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[sector_terror]

This is has been a long time coming, and it's about time. I want to discuss the game's profit and rewards for jobs and the balancing behind them. I've seen people talking about the issues with pay, personal and fleet development and I think it's time I make my comment. I won't poison the well right away so forgive me for extending a bit. Because a lot of issues stem from this.

   Before we discuss this I need to define two key terms, and that is the differentiation between risk and cost. Put simply, cost is the base money I have to chuck away just to take on a task(Personal or otherwise); The time given to finding a good job I can reasonably complete, the cost in fuel to get to and from systems, the cost in supplies for the time traveled, and the cost in crew and officer pay for said time traveled. These are inevitable and irretrievable win or lose. I will take SOME damage and I will lose supplies fielding ships. If a mission can't overcome this is means outright nothing, as might as well be a punishment I have to take just to stave off losing entirely. Having a follow-up quest as "punishment" for failing or a quest given at negative relationship values to re-build a factional reputation would justify a negative price, but that's a punishment not a normal task.
   Risk is what I put on the line, what could be lost. I'm not ever going to risk a buffalo in combat, but I could lose the escort ship for it. I'm not going to lose the tanker that never goes into battle, thus it's not a risk. But the cruiser I send in to potentially explode is. Every missions needs to have some acceptable risk to justify putting anything on the table at all, to make a battle more than a math equation and encourage using instinct run decision making. Do I go overkill knowing victory is absolute and cut heavily into my profits? Or do I take the risk for the extra moneys in reward. Do I take things slow and risk losing CR before the battle is won, or do I rush and risk damage I don't need to take for that extra time I now have not destroying my melee target.
   With this in mind every contact should ask this question when they give a job: What is the cost of this contract even being operated, and what is the risk it's asking me to put on the table. It's not unlikely to lose a single ship in battle, especially destroyers and, to some degree, frigates. At some points in the battle it's almost out of your control entirely. It's a wager, a risk, and the stronger the encounter the more is put at risk. Starting battles may only risk a frigate. Later ones mean even the cruisers aren't entirely safe. The idea you can walk into every encounter with no losses at all and with limited damage every time and still win, or even the majority, is idealistic at best. It's both breaking immersions to have that assumption be the requirement since the game world would never reasonably assume it under most conditions, but its just bad design to assume your players must be perfect and overcome even the most insane cheating AI.

   This isn't limited to bounties either. What is the price tag of a procurement missions? You'll have to wager against some security force to handle incoming enemies, likely enough to handle the raids of an enemy military patrol who would siege the colony down, sure, but that's unlikely. The main risk is simply the difficult of obtaining the necessary goods in the allotted time while handling the price of going to get it. For starting missions it's almost nothing, you have more than enough time to get 100 volotiles from Umbra at dirt cheap, if not just raid it, and come back without penalty. Even with taxing it cost next to nothing, meaning your profit can be huge with minimal risk. Not try doing that with 2000 volotiles. You'll need luck just to get that amount for cheap without running half the sector and spend more in fuel that the discount is worth. But you can still take risk to keep the profit up. But, you can say: take the risk of smuggling, knowing that the time needed to wait for patrols to give you an opening into the right planets may take so long the mission fails before you get everything. You can risk smuggling openly and losing reputation but risk getting caught. More price, but less risk. Maybe you decide to pay the taxes that mean minimal profit? Or, do you take the riskier route for substantially greater reward?

