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Author Topic: Trade is brokenly unbalanced  (Read 9820 times)

Amoebka

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #30 on: April 14, 2021, 05:48:15 AM »

Pirate base bounties are just hysterical. I can do a Buffalo mk2 and 3 hounds for 47k, or a full module low tech orbital for 50k.

Bounties in general need to pay like 2x or even 3x times more to be worthwhile (excluding pirates). They are by far the least time-efficient way to make money, and that's in a game about space combat.
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AcaMetis

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #31 on: April 14, 2021, 06:16:16 AM »

Those FedEx quests about transporting goods can attract pirate fleet ambushes trying to deliver a message from "the competition", too. Although in their particular case I've yet to see such an ambush fleet that was even a slight threat to anything but a non-tutorial starting fleet.
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Megas

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #32 on: April 14, 2021, 06:19:36 AM »

Those FedEx quests about transporting goods can attract pirate fleet ambushes trying to deliver a message from "the competition", too. Although in their particular case I've yet to see such an ambush fleet that was even a slight threat to anything but a non-tutorial starting fleet.
I have not seen such fleets since 0.65, but I can believe that.
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bonerstorm

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #33 on: April 14, 2021, 10:35:57 AM »

SNIP
VERY much agreed! Black markets should be a special thing, not a default go-to scenario. I'd love to see a mechanic where you have to do something to unlock black market contacts on specific planets, with concomitant risks that come with showing up to a planet you've never been to with a cargo hold filled with Space Heroin looking for a buyer.

Here's another thought from my econ background: not only are tariffs of 30% ridiculous, but tariffs are collected at the point of sale - not the point of purchase. The whole point of tariffs is that you incentivize domestic production and penalize foreign imports - this point is ruined if you've got entire planets with no domestic production and you pay the tariff buying or selling regardless of your allegiance or the point of origin.

Like this would totally be more trouble than it's worth to code, but an ideal scenario would have no tariffs if your cargo has a point of origin stamp with matching allegiance.

In general, it would be far more preferable to make trading more difficult rather than less profitable. Because that's what reality is: trading commodities IRL is very lucrative but also combines substantial investment with substantial risk.

My buddy IRL, God rest his soul, ran an import-export business where he specialized in buying junk freighters in the West and towing them to Mumbai to be sold for scrap.

Also definitely the price differential of food in a shortage should be worth more than the fuel and supplies you burn to get it to market. I can't remember a time when I ran food in this game for any other reason than charity to keep a planet from getting decivilized.
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Ad Astra

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #34 on: April 14, 2021, 10:59:39 AM »

Overbalancing seems to be a rather common issue here, I think first of all if, measures are taken to make every little aspect marginally profitable, then an easy mode should have modified values in every economic and logistical aspect. Otherwise you risk losing a considerable amount of new players who will slam their faces against many economic viability walls, just because the game ends up being balanced towards the playstyle of both people who are particularly good at this sort of game, and that of what can only be called experts who have played it for about a decade through all of its versions already.

There are several design philosophy decisions to make about this sort of thing, one is whether you make the player feel immersed and a part of the world, following the same rules as everyone else, or a different force who has forces stacked against them.
Example being either: 1)Immersive: legal trading is profitable between producing colonies and consuming colonies otherwise the universe makes no economic sense, but not if you drag a heavy cruiser escort in tow for example, you are a trader not a mercenary.
2)Circumstantial: legal trading is ONLY profitable when dealing with considerable surplus and scarcity in order to make the price difference worth it. This already would make normal trade a loss (slight ludonarrative dissonance) but would try and lead the player to more opportunistic and sporadic trading, you are not a trader, you make a living with something else but jump at an opportunity when its there.
3)Challenging: legal trading is NEVER profitable and so the player exists in a completely different state than the rest of the in-universe actors, you are forced to act illegally in order to make a profit from commerce. Considerably more heavy handed approach, this sort of system destroys all suspension of disbelief and makes the player identify it as a clear design choice, far more likely to cause frustration through the schism that appears between what is said (how everything is supposed to work) vs what is shown (how everything actually works).

