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Author Topic: Salvage Game Loop/Economy  (Read 1294 times)

Eji1700

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Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« on: November 06, 2019, 04:19:44 PM »

Actually salvaging:
In 90% of cases, if I don't salvage something it's because it would be too tedious to do/not worth my time.  From there there's about 9% where I don't have room to do it right (orbital station usually), and then finally there's the 1% of times where I can't because of enemies.

Further the actual process is "click through the menus, grab everything, control click on fuel/metals if i go over the limit".

In short, there's next to no thought put into it, it's just me mashing through menus.

Economy:
The other issue I find with salvaging is that you just hoard all of it.  Yeah you could sell weapons/ships, but it's not worth it (in part because of how frequently/easily you can salvage them), so you wind up with an apocalyptic supply of weapons sitting in Corvus or one of your planets inventories.


So looking at this, the 3 main payoffs to a salvage that actually get my attention are:

1. Blueprints
2. Recover a hard to acquire ship
3. Ship systems (fast missile racks, ITU, whatever).

and then misc (usually a nanoforge/core or a relevant amount of trade goods, which is just money).  notice that i've NEVER not salvaged because I was worried about losing machinery or crew.

1 and 3 matter less and less the longer the game goes on.  Usually by the time i'm ready to start up some colonies i've already got 70-90% of the blueprints in the game.  I'm the ultimate hodgepodge empire before I've even started, or can theme however I want.  There's no "hunt" for blueprints, or any real strategy to it.  Just play the game, you'll get them.  Ditto on ship systems (add check out the markets for this one, it takes a very short amount of time to get most of them).

So what was once an interesting moment of salvaging a ruin or battlefield quickly becomes done for the sole purpose of "i need supplies/fuel" or the rare case when you see a legion floating in space.

Some possible solutions:

1. Make salvaging take time/more costs:

Maybe not EVERY salvage (post battle shouldn't for example) but when i come across ruins/orbital relays/shipwrecks maybe it should be done the same was as a comm sniffer install used to.  This would lead to many more situations where you can't salvage because of enemy threats, and allows skills/systems to modify it.

2. Change ship/weapon drop rates:

I think ships should be much more likely to not be salvageable at all.  The "Default" method to acquire a ship ought to be through the marketplace (and i have another topic i might do on the black market), not salvaging post battle.   This would allow an economy tweak to where selling a salvaged ship is now worth your time and yet another way to have salvage skills matter more.   This should be similar with weapons (maybe by complexity level) so you don't leave on a bounty hunt and come back 7 tech levels ahead of when you left from combat and incidental exploration. 

As a side effect this could lead to cheaper restoring.  Right now it's hyper expensive because it's pretty easy to wind up with a hanger full of d-modded hammerheads, so price is the only thing stopping you.  If that situation was actually rare you don't need restorations to always cost so much because there's other factors stopping the player.

3. Give it real costs:

Even if you don't add time to a salvage, losing a few crew and some machinery is a joke.  Machinery should NOT be so common from a salvage as it just feeds the infinite "oh look salvage is free" loop, but exploring that research station at the edge of a black hole while in emergency burn ought to come with threats to your CR at the very least (outside of the eburn).

4. Give resources more of a meaning-

This is a large one so i left it for last as it might be out of scope, but right now the only difference between metals and organs is the market price.  At the very least going into mid/end game it might be more interesting if constructing your own ships actually required resources, so I can look at an incidental amount of plutonics as maybe helping me build my own fresh Medusa rather than spare change that I have to click on more.  There's some precedent in building nav relays/machinery for salvage/using the neutrino detector, but I think giving all the various trade goods more of a gameplay use would help the salvage system matter more.  Maybe i'll think more about if i want to dump my metal for food if it can be turned into more heavy machinery that I need for X or Y reason.