   With all this set out, there are a few ways to balance the missions. You can make the cost of the mission almost nothing and give players a slow but inevitable growth, with risk being minor and rewards being simply opportunities with potential; However, you can also run full risk reward and make the final missions tremendous rewards with strict limits that make risk a necessity with the potential for fantastic rewards, if the players can follow through. Starsector can do both favorably, but it's -heavily- favored for the latter. Everything in Starsector is expensive. Frigates not withstanding(as if they are made to be more expendable, hmmm) ships cost tremendous amounts of credits invested to replace. Damage is astronomically expensive, costing thousands for even minor hits and maintainance is an extremely high cost between officers, supplies, and crew. Going without a mission for a month until you get a "safe" mission can cost you 10s of thousands for a military capable fleet with a decent numbers of cruisers. And hard late-game multi-capital fleets 100s of thousands on maintanance -alone-. That's not even getting into the cost of keeping up with the AI officers in both story point pricing and money(I experimented with raising the officer limit to 20, I didn't get to 10 before the price became too much to maintain.) You can store ships not useful to a job your taking, but getting them back for a later job might cost extra and officers can't do that, nor can you for supplies and fuel, you have to upkeep them. Not that storage is a free solution either. With all this in mind, the more viscerally exciting high risk gameplay, where your perfect victories adds a full cruiser and a lot of breathing room for your finances, and where loss is devastating and can cost cycles worth of profit to undo, is Where starsector would shine, given the tools and prices for it are already in play. If not just because making jobs low risk and a slow methodical buildup would require changing almost every financial cost.

   And in that I can finally get to my conclusion, no, jobs is not balanced. Trade is -far- too profitable and bounties a bad joke. I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an items like 50 heavy armaments or 100 luxury goods paying profit of close to 25k, or just receive those numbers for absolute free and get raw profit for nothing. Meanwhile the starting bounties of 65k for 2 or three destroyers with maybe 5 officers and a few frigates, can become an astoundingly strong 120k for a capital ship and 5 cruisers with 17-19 enemy officers. In trade contracts I get tremendous turnout with little to not risk, with bounties I risk losing massive amounts of money if I so much as lose a single destroyer, sometimes with fleets made mostly of capital ships. With bounties, even if I gamed the system to twist everything into a perfect victory, saving and reloading constantly for it, I have to take tremendous risk just to break even, let alone obtain a victory, against enemies who are outright cheating and screwing costs they in no way could afford, and greater than I could ever afford to counter. I have no issue with the former given I want that challenge to my growing fleet, but when anything but perfect lands me in the middle of space, needing to scuttle ships because I have no hope of mainaining what I have, and chucking my crew into cryo-pods in deep space because I can't keep them all, it's a heartbreaker in both gameplay and immersion that is entirely unearned.

   And that's not even getting into the stealth missions where the high risk of being caught and losing 2-3 jobs worth of reputation if not failing the mission outright when you get caught and forced to turn transponder on(no job is worth going hostile) because there's not enough time to go back to being unnoticed.  Those are treated as even "Easier" than bounty contracts despite being possible to fail outright beyond your control. Not to mention setting you back cycles worth of work even if you success with anything less than a perfect run. And the difficulty doesn't scale to the size of your fleet either, which changes the difficulty of the mission entirely.

   I have my limits and as much as I was and still am in love with this update, I have to stop. I have for 2 games in a row now, ended up in space, helpless to do anything but start scrapping my fleet for supplies for the third time as I stagnate because any growth puts me in the range of bounty contracts way beyond the ability to make a profit without skyrocketing the difficulty to outright fake difficulty trash, and having to resort to abusing trade contacts. And I don't consider myself a bad player or pilot either, it's just that insane. I understand and respect Alex doesn't want players to grow so quickly they skip half the game or have such an easy time they start getting bored; But, this is becoming so ridiculous that maintaining a fleet pushes me to a level that isn't even fun. I don't want this to turn into an Atlas game where every fight only has "choice" as a blind lie because the only way to win is have X things, since anything but perfect gets you killed outright. The ships and weapons are incredibly balanced and Starsector has done an astounding job with making every possible option valuable, but when I see people saying the solution is to find the one unbalanced skill or ship and just abuse it to not end, I die a little inside. As it stands, the rewards are so underperforming, especially with bounties, that all I can do is abuse the -extremely- few jobs that are profitable to maintain myself until I have enough money to have some fun and enjoy the rest of the game.

