Problem #1: unreliable exploration
Description: the chance of finding high value loot early on is not any different to the chance of finding it later. It can be liquidated for a significant money boost and, if done on the open market, can be regained at a later date, when hundreds of thousands of credits are no longer as meaningful as they were in the early game. Whether the player will profit immensely from a salvaging run or barely scrap by is mostly out of player's hands.
I'm not sure how contacts will affect exploration missions in the next patch, but currently, exploration missions are the best return for minimal player investment in the game, so I'm a bit confused why players would only being scrapping by if they choose exploration to make credits.
Undirected exploration on your own is extremely random in payout, but if you actually pick up 2 or 3 missions out in the same direction (or even all directions really), the profit margins jump up. Especially for a single frigate. Personally, I never sell rare items - even early game, the credits are kinda trivial relative to the typical mean type between finding them. Exploration missions typically payout between 30k and 90k, depending on distance. It really only takes 1-2 missions to see the same payout as a corrupted nanoforge. 5-10 will get you the equivalent of pristine nanoforge, and in the current patch, quite reliable to find given they just pop up on your intel tab.
As a quick sanity check, I just created a vanilla game, wayfarer + shepherd start, grabbed an exploration missions at time zero, bought a mudskipper and dram, did the mission, filled everything up (supplies, some machinery, fuel, some volatiles), grabbed another mission that popped up, finished it, grabbed another 2 missions, and in 17 minutes real time am sitting at 330k credits along with my 4 frigates at around Jul 1, cycle 206. And one of those missions was a derelict far from the center (neutrino detector is key) in a binary system. I literally have sold nothing, nor even salvaged anything - simply noted locations of interest and moved on. And that's skipping missions I couldn't do because they were gas giant explorations. I'd say I tend to spend more than 20 minutes looking for a pristine nanoforge, so even at the beginning of the game, its not worth it to me to sell them if I do find one.
330k is enough for a small destroyer pack or a single cruiser fully fitted. It is pretty trivial to collect enough credits to settle a colony in under an hour with a tier 1 starbase and a cheap industry as a base to store my stuff in a system with potential to grow (since I just peak into systems as I fly by to get initial intel) without fighting a single ship or selling a single commodity, and reputation in the bank for every faction because of the missions.
Your description of the problem sounds like you are objecting to the credit to effort ratio that exploration provides. What do you see as the range of typical credits per time investment of the player currently for exploration, and what kind of range would you like to see after being fixed?
Solution: some of the better exploration loot could be moved to semi-quest structures that would put some risk (or, at least, interaction) to acquiring the high value loot, for example:
- Recently salvaged station that can traced to some fleet in the system. You can choose to fight them for loot or threaten into sharing the spoils, if you are strong enough.
- A new kind of item, encrypted data, can be cracked either by your fleet over time (bigger ships crack encryption faster), instantly by a trustworthy cracker for a significant sum of money or instantly by a shady individual for much less, but with high risk of having the data sold to someone else on the side, so you have to be first to the location of the loot cache or use gunboat diplomacy to make the first guy hand it over. Or, well it doesn't necessarily have to be location of a loot cache, it can be location of a ship or a condition to a planet that's hidden until you discover it (though the last case doesn't provide any immediate benefit).
- Some explorarium hardware could still work, but be unpowered. You could return the power to open the survey ship instead of drilling and sawing it open, but it will also power on (or just activate) nearby drones, forcing you into a fight to access the goodies. This would also have the benefit that a harder fight would happen for a reason, instead of just scaling with how much stuff you salvaged already.
Alternatively, it could be selling high value commodities that could be made riskier. Instead of simply going to black market and selling the nanoforge there, the player could have to go to a bar and look for the buyer, with the risk that selling to some buyers might have unintended consequences. Or, well, you could just turn it to the authorities for safer, lower payout.
I'm not opposed to more scripted missions/storyline type stuff, I'm curious why you're using combat fleet as the gating. Right now, optimal exploration fleets look different from optimal bounty hunting/combat fleets. These kinds of story lines leading to combat favor larger fleets with larger combat ships, making exploration fleets look more like bounty fleets, in turn leading to less fleet diversity in the game.
