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1

General Discussion / Re: Early game colony?

« on: April 20, 2024, 09:11:09 AM »

3. Citation needed here, but it feels like terran and other habitable planets tend to have ruins in them very often, so they're also good candidates for tech mining.

Tech Mining is in my experience almost completely worthless, even on Vast Ruins. I don't see any good reason to consider it when assessing colonization candidates, and even if I do for some reason care about it there's no reason to set up a permanent colony for it.

As far as the rest of your points go, none of them are relevant to an early-game colony that you're setting up to make money without attracting unwanted attention and could very well be planning to dump later on.

2

General Discussion / Re: Early game colony?

« on: April 19, 2024, 09:42:18 PM »

Food is much much much easier to capture market share in

The Core Worlds collectively produce somewhere around 100 units of Ore, 90 units of food, 60 units of Organics, 60 units of Volatiles, and 50 units of Rare Ore, and market share is essentially (accessibility) * (how much your colony produces) / (how much the sector as a whole produces). Out of these five resources, then, Food is the second most difficult in which to capture market share; what it has going for it is that it is the most valuable single market (270,000 for Food, 140,000 for Volatiles, 122,000 for Rare Ore, and 117,000 for Ore) - but if you have a good mining target, that doesn't really matter, because you're going to be tapping at least two and possibly three (maybe even four, if you have an exceptional candidate, though decent Organics mining sites that aren't Habitable are hard to find), and you're going to be capturing a large enough share in each of them that the combined total exceeds what you'd get out of going for Food.

Assuming an accessibility of 100%, gross revenue for each of these resources, assuming a size-3 colony, is somewhere around:
Food: 6000 (-1), 9000 (+0), 12000 (+1), 15000 (+2)
Ore: 2340 (-1), 3510 (+0), 4680 (+1), 5850 (+2), 7020 (+3)
Rare Ore: 0 (-1), 2440 (+0), 4880 (+1), 7320 (+2), 9760 (+3)
Organics: 4667 (-1), 7000 (+0), 9333 (+1), 11667 (+2)
Volatiles: 0 (-1), 1700 (+0), 3400 (+1), 5100 (+2)

In my experience, finding Volcanic worlds with at least +1 Ore and Rare Ore and Cryovolcanic worlds with at least +0 Ore, Rare Ore, and Volatiles is generally easier than finding Habitable worlds with at least +0 Farmland, and it's not that uncommon that I find something like a double-Ultrarich Volcanic world or a double-Rich + Plentiful Cryovolcanic relatively close to the Core. Volcanic and Cryovolcanic worlds are among the most common in the Sector; Habitables, meanwhile, are usually some of the rarest, and some of them - like the relatively common Desert worlds - are often entirely lacking in arable land.

Food ... is fairly trivial to scale.

Autonomous Mantle Bore says hello.

Additionally, best mining worlds usually have pretty bad hazard ratings and this really affects the growth pretty badly. Hazard pay is a MUCH higher initial investment because otherwise the colony won't grow and even if it does, the hazard pay will eat all profits for a while unless you're willing to go size 3 everything.

This is a thread talking about setting up some "early" colonies for the express purpose of making money while avoiding triggering things that you're not yet prepared to deal with using your early-game (or maybe early-mid-game) fleet. Somehow, I don't think that the cost of Hazard Pay is a particularly relevant concern.

3

General Discussion / Re: Early game colony?

« on: April 19, 2024, 05:28:01 PM »

Am I crazy for thinking that going for farming instead of mining is the ideal for this?

Mining has higher gross income potential than Farming, it's often easier to find a good mining candidate than a good farming candidate, and Habitable worlds are usually problematic if you don't want the colony to grow naturally for whatever reason.

4

Suggestions / Re: Integrating the Independents and Nova Maxios

« on: April 18, 2024, 01:28:57 PM »

As with a number of other posters, I don't see any real benefit to folding the various independent colonies into the major factions.

"Third most markets" ignores the fact only TWO "Independent" markets are even size 5, none greater. That means the entire independent population of the sector is at max, MAYBE 200K people, if even. Then you consider that of the two size 5s, one (Agreus), technically already belongs to the Hegemony according to the description, but is simply leased out, because it's a literal garbage dump, a scrapyard for junking ships, and the other is a refugee camp. These are not exactly high-priority places for conquest. Looking at the size 4s, you find places like Asharu, which is, again, nominally belonging to the Hegemony, but such a shithole they can't be bothered to go there on a permanent basis. And, of course, nobody pays any attention to size 3s because the ship you'd send to invade them has a higher population than they do.

Several issues with your figures:
1. Size-5 is defined within the game as having a population of "hundreds of thousands," i.e. the population of a single size-5 polity is somewhere between one hundred thousand and one million. Two hundred thousand is therefore the minimum population represented by a pair of size-5 polities; the upper bound, meanwhile, is just shy of two million.

