Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: Toranet on November 21, 2015, 09:57:46 AM
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I loved to trade in the game, and my most favourite way to trade was to sell food when there were food shortages, but now almost all the planets that would need food in previous update get the hydroponic station and become the mass food supplyers like Luddic church capital planet that prodused infinite amounts of food that I was selling to everyone elce.
Now Jungala has even more food, and even the neutrall planet in the same system(arconia was it?) has this feature and got redicuouls ammouts of food on it. Guys just finish it and put this hydroponics on ragnar complex cryor and all other objects in the game and everybody would be happy cus I wont even need to worry about the food trading. More over When I actualy found a food shortage, I bought food at jungala, took it to the place and there was just no price increase... Well I thought that it was just a bug but the second food shortage was the same. If food shortages need time to increase the price than decrease the ammount of those hydro stations that send relief fleets to the place before it gets the chance to escalate.
Please fix it or just delete food from the game because my favourite good I could speculate with becoming useless makes me mad...
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Thanks for sharing your experience - I'll definitely take a look at food shortages for the 0.7.1a release.
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Thanks for the replying so fast, well I was a bit too harsh because spent half an hour to get the tarsus freighter on pirate hunting to start food trade, and finding this situation brought me mad :)
The idea of food speculation was that food was massively prodused only on Luddic Church capital planet, and there were also some minor food producers like jungala but it never had more than 4000-5000 food at once and couldnt send relief fleets all the time. Because of that Tri-tahion Syndrian Dictat and independent had food shortages on regular basis. They were solved eventualy by traders that would get there in a month or so but before they come I brought food I bought in luddic and sold it. Often I sold way more food it needed, and at the begining of my game before I started buying stuff in luddic I created a barrage of food shortages in a system where 2 tri-tahion stations and 1 station 1 planet from independent by buying all the food they had and selling it to the other station where was the shortage, and creation a shortage in the place I bought food in a litle time after I left there thus shortages just never ended untill I bought the big portion of food at luddic and made it enough food there for ages.
Well I realy hope that you wont place this hydroponic station in just every system because it kills the food speculation. Luddic is in war with Syndrian Dictat and thus doesnt sell food to it and Jungala is made to provide food to tons of it's satelites and because of it cant provide food to independents on the oposite side from the luddic. Well couldnt before you added another hydroponic station on it too :)
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It's not really the fault of hydroponic stations; more the result of me nerfing food shortages way, way too hard in the wake of them being way too good in the previous release. Going to dial that back a bit!
Too much food on the open market is more a perception issue, but it's definitely an issue.
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It is not just food shortage, ALL shortage events are feeling useless, since even stuff that theoretically a station does not has, they have in the 6 or 7 digits sometimes.
Like I said in other thread, if you deleted half of the commodities of the game (mostly the completely legal ones), noone would ever notice, because right now trading them is utterly pointless, even when taking events and missions in account.
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Also, I serfed through some markets, and, well, when I saw 200 000+ units of volatiles(on cruor was it?) or 200 000+ units of bio stuff on jungala has made me feel realy wrong :D
I have actualy managed to do some trading by anonimusly killing all traders going to asharu and making a hudge disrupt in trade(independants hate me now hard but who cares) and than in a while came back and sold tons of machinery that was sold by low price on jangala made some profit, but still realy hard to do any exploits :/
You wont realy get any income from trade without exploits because of 30% tarrifs meaning 60% total charge in 1/1 trade thus making you need no less than x2 difference in price because of other costs like fuel and supplies do be payed and because of this food shortages were the way out that made trading having sence but without it maintaining big trading fleet is just meaningless.
Oh well I realy look forward for mining and production implemented, it would bring so much more fun in the game ^^
Also, the bug I found. I cant toggle sniffer otherwise than turning on "go dark" or getting caught by patrool for it to force me turn sniffer on.
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It is not just food shortage, ALL shortage events are feeling useless, since even stuff that theoretically a station does not has, they have in the 6 or 7 digits sometimes.
I think "feeling" is the right word here. It's still a shortage, compared to what would normally be available, and the prices are still higher. It just doesn't feel right given that there's still a lot of stuff available for sale.
Also, the bug I found. I cant toggle sniffer otherwise than turning on "go dark" or getting caught by patrool for it to force me turn sniffer on.
If by "sniffer" you mean transponder: it requires two presses to turn on/off - one to prime, one to confirm. There's a text prompt at the top of the screen letting you know this, and it also flashes yellow or red.
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I was clicking it multiple times and it was flashing yellow but I will try again eh my bad prolly :)
When production\mining update would come out I realy hope you would be able to build stations and outposts on planest to actualy build productions, and they would need tons of resourses and crew(the beter crew the higher the productivity) build upgrades on them and defences same as possibility to capture other stations ^^ Oh just imagine the boarding task on the big station when you come as a fleet to the station and its rediculously massive and takes half of the battlefield, you need to break through its shields and armor first under the fire of its weapons and only than board the station with some special ships, or like in SPAZ send suicide pods with boarding force :3 I realy hope you would implement something like that. Somewhat the idea of what to be made for 0.9 update, cus 0.8 is production/mining if I understood it right ^^
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It is not just food shortage, ALL shortage events are feeling useless, since even stuff that theoretically a station does not has, they have in the 6 or 7 digits sometimes.
