Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bobucles]

If player loses his biggest ship or few smaller ships, whatever bounty player receives gets eaten by expenses.

Not really. The player has access to plenty of random d-modded ships in their travels, and the cost of resupplying even the biggest vessels isn't anything outrageous. Big ships also typically have multiple lives thanks to player and officer talents so you can have a few capitals explode for every new option that shows up in scrap. Things only get expensive if you insist on only using the most pristine, defect free vessels, but that's totally intended anyway.

[Megas]

If player uses clunkers, he will have inferior ships or fleet against the mostly pristine named bounties.

Ships only have multiple lives if he has either officers or Reinforced Bulkheads, and they degrade even further after each "life".  Some of those (D) mods hurt, especially the logistics ones on a capital ship.

[Lucky33]

Do not fly through storms.
Do not use emergency burn all the time.
Open up your fleet screen. Find any Ox-class tugs. Scuttle them.
Check all your ships for Increased Maintenance and Erratic Fuel Injector mods. Scuttle these too.
Install Efficiency Overhaul and Militarized Subsystems on all your ships what allows such upgrades.
Learn Fleet Logistics lvl 2 and Navigation lvl 2 skills.
Buy the Salvage Rig.

[Thaago]

Oh and if you think your fleet is too small to have a salvage rig or two, get some Shepherds. They have the frigate version of the hullmod to increase supply/fuel lootand their drones can actually help a lot in low level combat. They become obsolete after a while, but are super solid early game for pretty much every purpose.

[Histidine]

Re: Recovering ships
Choose one option:
1) Making a profit from ship hulls
2) Recovering ships with high frequency
Having both breaks the game progression.

One of the uses of the upcoming story points is to recover disabled/destroyed enemy ships which the random roll didn't give you. So in principle we could greatly reduce the natural recovery rate of enemy ships and let recovery be a way to trade story points for cash.

[bobucles]

let recovery be a way to trade story points for cash.

That seems doubtful. Ships sell for pennies on the dollar. Capturing a ship requires stocking extra supplies, fuel and ships to make their transport possible. By the time a ship is recovered/repaired and dragged back to port, most of the profits are already gone. Mothballing a ship doesn't help either because ships with 0% CR sell for even less than a combat ready ship. The money simply isn't there. Chances are you could have dismantled the ship for a pitiful handful of supplies, yet still have been better off.

Recovery points would more likely let players pick up those rare ships from contracts, or to keep their legion XIV ships from being permanently lost. How many story points would it cost to recover a legion that already has 8 Dmods? There may need to be a limit on that feature, hehe.

[SCC]

The value at which ships are sold is not set in stone, it can be changed. At the moment, it's as low as it is, because acquiring ships is pretty easy. If getting new ships was hard by design, then the design would presumably also make selling ships more viable.

[Goumindong]

The value for selling ships is low because Alex did not want to create a situation where players were encouraged to salvage and return all the ships they find. This produces a situation where you spend a lot of time traveling back and forth from the core rather than running the core gameplay loop of exploration and combat. Thus, making salvaging ships only something you do if you really want to use the ship produces a situation where you're exploring and combating more. Which is better for the play experience

[TrashMan]

I disgaree with that assessment.

Why NOT salvage? With mothballing, you don't have to repair ship immediately. And with large transports (and possibly mobile repair ship), you can easily carry more than enough supplies to explore AND repair a few ships. Combines with skills that grant you 50% repair for free, I don't see it detracting from exploration at all.

Besides, what if people WANT to do it? Developers often deliberately gut completely logical/common sense moves to try and force players to play their game "the right way".

I edited the ship costs, the buying and selling prices, restoration costs and many other variables and values and am having more fun than I ever had. I can actually turn a profit when restoring ships and selling them (partially because ships are far more expensive). The whole "better for the play experience" is BS of the highest magnitude.

