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Author Topic: Ship costs and availability  (Read 16779 times)

TrashMan

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Ship costs and availability
« on: August 23, 2019, 04:51:36 AM »

I can't shake the impression that's it's all fubar.
It's far too easy to get rare ships from markets - no need for comissions. The black market and even the regular market have an absurd selection of high-end ships. Ships in general are far too cheap, and ship restoration far too expensive.

Currently gameplay seems exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Instead of salvaging ships, it's easier and cheaper to buy a new one, which goes against all common sense. Ships are expensive. They should be, and obnoxiously so. You could easily quadripple the price of ships.

Salvaging a ship and repairing it (not restoring, just repairing), then selling it should net you some profit.
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Megas

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #1 on: August 23, 2019, 05:47:37 AM »

I bet next version, restoration may be more important, depending has easy or hard it is to stockpile story points.  If it easier to grind for money than story points, then restoration (or reloading games) will be the way to preserve ships with built-in hullmods.  I agree that restoration is (usually) too expensive.  At endgame, I scuttle broken ships and build new ones.  I will not do that if story points are too tedious to stockpile.  (Do not want to burn two story points per ship I build.)

Most ships are more expensive than they were before 0.9.1.

I like that good ships can be bought without need of commission.  Annoying that the only way to get good ships in previous releases was to loot them from the enemy (since it was impossible to get more than one commission at a time, no one faction had everything, and some stuff was still too rare).  For really rare ones, I have attacked faction fleets just to steal their ships.  With colonies, we can build them, but having heavy industry eventually attracts absurd ten capital death fleets.  (Not immediately, but probably scales faster than player can keep up if he is not already endgame powerful.)

The main benefit of commission is more income (player is probably killing pirates) and no expeditions from that faction.  Also colonizing a good random planet in their system.
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sotanaht

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #2 on: August 23, 2019, 05:55:57 AM »

Non-civilian Capital ships don't usually show up in black markets.  If you want a Paragon for example prior to getting the blueprint and heavy industry, you are going to need a TT commission.  Considering that capital ships are the only ones that actually accomplish much of anything, I'd say that commissions are still EXTREMELY important.

Restoration is pretty questionable.  I also think it's pretty dumb how recovered d-mod ships sell for practically nothing.  Id think the sell value should at least be worth the effort of salvaging them and dragging them back to civilization, but as it is the scuttle resources are probably more credits.  I guess in the long run though it's probably better that you don't feel like you have to salvage and sell ships, because that would end up costing a lot of player time in exchange.
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TrashMan

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #3 on: August 23, 2019, 06:01:10 AM »

The entire balance seems backwards.

I don't mind restoration being expensive - it should be.
But ships are comparatively too cheap. Naturally, if you increase ship prices across the board, then you'll also have to increase bounty prices.

Getting high-level faction ships should be possible in only 3 ways:
1. buying with commission
2. salvaging (but the original owner faction might require some bribing to overlook it)
3. Black market - but with a big reputation penalty. You cannot hide that you do not have a government contract of purchase, nor can you hide that what you are driving is a Conquest that was reported lost two weeks ago.

If the US was to loose a destroyer and if I were to salvage it, you can bet that the US military wouldn't just ignore me as I come to port. They might take it from me by force, or hey might agree to allow me to keep it (for a price)

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Non-civilian Capital ships don't usually show up in black markets.

I see them all the time. Perhaps some of the mods require some tag to make them non-sellable or something, but I seem to recall seeing vanilla capitals on OPEN MARKET.

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John5

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #4 on: August 23, 2019, 06:01:30 AM »

IMO game like this, role-playing as a privateer should be a thing. but it isn't.

And what about the raid?
Raiding colony is totally unprofitable. It's just the loot box for blueprints and that's all. Commodities are so much underpriced, Selling a few hundreds of them which acquired from raid give you a penny.
In M&B Warband You can be the badass bandit who does raiding the village for living, but in Starsector it's not. This makes me sad.

I feel like this game is a kind of liner. While it should be a sandbox space game.

But I love this game. damn combat is too good  ;D
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Sinosauropteryx

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #5 on: August 23, 2019, 06:02:29 AM »

Currently gameplay seems exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Instead of salvaging ships, it's easier and cheaper to buy a new one, which goes against all common sense.
This hasn't been my experience at all. Whenever I sought to buy ships, particularly trying to move up a tier (like frigate to destroyer) the problem always came up that the weapon availability wasn't there. The ship would be underequipped, and without D-mods it would be very expensive to run. The higher tier of bounties I could now take on wouldn't always compensate for the increased overhead, and I did a lot of treading water.