Alternatively to all this, if salvage isn't meant to get much deeper, maybe it should take fewer clicks?  A "store/take all weapons" button would be nice at the very least.
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Plantissue

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2019, 10:47:34 AM »

You don't salvage when it is too tedious/ not worth your time. When does that occur? When money is no longer an issue. Your proposals will not change that. Adding time and "real" costs to salvaging would make it more tedious (it wasn't tedious before as clicking 3 buttons is not tedious, but your proposal now makes it tedious) and still not worth your time when money isn't an issue.
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Megas

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #2 on: November 08, 2019, 01:41:21 PM »

The big time waster is spamming Salvage on a debris field as many times as it takes until nothing is found, and then the depleted field stays there for a while (or forever if it is stable).  (I do this for research stations in case that special item is found on the final try before it is all gone.)  I would like to see Salvage take everything on the first go then remove the debris field.  Removing debris fields would also be nice in systems were my colonies are, because those fields tend to slow down my computer more than anything short of fighter spam.
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Eji1700

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2019, 03:45:50 PM »

You don't salvage when it is too tedious/ not worth your time. When does that occur? When money is no longer an issue. Your proposals will not change that. Adding time and "real" costs to salvaging would make it more tedious (it wasn't tedious before as clicking 3 buttons is not tedious, but your proposal now makes it tedious) and still not worth your time when money isn't an issue.
Which is why i proposed giving materials an actual use as opposed to "Money with extra clicks", and also making it so that salvage can be given more of a goal with better risk reward. 

I'm a hell of a lot more likely to salvage if i can direct it to something I might want (weapon/ship/core/blueprint), even if that means usually getting a lot less in post combat.  The generic "Salvage for supplies/fuel" should probably just be automatic when you stop in the right spots or post combat because the text that pops up is rarely, if ever, worth reading or even clicking through.
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bobucles

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #4 on: November 09, 2019, 05:44:31 AM »

I don't think anyone spams salvage to squeeze out those last 2 supplies, 4 fuel and 9 metal from the wreckage. The main reason to spam the salvage button is because a rare item still has a chance to spawn, even if it is remote. Even if the odds are one in a million, players are going to be tempted to play that slot machine.

I think if the salvage field quality is under a certain threshold, the chances of rare items should simply stop. You could justify it as the largest of items have already been thoroughly searched and picked up, so anything smaller than that is just nuts and bolts. Nothing left is big enough to be a rare drop. A good threshold rating might be between 5-15%, since that's already pushing the limits of ordinary salvage efforts anyway.

intrinsic_parity

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #5 on: November 09, 2019, 07:31:13 AM »

Didn't Alex say somewhere that he's getting rid of the multiple salvage mechanic entirely? You just salvage once and get what you get. I could be crazy but I feel like I heard that somewhere. That seems like a much better change, I don't think salvaging has enough depth to warrant all this effort. It's just a random reward for combat/exploration, so set the odds directly and minimize the tediousness of pulling the lever. The risk should come in getting to the point where you get to salvage. For combat, the risk is obvious, but for stations that could mean more significant defenders.
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Plantissue

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #6 on: November 09, 2019, 09:36:49 AM »

You don't salvage when it is too tedious/ not worth your time. When does that occur? When money is no longer an issue. Your proposals will not change that. Adding time and "real" costs to salvaging would make it more tedious (it wasn't tedious before as clicking 3 buttons is not tedious, but your proposal now makes it tedious) and still not worth your time when money isn't an issue.
Which is why i proposed giving materials an actual use as opposed to "Money with extra clicks", and also making it so that salvage can be given more of a goal with better risk reward. 

I'm a hell of a lot more likely to salvage if i can direct it to something I might want (weapon/ship/core/blueprint), even if that means usually getting a lot less in post combat.  The generic "Salvage for supplies/fuel" should probably just be automatic when you stop in the right spots or post combat because the text that pops up is rarely, if ever, worth reading or even clicking through.
If salvaging is tedious as money is no longer an issue then salvaging does not become any less tedious or interesting, just because the items you salvage can be used in the production of ships. You'll just straight up buy or transfer stock of the items yourself.
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Megas

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #7 on: November 09, 2019, 10:55:11 AM »

Didn't Alex say somewhere that he's getting rid of the multiple salvage mechanic entirely? You just salvage once and get what you get. I could be crazy but I feel like I heard that somewhere.
I think I read something of the sort too, although I cannot point to where I read it.
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BringerofBabies

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Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« Reply #8 on: November 09, 2019, 11:39:21 AM »

From a discussion about intel clutter from a ways back:
Quick update here:
1) Confirmed that generally, exploration intel will be removed for items once they've been salvaged, and
2) Made it behave the same way for debris fields, in addition to also making debris fields only scavengeable once

It may have also been mentioned other times, but that was the most recent place I found it.
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