[bobucles]

With mothballing, you don't have to repair ship immediately.
...
Combines with skills that grant you 50% repair for free, I don't see it detracting from exploration at all.

I'm pretty sure if you're instantly mothballing a ship, the free repair talents won't help. Mothballing nukes the CR to 0, you don't even get to keep the supplies.

I'd love for buy/sell multipliers to be less awful, but the current system essentially gives players a free pass on making a burnt out husk flyable again. The cost of making a derelict fly and immediately mothballing it is roughly zero, so any value of a husk ends up being pure profit for the ship. Granted, the current value of a 0CR husk is like 2% the value of a new ship.

Currently the vast majority of sale value comes from combat rating I.E. how many supplies you pumped into the ship. Spending 35 supplies to repair a double-D hammerhead boosted its value from 1040 to 5900. The supplies ended up generating profit, so I dunno what's going on there.

[intrinsic_parity]

Mothballed ships still cost fuel to move around. If you can sell mothballed ships in-system or close by I could see it maybe being slightly profitable, but if not, I'm pretty sure you lose money on the fuel cost. Even if you can sell in-system, 1-2k per ship is not worth the effort of selling them after very early game IMO.

I would like to make some money off salvage but I can see the problem in gameplay as well. Grinding easy combat with no gameplay significance to make a bit of cash is boring. You want the game to push you towards challenging/important battles rather than easy ones. I would prefer to balance these thing by risk/reward rather than trying to completely prevent them, but I can see how that would be very difficult since the value of the risks and rewards of a certain battle change significantly over the course of a campaign. I think as long as other more risky ways of making money are significantly more profitable, there's no harm in letting there be some profit in salvaging.

[Dread Lord Murubarda]

I disgaree with that assessment.

Why NOT salvage? With mothballing, you don't have to repair ship immediately. And with large transports (and possibly mobile repair ship), you can easily carry more than enough supplies to explore AND repair a few ships. Combines with skills that grant you 50% repair for free, I don't see it detracting from exploration at all.

Besides, what if people WANT to do it? Developers often deliberately gut completely logical/common sense moves to try and force players to play their game "the right way".

I edited the ship costs, the buying and selling prices, restoration costs and many other variables and values and am having more fun than I ever had. I can actually turn a profit when restoring ships and selling them (partially because ships are far more expensive). The whole "better for the play experience" is BS of the highest magnitude.

so now you're going back and forth all the time selling pirate armadas? that seems dull. I would also like to see a solution to salvaging, but not like this.

maybe ..... towing the ships to a shipyard and then paying an engineer to study them and extract the intact parts. say you get an enforcer with 4 D-mods, you take it to one of the few shipyards in the core worlds, or your own at a fraction of the cost, and have it disassembled, the broken parts you turn into metal, and you keep it's engines which were fine. when you eventually get all X enforcer ship parts you can build a pristine one for a small fee.

[Lucky33]

Dunno. I dont salvage ships for money. I salvage them to stock up all free storage areas and my colonies (if any). This way I dont have to drag all my battlefleet across core worlds. Only from closest staging area. Its almost as if being able to use several different fleets. Shame that you cant turn pirate bases into such storage facilities.

[TrashMan]

so now you're going back and forth all the time selling pirate armadas? that seems dull. I would also like to see a solution to salvaging, but not like this.

Nah. Cargo bar runs are still more profitable. I do occasionally restore and sell a ship, if it's a good one. Less D-mods = more profit. If I'm lucky enough to find a big, rare capital, I can ear a lot on selling. At least with my settings.

If anything, since I increased the prices of ships (buying price too), I find bounties less attractive than cargo runs. A lot of time and resources wasted FINDING the damn target.

[Histidine]

Random idea I had: Instead of the player personally towing recovered ships back to civilization, repairing them and selling them, player collects a fee to inform a scavenger about the salvageable stuff and lets them deal with it.
This reconciles the 'realism' thing with the desire to avoid an annoying gameplay loop.