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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 249057 times)

Strict

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #420 on: November 24, 2021, 10:48:15 PM »

Small mining colonies only pay for themselves in reasonable time if you don't grow them. It's a pick your poison situation - either you lose money for a long, long time; or your colony never grows and its meagre income becomes meaningless compared to your fleet expenses.

Making millions eventually is exactly the problem. Colonies are a net loss of money early, when money matter the most, and only start giving profits when the game is already over because you have nothing else to do. The investment is too long term. It's like pouring all your money into stocks that will only start paying off when you are 80.

I completely agree. Game has literally one (1) questline, you dont really need colony to complete it, even though encounters are made for super late-game and/or specifically tailored fleets to counter them. Colony will never give all investment back (in vanilla) because there is no reason to play campaign for that long (due to lack of content), something needs to be done, like adjusting growth rates, or upkeep costs, or items for that,  or adding more content for late-game, but instead colony skills got removed... Im questioning the necessity of the whole colony gameplay now, what's the point? To give exploration some meaning? Just make "production slots" bar encounter more often. As of now mods handle colonies better.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #421 on: November 24, 2021, 10:52:34 PM »

Small mining colonies only pay for themselves in reasonable time if you don't grow them. It's a pick your poison situation - either you lose money for a long, long time; or your colony never grows and its meagre income becomes meaningless compared to your fleet expenses.
In my experience, pretty much every colony will make it to at least size 4 without hazard pay, and I think low-hazard habitable worlds will usually be able to make it to size 5 or 6 (albeit very slowly). Of course you will likely to want to spend money to speed up the process at some point, but I don't think it's at all required early on. You can definitely ride some passive income from a nice Terran world with farming through midgame and then turn on hazard pay later on when you're ready to scale up/invest. You certainly wouldn't end up behind where you would be if you waited to colonize until you were ready to invest IMO.

With regards to late game, it seems quite likely that there will be new things added that give you incentive/reason to have scaled up colonies. You have to remember you are playing an alpha, just look at that juicy greyed-out orders tab. I consider the entirety of late game to be a placeholder right now, so I am not judging it yet. It's more just something to do now since most of the story/late game content is (presumably) yet to be added.
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Jackundor

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #422 on: November 25, 2021, 01:24:09 AM »

Some nice changes, especially to my beloved dominator

Not that i'm going to play with them

i haven't played in half a year

such is the modmaker experience
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #423 on: November 25, 2021, 02:42:13 AM »

Heavy industry as first industry is a straight-up mistake if the goal is money (as opposed to building ships or weapons early). HI profitability is a joke, and only gets worse in modded games where every faction has its own HI flooding the market.

For the starter colony, Farming/Mining requires the lowest capital expenditure and is pretty much assured of a modest profit. Free port Light Industry (aka drug lab) may have the best non-Commerce profit per industry slot, that or Refining (due in part to the aforementioned HI bloat).
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ubuntufreakdragon

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #424 on: November 25, 2021, 04:55:10 AM »

btw freeport can bypass haz pay for smaller colonies.
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bobucles

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #425 on: November 25, 2021, 05:52:22 AM »

Small investment, small payout. The academy stipend could be replaced with a quest to reestablish contact and become governor over a mining colony, and it'd be practically the same reward. That might even be a pretty nice quest, it gets players on the colony game from the very start.


The cluster spanning empire with gigantic shipyards, top tier worlds and $mil/month income is pretty much post game territory. There isn't really any reason or purpose to invest that hard into colonies. It seems most of the issues only pertain to endgame or post game economy, but players with that level of experience are well on their way to modding their game. So is it really an issue? A casual, ordinary player can just pick a few planets, build a few things, and call it good.
« Last Edit: November 25, 2021, 05:54:52 AM by bobucles »
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SCC

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #426 on: November 25, 2021, 01:14:11 PM »

In my experience with the latest patch, colonies don't make money until the game is already over. 6 cycles while constantly bleeding money (iirc 60k to 200k, but I'm not sure) is not viable until later in the game, when you will not make the investment back, at least not without colony items and story points.

Grievous69

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #427 on: November 25, 2021, 01:27:17 PM »

I'll just chime in and agree with the others. It seems like the colony part of the game is balanced purely around min maxers, which is weird tbh. Unless you find perfect items you need and have the will to search for a perfect system, you're probably going to be struggling for a while, or as already mentioned, invest everything you can but at that point you're a god already and don't care about extra money. If I didn't take a commission last playthrough, I would be operating with a net loss each month. There's no point in balancing income in a way that makes colonies useful only if you "max" them out, it's tedious.

This is just another example of people crying too much about something, then nerf batting that part when it's just the vocal minority that happened to get lucky. Yes I saw your 500k income colony with 10 Alpha cores, all colony skills and exploration items, very nice. But now we all suffer.

The first iteration of colonies was straight up busted, I'll admit that. But this is getting ridiculous with each update making colonies more and more miserable. It's enough of a chore already when waiting for defenses to build and colony size to increase. Lately I barely bother with them, I just use them as a place to stock up on supplies/fuel and to hoard all my weapons and LPCs.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #428 on: November 25, 2021, 02:16:37 PM »

I mean, right now, 500k/month maxed out colonies don't really matter because there is no late game content so nothing matters at that point. But if the goal is to add a real late game with actually stuff to do with your colony income, late game colonies do need to be balanced.
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Grievous69

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #429 on: November 25, 2021, 02:23:49 PM »

Then just flatten the progression curve. Make early-mid colonies less crap and late game colonies less absurd in those "stars aligned" scenarios.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #430 on: November 25, 2021, 02:26:16 PM »

500k a month is not quite enough to restore a typical capital recovered from battle.  Certainly nowhere near enough to restore Ziggurat, which costs close to two million.

