Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Planet Search Overhaul (07/13/24)
Isn't 0.97a already on 17?Nope
People buy on the black market with Transponder on?If you're buying a couple of weapons, it makes no difference. Sure I'll pay a bit extra but that's peanuts in the end.
I get what the OP is saying but as one who pretty much uses the black market as intended (rarely, and in small doses), all this does is force me into a stealth quest every time I want to shop around the major markets. 99% of the time, I use the black markets to buy, not sell, so the proposed change would be a great inconvenience to me. I'm not against it, per se, but I'm also not abusing constant Pather shortages to make millions from trade early on. The problem I would have is that it might take me 2-3 minutes to coordinate a sneaky way in only to find the black market has nothing I want.Same here, sometimes I find a weapon/hullmod that I really need and I buy that since it's on the way. I generally sell everything through the open market since I get my money from bounty hunting and exploration missions.
The thought occurred to me leave black market access as-is but limit how much can be sold on the black market as some function of colony size and stability. That is to say, there is a finite amount of funds available to buy up your stuff. A backwater frontier world shouldn't be able to pay out millions of credits for your Domain-era colony items or buy up strategic levels of commodities. If you want to sell large quantities or rare items, you'll have to go major population centers because they're the only ones with the capital to actually buy it.
Military markets could function similarly, albeit with much more purchasing power and their own limitations as to what they will or won't buy. Of course, you have to rep to access them and while off-topic, I've always thought the military market tariff should be a function of reputation (i.e. higher rep lowers the tariff). It does create "preferred market" status (i.e. optimal play might be to go to the same military market each time) but that's a perk for trade, too.
Why was nebula terrain removed anyways?AI wasn't aware of it.
DEMs returning to the ship is a little too much for me but balancing them around regenerating ammo seems interesting to me. As in, they have only have 1 ammo capacity but they reload semi-regularly. Their below-average damage is offset by more long-term use.And that would kill Gorgons and Hydra.
I suppose the downside is that the AI would not be particularly good at using them well or you’d just set them on auto-fire and forget about them. Neither makes for compelling gameplay.