2. Assuming an unmodded game, there are actually six to nine - not two - independent size-5 polities in the Core: Agreus, Ailmar, Baetis, Eldfell, Ilm, and Nova Maxios for the six specifically marked as "Independent," as well as Qaras, Umbra, and Chalcedon if you count the Pirate/Path polities. Counting only these polities, the "independent" population in the core is between six hundred thousand and six million, or between nine hundred thousand and nine million including the Pirate and Path polities. It would not be unreasonable to think that there at least a couple million people in the Core who are not citizens/subjects of one of the five major factions.

3. It is dangerous to ignore the size-4 polities when trying to estimate "actual" population numbers from the game's loose order-of-magnitude approximations. In an unmodded game, there are five size-4 Independent polities (Asharu, Cethlenn, Derinkuyu Mining Station, Nortia, and Orthrus), five size-4 Pirate polities (Donn, Kanta's Den, Kapeteyn Starworks, Lost Astropolis, and Thulian Raider Base), and one size-4 Luddic Path polity (Epiphany); taken together, these eleven polities represent at least 110 thousand and possibly as many as 1.1 million people. Effectively, the equivalent of at least one size-5 polity is probably hidden amongst the size-4 polities, and that's not really something to wave away when there's only nine "real" size-5 polities that aren't flagged as belonging to one of the five major factions - and it's especially not something to ignore if you think there's only two size-5 polities worth counting.

5

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: April 18, 2024, 10:36:19 AM »

You would think, yes, considering that the pirate versions explicitly state they're the product of manual labor. What's weird, though, is finding Church blueprints in Domain wrecks. The Church does not exist pre-Collapse, according to the timeline, forming only in C8, so you shouldn't be able to find an LC blueprint pack in a Domain ship. Or at all, really, since their ships are just the regular ship with a paintjob on it.

The Church may not have existed pre-Collapse, but Ludd did, and had a large enough following that the Domain decided he had to go; according to the "A True and Accurate History of the Persean Sector" blog post, he may even have lead an 'exodus of the faithful' to settle in the Persean Sector. It's plausible that the "Luddic Church" patterns originated with the pre-Collapse Luddic movement and have since become associated with the Luddic Church for obvious reasons.

It also bears mentioning that the ruins and derelicts we can find, and their contents, aren't necessarily pre-Collapse, or at least not entirely. We know that the Fringe is essentially devoid of populated worlds (or at least ones that aren't 'decivilized') in the "present," but we don't know how long it took to get to that point after the Collapse, and the player character is very clearly not the only scavenger active in the Fringe, even if the NPCs aren't allowed to tear apart the derelicts and dig through the ruins; we can also see that even the Domain survey stuff is still at least partly functional and has some degree of interstellar capability. Two chaotic centuries is plenty of time for things to disappear and turn up again in odd places.

6

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: April 17, 2024, 10:22:39 PM »

I suspect Lion's Guard ships other than the Executor are not blueprinted at all, which is why there are none to steal: Ships are turned into LG variants BY HAND, using manual labor.

If that were the rationale, you'd think that most of the Pirate and Pather variants wouldn't be available as blueprints, either.

7

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 12, 2024, 07:48:31 PM »

Why not? Why shouldn't the player be able to rise to the level of fleet commander without being a strong warrior? History and the modern world are full of examples of people who rose to the top job without being exceptionally skilled as warriors.

Because it's not fun.

For you, maybe. I, personally, almost never take so much as a single skill from the Combat tree.

8

General Discussion / Re: How large was Opis?

« on: March 28, 2024, 10:43:37 PM »

I'm inclined to agree with the others that the Pathers are likely exaggerating.

It's also a moon so I don't even think there is enough room for that many people

Unless there's a hard number somewhere for the size of Opis, I don't think that that's a reasonable assumption to make. At a population density of a thousand people per square kilometer (about a tenth that of New York City or a fifth that of London, according to a quick Google search), you'd only need an object with a surface area of a million square kilometers to fit a billion people; assuming a spherical body, that's an object with a radius of about 280km. That's not tiny, obviously, but at only about a sixth of the radius of the Moon I don't think it's really straining credulity, either.

The bigger issues with moons as major population centers tend to be things like habitability and economic viability, especially considering that much of the industry it might have had would seem to have been duplicated elsewhere in the system, going by what's represented in the game, and that if we're assuming it's a small moon then it probably wouldn't have had much in the way of natural resources.

Chicomoztoc, which currently makes up a majority of the sector's population on its own, has a population in the hundreds of millions, which would mean that Opis made up somewhere around 90 percent of the sector's population.

