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Author Topic: Questions about mid-late game  (Read 1599 times)

BreekiJack

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Questions about mid-late game
« on: April 17, 2021, 03:26:15 PM »

Hi !

I'm doing my second run on this game, first one on this release. I had a few questions I hoped experienced players could help with concerning mid game :

1) Faction raids : I have 3 colonies in a star system east of the core worlds, and i'm having good income (approx. 300k a month). However, the factions, some of them having very good standing (50+ reput.) with keep attacking me, sometimes 2 of them at a time. It's not a real bother, but i don't really have good defenses up yet, but each time i kill them i get -5 reput., and i can't farm story points fast enough to bribe everyone. What are you supposed to do about that ? If your faction reboots them without you attacking those faction fleet, do you still eat -5 reputation ?

2) Military bases and colony size : alright so i only have fast pickets because i didn't know you were supposed to build a military base. However, i'm seeing on the wiki that the quality and number of fleets you get depends on the size of the colony. However, my main colony is an income colony, that has heavy industry but no military base : the military base is being build on a forge world with higher hazard rating. My questions are : does the colony keep growing after 6 where you get the maximum industries but can't pay hazard pay anymore to stimulate growth ? If that's the case, is the max size attainable with high hazard colonies (meaning you're supposed to implement your military base on a low hazard colony ? Also, does it matter that the colony that has the military base isn't the one that has the heavy industry (for ship quality ?) ? Also also, would you say you NEED to build a military base on every colony to have good defenses ?

I realize that's a lot of questions at once, but I hope some of you can enlighten me, I'm having a blast with this new release but those things are really bugging me !

Thanks a lot !
« Last Edit: April 17, 2021, 03:32:04 PM by BreekiJack »
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AcaMetis

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #1 on: April 17, 2021, 03:39:54 PM »

Quote
1) Faction raids : I have 3 colonies in a star system east of the core worlds, and i'm having good income (approx. 300k a month). However, the factions, some of them having very good standing (50+ reput.) with keep attacking me, sometimes 2 of them at a time. It's not a real bother, but i don't really have good defenses up yet, but each time i kill them i get -5 reput., and i can't farm story points fast enough to bride everyone. What are you supposed to do about that ? If your faction reboots them without you attacking those faction fleet, do you still eat -5 reputation ?
You get -5 rep if the expedition fails, no matter the cause, I believe. As in that raid fleet can encounter and die to a random pirate fleet in hyperspace and you'll still get -5 rep.

As for what you're supposed to do about it, realistically, wait for the next update. There's supposed to be a cooldown on these sorts of expeditions so that you can only get 2 per cycle at absolute most, but it doesn't work.

Quote
2) Military bases and colony size : alright so i only have fast pickets because i didn't know you were supposed to build a military base. However, i'm seeing on the wiki that the quality and number of fleets you get depends on the size of the colony. However, my main colony is an income colony, that has heavy industry but no military base : the military base is being build on a forge world with higher hazard rating. My questions are : does the colony keep growing after 6 where you get the maximum industries but can't pay hazard pay anymore to stimulate growth ? If that's the case, is the max size attainable with high hazard colonies (meaning you're supposed to implement your military base on a low hazard colony ? Also, does it matter that the colony that has the military base isn't the one that has the heavy industry (for ship quality ?) ? Also also, therefore would you say you NEED to build a military base on every colony ?
Player colonies are capped at 6 regardless, unless you change that cap in settings.json. Colonies visibly "growing" past that point is...not sure if "bug" is the right word, but it's attention to detail that was missed.

Military bases and heavy industry are separate. There's no special benefit to (not) combining them on any given planet.

I don't know about "need", but it is something you can choose to do. Military bases (or High Commands) don't generate income from exports and are fairly expensive buildings to maintain, but they do increase security and stability beyond what a patrol HQ does. It's up to you to decide whether a particular colony (or system) needs it.

Quote
3) Capital ships quality : alright now that's something i just noticed and was baffled about. I recovered 2 Astral capital ships in my travels, and kept them in storage. Now i have the cash to restore them (3 D mods on each one of them). However, one of them has 27 max speed and 0.66 flux per damage on shields, whereas the other has 30 max speed / 0.61 flux/shield : and it's not a D mod doing that. Are there randomized quality stats for capital ships ? How do they work ? I compared, other common ships like mules have the same stats on the hull unless they have D-mods, but I have 3 conquest and one of them has slightly better speed/flux per damage stat. Also, the Astral top speed, on both the 27 and the 30 speed one appear in red, that means it's lowered by something right ? However the wiki says the normal max speed is 30 so i don't get it...
What you're seeing is the result of Combat Readiness. If a ship has low CR (I think around 40-50%?) they start to take penalties to various stats, including top speed, and beyond that they will start to suffer from malfunction chances (30%) and eventually critical malfunctions chances (10-15%, I forget exactly). Conversely, if CR is raised above the default limit of 70% a ship will receive bonuses to it's stats. All you need to do is repair your ships using supplies, either over time or at a dockyard, and the low CR will be fixed.