As such the act of balancing is not only between simple numerical factors among themselves, it also involves the vision of what the experience and contact of a player with the world ought to be. How much immersion wants to be achieved, how conscious the player should be about the mechanics they interact with (in a bad trade you could expect to be screwed by the mechanics through developer choice or you could expect to be screwed by the pirates through in game factors). Sense of the game vs sense of the world.

Punishing environments with unclear rules are good for people who are seeking exactly that, but if the game seeks to be attractive to more than that minority, then either different modes must be developed extensively, or challenge must be provided in more specific aspects of the game, with proper explanation of what the player can expect.

Personally I've never found anything I couldn't deal with, but then again I'm someone who powergames even "relaxing" farm sims. You can't take me or number crunching meta gamers as the base difficulty without serious market risks.

Tl dr: subpar strategies and playstyles should remain viable both for immersion and noob friendliness, while challenges for metagamers should be provided through other means. Most importantly boring mechanics ought to be safe while fun mechanics ought to be risky, the difference in fun between an hour of glorified delivery service and 10 minutes of badass space bounty hunting is evident to all i believe, let the poor kids who still can't fight get a decent money cushion to fund their future strategic and logistical disasters.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2021, 11:07:53 AM by Ad Astra »
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You can park your spaceship anywhere you want if you get along with pirates

bonerstorm

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #35 on: April 14, 2021, 11:17:27 AM »

Bad idea: you can only trade on the black market if you either have a contact at the world, or you sneak in without being detected.

...

The current system isn't that. The current system is either smuggling or nothing, with no room for an ethically-flexible band of gray-market misfits doing a mix of legit and questionable jobs as they come up.

Isn't this what contacts, bar missions, procurement missions, and shortages are? I get pop ups for jobs coming up pretty constantly.

Touche!

Here's my point: legit trade is unprofitable without a price differential of at least 86% + the cost of supplies and fuel. And the minute demand is met during a shortage, the price immediately drops from 50%-300% over market par to about 15% UNDER market par. Maybe I aided market saturation with my own colonies.

What's worse, often I've found shortage prices to be less than the 86% differential which means that - even on otherwise profitable jobs - the marginal profit becomes negative as you approach the demand limit. And it's difficult to tell at what point you're losing money without micromanaging your sales.

If you just get rid of the tariffs on purchases (like how tariffs work IRL), you make the whole situation a lot more manageable with a necessary price diff of 42.85%.

But that's besides the point: even the "right" kind of legit trading where you only are shipping from surplus to shortage is incredibly unprofitable. I understand that's kinda the point because you don't want players doing nothing but playing Drug Wars on their TI-86 calculators (I'm old).

My take is that trading being more unprofitable is lame and not fun (because it already is). Making trading more DANGEROUS and RISKY is a better alternative.

As it stands, legit trading may as well not even exist because it's so vestigial that there's no point in delivering desperately-needed goods to dying colonies except as charity.

The only place where trading remotely works right now is in running drugs, guns and mercs to pirates/pathers on the black market.

Please don't make that WORSE by making that unprofitable too. I'd rather you made everything else more profitable but also more dangerous.

Ideas:
  • Adding more pirates to the hyperspace map
    Repurposing the space cop code you've already got to get them to do interactive shakedowns of passing traders instead of going straight to combat
    During wartime have dedicated faction privateer fleets to intercept hostile-nation traders
    Having MUCH HIGHER rep penalties for being caught with contraband - maybe even going straight to hostile
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AcaMetis

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #36 on: April 14, 2021, 11:19:49 AM »

Quote
In general, it would be far more preferable to make trading more difficult rather than less profitable.
Quote
My take is that trading being more unprofitable is lame and not fun (because it already is). Making trading more DANGEROUS and RISKY is a better alternative.
Trading isn't the only aspect that people use (black) markets for, though. See my previous question, if trading becomes this whole ordeal than what are people supposed to do when they find 25K ore while out exploring? Just automatically ditch the lot of it because the potential profit from offloading it would be too much bother to be worth it?
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #37 on: April 14, 2021, 11:29:36 AM »

Quote
...what are people supposed to do when they find 25K ore while out exploring...Just automatically ditch the lot of it because the potential profit from offloading it would be too much bother to be worth it?
Yes, that's already what you should do. With the way supply/demand works, it's basically impossible to have that be worthwhile since selling some will decrease the price, and the price is already basically nothing. There's really no reason for 10k+ ore drops to be in the game. When you're exploring, there's basically no situation where you wont be able to fill up on at least metals/organics that are worth 3x as much base.
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AcaMetis