I would advise you to be extremely cautious about making these kinds of assumptions regarding relative populations from the numbers we're given in the game, especially given that we do not know if - or how - population numbers are rounded. (something)x10⁸ could be anything from 100 million to just shy of a billion,* we have no idea where in that range the population of Chicomztoc falls, and aside from an unreliable source claiming "billions" we have no idea what the population of Opis was prior to its destruction. Furthermore, there are seven size-7 and five size-6 worlds in the Core, which could between them represent anywhere from 75 million to 750 million people, so while it is certainly plausible that Chicomoztoc is home to a significant majority of the Core's population, it's also possible that Chicomoztoc's population is less than an eighth of the Core's "present-day" total while an Opis which really did have a population in excess of a billion could plausibly have been home to less than half of the Sector's total population at the time of its destruction.

Another point of caution for these kinds of relative population figures is that we do not have reliable - or in most cases any - "historical" population data. Opis may have been destroyed only ~25 years before the game starts, but that's still time enough for significant changes in population to have occurred, especially considering that we know that the Second AI War was fought - and Hanan Pacha and Killa essentially wiped out - in the intervening period.

* Other ranges are possible, depending on how loose you want to be with the numbers. 950 thousand, for example, is a number in the "hundreds of thousands," i.e. size-5, but it's also "about" a million, i.e. size-6, while if you want to be nit-picky you could also argue that size-N must be strictly more than 10^N since for example one hundred thousand isn't the "hundreds of thousands" that size-5 is described as representing.

9

General Discussion / Re: Where is Pontus to find the probe

« on: March 12, 2024, 11:15:00 PM »

Pontus is a planet. You can press e to open the intel tab. In the intel tab there will be a number of selections at the bottom of the map. Go to accepted and click on the mission. If you press S after this it will autopilot you there. But it will also produce an arrow for you to follow (and show you where this mission is on the map)

This mission may be hard for you to complete if you're new. Sneaking missions are... a bit difficult frankly. Remember to use the "go dark" ability and save often (it may be frustrating depending on your fleet)

The stealth segment of the tutorial is the data retrieval from Derinkuyu Mining Station. Going out past Pontus to salvage the probe for a Gamma Core doesn't require stealth at all, and in fact more or less requires you to sensor-ping once you get to Pontus in order to actually locate the derelict.

10

General Discussion / Re: Putting Luddic Majority(upgraded) to good use.

« on: March 12, 2024, 11:07:55 PM »

It's kind of strange to see people going out of their way to tech-mine ruins. The payoff is relatively low, and it's faster and easier to just explore the whole sector. Pretty much a guarantee to get enough colony items for a seven figure income, that way.

you can do both, though. i've seen vast ruins give a pristine nanoforge or similar on the first month. and meanwhile i haven't found a single biofactory embryo or catalytic core with ~75% of the sector explored.

Maybe it's been changed since the last time I bothered with Tech Mining, but in my experience Tech Mining's drop rates for anything actually useful are abysmally low. It's all well and good to say you've gotten a pristine nanoforge or whatever out of it in the first month, but I've never once gotten anything actually useful out of it - just loads of more or less worthless commodities and the occasional blueprint I rarely if ever actually use.

As far as I'm concerned, Tech Mining's a waste of an industry slot, and developing a planet up to Size 6 just to decivilize it so you can then Tech Mine it strikes me as an enormous waste of time.

11

Suggestions / Re: Let your faction be able to claim uninhabited core systems

« on: March 12, 2024, 11:59:06 AM »

- I have a Hegemony commission. For whatever reason I also have a Duzahk variant with a bunch of planets in it. I get to colonize these easily.

- Through Protagonist Nonsense/lucky rolls on the gas giants I hazard-pay my way up to all the planets in here being functional. I fight off the Crises, I have a ton of size 6s, etc etc etc

- I then resign my Hegemony commission and declare independence. By all rights, this system should be mine

By all rights, this system belongs to the Hegemony - they have a preexisting claim and you colonized it under their auspices. Reasonably, if you want to take the system with you when you 'leave' the Hegemony, you should have to fight a war or have a great deal of influence in high places.

12

Suggestions / Re: Hammerhead Rear Weapon Arcs

« on: February 28, 2024, 06:41:08 PM »

Apogee is in a pretty similar position, Sunder outguns it by a LOT for the DP.

So? Destroyers generally bring more firepower per DP than cruisers do, and the Apogee also brings a lot of noncombat utility while still managing to be a decent if unexceptional line cruiser.

13

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: February 28, 2024, 04:49:26 PM »

Once again: There is nothing in the game that requires you to go after deserters if you don't want to do so or cannot justify it to yourself or whatever. If you feel that going after deserters is evil and you don't want to play an evil character, then don't pursue deserter bounties.