Note that you might need to hire more crew - like, a lot more crew - if you're taking capitals out of storage like that. All ships have a minimum crew requirement, and being under that penalizes your fleet's CR caps. Capitals need lots of crew, so if you're taking big ships out of storage you might need to prepare enough crew beforehand (or just keep extra crew in storage along with the ships).
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Radicaljack

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #2 on: April 17, 2021, 05:16:31 PM »

Wait, the expeditions being sent so often is a bug and should be fixed in the bug patches coming "soonish"? That's a relief, was pretty miserable farming rep just so I could deal with the 10 or so a cycle.
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BreekiJack

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #3 on: April 17, 2021, 06:09:31 PM »

AcaMetis : thanks a lot! Sorry for the bit about capital ships, I didn't know CR had these effects but I figured it out just after posting so I took it out : you beat me to it.

Thanks a lot : that's much clearer. The thing about raids I don't hate is that it makes it hard to have good standing with everyone (the factions are always fighting among themselves, why should they let you create your faction and challenge their market shares?) . But the fact that hegemony, which is friendly with me at 50+ rep is still raiding is really annoying. It'd be nicer to have it implemented more elegantly, but politics are tough to simulate. Warband didn't manage to do it with everyone fighting everyone for whatever reason, for instance.

The way it works right now is that having good relations with everyone is very easy so the constant raiding is the only reason why you're not friends with everyone. And if dev fixes it and that you only have 2 raids per cycle, players will be friends with everyone very easily, which I guess isn't something desirable either, right?
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Radicaljack

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #4 on: April 17, 2021, 06:21:38 PM »

Would be nice if the options weren't just "WE ARE GONNA RAID YOU" or nothing. Having your market share impacted or paying people off via colony supply would be more interesting. If their intention for an expedition is lost profits, money should be an option. Paying a SP is never ever going to be a sustainable or worthwhile option, those are pretty much finite at max level and paying them for 5 rep is nuts. I don't even mind farming rep, but it's just insane when every 2 months a new assault is inbound.
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BreekiJack

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #5 on: April 18, 2021, 07:11:05 AM »

Would be nice if the options weren't just "WE ARE GONNA RAID YOU" or nothing. Having your market share impacted or paying people off via colony supply would be more interesting. If their intention for an expedition is lost profits, money should be an option. Paying a SP is never ever going to be a sustainable or worthwhile option, those are pretty much finite at max level and paying them for 5 rep is nuts. I don't even mind farming rep, but it's just insane when every 2 months a new assault is inbound.

Yeah it's getting to the point where I have a massive raid every 2-3 months, meaning the next raid is already announced when the first is still in my star system.

As for what you're supposed to do about it, realistically, wait for the next update. There's supposed to be a cooldown on these sorts of expeditions so that you can only get 2 per cycle at absolute most, but it doesn't work.

Has the fix been announced, or at least the dev made it clear he was aware of the issue ? Or do you know of a DIY fix for this then ?

I wouldn't actually mind if you didn't eat a -5 reput. loss everytime you defend yourself
« Last Edit: April 18, 2021, 07:16:19 AM by BreekiJack »
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AcaMetis

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Re: Questions about mid-late game
« Reply #6 on: April 18, 2021, 07:22:14 AM »

About raiding, a temporary "fix", if you wish to call it that, is to go into setting.json and set the minimum colony size for punitive expeditions to something greater than the maximum size of your colonies. This will completely disable punitive expeditions based on market value or freeport status, which I personally find preferable to the current state of affairs. Ideal? No, but preferable to a broken system.

About having to use SP to buy off expeditions, I do agree that for market share-based expeditions it doesn't make sense for it to cost a SP. If you do the math you'll figure out that these factions are throwing millions worth of ships after your industries because the specific industry they're targeting costs them somewhere in the order of tens of thousands per month in lost profits. One would think that a sufficiently large bribe would be enough to convince them to leave you alone.
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