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Author Topic: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions  (Read 8154 times)

Pappus

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Especially since it perfectly scales with you in the beginning and doesn't cost anything but time. Hit the tavern a->b profit. Buy additional freighter and your profit increases.

Without any risk attached to it a quick 100-200k for going 5 lightyears is a bit much and basically vaporizes any chances of an early game or smuggling being interesting.
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Agile

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #1 on: August 18, 2019, 10:30:29 AM »

Especially since it perfectly scales with you in the beginning and doesn't cost anything but time. Hit the tavern a->b profit. Buy additional freighter and your profit increases.

Without any risk attached to it a quick 100-200k for going 5 lightyears is a bit much and basically vaporizes any chances of an early game or smuggling being interesting.

Depends.

Ive taken a 250K recreational drugs bar mission once, thinking it was easy money.

I dropped into hyperspace, was 2 light years away from hitting the hyerspace point into the drop off system, and then get ambushed by a pirate armada that had only 1 dmod for all the enemy ships, and they had everything but a capital.

Needless to say, I died in seconds (this was early game so I only had 2 destroyers, 2 freighters, 3 sheperds, and 1 dram).

The missions you take have pirate activity, which means if your dropping off at a system with -2 stability or worse, it means the pirates are fairly decent and their base is almost upgraded. At -3 stability on all colonies due to pirate activity and the pirate base is almost if not fully upgraded, and the pirate raids being sent to the colony you have to drop off at are fairly strong with few dmods.

TL;DR RNJesus dictates the missions.

Usually, the bigger the shipments, the more threat there is of a pirate owning your ass. These missions, however, are easy at mid to late game as you can either dodge or kill most pirates at that point.
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Vextor

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #2 on: August 18, 2019, 12:36:37 PM »

Truck driving in the real world works the same way. A lot a driving, a lot of contracts, a lot of cash and a lot of boredom.

SS has the added bonus of pirates, which can make you lose the entire shipment, because I know I did. But otherwise yeah, it's quite a linear method to reach end game. On the other hand, the game offers a lot of choices in the way of making money and progressing through content, so it's not like its forced down our throats.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #3 on: August 18, 2019, 01:44:06 PM »

I remember in the escape velocity games, there would be scripted pirates that would show up at the destination of you missions a lot. It could be interesting if you were ambushed (as part of the mission) by pirates on those really high value contracts.
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Plantissue

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2019, 04:58:14 AM »

Especially since it perfectly scales with you in the beginning and doesn't cost anything but time. Hit the tavern a->b profit. Buy additional freighter and your profit increases.

Without any risk attached to it a quick 100-200k for going 5 lightyears is a bit much and basically vaporizes any chances of an early game or smuggling being interesting.

Depends.

Ive taken a 250K recreational drugs bar mission once, thinking it was easy money.

I dropped into hyperspace, was 2 light years away from hitting the hyerspace point into the drop off system, and then get ambushed by a pirate armada that had only 1 dmod for all the enemy ships, and they had everything but a capital.

Needless to say, I died in seconds (this was early game so I only had 2 destroyers, 2 freighters, 3 sheperds, and 1 dram).

The missions you take have pirate activity, which means if your dropping off at a system with -2 stability or worse, it means the pirates are fairly decent and their base is almost upgraded. At -3 stability on all colonies due to pirate activity and the pirate base is almost if not fully upgraded, and the pirate raids being sent to the colony you have to drop off at are fairly strong with few dmods.

TL;DR RNJesus dictates the missions.

Usually, the bigger the shipments, the more threat there is of a pirate owning your ass. These missions, however, are easy at mid to late game as you can either dodge or kill most pirates at that point.
Your mistake was running into a pirate armada, and/or not having ships able to avoid a pirate armada, just because most of the time you never have to worry about such. Now imagine trying for system bounties, where you have to always have to be aware of your surroundings and judge whether you can fight or flee, and all for a pittance. And/or personal bounties where you can lose enough value in ships to make a net loss. And you spend more time for less money. With trade missions you only have save after each mission and reload a minute worht of time. It is easy money.
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Agile

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2019, 06:49:08 AM »

Especially since it perfectly scales with you in the beginning and doesn't cost anything but time. Hit the tavern a->b profit. Buy additional freighter and your profit increases.

