Yeah, it's funny: I can totally see how this began life as a meme mod, but the thing is, you've addressed something that I think has bugged a lot of players for a while.
The Sector might be a bit of a wild frontier, but especially in the modern game, it's clear that the major faction-polities should have more than enough organization and power to prevent the sale of dangerous materiel to independent, unaffiliated spacers. The way it's set up now is in service of making sure folks, especially newer players, get into Spaceship Fights™ as easily as possible, but I much prefer adding a bit of verisimilitude to the game by having access to military technology be significantly more tightly controlled, unless you go out of your way to travel to obviously extra-legal locales.
On that note... I've actually warmed up extremely quickly to 2.0's current system of handling black markets, to the point that I went and rewrote/expanded the market tooltips in my own game to reflect how it works.
I actually very much like the idea that, especially at the worlds of the larger multi-polity governments, even trying to contact general underground markets to move things in bulk while you're being tracked and monitored is basically impossible. Yes, it kind of overrides Starsector's base game logic for black markets, but to be honest, that logic has always struck me as a little dubious anyway, especially at larger planets that have broader controls and actual military bases. Getting in touch with the "black market" of Chicomoztoc, or Kazeron, or Sindria, or any Diable base, or any Imperium world, or what have you, should be really hard and require a lot of stealth. And since a lot of those planets/bases are difficult to approach in that manner, the rewards should be commiserate with the challenge (e.g., it's time to buy SOME EFFIN' GUNZ). For the cherry on top, this even ties into the lore for both some of the vanilla markets (like all the Sindrian ones) and in certain mods, which use the market description text to posit that if you're going in undetected, what you're accessing as the black market is
completely separate from the standard commercial markets of that given polity/volume. So I guess you can put me in the column for keeping it the way it is, but I there are definitely multiple approaches to this idea that are equally valid. (And, most importantly, these all make bar encounters a lot more valuable, because they're a much easier way of getting your hands on hardware, and it makes face-to-face interaction feel a lot more valuable because it's just that bit much harder for The Man to clamp down on.)
As far as the nanoforges go... I do get that the
real thing we're trying to address here is "the solution for player industrial output is to steal the Chico or Kazeron pristines, or any other pristines a mod may add". The design intent is clearly for pristine forges to be either something a player finds rarely during sector exploration (with one not remotely guaranteed to appear in a game outside of maybe the historian) or commit heavy resources to trying to acquire an existing one. It's just that Alex has underestimated what "heavy" resources should be; it's too easy to steal one, and with story points as of .95 (a system I otherwise like a lot) you can even avoid detection for it. It's just far too easy to acquire one and start pooping out constant perfect capital ships.
So while it's probably significantly more work, my suggestion would be to make a change to
raid behavior. Specifically, it should be
much, MUCH harder to steal a Colony Item via raiding; I'm talking like "a raiding power equivalent to at least upper-tens of thousands of marines is required for it", since the opponent is going to throw literally everything they have at trying to stop you, and also there should be no story point option for avoiding consequences, because of the sheer scale of the operation required.
And those consequences should be the equivalent of a saturation bombing. Or worse.
Like, think about it: you are dismantling, stealing, and putting at risk an absolutely critical piece of infrastructure that is helping to keep the Sector going, literally for your personal benefit. It's the sort of *** that the sector spent much of the earlier cycles of post-Collapse history trying to stop when fighting maniacs like Loke. In doing this, you are bringing The Bad Old Days back to the Sector, and literally everyone should hate your guts for it and try to destroy you for doing it.
So I think that would make for a more engaging solution to the Nanoforge Problem™: the player should still be able to
do it, but it should require truly epic resources and a fleet engineered specifically for that objective, and the consequences for doing so should be fairly dire. It makes finding your own nanoforge a much more attractive proposition.
Either way, I'm glad you're so engaged with the mod, Jaghaimo! Hopefully this feedback is helpful.
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Topic: [0.95.1a] Starpocalypse 2.3.2 - more apocalyptic settings (Read 165085 times)