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« on: June 15, 2021, 02:19:59 AM »
Lol I think it extends well past early game. Get a Phantom/Valkyrie and say 200 Marines and you can just do a circuit of raids on Pirate stations/colonies every few months, accruing lots of drugs/volatiles/supplies and sell them wherever is paying the most, total investment of say 70k and marine losses are negligible. I can crush any mid-sized pirate fleet with my LP Brawler and two officered LP Lashers. There's no risk since Pirate fleets are weak and they always hate you anyway. Currently my view is Starsector is great as a game for exploring star systems and engaging in spaceship battles (ignoring the problem of horrible AI loadouts) but is lacking in the resource management department currently. There's basically no hobo phase, or sense of having to scrape the pan to gain power and wealth. A game that does resource management really well is Battle Brothers, which is structurally similar to Starsector. In BB you HAVE to take on risk to make money or get good gear, there are very few free lunches, and the way progression works with gear means once something becomes easy to fight it probably also isn't very rewarding to fight anymore.
Pirates are simultaneously weak AND rewarding to fight, there's no stage at which it isn't rewarding to crush hilariously weak pirate fleets. In Battle Brothers the early enemies drops, and the rewards associated with fighting them under contract are comparatively low and stop being worthwhile later on, you have to graduate to riskier enemies with greater rewards. The equivalent in Starsector could be having to start fighting pathers instead of pirates, given they're somewhat more threatening and their stations are larger. But there's no need to, I can just raid pirate worlds and squash easy pirate bounties for cash. Not that it isn't more lucrative to fight pathers, or fight remnants for AI cores. But you don't really need to to make a lot of money, there's so many easy ways to make money or free lunches like raiding pirate colonies that the player doesn't need to take on risk to progress, you can safely ignore high-risk bounties and situations to accrue power safely.
A balance pass that made the economic aspect of the game less forgiving would:
- Improve AI loadouts so that even early pirates don't just give you their ass on a silver platter to spank. I want to cry when I see pirate ships sporting light mortars, swarmers, and mining lasers.
- Make the player actually have to take on risk to make money/progress by doing away with free lunch payouts, work such as bounties and probe/survey/bounty missions could also stop being handed to the player on a platter, all work could require actually having to forge contacts and build a reputation. The alternative being to scavenge which is less reliable (and could involve more risk) or fight/raid which should also be riskier.
That said this could all get in the way of the game letting you smash cool spaceships together so there should be a mode that is basically like the game is now where money is easy to come by. But I'd definitely like to try the game with more punishing resource management where losing a ship is more of an issue and something like finding an Alpha Core is more of a big deal.
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