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Author Topic: Alternatives to colony for passive income to offset fleet upkeep  (Read 2239 times)

goduranus

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At the moment, as soon as your fleet exceeds 2000 crew, the monthly upkeep reminder kinda pushes the player to generate passive income with a colony. It not the money drain itself, but the red text popping up and the ominous sound of your monthly deficit. This kinda shoehorns all players into the colony gameplay by mid game, fighting raids and expeditions as stuff.

Would be cool if the players who prefers a pure fleet play style can have more avenues than commission or colony to offset their officer and crew upkeep, so it doesn’t feel as if the clock is always ticking all the time. Maybe allow the player to invest in industries on faction planets to get a share of the income, or put spare money in the bank to receive interest payments or something like that.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2019, 11:29:03 AM by goduranus »
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LucusLoC

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Re: Alternatives to colony for passive income to offset fleet upkeep
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2019, 02:02:32 PM »

A few alternatives would be pretty sweet, but you would have to make sure they play nice with the other game mechanics. I am not talking about locking people out if they go down a certain rout, just making sure that the income stacking does not get too wild.

A few thoughts:

1. More "player" fleets; officers can be put in charge of a fleet of their own, and take orders for missions from you (you assign them a mission/bounty/trade loop which they perform until completed or you assign them something else. Officers wold gain access to feet wide bonuses so they could be specialized for such roles. Colonies with a High Command would give an additional combat fleet (mins any officer bonuses) that can only take "combat" missions, colonies with a Commerce structure gain access to a single trade fleet that haul selected goods to specific destinations.

In addition to this change I would roll "officer" and "administrator" limits into one "subordinate" limit, so that players would need to choose between more fleets or more colonies (or deal with AI raids in the case of AI admins). Whether or not AI can be used to run their own fleets would be a balance issue that needs testing, but I would be inclined to say yes, so long as those fleets incur significant risk when interacting with "AI adverse" factions (AI trade fleets would be very poor, since they would be super limited in who they could trade with, for example).

2. "Tech Mining" Expeditions; don't want to set up a colony just to do some tech mining? Send repeated expeditions! After the initial "grab what is laying around in the open" phase that you perform after the initial survey the player should have the option to bring specialized survey equipment (a ship? a new item?) to continue harvesting loot. This should be far slower than colony tech mining, but should eventually yield the same results. The player should also be able to fund an expedition, and due to the different game mechanics these should be "independent ventures" not counted against a players fleet limits. The only limits on the player would be the initial capital to set up the expedition. (incidentally, the planet survey data *really* needs to show the depletion level of ruins. . . ). Players should also be able to "tag" stations, derelicts and debris fields to send expeditions using the same mechanics.

2a. The player should be able to hire a dedicated "salvage fleet" to clean up after player battles. They could be the ones to run off with full cargo holds (after topping up the player fleet with supplies and fuel), giving the player more time out and about wreaking havoc (for a small price of course).

2b. Not really related to passive income, but the player should be able to request delivery of supplies out in the black. "Emergency beacons" are pretty useless for large fleets, because responders usually have little available (and if you are hostile to most factions you have to fight and salvage anyway, further reducing availability of what you need), plus commissioning a supply run would let you request what you actually needed, not just hope for it.

3. I do like the idea of "investment" in other colonies, but for simplicity sake I think it should be limited to just "investment interest" where you give cash to a faction and get an interest payout based on the success of that faction. Due to "competing interests" this payout should be severely curtailed if the player owns their own colonies, diminishing rapidly with the increasing success of player colonies. This would help keep the player from "making money from both ends" which I can see easily becoming game breaking.

4. Commissions should be expanded, eventually allowing a player to "write off" most expenses to the patron faction, in effect sending them a bill for supplies used while acting in their interest. Sending them too large a bill for too little gain would impact reputation negatively, and repeat offenses could jeopardize the commission. (with the converse being true too, under-billing for services would improve reputation). This wold in effect be an expansion of the bounty system, but would be tracked for all hostile factions, not just ones they explicitly placed a bounty on. The system could also be expanded to include trade and exploration too, though I would need to think about how that would work best. This game-play arc would basically see the player become a semi-independent member of that faction, and should include a number of game-play features to that end. (maybe after a certain point the exploration side of a commission would see a player set up and "manage" colonies directly for that faction, for example)

4a. Combined with point 5 below, the player should have the ability to play politics within the faction to move up in stature (with the possibility of taking over the faction completely)?

5. Politics; similar to commissions, but without so many strings attached, the player could enter into political deals that agreed to certain payouts for certain continued actions (e.g. killing pirate fleets). This would help supplement the income for players operating with larger dedicated "killer" fleets. I imagine this would be a bit tighter of a line to walk than a commission, since factions would of course be more concerned funding a powerful fleet that was so far outside of their control, but that is the cost the player pays for more independence. As a further option factions could use the player acting in this role as a "plausible deniability" agent to act against otherwise friendly factions (making the player take the rep hit instead of them in exchange for a cash stipend).

6. Players should be rewarded passively by factions they maintain high rep with, most notably through lower cost on needed items like supplies, crew and fuel. This would be a kind of "passive income" in that it would reduce over all costs, son long as you were getting those supplies from those factions.

Let me know if there are any other game-play loops that were not covered in those points and I will see what I can come up with.
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Vind

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Re: Alternatives to colony for passive income to offset fleet upkeep
« Reply #2 on: October 11, 2019, 08:32:21 AM »

Reducing enormous officer salary can help. 2500 each month is hardly a small sum considering crew receive 10 each.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: Alternatives to colony for passive income to offset fleet upkeep
« Reply #3 on: October 11, 2019, 08:57:25 AM »

Commissions basically mitigate upkeep with their base pay (and then some, except for the most extreme fleets) and the other commission related payouts go on top of that (although commission bounties could stand to be a lot higher).

There's only two sources of passive income basically (disregarding the Academy payout that'll run out eventually) - Colonies, for big payout with big risk/maintenance and Commissions for small payout, low risk/maintenance. There could stand to be more for sure, but if we get any they'll probably only come in once (if?) we get more than one player fleet to control.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2019, 08:59:12 AM by DatonKallandor »
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