Nowadays I don't buy ships unless I'm already well broken into a tier, with weapons to spare, and need a specialist role in that tier, or if I'm rolling in cash for some reason (TT loan or early value treasure find). Otherwise, I almost exclusively build fleet through salvage. Money is spent on supplies first, then noncombat ships to increase my range and duration in the field. (I guess in this sense I do buy ships - I assume that isn't what you're talking about.) The core fighting force is low-investment tanks backed by carriers, all salvaged. Level 3 Field Repairs keeps running costs low. Climbing tiers happens organically, and I believe every run to date has had me find a derelict capital floating somewhere before I ever had to think about buying one, or fighting one to try and salvage it.

However, I do agree with both these statements:
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You could easily quadripple the price of ships.

Salvaging a ship and repairing it (not restoring, just repairing), then selling it should net you some profit.
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Grievous69

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #6 on: August 23, 2019, 06:16:08 AM »

Ship prices were already increased a couple of times iirc. But even after that there's always someone ''more, mooooree, anything except the Wolf should cost a million credits''. Ship prices are perfectly fine, and also I have no idea what are you on about regarding availability. In 2 of my vanilla playthroughs, there were ships I haven't even seen for sale (military markets ofc). Black markets tend to sometimes have decent ships (I found a pristine Apogee on a pirate base in a middle of nowhere), if they never had anything good, then there is no point to it. Open markets on the other hand are useless and don't even have the basic PD weapons.

Restoration prices could be a biiiit lower tho.
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TrashMan

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #7 on: August 23, 2019, 06:27:46 AM »

I can do a single cargo run and have enough money to buy 2 cruisers. That's BS.
These are military starships, not used cards.
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #8 on: August 23, 2019, 06:31:02 AM »

Does restoration need to be made cheaper? Personally I think so.
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Grievous69

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #9 on: August 23, 2019, 06:45:16 AM »

I can do a single cargo run and have enough money to buy 2 cruisers. That's BS.
These are military starships, not used cards.

Jesus why people look at ship prices like it's all there is. You have to be able to maintain such ships, not just buy them and finito. You need crew, supplies, fuel, weapons and so on. Sure you could buy a cruiser in early game as fast as possible but that's not gonna end up well.
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Nysalor

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #10 on: August 23, 2019, 08:02:30 AM »

I can do a single cargo run and have enough money to buy 2 cruisers. That's BS.
These are military starships, not used cards.

Consider that by 'a single cargo run' you mean 'a large fleet of cargo ships dropping off enough of some critical commodity to resolve a serious planetwide shortage, for which they charge premium price'. I mean, if back in the 70s some commercial concern had suddenly popped up with a shipment of enough billion tons of oil to resolve the oil crisis, you BET we would have paid them enough to buy a couple of aircraft carriers.

 Interstellar trade is not a small business; if you're looking for a realistic justification, consider that every credit in-game is probably something like a thousand or ten thousand dollar-equivalents, and a 'unit' of cargo is probably measured in metric tons.
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BTracer

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #11 on: August 23, 2019, 08:31:45 AM »

These are military starships, not used cars.
They are Military TYPE ships, not ships owned exclusively by the military. As far a lore goes, anyone with the blueprint can build them. After 206 cycles, 6 warring factions, and billions of private citizens, and Pirates, I'm under the belief that yes, anyone can own one and the 'military' wouldn't raise an eyebrow. Also yes, they are very much like used cars. Traded, repaired, sold, recovered, stolen, modified, etc. The very definition of used car.

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Salvaging a ship and repairing it (not restoring, just repairing), then selling it should net you some profit.
As for salvaging, imagine for a second it was profitable (I'm pretty sure it was at one point) - in an average game session, how many ships do you destroy? 10,100, 1000? Even if you got half the listed price we're talking 10's if not 100's of million in profit. In a game dedicated to blowing up ships, I can't think of a way to make salvaging profitable without breaking the balance completely. Doesn't mean there isn't a way, but I haven't seen your suggestion on how to make it work.
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Sinosauropteryx

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #12 on: August 23, 2019, 09:06:12 AM »

Doesn't mean there isn't a way, but I haven't seen your suggestion on how to make it work.
Your post gives me an idea - the comparison between cars, selling, and scrapping. When you're selling at the market, you're probably selling for scrap, hence why you can do it instantly, and why the value is about the same as scrapping it. You haven't found a buyer for the ship, just the scrap.

