"They aren't exploits, it's just the game. Play it how you will. Or fail how you will."
I disagree, most modern games, if alive, would constantly release rebalancing patches to fix broken mechanics, by your logic rebalance shouldn't even be a thing.
"Bounty scaling is definitely weird"
When I have an end-game fleet, I don't want to get a bounty asking me to kill some guy with a few starter ships, I just want some challenge
"And more varied rewards? Would you prefer payment in food or ore? Are the costs of the sale tariffs being considered, so player gets extra food/ore?"
I agree it's not necessary, since everything can be converted to credits, but again, why most modern games have diversified rewards?
"Play longer, and you'll realize that shortages are generally more organic, pirate activity etc. Heck, once player gets some cash and a decent fleet, they can start artificially inducing shortages with piracy! But even if player doesn't feel like raising the black and slitting some throats, all shortages inevitable end. So wait until 8 years into a run and player be broke as hell since fleet is expensive, lack of shortages to exploit, and fleet too expensive to run exploration missions (the solution is to store/sell ships to make fleet cheaper to run, then do exploration missions!).
I have also played this game enough to realize that shortages seem to be somewhat more common in early game, prolly to give baby player more opportunities. But by year 12, not necessarily as common..."
That's the equivalent of saying you'll understand when you're older or you can enjoy life after you retire, I just can't agree with this mentality, what percentage of the player population of a game are veteran/hardcore players? 5%, 10%? The majority are casual players, and their gaming experience definitely matters, after all, it pretty much determines whether they're gonna stay to become a veteran or just quit after a few hours.
so instead of subjectively expressing our feelings, how about we get just a little bit more quantitative, can you explain to me how this is balanced:
on average each mercantile voyage takes me about 5 minutes, making approx 250k income, minus 20k base cost that's 230k profit/run, 46k/min, I'm not talking about the best case, I made 500k once, admittedly it's kinda boring if you do it constantly
at the same time, a bounty gives a 50~100k reward while takes on average 10 min to finish, because they tend to scatter in the outer reach of the core world,
since there's combat involved the base cost oftentimes goes beyond 50k, giving me 0~50k profit, 25k/run on average, 2.5k/min, good thing is you do get to play a lot of combat.
now let's talk about surveys, those are normally in the deepest space, more than twice the distance of a bounty run, the reward is generally around 90k, minus the base cost of 80k, you get about 10k profit/run, let's assume it also takes 10min to finish, that's 1k/min