     This can be fixed to. None of this is design element problems, they are just numbers. Cutting enemy officer spam en mass and just letting the cap be what the player can reasonably afford before the risk overtakes the reward so much that losing half the fleet is just a matter of time. Just like cutting the skill the ECM bonus of the gunnery implant skill would stop the ECM issue. If the rewards of the missions were adjusted to let a flawless victory be astoundingly rewarding, this would not be an issue. And if people want to rush into battle underpowered for the difficulty, let them do it, they will take jobs way below their requisite fleet "level" and grow faster than most as a reward. You can make quests and enemies with special NPCs that only happen at cap relationship level on the higher end groups, and are basically super-bosses where players are expected to lose without running the best of the best for the end-game if you'd like. But it shouldn't be put on every quest. And right now, I just cant keep doing this reload and play perfectly shenanigans.

[intrinsic_parity]

I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an item every month, cover numbers into over a million credits.

Those are not procurement missions, they are colony supply missions. You have to have a colony producing x amount of resources per month to complete them (I thought the same thing when I first saw them). Most of them are not completable until you have a quite large colony with the correct industry. I felt like they pay pretty poorly for the investment required most of the time. The millions of credit ones would require admin + alpha core + exploration item + story point boosted industries on a max size colony sometimes.

For my first play-through, I was almost exclusively funded by bounties and exploration loot. I know I felt a lot of logistics pressure until I took the supply upkeep reduction skill (and took a commission), and after that it was smooth sailing, so maybe that will help you? I also noticed an initial spike in bounty difficulty, but things leveled out a bit after, and I was reliably finding manageable ~150-200k bounties with only a bunch of cruisers. One capital with light support can actually be pretty manageable as well. Getting a good bounty contact to a high level also helps, since you can tune the bounty difficulty, but you have to put up with bad payouts until the reputation gets higher, which kinda sucks.

[sector_terror]

I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an item every month, cover numbers into over a million credits.

Those are not procurement missions, they are colony supply missions. You have to have a colony producing x amount of resources per month to complete them (I thought the same thing when I first saw them). Most of them are not completable until you have a quite large colony with the correct industry. I felt like they pay pretty poorly for the investment required most of the time. The millions of credit ones would require admin + alpha core + exploration item + story point boosted industries on a max size colony sometimes.

For my first play-through, I was almost exclusively funded by bounties and exploration loot. I know I felt a lot of logistics pressure until I took the supply upkeep reduction skill (and took a commission), and after that it was smooth sailing, so maybe that will help you? I also noticed an initial spike in bounty difficulty, but things leveled out a bit after, and I was reliably finding manageable ~150-200k bounties with only a bunch of cruisers. One capital with light support can actually be pretty manageable as well. Getting a good bounty contact to a high level also helps, since you can tune the bounty difficulty, but you have to put up with bad payouts until the reputation gets higher, which kinda sucks.

Fair point I'd forgotten about that requirement. I had it in my head you could fill it through normal trade. That was my bad, I'll fix it back to proper procurement missions. Thank you for pointing that out.

[torbes]

Running a lean exploration fleet for a few years can easily net you a few million credits. Also the dead drop missions are pretty safe no? I only did a few but I never saw combat baked into them. I feel like the stealth bar missions are a trap, I never even attempted them. I do agree that some of the numbers are off in terms of supply for the larger trading and there is still a bounty spike where the missions go from pirate junker fleets to Admirals deserting with multiple capitals practically overnight. Finally regarding trading I feel like there was mention that it scales to player cargo? I may just be imagining that though.


Edit: Comm sniffers are worth their weight in gold, can get a sector's worth of missions without having to fly to them. Makes grouping missions together much easier.

[intrinsic_parity]

Fleets will come asking about the dead drop and you can sell out your contact, or fight the fleet.

