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[Obscurus]

So here's what I've been wondering. Given you can only raid for blueprints you don't know, can't you just keep raiding until only a truly expensive blueprint remain "undiscovered" (you can have it in your cargo hold, but haven't right-clicked it yet.). This way, you can continue raiding that blueprint once a day and amass a truly gamebreaking amount of a really expensive blueprint (i.e. paragon) to sell.

I think how I would go about this early game would be to first obtain and use the fairly common pirate blueprint package and some marines to repeatedly raid Kapteyn Starworks until only the Atlas Mk.II remain the only blueprint not known/activated (Getting the pirate blueprint package helps cut down the amount of raids until only the Atlas Mk.II blueprint remain). Then you can raid once a day for a 188,000 credit blueprint plus fodder as much as you want until ground defense rating builds up too much.

This has the potential to be really broken and all it would cost is a pirate station becoming decivilized.

[Wyvern]

My general experience has been that by the time you've got all the necessary setup rolling, the credit value of the blueprints isn't really important anymore.

Also, I would expect (but haven't tested because I don't want to decivilize the station) that once it hits stability zero your raids will stop giving you more blueprints.

[Agile]

My general experience has been that by the time you've got all the necessary setup rolling, the credit value of the blueprints isn't really important anymore.

Also, I would expect (but haven't tested because I don't want to decivilize the station) that once it hits stability zero your raids will stop giving you more blueprints.

I believe  you are right. This is why I stopped raiding unless I needed critical blueprints like XIV Battlegroup, because after raiding a few times, a orbital / heavy industry world stops giving blueprints (despite the menu saying they will give blueprints in the raid).

This can be, however, exploited in Nexerelin because you can give stabilization packages to colonies of other factions.

[Megas]

If player tries to raid right off the bat, he will often get junk blueprints that normally come from a pack.

By the time player can learn enough to save only the best to steal late in the game, it is late in the game.  That said, it can be an alternative to hunting 350k bounties if player is not powerful enough to kill them painlessly, and needs income to upgrade a colony.

Player will probably inflict about -2 stability per raid, and it takes a long time for stability to recover.  It is better to raid for blueprints after you explore and find the more common packs, to reduce the raiding needed to complete your blueprint library with the good rare stuff.

That said, if they are at max stability (no penalty from raids), then it should be okay to raid them once early for a lucky drop (if you have enough attack), then wait until stability recovers.  While waiting, move on, raid someone else, kill a bounty, do trade runs, or explore for fringe for the packs.

One exploit I tried is selling pristine nanoforge to New Maxios, then raid it back, and sell it back to them and repeat.  It was painful.  The chances of stealing back the nanoforge are too low to make it work easily.  Not really worth it if you want your nanoforge back.

[ZeCaptain]

Trying to raid for nano-forges is really really hard and generally not worth it, raiding to remove a faction's nano-forges so they're not as powerful is also hard. I raided a faction's orbital works like 10 times with 10k marines, got a pristine nano-forge on the tenth raid, then checked the colony information and found out they have more than one.

Now if you are already -50 or more with a faction, tactical bomb, then raid. This drastically reduces the amount of effort to raid them, at the cost of reducing their stability by alot.

[Obscurus]

Does 0 stability market really stop giving you more blueprints? I guess this needs further testing. I chose to raid pirates because all pirate ship blueprints except Falcon P and Atlas Mk. II can be obtained in a relatively common blueprint pack all things considered (probably can get it just by mining ruins in the core), so I think it might be viable early on depending on how many weapons and fighter blueprints pirates possess to grind through (There shouldn't be too much from experience). Still getting a bunch of Atlas Mk.II blueprints can be valuable in early to midgame especially when you are developing colonies. If you need to raid often, you can limit raid effectiveness to 40 to 50 percent to lower stability loss to 1 while still getting blueprints.

[Megas]

Trying to raid for nano-forges is really really hard

It is, but if I do not have a pristine one when I need it, I want to permanently cripple a faction (weaker expeditions), or claim a little more market share, then I will raid them for the item.  It also has the benefit of making their Pather cell dissolve on their world, unless it is Culann (AI admin) or Sindria (two items to steal).

If I want to steal their item, I bring as much as I can, and knocking out their battlestation is enough if I need to cut their defenses.  Knock out spaceport would be handy, if it did not crash stability down to zero, which I do not want.

[Snowblind]

Does 0 stability market really stop giving you more blueprints?
...

Unless Nex changes how this works (which it almost certainly doesn't), then blueprint raiding can be spammed well below 0 stability. I have gotten colonies to well over -100 unrest in the pursuit of blueprints, and I was still getting blueprints up until I acquired every one that the owning faction had available, or until I stopped hoarding duplicates of capitals and expensive cruisers and actually learned them.