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #38 on: April 14, 2021, 11:41:53 AM »

Yes, that's already what you should do. With the way supply/demand works, it's basically impossible to have that be worthwhile since selling some will decrease the price, and the price is already basically nothing. There's really no reason for 10k+ ore drops to be in the game. When you're exploring, there's basically no situation where you wont be able to fill up on at least metals/organics that are worth 3x as much base.
Hmm...honestly, I don't think you're wrong. I think the most I've ever sold a 12-15K load of ore for was 8c a unit when the planet in question had a 10K deficit, so not really an impressive sum for something that requires many Atlas ships to pull off. That said if trading becomes a bother than offloading the rewards from exploring also becomes a bother, and that wouldn't be right. Exploration is by no means safe and easy, especially when you try to plunder a red system.
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bonerstorm

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #39 on: April 14, 2021, 12:26:07 PM »

*SNIP*

I'm also of the opinion that all of this hammering on smuggling is just a distraction from bigger problems that the current patch has. 0.9.5 added a number of bar missions, contact missions and so on, so why are people still singing the same old song of "drugs drugs tons-o-drugs!" like nothing changed? Why do people not accept commission and cry about getting easy money for doing literally nothing? Why is bounty hunting not a viable career? How does buttering up a high importance contact not land you with opportunities more lucrative than just shipping more drugs? And why are drugs (and maybe guns to a lesser extent) the only thing(s) seen as worth shipping anyway? Why not any of the other commodities? Before bringing the hammer down on smuggling I'd like some answers to those questions, because it seems to me like smuggling isn't what's broken, it's the only thing that's somewhat functional in a sea of broken, ignored alternatives.

1000% yes to this!

It really feels like the game railroads you into a specific style of play: taking a commission, trading nothing but drugs, hunting pirates (but ONLY fleets that pose so little threat that you won't lose any ships, which will more than kill your profit), setting up a massive empire using Alpha AI admins and then saturation-bombarding every other faction into nonexistence.

This is the inevitable progression of the game because these are always the best decisions.

There isn't room to be an even halfway legit trader unless you're "half" Space Pablo Escobar. And now there's talk about nerfing even that.

What I'd like to get across to the devs is that some of us like to do things that don't make mechanical sense just for RP.

I *WANT* to do a pather-friendly playthrough where I don't use AI at all and don't deal in drugs/organs. I *WANT* to skate on the edge of profitability by selling domestic goods through pirate blockades. I want to declare Space Jihad against the REDACTED and anyone who deals in their filthy tech. I *WANT* to get into difficult space battles and watch half my fleet go up in smoke.

And, most of all, I want to have a collection of colonies that aren't either 100% money pits which I have to constantly babysit or 100% money factories which I ignore while they grind expeditions + faction rep into the ground with no input from me - with no gray zone in between.

What I'm trying to say is that, in many ways, the design decisions are pushing the players into more boring styles of play - which is the opposite of the stated intention of these decisions.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2021, 01:08:02 PM by bonerstorm »
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Chthonic One

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #40 on: April 14, 2021, 12:34:02 PM »

Bad idea: you can only trade on the black market if you either have a contact at the world, or you sneak in without being detected.

...

The current system isn't that. The current system is either smuggling or nothing, with no room for an ethically-flexible band of gray-market misfits doing a mix of legit and questionable jobs as they come up.

Isn't this what contacts, bar missions, procurement missions, and shortages are? I get pop ups for jobs coming up pretty constantly.

Touche!

Here's my point: legit trade is unprofitable without a price differential of at least 86% + the cost of supplies and fuel. And the minute demand is met during a shortage, the price immediately drops from 50%-300% over market par to about 15% UNDER market par. Maybe I aided market saturation with my own colonies.

What's worse, often I've found shortage prices to be less than the 86% differential which means that - even on otherwise profitable jobs - the marginal profit becomes negative as you approach the demand limit. And it's difficult to tell at what point you're losing money without micromanaging your sales.

