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[Rauschkind]

not sure if this is a bug or if this should be a suggestion instead. anyhow:

when a merc officer gets hired one gets 100% sp bonus. when the contract is renewed the bonus is 0.
this does not seem right to me. have i treaded them so poorly the costs go up? XD

anyway. with the game works now, that 0% hurts a LOT.
if bug please fix, if this should be a suggestion instead please move.
thanks

[TaLaR]

I don't think it's a bug. Mercs are just meant to be a huge SP sink.
But having to pay SP for mere maintenance instead of persistent buffs is definitely depressing.

[Rauschkind]

well as it got moved to suggestions it is not a bug.

i think this system could be awsome, but i also think it needs some fine tuning.

hm, i just realized i just can double the contract lenght in the settings file. that should have almost the same effect.

[Alex]

In theory it's supposed to provide a temporary boost, not something you maintain on an ongoing basis. It might work better if, say, you could hire 2-4 of them at once (perhaps for a single point) or some such.

[Rauschkind]

but how are we supposed to compete with 20 officer fleets then?

[Megas]

If endgame fleets will continue to spam officers, then player will need that "boost" on a permanent basis.

[Rauschkind]

interesting... so i take it if i "hotfix" my game on my own by increasing the contract time, im closer to the intended version of the game.
thank you.

[Alex]

but how are we supposed to compete with 20 officer fleets then?

You can have tons of s-mods, better ship loadouts, good officer builds, and you can capture some objectives to give you more deployment points. You can also pilot your flagship and make a bigger impact than any of the officer'ed AI ships on either side can make.

I'm not saying balance or difficulty is perfect or some such! And that's kind of subjective, too. But you definitely don't need mercs to beat any of the toughest challenges in the game.


I'm actually looking at officer counts in AI fleets right now, and... well. I'd love to know more about the specific types of fleets that are causing players these difficulties. Is it limited to bar/contact bounties? Because regular faction fleets don't generally have that many officers. Neither do most of the publicly-posted bounty fleets; they have some extra but it's not, like, every ship - with the exception of the Hegemony deserters, that have a maximum of 21 total once the bounty is maxed out, which, yeah, is a lot.

But if it's mostly top-level bounties - and specifically bar/contact ones - then these are intended to be challenging fights. And the bar/contact bounty mission even includes a mechanism for letting you pick the difficulty you want.

The player gets to build s-mods into their ships. I suppose that could be a way for top-end fleets to go, too, instead of overloading on officers quite as much. IIRC initially I didn't do that because then the player would just recover a bunch of ships with s-mods and building them in with story points would feel like a waste. But that was before s-mods were being stripped out of recovered enemy ships, so maybe that's something to revisit. In some cases it'd feel weird to have the ships be too high a quality, though... hm.

I'm wondering whether "too many officers" is not directly the problem. It may just be a combination of several things like "ECM is too oppressive *with* that many officers" (which has knock-on effects with making the AI too passive), "the rewards for the top-end fights are not high enough", and even things like the "elite helmsmanship bonus applies while venting/overloaded and makes it too hard to finish off certain enemies". The ECM thing is probably the biggest issue right now, though - I think it's big enough that it makes it difficult to evaluate other things accurately.

[Dread Pirate Robots]

The player gets to build s-mods into their ships. I suppose that could be a way for top-end fleets to go, too, instead of overloading on officers quite as much. IIRC initially I didn't do that because then the player would just recover a bunch of ships with s-mods and building them in with story points would feel like a waste. But that was before s-mods were being stripped out of recovered enemy ships, so maybe that's something to revisit. In some cases it'd feel weird to have the ships be too high a quality, though... hm.

For me, I don't think it would make putting them in feel like a waste, because you're not going to pick up the perfect hull mods every time. I'd happily use some random smods for ships in my fleet, but for the ship(s) I'm flying I want to pick the exact smods myself and I'm more than happy to spend story points to do it. The advantage of being able to recover them is that as it stands, when I see a fleet full of green marks it feels like an added annoyance, if I could recover the smodded ships, it might seem like an annoyance and an opportunity.

One wrinkle is I can imagine a situation where I finally recover some ship I've been having trouble finding, and it has the wrong smods and it would actually be annoying! That would be pretty rare though.

I agree that having a bunch of ships with smods feels weird in some situations however, like if the fleet were pirates or explorarium ships.

[Megas]

Enemies having too many officers is like them exceeding the fleet cap and making it look like the AI blatantly cheats (for human factions).  In theory, player can get that many mercs eventually, but I do not want to bleed story points like that to maintain those mercs.  Turns them into a story point tax.

If AI does not drop s-mod ships at all, how can the player know that the enemy never used them or did use them but were removed after recovery just by playing the game?  Also (I have not tried this) but if enemy cannot drop s-mod ships, would that mean when player loses his s-mod ships in battle, his ships lose s-mods too when recovered?  If so, that would make preserving s-mod ships a frustrating experience and an obnoxious point sink (or a reload spree in my case).

[Dread Pirate Robots]

If AI does not drop s-mod ships at all, how can the player know that the enemy never used them or did use them but were removed after recovery just by playing the game?  Also (I have not tried this) but if enemy cannot drop s-mod ships, would that mean when player loses his s-mod ships in battle, his ships lose s-mods too when recovered?  If so, that would make preserving s-mod ships a frustrating experience and an obnoxious point sink (or a reload spree in my case).

I'm pretty confident the way it works is if you are recovering an enemy ship, they will not have their smods, but if you are recovering your own, they still will (plus new dmods).

[Alex]

(Yep!)

[Sarissofoi]

You can adjust that in setting.
Both how long merc contract is and how much XP return from keeping contract you get back.

[Rauschkind]

(context: mercs)

In theory it's supposed to provide a temporary boost, not something you maintain on an ongoing basis.

how is this supposed to work though? for this to make sense there would have to be a reliable and quick way to contact mercs. i wont visit every colonized system in hopes of finding one *after* i took on a difficult task.

[Kaphraxus]

(context: mercs)

In theory it's supposed to provide a temporary boost, not something you maintain on an ongoing basis.

how is this supposed to work though? for this to make sense there would have to be a reliable and quick way to contact mercs. i wont visit every colonized system in hopes of finding one *after* i took on a difficult task.

Perhaps there could be a structure you could build on player colonies that would increase the chances of mercs appearing. I'm pretty sure a mod does this but I see no reason why it couldn't be in the base game. Maybe a structure is too much, maybe it would require an initial story point investment.

Another possibility is that there could be "personnel" contacts that would inform you of more specialized mercs and where to find them, for a finder's fee of course.