I was under the impression small fleet exploration was supposed to be riskier because of pirate salvage fleets, redacted systems, and the like being out in the deep black, and if you run into them, you need to flee. If you've got a bounty fleet dealing with these situations, is there really any risk, or is it merely a gear check? Or simply turning exploration into an alternative to bounty fleet hunting?
Personally, stuff more like pulsar beam effects, or black hole effects make more sense as risky exploration options - as then you're sacrificing supplies and/or fuel and the like instead of requiring your fleet to carry X guns. A combat fleet handles those kinds of situations worse given the worse cargo to supply recovery ratios.
Problem #2: easy access of ships
Description: currently, getting some of the better ships (Tempest being most prominent example) is mostly tied to luck or persistence. And money. But if you acquire a significant sum of money through luck, you can scour through the colonies in the core and come with a bunch of new, powerful toys. The player can move up the food chain quickly and without risk with one good salvage run.
Solution: decrease the chances for dedicated combat ships to spawn in open and black markets. Instead, the source of the player's ships should be contacts, legal or underworld, perhaps through temporary access to military market or other means. However, because getting new ships now involved earning money and then earning reputation to gain the access, this process should not be too time consuming, and military market ship selection should be enticing. Depending on how quickly the player is meant to acquire contacts, perhaps ships in certain sizes (e.g. frigates) should still be available in open and black market, as they currently are.
I dunno how I feel about turning reputation into a further grind for ships. It does makes sense thematically. I just don't like having to gain reputation 3 or 4 times with all the vanilla factions, and then doing it with a bunch of mod factions is just depressing in a single game. On the other hand, the black market is probably a bit too well stocked at the moment in terms of ships as well.
More important than ship hulls however, is guns/missiles/fighters. Right now I tend to find I'm more likely to be weapon limited than hull limited at the very beginning of the game. If I see railguns for example, I buy a few of them if not the entire stack, at the beginning of the game for example. If I see a tempest hull, I'd be like, shrug. Especially if I don't have appropriate medium energy weapons at hand. I don't need rare combat ships to do well, I just need common combat ships well fit.
Perhaps if there were ways to get larger chunks of reputation at a time late game. When you can earn enough credits to buy a capital in 1-2 bounties, but only get 5 or 10 reputation, it just feels meh having to do it 7 or 8 more times to get to a high enough reputation to have access to that faction's capitals. At that point, might as well just turn off the transponder, attack a capital fleet, salvage the ship, and remove the D-mods at a port with all the extra cash.
Problem #3: monotonic fights
Description: early bounties involve fighting pirates, who have limited and poor ship selection. There's little to be gained to the player from enemy fleet and the whole profit comes from the bounty, until you fight fleets with Falcons (P). It's also boring to fight the same few ships again and again.
Solution: pirate fleets could benefit from some randomisation. There could be a low chance for each ship that it will be replaced with any other ship from the whole boardable ship pool or from a particular faction's ship pool. This would provide some variety to fights and more valuable loot. If there's a concern that it might take too much personality from pirates, then only officers should have a possibility of commanding a random ship.
It is an interesting idea, although it would bump up the pirate fleet difficulty. Hammerheads even with D-mods, for exapmle, certainly can be much harder to deal with than a Buffalo mk II. Also potentially gets scary as you add in mod factions. Given officers are generally on the biggest/most expensive ships in the fleet, limiting to officers isn't really much of a difference in my mind, or perhaps increases the difficulty even further by guaranteeing only the best ships get upgraded to real faction ships. Although, even terrible pirate frigates are distraction ships that you can just throw out there and not care about.
I guess I'd be interested to know how much trouble new players currently have with pirate bounty fleets and if they're looking for higher difficulty and better salvage options, or the current difficulty is better? With the contact system coming up in the next patch, we might have more fine grained control over the risk/reward of bounties, so this might not be necessary.