Without any risk attached to it a quick 100-200k for going 5 lightyears is a bit much and basically vaporizes any chances of an early game or smuggling being interesting.

Depends.

Ive taken a 250K recreational drugs bar mission once, thinking it was easy money.

I dropped into hyperspace, was 2 light years away from hitting the hyerspace point into the drop off system, and then get ambushed by a pirate armada that had only 1 dmod for all the enemy ships, and they had everything but a capital.

Needless to say, I died in seconds (this was early game so I only had 2 destroyers, 2 freighters, 3 sheperds, and 1 dram).

The missions you take have pirate activity, which means if your dropping off at a system with -2 stability or worse, it means the pirates are fairly decent and their base is almost upgraded. At -3 stability on all colonies due to pirate activity and the pirate base is almost if not fully upgraded, and the pirate raids being sent to the colony you have to drop off at are fairly strong with few dmods.

TL;DR RNJesus dictates the missions.

Usually, the bigger the shipments, the more threat there is of a pirate owning your ass. These missions, however, are easy at mid to late game as you can either dodge or kill most pirates at that point.
Your mistake was running into a pirate armada, and/or not having ships able to avoid a pirate armada, just because most of the time you never have to worry about such. Now imagine trying for system bounties, where you have to always have to be aware of your surroundings and judge whether you can fight or flee, and all for a pittance. And/or personal bounties where you can lose enough value in ships to make a net loss. And you spend more time for less money. With trade missions you only have save after each mission and reload a minute worht of time. It is easy money.

System bounties are actually better than personal bounties, especially at colonies with -2 or more stability from pirate activity. Lots of pirates go to these locations, so you get very good cash drops (especially when you have a mid game fleet) and huge rep boosts. I agree, though, that bounties are broken for the time and effort you have to spend on them and don't incentivize players to go after them unless thats your main playstyle, especially considering milk runs and procurement missions exist.
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Plantissue

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2019, 08:18:00 AM »

I don't need you to tell me how to play, I've been playing this game for years.

Just because you ran into a enemy fleet due to carelessness this one time does not suddenly make procurement mission not easy money.
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lethargie

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #7 on: August 19, 2019, 08:34:47 AM »

I don't need you to tell me how to play, I've been playing this game for years.

Just because you ran into a enemy fleet due to carelessness this one time does not suddenly make procurement mission not easy money.

by that metric all mission are easy money. I can crush bounties for all day without breaking a sweat and get huge money for it, this say squat about something being too easy. That you need to be careful, have specific ship+loadout and plan your move actually tend to demonstrate that there is fairly good game play to be had in procurement. I personally almost never do them because bounties give me tons more money.

I do remember that there was scripted pirate trying to intercept you, at least I remember being intercepted by a pirate asking for the specific procurement I was carrying.
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Pappus

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #8 on: August 19, 2019, 11:08:58 AM »

I don't need you to tell me how to play, I've been playing this game for years.

Just because you ran into a enemy fleet due to carelessness this one time does not suddenly make procurement mission not easy money.

by that metric all mission are easy money. I can crush bounties for all day without breaking a sweat and get huge money for it, this say squat about something being too easy. That you need to be careful, have specific ship+loadout and plan your move actually tend to demonstrate that there is fairly good game play to be had in procurement. I personally almost never do them because bounties give me tons more money.

I do remember that there was scripted pirate trying to intercept you, at least I remember being intercepted by a pirate asking for the specific procurement I was carrying.

I have yet to see a bounty mission go far above 300k, while trading missions easily do. Although you need the materials for those on hand. But still the way back and forth to mr. pirate usually means 2-3 completely harmless hauling missions with no requirement other than slapping some freighter into your fleet.
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Plantissue

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #9 on: August 19, 2019, 01:16:10 PM »

I think you need to do a few bounty missions before you can see the 300K+ bounty missions. They usually have something silly like 5+ Capital ships and "may contain upwards of 20 other ships of lesser significance." They are usually Tri-Tachyon deserter fleets for some odd reason, so expect to face multiple Paragons, Astrals and loads of phase ships. They will have 30 ships. The ships of lesser significance will mostly be destroyers and above.