If you just get rid of the tariffs on purchases (like how tariffs work IRL), you make the whole situation a lot more manageable with a necessary price diff of 42.85%.

But that's besides the point: even the "right" kind of legit trading where you only are shipping from surplus to shortage is incredibly unprofitable. I understand that's kinda the point because you don't want players doing nothing but playing Drug Wars on their TI-86 calculators (I'm old).

My take is that trading being more unprofitable is lame and not fun (because it already is). Making trading more DANGEROUS and RISKY is a better alternative.

As it stands, legit trading may as well not even exist because it's so vestigial that there's no point in delivering desperately-needed goods to dying colonies except as charity.

The only place where trading remotely works right now is in running drugs, guns and mercs to pirates/pathers on the black market.

Please don't make that WORSE by making that unprofitable too. I'd rather you made everything else more profitable but also more dangerous.

Ideas:
  • Adding more pirates to the hyperspace map
    Repurposing the space cop code you've already got to get them to do interactive shakedowns of passing traders instead of going straight to combat
    During wartime have dedicated faction privateer fleets to intercept hostile-nation traders
    Having MUCH HIGHER rep penalties for being caught with contraband - maybe even going straight to hostile
The X universe, if you don't mind me using it as an example, had freight scanners that were "illegal" for people to own that didn't have a police license in the sector they were in. Pirates would often use them to illegally scan freight to see if it was worthwhile to extort a trader for some of their goods.

If the game had some sort of mechanism like this, it'd help build on some of the realism of the game.
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bonerstorm

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #41 on: April 14, 2021, 12:38:29 PM »

*SNIP*
That way Pirate fleets will actually be *** off if you avoid paying Pirate tariffs and chase you to collect "Kanta's cut". Also instead of random scans for contraband, it's random scans for hot loot they can extort from you... giving players the option to give up a slice of their cargo in exchange for staying alive and doing so gives you status that can eventually translate into being cleared for trade. Maybe being on a pirate trade mission makes them let you through regardless of your status.

This seems reasonable in theory but it still does not address the issue in practice; the AI needs to be buffed immensely to be able to prevent a player from just working around this nuisance. First of all, not all pirate shortage planets have patrols; many of them are wide open. Second, shortages are also frequent in core faction worlds. Third, shielded cargo holds are a thing and prevent scans. Four, fast fleets full of hounds aren't difficult to salvage or expensive to buy and they can get into any market without difficulty regardless of the mechanics in place.

I agree with you there.

That brings me to another suggestion: there should be serious consequences for buffing pirates by smuggling to them in the form of better defense fleets - including all frigate/destroyer picket fleets specifically for hitting smugglers. Right now it doesn't feel like there's any global economic consequence to massively arming radical space jihadists or being a wildly-successful drug kingpin. I don't know what factions do with their money, but increasing the profitability of their colonies should be translated into some visible mechanical faction effect (if there is now, I haven't noticed it).

Also I've never abused and spammed hounds because that sounds incredibly boring. Like... why would I do that to myself? If it's that abusable, then maybe retreats or hounds should be nerfed, not trading at all.

It goes to the point I made here just above ^...

The existing mechanics around trade and colonies and combat push players into boring styles of play. Nerfing trade even more to accommodate metas like speed-hound spam will just make it even worse.
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bonerstorm

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #42 on: April 14, 2021, 01:03:51 PM »

Overbalancing seems to be a rather common issue here, I think first of all if, measures are taken to make every little aspect marginally profitable, then an easy mode should have modified values in every economic and logistical aspect. Otherwise you risk losing a considerable amount of new players who will slam their faces against many economic viability walls, just because the game ends up being balanced towards the playstyle of both people who are particularly good at this sort of game, and that of what can only be called experts who have played it for about a decade through all of its versions already.

