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Author Topic: bounty strength vs. reward  (Read 2886 times)

intrinsic_parity

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bounty strength vs. reward
« on: May 23, 2019, 10:08:18 PM »

The bounty generation sometimes makes ridiculously strong fleets for the amount of money they are worth and other times makes reasonable or even weak bounties for the same price:

Here is a fairly reasonable/weakish bounty:
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And at the same time this bounty was also available:
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The first bounty has 6 cruisers and 10 additional ships, the second bounty is worth 50k more and has 5 capital ships and 20 additional ships... something is not working properly
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Vind

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2019, 10:54:08 PM »

It depends on number of enemy officers and their level too. For money making purposes pirate base destruction is number one - bounties just not worth it especially then AI wingmen cant find strenght to attack 3 capitals which support each other in big bounty fleets.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #2 on: May 24, 2019, 06:03:10 AM »

There's no way officers account for this discrepancy, did you look at the fleets? Even if every ship in the first fleet had a max level officer and every ship in the second had no officer, it would still be a dramatic difference in difficulty for only 50k more. The drastic discrepancy in difficulty for the same approximate price range is clearly a bug, or problem of some sort.
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Gotcha!

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #3 on: May 24, 2019, 06:23:23 AM »

Does it really matter though?
With a bit of imagination one can assume that a particular deserter has a number of war crimes on their name, making the faction all the more eager to see them dead.
I don't think every bit of math has to be perfectly correct down to the last number. It makes the game feel less alive, like you're trapped in some calculator.
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Tartiflette

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #4 on: May 24, 2019, 08:16:07 AM »

It matters when there only are a handfull of bounties available at all times. More randomness has to be compensated by more availability so that you aren't trapped out of bounty hunting for extended periods of time.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2019, 08:36:01 AM »

I don't mind if there is variance in bounties, but that is not what is going on. That second fleet should be 500k at least. It's at least 2 tiers higher in difficulty than the first but priced more or less the same. Particularly now that ships (and consequently losing ships) are more expensive, and due to that fact that there aren't always that many bounties available, the risk/reward balance has been thrown off further. Variance should be on the order of +/- 5 ships or lose a couple ships and add one ship of the next class up, not add multiple capitals and 10 more ships to the fleet and price it the same.
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Alex

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #6 on: May 24, 2019, 08:42:28 AM »

There's a 50k difference; this looks like it would correspond to maybe a 2-4 level difference under the hood, depending on how the random elements of the rewards line up. The game generates one "high-level" bounty most of the time, this looks like it. So, this isn't random, but rather the one intentionally tougher-than-normal bounty.

The fleet composition intel is there so you can look at it and decide whether you can do it profitably or not. The actual cost/effort involved depends so much on the player's fleet, and is non-linear - that is, more capable player fleets can do way more without it costing way more, just a bit more.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #7 on: May 24, 2019, 09:25:12 AM »

I don't mind the tougher bounty being available, but 50k seems like way too small a difference for 2-4 tiers. My fleet at that time was ~15 ships with ~3 cruisers and couple carriers. By the time that I could kill 5 capitals, I will not care too much about 200k, much less 50k. By that time I will have colonies that make me that much money in a month. I'm just not sure what the point of having these bounties is if the amount of money/extra money is irrelevant by the time you could kill them and they clog up the bounties when you aren't strong enough to fight them.

The mid to late game transition just feels strange.
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Alex

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #8 on: May 24, 2019, 09:36:57 AM »

In general, fair enough. The "late game" - though there's more of it now - is still not too much of a thing, so I'm sure lots of things could get smoothed out.

More specifically about this - it could also be that, say, you're more focused on colonies, and someone with more focus on building up their fleet would find it worthwhile. I also wouldn't write off a month's worth of income as not being useful - you're still going to be doing *something*, right? It could easily be a "swing by on the way elsewhere" or just "more profitable than anything else active right now" type of thing. Point being that colony income is passive, right, so it's not directly competing with other activities unless it completely trivializes them.