[Dread Pirate Robots]

I didn't have any more trouble keeping afloat in this version compared to previous ones, but I definitely agree that bounties pay too little, and the fleets get too big. I did some bounties early on, but many of the mid and high end difficulty bounties, both the random intel screen ones and the contact ones, simply do not pay enough money to be worth it. It's strangely inconsistent though, sometimes you will see very weak pirate fleets paying around 150,000 and on the other hand one of my contacts offered me a bounty against a fleet of eight guardians in the very farthest corner of the map, for 220,000.

I honestly think a lot of these issues come down to the simple fact that bounty fleets just shouldn't get to 5+ capital ships. I think gigantic fleets like that should only exist with more substantial context and build up, like pirate armadas. First of all it feels really weird in-universe. Why are all these random deserters flying around in fleets way more powerful than anything you see in the core worlds?  I don't think the bounties fleets should ever get bigger than system fleets or remnant ordos - one, maybe two capitals and a handful of cruisers. Then you can top off payments where they are and they'll feel worth it. This means to some extent bounty hunting might stop being a very good way to make money in the very late game, but I think that's already the case, and players are expected to do fewer missions and rely more on colonies for your income for the late game (when there's eventually a use for that money).

Now how do you deal with end game combat missions against big fleets if bounties top out? Ideally I think you have them be more rare, pay much better, and have more narrative context than a regular bounty. For example, if you wanted to get the player to fight that eight guardian fleet, you could have something like your contact gets word a colony is going to be attacked by it, launching from some outer system, and you can stop it along the way or fight it in the system like a pirate armada, and you get paid better if you kill it before it gets in-system. Here it feels like a major event: it's going to take a little while to complete, and so you could justify something like a temporary monthly payment (letting the player prepare for the fight without worrying about money) until the fleet is killed, with bonuses depending on how you complete it, and no bonus if you fail. You could have similar versions of this for different factions with something like a Hegemony contact getting you to fight against a TT fleet (if they are currently in conflict) that's trying to raid a Hegemony station or something. This is a bunch more work of course but I figured using the already implemented pirate raids as a framework shows that it's possible.

The spy satellite missions are often just brutally hard, but sometimes incredibly easy, so I'm not sure how to manage those.

[sector_terror]

Well spoken Roberts. I specially love the narrative context. It follows the idea I liked of the original Guild War 2 doctrine(back when they followed it). The fleets you attack are DOING something. They are midway through fleeing and will vanish if not chased down, and may even be cause -early- if fast enough. OR an attack is on it's way, intercept. Or maybe an ally has been captured and is being interigated, get him out before he gives out information. were have fleets spawning mid-way through travel with dead drops already. Plus it gives reason why a deserter has high power capital ships.

To explain the pirates, I think it's because the programing cant differentiate between a colossus Mk.II & III and a proper eagle class cruiser. Nor can it separate which D-mods are more or less serious. So the game thinks its "a capital and 4 cruisers" despite one being a paragon2, furys, and 2 auroras, and the other being an atlas MK.II and four Collusus.MK IIIs

[Pushover]

I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an item every month, cover numbers into over a million credits.

Those are not procurement missions, they are colony supply missions. You have to have a colony producing x amount of resources per month to complete them (I thought the same thing when I first saw them). Most of them are not completable until you have a quite large colony with the correct industry. I felt like they pay pretty poorly for the investment required most of the time. The millions of credit ones would require admin + alpha core + exploration item + story point boosted industries on a max size colony sometimes.

I think the biggest issue I have is that these missions aren't really something you will 'work towards' or 'work on'. It's generally a binary 'do I fulfill this already/will I have it in 2 years, so it's literally free money, or do I decline?' The reward is not high enough to promote going out of my normal colony building to try and set up the industry. I can't help but feel like economy system needs another change, to actually make supplying... supply an amount of goods rather than up to a certain demand on an infinite number of planets. That way, a contract to supply a person with X amount of goods means that you will actually be giving up those goods, if those are used in areas like 'supplying the patrol HQ' or similar. In a similar vein, while not exactly a 'mission', continuous shortages at several locations can effectively be a monthly 'procurement mission' for the quantity equal to the shortage. Pirates and Pathers should not end up with continuous shortages because they have low access on most of their colonies, as these are super exploitable for absurd amounts of cash. This also gets compounded with procurement missions getting offered from places that already have a shortage, offering crazy sums.

