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Author Topic: Game feels balanced around colony income  (Read 1598 times)

Amoebka

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Game feels balanced around colony income
« on: April 07, 2021, 04:58:05 AM »

Bounty hunting becomes unprofitable, or, at least, extremely risky, past the initial pirate/pather hits. The amount you get paid barely accounts for fuel and supplies, and losing ships makes it a net loss of money. You have to do multiple quad-capital bounties perfectly to get enough money to buy/restore one capital yourself. Since you can't recover s-modded enemy ships, you don't even get paid in trophies.

It feels like bounty hunting is less of a "career" you can take to make money, and more of a late game entertainment for people willing to waste money on fun combat challenges (and they are fun when you forget about the dreadful campaign layer implications of what you are doing). You MUST have profitable colonies to participate.

And colonies is something you can't earn by doing bounties. Once the enemy fleets scale up (i.e. you get tired of killing the same pirate trashballs over and over), you have to stop bounty hunting, stash your combat fleet, and do HOURS of boring surveying/salvaging. Just dropping mining on the first volcanic world you find isn't going to be good enough. You need to find good planets and industry boosters (which in my experience are terribly rare now). And then you have to WAIT several cycles for them to grow. Boring grind you have to do to be allowed to participate in late game fleet combat without savescumming.

If colonies are indeed supposed to be an unavoidable part of the game allegedly about space combat, make them earnable by combat. Make bounty targets drop guaranteed colony items and data on good planets. People who don't like combat can still find them naturally through exploration, people who want non-stop action can win them by defeating reasonably strong enemies (this is around the 2-3 cruisers part of the game). Everyone's happy.
« Last Edit: April 07, 2021, 04:59:48 AM by Amoebka »
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Immahnoob

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2021, 05:28:25 AM »

The only reason bounties suck as proper income is because they're all over the place. You'll have 5 bounties going on and they're all scattered way too far and in different directions.
But they're never not profitable, your fleet isn't good enough if that's one of your problems or you're meeting very nasty bounties without being prepared. I don't know how you'd be using more resources than you pour in otherwise, maybe you're not scavenging? Get one or two salvage rigs, at least.

On the other hand, system bounties are great income because there are so many pirates attacking with such bad compositions that you'd be hard-pressed to lose any money from those exchanges, besides the fact that you can get back your supply and fuel losses by scavenging.
I mix this up with raiding the pirates and selling whatever resource they have in excess (or raiding anyone I don't like, really), that's how I got proper money for a colony when I made my fleet composition jump too hard without any cash in the bank.
Raiding pather bases is also very good, you can do the same trick, buy whatever they have, raid, then destroy them for the bounty.
Raiding convoys is also great, sometimes I raid supply/fuel convoys so I don't have to restock, then I sell wherever I made a hole in their trade, win-win since you seem like the type that likes fighting.

Basically, mix it up, you won't always have bounties going, just like you'll not always have explorations going. I'm pretty sure the idea is to not have you specialize too much, or at least, in our case, it's more like "fighting" isn't only "bounties", it's also raiding convoys or colonies.
« Last Edit: April 07, 2021, 05:30:43 AM by Immahnoob »
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Ryan390

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #2 on: April 07, 2021, 09:34:13 AM »

Take some marines and raid the various pirate bases for free supplies and fuel, it's rare you need to pay a fortune to re-stock that way.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #3 on: April 07, 2021, 09:47:43 AM »

I mostly did bounty hunting on my first play-through and I funded the growth of my colonies with it. Definitely pick your fights, you can't take every bounty, but the contact system lets you have a steady supply of manageable and safe bounties, and then you take whatever general bounties you can do as well.

The biggest mistake is to bring too many ships, always be evaluating if you can leave ships behind safely. If you aren't deploying a ship in most fights, leave it behind. Also taking upkeep reduction skills and d-mod removal skills makes things much more manageable logistically.
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Ryan390

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #4 on: April 07, 2021, 10:06:47 AM »

I mostly did bounty hunting on my first play-through and I funded the growth of my colonies with it. Definitely pick your fights, you can't take every bounty, but the contact system lets you have a steady supply of manageable and safe bounties, and then you take whatever general bounties you can do as well.

The biggest mistake is to bring too many ships, always be evaluating if you can leave ships behind safely. If you aren't deploying a ship in most fights, leave it behind. Also taking upkeep reduction skills and d-mod removal skills makes things much more manageable logistically.

Well one advantage of taking a lot of ships is you can retreat some ships out that get low in CR or take too much hull damage, then tag in another ship and keep the fight going.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #5 on: April 07, 2021, 10:25:31 AM »

If you can't win fights without deploying a ship (even as a reinforcement), then it's not safe to leave behind. Obviously bring what you need to win, but if you deploy a ship once in 10 fights, you're wasting a huge amount of resources lugging it around and not using it. You're better off just running CR down to win a fight once in a while in that situation. What I'm saying is that 'safety net ships' that you have just in case but never use are not worthwhile anymore IMO. In the last patch I would have 2-3 times the number of ships to fill a single deployment because the amount of DP you have at the beginning of a fight was based on total DP, but now that is not true, so I think there is much less value in having extra ships.

I guess for a new player, it can be difficult to evaluate what you need to win without trying, but I feel like that's part of learning the game. I think there's no shame in save-scumming to try different strategies and compositions to learn.

OP is saying they find that the supply/fuel cost is too high, the obvious solution is to get rid of ships to reduce those costs.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #6 on: April 07, 2021, 11:02:19 AM »

I just finished my first run through the campaign and I didn't get any colonies. I didn't even grab a comission either, so I had a negative persistent income the whole game. You can stay afloat doing bounties, you can make *tons of money* with the "here's a bounty on this outlying system" quests, good money doing exploration missions, fantastic money doing Galatian Academy quests and fantastic money doing raids.
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pairedeciseaux

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #7 on: April 07, 2021, 11:32:24 AM »

I struggled with bounty hunting at some point, and had to adjust fleet composition and go smaller (smaller fleet, no big ships, smaller bounties). Then, after a few cycles and a few upgrades, I was able to go big again.

Finding the right balance isn't that easy, especially when one initially tries to stick to old play-style like I did.

Also, in addition to skills and smaller fleet, putting Efficiency Overhaul hullmod in some ships further helps reduce supply&fuel consumption.
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Razor Feather

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Re: Game feels balanced around colony income
« Reply #8 on: April 07, 2021, 12:01:34 PM »

Specifically in reference to not being able to get good colonies started without doing loads of exploration, one thing I find particularly helpful in that area is to take notes on any interesting survey or exploration missions that come up, even if I don't end up accepting them.

For example, if a mission to scan a mining station in a remote system pops up, I'll just throw "Mining station, trappist system, asteroid field" into note pad, and once enough of those notes have come up, I head out already knowing where a lot of the high value stuff is. The same can be done with planets. If a mission to survey a Terran world shows up, bam, instant knowledge of a habitable world, with no resources expended. Just mark it down, and check it out when it's convenient to do so. The majority of habitable planets make workable, if not necessarily excellent, colonies, so its a good place to start.

Further, if you run shepherds or throw survey equipment on some of your logistics ships, you can get most surveys down to only 5 supplies, which makes it easy to survey all the random planets you fly past as you do other activities. With the cost that low, you tend to make a pretty substantial net profit on each survey, even if you aren't really scoping out for colonization.

Another handy thing to do is to throw down some com relays in various outlying systems. They don't cost anything to maintain, and will give you new bounties while you are already out of the core worlds, and so they are sometimes very easy to reach, saving fuel and time.
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