(The higher-bounty fleet is going to have way more salvage, too, as well as a really good chance of having some recoverable Onslaughts, perhaps even the XIV. That's not to be underestimated, but is lost entirely when just looking at the reward amount.)


But as a more general point, there's always going to be some combination of priorities that results in some missions/activities not being worth doing at some point, right? There are separate things with their own difficulty curves and depending on what path you take through the game they'll line up differently.
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Thaago

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #9 on: May 24, 2019, 10:36:27 AM »

Looking at the bounties, the first seems easy for a 238k bounty. More like a 150. The second looks like a 350k. If there is some randomness to the prices, I wonder if this particular example is both highballing the first one and lowballing the second?

Because the second bounty has only 1 officer, its probably easier than it looks. I do think it merits bringing a player capital, but I don't think it needs more than 1.
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Megas

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #10 on: May 24, 2019, 10:51:59 AM »

Recovering capitals is only good if either I do not have enough or if I build an industrial zombie specialist that wants clunkers.  Once I have heavy industry and enough blueprints (and with raiding and New Maxios as it is, it is not very hard), I prefer to build pristine ships, especially with the new campaign (D) mods.  Of course, with colonies as expensive as they are, it probably will be endgame by the time player can afford and defend a colony with Heavy Industry.

Lugging a recovered capital with 5 or 6 burn is an awful experience, and if I do not need it, it gets scuttled without a second thought.  Ditto with the new campaign (D) mods that really eat the pocketbook (and travel radius in case of Erratic Fuel Injector) when placed on a capital.

Named bounties are only worth it if they are along the way to something else (or player has nothing else to do) and can destroy them flawlessly.  Otherwise casualties might eat whatever profit gained.

Base bounties are generally more rewarding and lower risk.  In case of reward, not just bounty, but also extra loot taken from a raid before the kill.  Also, crew and marines are cheaper at enemy bases than from your own colony, and I try to restock personnel from enemy bases when I can.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #11 on: May 24, 2019, 12:45:34 PM »

I'm not actually sure if officers show up in that screen. I don't see any officers besides the flagship on any of the bounties in my current game which seems... unlikely. Could just be chance though.

Regardless, it seems like it's always the right call to go after stations for 200-300k or easier ~150-250k bounties rather than these multi-capital fleets when you only make ~50-100k more most of the time. You lose one or two destroyers or a cruiser and you've already lost any profit you would have had vs. an easier mission. I just don't see how the risk/reward works out.

Totally fair to point out that the end game isn't all there yet, I'll reserve judgement on that for now.

With regards to recoverable ships, my experience is that recovering ships is only really a big deal when you are transitioning to the next class of ships up. In other words recovering that first d-moded cruiser or capital can really unlock a new threshold of income and accelerate my campaign, but if I already have a decent number of ships of that size, it doesn't benefit me to add more: they will just sit in storage and never get used while I lose out on the supplies and fuel to transport them home. The point being, I probably only get 4 or maybe 5 capitals total in the entire campaign, and all but 1 will sit in storage 90% of the time (because of fuel/supplies), so being able to recover a d-moded onslaught is not very valuable to me once I have 1-2 good capitals. Maybe this is an indication that capitals could be a lot more expensive to buy, or maybe it is an indication that there are no difficult challenges that warrant having lots of capitals. The fleet cap also seems to really limit the number of capitals you could ever want. I guess that could change a lot if more things in the game forced you to try and become stronger very quickly.
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Megas

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Re: bounty strength vs. reward
« Reply #12 on: May 24, 2019, 01:26:08 PM »

The thing that prevents me from moving around with many capitals is the fuel drain.  In 0.9a, with excessive colony income and no Erratic Fuel Injector, this was not a problem.  Now, I probably can bring no more than three capital-sized warships, and even then, I might need a Prometheus (a fuel hog itself) to haul the fuel I need.

Multi-capital fleets probably wants dirty tricks to win flawlessly, like wall hugging or chain Afflictors.
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