Larger procurement missions also frequently place the good on the market, which can mean a sudden 'excess' of whatever good you brought, so you can get paid once for the mission, then get paid again when you buy back whatever you just sold at a massive discount.

[Histidine]

In my first run I had 1.877 million credits on November 207, the month before I started my first colony. Most of this came from doing various non-combat jobs for people in bars, plus a few opportunistic supply runs to places like Chalcedon; did bounties only when they weren't too far out of my way and I was confident I could take them.

Looking from the outside, dedicated bounty hunting seems kinda screwed in terms of the economics involved. The payout not keeping up with the target strength has been discussed too many times to repeat here, but I'll also note that combat is way more capital intensive than non-combat work; haulers are cheaper and easier to procure than good warships, easier to improve for their job (the capacity hullmods available at the start, and also Bulk Transport — a level 1 skill!), and you're less likely to lose your investment. Lower upkeep too; officers get expensive pretty quickly.

[TaLaR]

You still can do a pure bounty playthrough, but it takes one of the more overpowered approaches: piloting Doom or Afflictor, or maybe Derelict Contingent abuse.

[SCC]

I am doing a bounty focused run (focused, because I'm also doing academy quests) without using any cheese and I had about a million in cycle 207. In 210, I have 800k, 2 more cruisers and a colony with techmining. It probably helped that I SP recovered a Paragon earlier in 207. I'm also level 15 for, I think, a year already.

[Grievous69]

You still can do a pure bounty playthrough, but it takes one of the more overpowered approaches: piloting Doom or Afflictor, or maybe Derelict Contingent abuse.

I'm doing it with zero phase ships, most of the game I had light cruisers with various escorts, only recently I took 2 capitals so I can defeat the harder bounties. The thing is you have to be very picky about them, so many seem like a total waste of time, while some almost seem like traps judging from the rewards vs what the intel shows. It's certainly possible without cheeseing, it just takes longer to build yourself up compared to other playstyles.

Also commissions help out a ton, without that I'd probably have to do other types of missions for quick and easy cash.

[TaLaR]

That's exactly why I call phase OP - I didn't have commission or need any other significant income source.

[SCC]

I just had a mining station drop 18k ores on me and I wondered if it would be worth it to take it.

18k ore would sell for 188k on Culann. The expenses I would have to take, if I knew in advance that I would both find a fuckton of ore and that there was a shortage of ore in Culann, would be: 370*100 = 37 000 cr for the stabilisation of all that ore in the first place, 16 days each way, 8 times, 800-ish fuel each way, 8*633*25 = 126 600 cr, supplies for this time would be 16*8*4*100 = 51 200 cr. And salaries: it's roughly four months, so for 800 men it would be 16k. 188k - 37k - 127k - 51k - 32k = -59k cr (loss) over the course of two months.

The numbers are only approximate, though, because fuel usage, maintenance and salaries were approximated, since my fleet isn't optimised for trading or exploring, but for bounty hunting with some exploration and quest solving on the side. Industry skills (if all taken) could halve salaries and quarter fuel and supply costs, making this pile of rocks give about 90k profit. Seems similar enough to Histidine's 1,877m over 20 months figure, which equals to about 94k profit a month.

For my current fleet, costs would be more similar to 253k for fuel, 103k for maintenance and 90k for salaries (for crew and officers, the latter I didn't count the first time), which would make bothering with this pile of rocks a total loss of 258k credits.

[intrinsic_parity]

The crazy ore thing is a joke. I don't pick any of it up. Other resources are worth way more (even metals) and I can fill my cargo space with them extremely easily.