Ironically, Prism Freeport makes abusing blueprint raiding more attractive, since you can easily amass 100k worth of blueprint exchange points off a single colony via this method (enough to buy a dozen+ capital ship blueprints).

And I have also had a difficult time getting cores and nano-forges sometimes via raiding. I think I had a colony down to about -130 once before I finally got it's alpha core (I was probably exceptionally unlucky, but still).

[Plantissue]

The obvious fix is for drop rate to be completely independent of previously known blueprints. Does the player need to be able to have all blueprints from raiding?

[Agile]

Does 0 stability market really stop giving you more blueprints?
...

Unless Nex changes how this works (which it almost certainly doesn't), then blueprint raiding can be spammed well below 0 stability. I have gotten colonies to well over -100 unrest in the pursuit of blueprints, and I was still getting blueprints up until I acquired every one that the owning faction had available, or until I stopped hoarding duplicates of capitals and expensive cruisers and actually learned them.

Ironically, Prism Freeport makes abusing blueprint raiding more attractive, since you can easily amass 100k worth of blueprint exchange points off a single colony via this method (enough to buy a dozen+ capital ship blueprints).

And I have also had a difficult time getting cores and nano-forges sometimes via raiding. I think I had a colony down to about -130 once before I finally got it's alpha core (I was probably exceptionally unlucky, but still).

Strange cause I stopped getting blueprints after raiding industry worlds like 5 + times.

Probably other factors were related, then.

[Megas]

Given that 1) it is a way to acquire blueprints if exploration fails (raiding was meant as a last resort option) and 2) they never drop packs (if you raid right off the bat, the blueprints that usually drop are common stuff bundled in a pack), I would say yes.

Last release, chances were low to get blueprint from a raid.  I just save-scummed as long as it took until a blueprint dropped.  Now, I take what I get and move on to something else.

Also, due to how much babysitting I need to do, exploring for blueprints (without letting something burn down) can be hard, and it is nice to raid a heavy industry while on the go in core.

I often do not get blueprints if I raid in quick succession.  I raid once for near-guaranteed blueprint, move on to the next world, then come back and raid again after some time passes.

[sotanaht]

The strategy does work, and depending on how early you can get into raiding it might actually be significantly beneficial.  If you play with certain mods, the stage of the game where you need that extra cash might be extended, and some faction mod blueprints cost a good deal more than vanilla (I've seen them >1.5m).  Finally, nexerelin has the prism freeport where you can trade in blueprints to get other blueprints, so having spare valuable blueprints (trade in value is based on price) helps a lot.

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with being able to get extra blueprints to be able to sell for cash.  Raiding deserves to pay well, and currently does not.  I don't like that you are encouraged to not learn (right click) particularly good blueprints in order to benefit from this though.  Ideally, the game would track which blueprints you've obtained instead of the ones you've learned (including ones left behind in loot), and instead of never giving duplicates, it could only generate blueprints you've seen the fewest number of times.  The net result is that you'd still see every single blueprint once before getting duplicates, but you would not be able to game the system by not learning one, and you would be able to get as many duplicates as you wanted if you kept raiding.

Given that 1) it is a way to acquire blueprints if exploration fails (raiding was meant as a last resort option) and 2) they never drop packs (if you raid right off the bat, the blueprints that usually drop are common stuff bundled in a pack), I would say yes.

Last release, chances were low to get blueprint from a raid.  I just save-scummed as long as it took until a blueprint dropped.  Now, I take what I get and move on to something else.

Also, due to how much babysitting I need to do, exploring for blueprints (without letting something burn down) can be hard, and it is nice to raid a heavy industry while on the go in core.

I often do not get blueprints if I raid in quick succession.  I raid once for near-guaranteed blueprint, move on to the next world, then come back and raid again after some time passes.

Assuming you have enough marines (I usually bring a couple thousand if I intend to raid), you are guaranteed to get a blueprint every single time you raid until you have fully exhausted the possible blueprints from that faction.  In fact, the easiest way to know that you know every single blueprint that faction has is to just keep raiding them until no more drop.  You can fail to get a blueprint if your force strength is low enough.  I usually don't want to let that go below 80% because that means losing hundreds of marines every raid, but I think it has to be below like 30 or 40 for you to fail to get a blueprint.

[Locklave]

My general experience has been that by the time you've got all the necessary setup rolling, the credit value of the blueprints isn't really important anymore.

Also, I would expect (but haven't tested because I don't want to decivilize the station) that once it hits stability zero your raids will stop giving you more blueprints.

^^ This. By that point you have unlimited cash and are raiding core worlds.