I mean, if you walked into a bandit camp and these bandits were like hiding out there. They would stop you from leaving, because they would know that you were going to snitch on them, probably.

Why are you so desperate to make up excuses for the behavior of the deserter fleets? Scavengers rarely run stealthy fleets, so a typical deserter fleet should spot a scavenger at about the same time that the scavenger spots them, and the two fleets should be able to determine one another's composition and identity at about the same time a little later; the only thing that the deserter should need to do to avoid being reported is to just leave the scavenger alone and maybe maneuver to avoid contact if the scavenger decides to investigate the large mobile unidentified contact instead of being smart and leaving it alone. What are they going to do, report that they encountered an unidentified contact in (system) about a month or two ago and avoided it?

Also, the "moral" way to deal with this is simply to avoid contact - that's perfectly normal behavior in the fringe, where pretty much nobody is running around with their transponder active and you don't know if that contact's friendly or hostile. You leave it alone, you hope it leaves you alone, and you run if it starts coming for you without identifying itself unless you're willing to risk a fight. Attacking other fleets is quite possibly the worst way you can go about remaining hidden - one of the victims gets away and reports that a fleet of such-and-such a composition attacked them in (system); someone else in the area sees the engagement and reports it; an automated distress beacon goes off; the victims' friends come looking for them, see you, and get away with that information; whatever - and maybe just move on if they're that concerned about it. Attacking people just for coming within sensor range calls attention to your position, and on the whole probably makes it more likely - not less - that someone will come after you.

I mean, the excuse with the bounties. Like you come into a system in the middle of nowhere with a large fleet, then approach the fleet, and then you're like surprised they attack you? Like why would you be there, to sell them flowers? Of course they're going to attack you.

You have as much right as they do to be there, there's several in-game reasons (surveying, scavenging, Galatian Academy missions, possibly hyperspace topography scans) for you to be there that have nothing whatsoever to do with the deserters, and if they just avoided contact what would you have to report? "An unidentified contact avoided us a month or two ago over in (system)?"

Attacking anyone who comes near is about the least moral and stupidest way to go about remaining hidden, especially when there's nothing to keep you in that position after you're spotted. People aren't going to go out of their way to report a fleet that left them alone while they went about their business; they're much more likely to make noise about a fleet that attacked them without provocation, even if it's only to let their buddies know about the danger, and a faction-style fleet playing pirate will draw even more attention from exactly the people that the deserters presumably don't want to come looking for them.

14

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: February 27, 2024, 09:01:39 PM »

that's not really that much better... Bounty hunting is literally a job of non-trial serving of institutions by taking money without asking any questions to gun down some people you know nothing about. For all we know Sindrian Diktat deserters could have been the good guys, but the player is so absent-minded they just walk up to them, beat them up. Take the paycheck and leave.

One, you don't need to accept every job that's offered - nothing in the game prevents you from playing a 'moral' bounty hunter who only goes after pirates and Pathers or refuses to work for dubious factions/contacts or whatever other restrictions you need to let you justify your character's actions in whatever moral framework you want to use.

Two, I don't believe that the available evidence really supports the idea that deserters are ever the 'good' guys, even when they're deserters from morally-suspect factions like the Sindrian Diktat. Deserters more or less universally command faction-style fleets primarily composed of combatants, which calls their innocence of their former faction's potential crimes into question - you don't become a highly-placed officer in a military organization without putting in the time, following orders, and developing connections even when that organization holds closely to the meritocratic ideal, and even the commander of the lowliest patrol formation you can see in the game is reasonably a fairly senior officer given the nature of their command - and isn't exactly a positive indicator for their peaceful intentions; hide out in the fringe rather than taking shelter with any major faction other than the one from which they deserted, or even an independent/pirate world, which suggests that no one in the Core was willing to take them in even when we're talking about a faction that has no real need to fear reprisals from the deserter's former employer, as for example would be the case with the Hegemony and a deserter from some random independent world's military; and act like any other pirate when given the opportunity (e.g. attacking independent scavenger fleets that just happen to be in the area). Maybe these were once honorable and upstanding citizens of civilized space who left their former factions when they could no longer reconcile their consciences with what they knew of that faction's activities, but more likely they're amoral/immoral opportunists with just enough charisma to drag many/most of their subordinates along with them when they saw a chance to turn pirate and took it, or possibly even tried (and failed) to become the next Leonis, Loke, Kanta, Andrada, or whoever.

15

Suggestions / Re: Removing free storage

« on: February 21, 2024, 03:49:19 PM »

I do not see any positive gameplay benefit coming from the removal of free storage in abandoned stations, and as far as I'm concerned every game I've ever played that has had a mechanic that allows something to steal things from the player has been worse for it.

If you don't like using the stations, then don't use them.