There are several design philosophy decisions to make about this sort of thing, one is whether you make the player feel immersed and a part of the world, following the same rules as everyone else, or a different force who has forces stacked against them.
Example being either: 1)Immersive: legal trading is profitable between producing colonies and consuming colonies otherwise the universe makes no economic sense, but not if you drag a heavy cruiser escort in tow for example, you are a trader not a mercenary.
2)Circumstantial: legal trading is ONLY profitable when dealing with considerable surplus and scarcity in order to make the price difference worth it. This already would make normal trade a loss (slight ludonarrative dissonance) but would try and lead the player to more opportunistic and sporadic trading, you are not a trader, you make a living with something else but jump at an opportunity when its there.
3)Challenging: legal trading is NEVER profitable and so the player exists in a completely different state than the rest of the in-universe actors, you are forced to act illegally in order to make a profit from commerce. Considerably more heavy handed approach, this sort of system destroys all suspension of disbelief and makes the player identify it as a clear design choice, far more likely to cause frustration through the schism that appears between what is said (how everything is supposed to work) vs what is shown (how everything actually works).

As such the act of balancing is not only between simple numerical factors among themselves, it also involves the vision of what the experience and contact of a player with the world ought to be. How much immersion wants to be achieved, how conscious the player should be about the mechanics they interact with (in a bad trade you could expect to be screwed by the mechanics through developer choice or you could expect to be screwed by the pirates through in game factors). Sense of the game vs sense of the world.

Punishing environments with unclear rules are good for people who are seeking exactly that, but if the game seeks to be attractive to more than that minority, then either different modes must be developed extensively, or challenge must be provided in more specific aspects of the game, with proper explanation of what the player can expect.

Personally I've never found anything I couldn't deal with, but then again I'm someone who powergames even "relaxing" farm sims. You can't take me or number crunching meta gamers as the base difficulty without serious market risks.

Tl dr: subpar strategies and playstyles should remain viable both for immersion and noob friendliness, while challenges for metagamers should be provided through other means. Most importantly boring mechanics ought to be safe while fun mechanics ought to be risky, the difference in fun between an hour of glorified delivery service and 10 minutes of badass space bounty hunting is evident to all i believe, let the poor kids who still can't fight get a decent money cushion to fund their future strategic and logistical disasters.

I could not agree more with everything you just said.

It highlights the dangers of designing a game around the stated desires of min-maxing superfans. I *AM* one, but the immersion gets broken pretty quickly when I realize that I start treading water even while min-maxing if I make even token efforts towards RP.

Good examples: solar lamps, cryosleepers and hypershunts all require a supply of 10 commodities, which all exceed the base market availability. In order to use them at all, you've got to either make your own endgame-level supply chain specifically to accommodate them or use cores to reduce-demand/increase-supply or some combination of the two. At the endgame-level... what is even the point? What could I possibly be doing in the endgame to need the minor boost that would justify the hassle of getting a working hypershunt?

Similarly, a planet with Orbworks needs +1 from corrupted nanoforge, admin, alpha AI or SP improvements to supply enough ship hulls for their own PATROL STATION. A military base requires +3. A High Command requires +4. And - in order to be reasonably safe from raids most of the time - you need at least 2 High Commands in the same system.

^ In other words, in order to supply a functional defensive military you pretty much NEED a Pristine Nanoforge (which I haven't found once in my current playthrough despite searching ALL of the REDACTED systems plus 80% of rest of the sector).

Why is the game experience built around min-maxing and spamming cores as a baseline?

I simply can't imagine playing this game as anyone other than a min-maxing tool like me. I can't recommend it to even my hardcore gamer friends save the most self-flagellatingly obtuse of my on-the-spectrum bros.
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Pushover

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #43 on: April 14, 2021, 01:28:02 PM »

Good examples: solar lamps, cryosleepers and hypershunts all require a supply of 10 commodities, which all exceed the base market availability. In order to use them at all, you've got to either make your own endgame-level supply chain specifically to accommodate them or use cores to reduce-demand/increase-supply or some combination of the two. At the endgame-level... what is even the point? What could I possibly be doing in the endgame to need the minor boost that would justify the hassle of getting a working hypershunt?
I think colony economics has a lot of issues, but the systems are very different from trading, to the point that it deserves its own thread. Things like the supply/demand system for colonies not making real sense (how can 1 colony producing fuel supply 100 in-faction military bases? Why are my colonies exporting a good during a shortage?) or even money made from colonies (how does it make sense that I would face total economic collapse if I was the only faction in the game?), or prices of goods (if I'm now producing 50% of the sector's food from only a few colonies, how has the trading price not gone down?). I'd love to see colonies get better integrated with the trading systems, beyond 'having X structure deletes Y goods and generates Z goods each month'. Shouldn't I be able to profit if I'm able to source enough volatiles for a month of fuel production in my colony at below market price?