Unlike bar missions and procurement missions, successfully completing the 200K+ missions with a normal fleet will take significantly more real time, sunk costs and risk, both monetary and real time. Lethargie suggesting that bounties give tons more money is just simply not true.


There doesn't seem to be an appropriately scaling mechanism like bar missions. On the plus side there always seem to be these 40-55k personal bounty mission where you kill 4-6 damaged pirate ships.

Honestly speaking the bar missions are so...honest it's funny. When bar missions were introduced I thought they would be organ and drug smuggling operations. Small amount of illegal goods to tide over downtime that you can do with a small number of ships.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #10 on: August 19, 2019, 01:36:36 PM »

While it's true that bounties have more risk, and require more IRL time, the idea of a large sunk cost is not true. You can gain net supplies in bounty fights if you have the right skills and maybe a few salvaging ships. And they do pay ~300k which is plenty of money. If you like the combat, then bounties are a perfectly reasonable way to make money, although I still view them as part of the income, not the whole. Exploration and bounties are intertwined since you have to travel far to get to the bounties.

I think Alex had in mind that the ships you recover were also part of the reward, but my experience is that you need to have better ships to beat the fleet in the first place so those recovered ships are almost always useless. Occasionally I will get a rare ship I don't already have from bounties but that is the exception, not the rule.
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SCC

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #11 on: August 19, 2019, 01:38:40 PM »

It would be nice, if there was some sort of counter that kept track if the player was making too much money through non-combat means, and have it eventually bring better sort of pirates after you. Kinda gamey that it targets the player specifically, but it would be a way to make it more risky.

Danjen

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #12 on: August 19, 2019, 01:40:30 PM »

Unlike bar missions and procurement missions, successfully completing the 200K+ missions with a normal fleet will take significantly more real time, sunk costs and risk, both monetary and real time.

This is why I mostly play pacifist. The amount of time and lost money from combat is way too long. It's safer to do a handful of missions, be neutral with everyone, and never get attacked again (within reason). Then, you can safely transport 3,000 unit cargoes with basically no risk and hit supply mission after supply mission.

When I get bored with that, I do a bunch of salvage/survey stuff to find decent colonies and set up for the endgame, and easily get 600k+/mo without any risk of hostilities. I don't know what to do after that point.
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Plantissue

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Re: Making money is way too easy with the randomly generated missions
« Reply #13 on: August 19, 2019, 02:27:33 PM »

Let me clarify that when I say a large sunk cost, I mean it as in you will generally need to obtain a large fleet in the first place. Lets say that you have loads of combat skills a lvl 20 officer and 2 Paragons. You still want to deploy them together so you need a fleet large enough outmatch the bounty fleet so you have 120 DP and they don't. How many other capital ships and cruisers do you need in order to do that? Or perhaps you are happy with a Paragon and whatever else you can fit into the DP. You'll still need a comparable amount of capital ships and cruisers. If by doing bounties, it takes a long time to get to that level of fleet and you are very suspectable to downtime. Or perhaps you'll deploy a single harbinger over and over again. Multiple times. By the time that battle ended, you could had gone from a wolf start to doing 100k+ bar and procurement missions.

Meanwhile by way of comparison, by doing bar and procurement missions, which in the case of procurement mission, will not require more than 500 cargo space which is easily achieved naturally or just by buying a cargo destroyer. It's not risk free, but you will hardly ever have to wait around for a mission appropriate for your fleet, and you will almost always know that it completable profitable, enabling you to save and reload if something goes wrong. Completing the mission will take 1-2 minutes. Meanwhile bounty mission forces you to go out somehwere, where if you are unlucky, you might goto the wrong star or head to the wrong world, for even more travel time. And then you got to fight. And then head back.

As a way of making money, bounties are less effective than bar and procurement. In order to make money, combat is seen as something to avoid, which is the opposite of how it should be, which is a shame. This game is best when you are fighting. I know people demand to be able to trade profitably, but the focus on the game should be about combat, not about making money. Because once you can make money, there isn't much you can do enjoyable with it. Other than combat. And then you have to find reasons for combat, because you certainly don't need the money.

I suppose in theory trading can be fun, dodging pirates hiding in nebula and the like, but I'm guessing most people just press shift and emergency/sustained burn on and reload as the fastest way to make money as it is now.
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