Millions per month would be nice to build custom fleets and send them out on hit jobs, or to fix up your fleet after you lose about half of your ships like NPCs (in the player's shoes) would.

500k is only too much when the game expects flawless victories after combat.

There's no point in balancing income in a way that makes colonies useful only if you "max" them out, it's tedious.

This is just another example of people crying too much about something, then nerf batting that part when it's just the vocal minority that happened to get lucky. Yes I saw your 500k income colony with 10 Alpha cores, all colony skills and exploration items, very nice. But now we all suffer.
That is my skepticism of the Commerce nerf.  It does nothing to the items that raise it to ridiculous levels.  I suspect Commerce will not be worth it unless player scores a Dealmaker.
« Last Edit: November 25, 2021, 02:27:48 PM by Megas »
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Wyvern

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #431 on: November 25, 2021, 02:50:52 PM »

Weird how different people seem to have wildly different experiences with the current colony system...

For me, for example, Commerce is already not worth it - it's literally the last industry I build, and only if there's nothing more important and the colony can afford the stability hit.

Then again, I'm not looking at colonies as a primary cash supply - which, I mean, they do supply some if you haven't messed things up too much, and that's useful, but the primary purpose for colonies for me is to keep my stuff, and to allow production of things I've got the blueprints for. Income is a nice bonus, but not a priority.

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EclipseRanger

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #432 on: November 25, 2021, 04:16:59 PM »

Personally,I do like fiddling with colonies,but they take the fun out of the game when they re fully equipped. Nothing can get past a fortified colony with a Star Fortress and multiple fleets patrolling it. Obviously, they will have a use in future updates,but I feel that the fact that OUR colonies can get so powerful and self suffucient,Core World faction colonies feel relatively weak.Not saying that the should all be pumping out capital ships,but giving at least capital worlds a really good fleet would make them more realistic.

Not to mention,when player colonies are fully set up,money becomes a non issue,so part of the fun of exploring to make ends meet is taken away. You just have functionally infinite money.Again,future updates are likely to change that,but unless there is some real money sink in the future AND the colonies don't produce enough credits to eclipse every other form of income, they will still remain a relatively shallow aspect of the game,which is a damn shame.I am sure many players,myself among them,love seeing their colony flourish from a small outpost to a self sufficient fortress. The story points change was a major step in the right direction IMO.
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #433 on: November 25, 2021, 04:31:33 PM »

I will point out, you don't need stars aligned scenarios for end game size 6 colonies to be profitable in 0.95a.  A single colony fully loaded pulling in 500-600k per month, still pulls in 200-250k per month with all the exploration goodies and cores removed.  It's roughly a factor of 2 in net profit difference on profit focused worlds.  There's some room to flatten, but not as much as you might think.  Flattening also impacts other portions of the game, for example making exploration less relevant.  Flatten too much and make minimal effort colonies produce enough credits to retire on, then why put anything other than minimal effort into your colonies? 

I guess it comes down to what people see colonies as in terms of gameplay.  Are they a tool?  Are they a goal? Are better colonies a reward for exploration gameplay as well as routinely defeating Remnants?  Are they optional or are players expected need them every game unless they're playing really well?  Are they intended as a credit sink for players already doing well, or a support for players doing poorly?  Are they intended to solve problems or create problems to be solved (like, hmm, now I need a gamma core to reduce the ore requirements for my refinery to reduce my upkeep costs)?

I wonder what people would want to see as the early and mid-game return on investment?  Should colonies early and mid-game be more profitable than actually flying your fleet around and doing stuff?  Should colonies become the focus of the economic portion of the campaign and thus in some sense, mandatory?  What about the cost benefit analysis between simply not paying hazard pay and pulling in profit now, versus paying hazard pay for less (or negative) profit now for more profit in some nebulous future.

Right now in the very early game, best return on investment is commissions, which scale from 25,000 credits/month at level 1 up to 95,000 credits at level 15 for an investment cost of nothing.  Not to mention bonus credits for blowing up ships you were going to blow up anyways.  You can grab a commission on day 1 of a spacer start.  Should a single colony's profits be comparable to commission profits early and mid-game? Less, more?  How about multiple colonies combined?
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #434 on: November 25, 2021, 04:39:49 PM »

Weird how different people seem to have wildly different experiences with the current colony system...

For me, for example, Commerce is already not worth it - it's literally the last industry I build, and only if there's nothing more important and the colony can afford the stability hit.

Then again, I'm not looking at colonies as a primary cash supply - which, I mean, they do supply some if you haven't messed things up too much, and that's useful, but the primary purpose for colonies for me is to keep my stuff, and to allow production of things I've got the blueprints for. Income is a nice bonus, but not a priority.
Heavy industry is the only (non-defense) industry that does anything more than making money, and commerce as the third industry with any boost (cores, items, story points) already makes more than any other industries. If you don't care about money, then I guess you just spam heavy industries? Nothing else would do anything.
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