I think my thoughts on trading can be summarized as follows:
  • Trading on the open market should not be profitable under normal conditions
  • Trading on the open market, by either buying from an excess, or selling to a shortage, should, under most conditions, be profitable.
  • Trading on the black market should be more profitable if done in the same volume as trading on the open market.
  • Trading on the black market in high volume should come with significant risks or penalties with non-pirate factions
  • Trading on the black market in illegal commodities should be (more easily) profitable than other types of commodity trading, as there are risks to getting caught.
  • Significant trading with Pirates (and Pathers) should result in risks and/or penalties (beyond potentially getting attacked by them), even if done with the transponder off.

Currently, only (3) and (5) are really the case. (4) is not because the risks are fairly minor (only a little rep loss) unless you happen to get scanned while holding illegal cargo. Now that you have SP, scans are completely avoidable. There are only very minor risks to getting caught on (5). For (6), I'd love to see things beyond rep loss from trading with Pathers/Pirates. Load them up with heavy armaments? They launch a raid, Hegemony investigates where they got all these weapons and surprise... your name comes up.
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Thaago

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Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« Reply #44 on: April 14, 2021, 01:52:23 PM »

*SNIP*

I'm also of the opinion that all of this hammering on smuggling is just a distraction from bigger problems that the current patch has. 0.9.5 added a number of bar missions, contact missions and so on, so why are people still singing the same old song of "drugs drugs tons-o-drugs!" like nothing changed? Why do people not accept commission and cry about getting easy money for doing literally nothing? Why is bounty hunting not a viable career? How does buttering up a high importance contact not land you with opportunities more lucrative than just shipping more drugs? And why are drugs (and maybe guns to a lesser extent) the only thing(s) seen as worth shipping anyway? Why not any of the other commodities? Before bringing the hammer down on smuggling I'd like some answers to those questions, because it seems to me like smuggling isn't what's broken, it's the only thing that's somewhat functional in a sea of broken, ignored alternatives.

1000% yes to this!

It really feels like the game railroads you into a specific style of play: taking a commission, trading nothing but drugs, hunting pirates (but ONLY fleets that pose so little threat that you won't lose any ships, which will more than kill your profit), setting up a massive empire using Alpha AI admins and then saturation-bombarding every other faction into nonexistence.

This is the inevitable progression of the game because these are always the best decisions.

There isn't room to be an even halfway legit trader unless you're "half" Space Pablo Escobar. And now there's talk about nerfing even that.

What I'd like to get across to the devs is that some of us like to do things that don't make mechanical sense just for RP.

I *WANT* to do a pather-friendly playthrough where I don't use AI at all and don't deal in drugs/organs. I *WANT* to skate on the edge of profitability by selling domestic goods through pirate blockades. I want to declare Space Jihad against the REDACTED and anyone who deals in their filthy tech. I *WANT* to get into difficult space battles and watch half my fleet go up in smoke.

And, most of all, I want to have a collection of colonies that aren't either 100% money pits which I have to constantly babysit or 100% money factories which I ignore while they grind expeditions + faction rep into the ground with no input from me - with no gray zone in between.

What I'm trying to say is that, in many ways, the design decisions are pushing the players into more boring styles of play - which is the opposite of the stated intention of these decisions.

You can already do all of those things that you say you want to do, and none of the things you say you are obligated to do, and still make plenty of money. I have not run drugs once in either this version or the last, simply because its boring and a player doesn't need to. Any of those things you really want to do: just go do them. Its fun.

But people will do drug running because its the "best", where "best" is the most/fastest/easiest, not interesting or fun. Since a better game is one where people spend there time doing interesting things rather than boring things:

(a) drug runs need to become more interesting or (b) drug runs need to be nerfed into the ground so that people don't do them.

Personally, I vote for option (a), and thats going to come with restrictions and gameplay challenges to overcome: more pirate patrols to sneak by. No access to the black market without contacts or sneaking. Hunter fleets coming after the player. Surprise inspections by main faction patrols once the player gets a reputation as a smuggler... etc. There are lots of ways it could be done.
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