So why not a ship listing? If you don't need the money right away, you can buy cargo space and store your ship (as the game already lets you do) with the option to name a sale price. Undercutting market rates will get your ship sold faster, and vice versa.
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Sarissofoi

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #13 on: August 23, 2019, 09:47:40 AM »

I am agree with Trashman.
Whole PROGRESSION in game don't exist.
You can straight jump from doing few smuggler runs or exploration mission with the dram to end game content(if you know what are you doing).
getting ships both from salvaging and from black market is easy(but getting from black market is even easier and cheaper - if you want pristine one).
The late game suffer from it greatly because if player can jump into it right now - the only way is just to throw more fleets with more ships at him.
Its get boring fast and its go against LORE(yeah read it - all of it) and general sector settings.
Trading usually is not profitable, black market trading is greatly profitable and EASY, transporting cargo scale with your cargo holds and pay well(even if you need find missions manually), exploration is easy cash(and safe one even if quite time consuming), commissions is essentially free cash(some people compared it to NEETbucks and rightfully) that you get for nothing, colonies print money, pirates run crazy with infinite amounts of ships.
Don't get me wrong I still get my enjoyment from game and have great times but its mostly against it that with it.

Sector is essentially some African tier colony(or maybe Australia compared to amount of people with dirty background getting send there) that is cut from the world and gone crazy with out no tech and aids(as it was developing and rely essentially on Domain bucks).
Hegemony should be (and maybe Sindra to lesser extent) only one to have military grade equipment(like Ambrams and Humvees) as they were military arm of Domain here.
Tri tachs should rely on their own PMC forces and some rare high tech one(but its should be rare). Other militaries should have some older Doamin stuff(like T-55 and other post soviet stuff) and most(even including Hegemony and TT but maybe to some lower extent) should just run with reporposed civilians and old scavanged military stuff(think about technicals and mad max style armored cars).

Cost and availability to real military grade equipment and high tech stuff should be very limited. Sure quartermasters can miss or get away with few missing Humvee or M16 but not with missing aircraft carrier or dozens of Abrams or F-16. getting them on black market should cost a lot of cash(A LOT), need right connections and still have high chance of failing.
Player should either get high rep and license for it or find them in the wild.

I mean the whole trading/black marketing thing is kind of shallow right now.
There should be trading license that allow trading stuff in open market(with lesser tariff) or maybe it should be rep scaling. Even forbidden goods should be possible to trade if you have high enough rep and righ connections(license) like Weapon dealer or medical dealer license(for drugs and weapon trading). On the other hand black market should be limited by connections or/and need for bribes. So you want some stuff that is not available for you at open market(either illegal or you black rep/license/ there is shortage) - you either need connections(good rep) with local quartermaster/postmaster or criminals.
If you track goods by the way you acquire them - its open whole new thing for trade/smuggling. Star Traders:Frontiers is the best example for that sort of thing9sadly the game have less enjoyable combat and gameplay). Liek you need to forge papers for that new set of 'xxx' cargo if you want to sell it legally.
Yes that would mean that all factions have full set of licenses - making cross faction trading harder but infaction trading easier(if you get only one set). Some faction would need only cash payment for it, some good rep, most both.
Salvage is another matter. Now for some different reason selling ships is completely unprofitable. I get them but it could expanded.
Make player get a salvaging license(with few degrees maybe) if he want to salvage in peace - and track ship by faction origin. So a Conquest scavenged from battlefield over Sindra - you can haul it to Sindra docks(if you have salvaging license) and get a cash prize for it - or get it into pirate dock and repaint/hack ID - or simply cut it into pieces if nobody watching. Even if player repaint/change ID chips if he appear with conquest and don't have right papers on it  - he is asking for trouble.

Overall I wish we get longer early/mid phase and definitly squah the amount of power level in the end game(that come to fast).
Now if player don't play with self imposed rules/RP early game is short and mid game is non existent. Squashing the size of the fleets would be good start.

Thaago

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Re: Ship costs and availability
« Reply #14 on: August 23, 2019, 10:05:07 AM »

Nah, ship costs and availability are fine.
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