman enterprise or port tse, black markets could mean mercenary freeports, resellers that are operating under the radar, etc etc.

you'd have to define black market way more stringently for ship sales to stop making sense.

presumably, hulls are salvaged by all sides after a battle, including by independent freecaptains etc. i am sure there are people rebuilding them which is how they show up on black markets, outside of state control. not to mention mutinies, ships that flee from battle and then never show up to their home state again, etc.

Yeah, I'm sure i can go out and buy a Nimitz carrier...oh wait!
But I can surely buy an old warship like the Iowa.... oh wait...

Something that is big investment of time and money and big trouble in unwanted hands is not something any state lets go of.

[Cik]

the situation of blackwater navies is absolutely nothing like the situation on a period of relative stability in the bluewater navies of a single planet.

in starsector the sector is a pit of anarchy where states are teetering on the brink of collapse and the state actors are having trouble keeping themselves together. there are numerous privateers in service with both sides, and pirates with large ships are fairly common, even if those ships are not exactly maintained well.

it shouldn't be a common thing, but possible? yeah, sure. like i said, ships are salvaged in the aftermath of battles and restored by minor corporations and syndicates, pirate groups or mercenaries and can thus end up in circulation beyond the reach of state actors.

by the way nimitz probably qualifies as a supercarrier which isn't a cruiser but a capital. anyway these two situations have nothing in common anyway so looking at it that way is foolish.

[TrashMan]

the situation of blackwater navies is absolutely nothing like the situation on a period of relative stability in the bluewater navies of a single planet.

in starsector the sector is a pit of anarchy where states are teetering on the brink of collapse and the state actors are having trouble keeping themselves together. there are numerous privateers in service with both sides, and pirates with large ships are fairly common, even if those ships are not exactly maintained well.

You are talking something like in Age of Sail?
Even then you couldn't buy such ships.
They were made by rich nations for rich nations.

Rich merchants could buy big ships and convert them to combat roles, but they didn't have full-blown man-o-wars either
You also had privateers, mercenaries hired/sponsored by a nation to cause trouble.
They had good ships, true, but again - they focused on faster, lighter ships for quick raids.

The only way to get a battleship was to capture one OR be best buds and work for the government. Both of which are good for gameplay too.
Large capitals ships become rare and more valuabale, since it takes more effort to get them.

Skills and equipment to increase chance of having the ship boardable would be nice to have though.

it shouldn't be a common thing, but possible? yeah, sure. like i said, ships are salvaged in the aftermath of battles and restored by minor corporations and syndicates, pirate groups or mercenaries and can thus end up in circulation beyond the reach of state actors.

And who is most likely to salvage them? Again, the great powers.
They will have more resources and rescue and salavage teams.
Whatever side wins, won't be leaving much behind, since they will take it for themselves.

Any anyone who does manage to salvage/capture a capital, won't be doing to sell it, but to keep and use it.

[Cik]

And who is most likely to salvage them? Again, the great powers.
They will have more resources and rescue and salavage teams.
Whatever side wins, won't be leaving much behind, since they will take it for themselves.

Any anyone who does manage to salvage/capture a capital, won't be doing to sell it, but to keep and use it.

most likely being key operator in this case. MOST LIKELY the great powers. meaning it's not impossible to have someone stumble upon a drifting hulk and fix it.

basically having a tiny % of having a cruiser appear on the black market is not gamebreaking nor does it really break the fluff.

basically, opinions