I think "feeling" is the right word here. It's still a shortage, compared to what would normally be available, and the prices are still higher. It just doesn't feel right given that there's still a lot of stuff available for sale.
Also, the bug I found. I cant toggle sniffer otherwise than turning on "go dark" or getting caught by patrool for it to force me turn sniffer on.
If by "sniffer" you mean transponder: it requires two presses to turn on/off - one to prime, one to confirm. There's a text prompt at the top of the screen letting you know this, and it also flashes yellow or red.
It isn ot just a question of "feeling", but the fact that to have a tiny profit with legal stuff you need a huge fleet costing 200k right of the bat at the start of the game, even if you use missions and events.
I decided after a while to give up on trading completely and just create a bounty hunter char (and then had another can of worms to happen: I find no pirates to kill! Only luddites, but those rarely get bounties on their head, and frequently you only find them at all in hyperspace, where bounties don't count, and in huge fleets that pound you even if you have help from a hegemony whole armada)
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So far, I only managed to earn XP from trade twice so far, once for hauling supplies from Jangala to Asharu, and some other commodity from Orthus to Tigra City. Missions are generally more profitable but give no XP.
I suspect the only way to get XP from trade is to stockpile stuff at victim markets and sell like in 0.65. I have not quite reached endgame yet to try (though I am close now that major factions other than Hegemony are getting hostile).
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I made a reasonable amount of money and XP by hauling volatiles from Mimir Syphon Platform. It tends to have 10+ million stockpiled and prices in single digits. You need at least a couple Atlases to make it worth it, though.
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yeah, trade is a no go, I do agree food was exploitable last version. But now just being a humble trader? No, not happening. Which I love to do sometimes. Lean fleet that is focused on run about trading. I would like to trade (without Atlas) all the neat goods you took time to put in, and turn a worthy profit. Not ten's of thousands, but a good amount to cover bit of supply/fuel and a little extra in pocket.
Right now, I don't even look at those cool commodities. I do click on them to hear the cool sounds though.
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I've had a reasonable amount of success with carrying extra units of whatever a mission asked for to wherever the mission's destination is, especially when the unit price offered by the mission is high; the missions seem to usually be a good indicator that the goods being asked for have a relatively high price at the destination.
There was also a stretch where Mimir's trade kept getting disrupted, which caused the station to buy heavy machinery for about 300 to 400 credits before tariffs, and Ratatosk was selling heavy machinery for about 120 credits per unit before tariffs at the same time. Probably not healthy to abuse that situation too long since you'll end up ticking off at least one of your trading partners, but it did net me a tidy profit; by the time I stopped, I had added two Hermes-class shuttles to my fleet (sadly, nothing better was available on the open market, and I wasn't feeling that inclined to buy from the black market) and I'd gained about 100,000 credits even after deducting the cost of the shuttles (helped along by a couple of missions asking for heavy machinery, but it would have been profitable without those missions regardless).
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I'll check that out.
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I have begun to carry extra drugs and hand weapons in case I stumble on more missions I can exploit.
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Now that even trade disruptions have much thinner margins, would it be alright to reduce the tariffs a bit (say 20%)?
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I find that trade works - but I have done so opportunistically. There are some pretty reliable sources of cheap supplies/fuel/heavy machinery to build up a stock. I then sell whenever I happen across a market with a high prices. Sometime it takes a long time before an opportunity opens up, but thats ok for me because I'm doing this on the side between bounties. I'm not sure how fun pure trader right now would be because of the wait but its def possible.
Oh, and sell on the black market. Legal trading is for chumps :P.
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I have yet to find a legal trade route that would turn any significant profit. So far I've only been able to run a small profit on the black market. But not enough to make it worth it.
I don't really mind that much, bounty hunting and doing quests is more fun and much more rewarding anyway. But it does seem weird to me to have this awesome dynamic economy set up, and then making it almost completely irrelivant to the game experience.
(ofcourse it's entirely possible I have just missed some super obvious trading opportunities)
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i am doing rather well in my current play through, Agreus had a market disruption that lowered the price of supplies to 6 per unit. then ratatosk had a supply disruption that jumped their prices up to 440. combine that with black market trading... ahhahahah!
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Still, I know the intention of trading being difficult was to make smuggling more worthwhile, to encourage combat potential with factions...
Still, I think trade should be made easier, and specially profitable if you have huge trading fleets (example: trading with a port huge amount of goods at once lower you tariffs), then encourage pirates to hunt those huge fleets, thus you achieve both objectives (trading become fun, with the more you get money, the more profit is your potential, but also become more risky, with larger cargoes attracting combat).
Right now you need to luck out too much, and is easy to get stuck (ie: you don't have sufficient money to expand your cargo space to use some opportunities, or don't have money to buy the requried goods... For example maybe you noticed you could profit 2000 per piece of some high-priced good traded, but you have money only to buy 2, making the trip not worthwhile in terms of supplies and fuel).