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Author Topic: Project Ironclads TC (28 of April, 2017) Source files for the mod  (Read 1638615 times)

Okim

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3780 on: March 10, 2015, 07:44:33 AM »

I finally had a chance to play the latest version for a couple hours and have a couple observations:

1) I was able to make over 4 million credits in about an hour of playing by trading between stations with the trade disrupted event.

2) Related to this, I think it would make sense for a faction which is blockading a station or planet to become hostile if the player trades with the blockaded station or planet.  It might be kind of difficult to get them to actually stop you, since you could still generally avoid the fleets since they're pretty slow, but at least there would be some downside to doing this.

How many trade disruption events do you usually have at once?

As for the trading with hostiles - I wonder why Alex didn`t include that thing already in the game (I mean - we have negative impact when a colony witnesses the fact of trade with the hostile colony, so why not to have fleets do the same?). For me it is a bit difficult to do code wise.

Pushover

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3781 on: March 10, 2015, 10:12:09 AM »

I finally had a chance to play the latest version for a couple hours and have a couple observations:

1) I was able to make over 4 million credits in about an hour of playing by trading between stations with the trade disrupted event.

2) Related to this, I think it would make sense for a faction which is blockading a station or planet to become hostile if the player trades with the blockaded station or planet.  It might be kind of difficult to get them to actually stop you, since you could still generally avoid the fleets since they're pretty slow, but at least there would be some downside to doing this.

How many trade disruption events do you usually have at once?

As for the trading with hostiles - I wonder why Alex didn`t include that thing already in the game (I mean - we have negative impact when a colony witnesses the fact of trade with the hostile colony, so why not to have fleets do the same?). For me it is a bit difficult to do code wise.


It really depends on the events and locations of the trade disruptions. The best one I had was a trade disruption on Shington Trading Hub, pushing ore to ~double price. Bought up all the ore on Jorgia, made a quick 5m credits. Disruptions on Archimedes that push up supplies or fuel allow you to buy up the thousands of supplies or fuel on the Centronom Trading Hub and sell it immediately for a lot of money. Certain places like Cold Sands often have trade disruptions on ship parts, which can be a few hundred thousand if it happens.

Right now, there are a few trades you can do monthly. Archimedes (I think it should be spelled like this) Mega Lobster + Medicaments -> Centronom Trading Hub makes a few thousand each month. Electronics from Freya -> Centronom Trading Hub is ~50 credits profit per unit. Rock Fly Brights can be bought from Uomoz, and sold for ~5k+ profit per unit. Most edge planets such as Dwarf or FFS planets sell Luxury Goods for ~1k, and you can turn them around for a ~500c profit per unit. Again, low volume, but it adds up when looking for trade disruptions. Scrapyards obviously sell machinery, ship and weapon parts at a profitable price, but don't sell a lot of them.

A few places are bugged in terms of price, some of the FFS planets sell their recreational drugs for 1-3c per drug. Although they have low volume, it's still free credits.

Otherwise, Rare Metals are a super easy way to make money, since high stability worlds that don't sell rare metals tend to buy them for ~1200-1800 for about 200 units. I'm not sure whether it's up to you to fix this, or whether Alex has the fix next patch, but you can make a few hundred thousand by shipping rare metals to Vella and Danbridge (and other places) from planets within the system. Alex is fixing the ability to just save and exit and reload the game to reset the price of rare metals on these places next patch.



To reduce the abuse a little, it might help to space some of the stations out just a little more (a few hundred units at most). It's possible to reach both the Centronom Trading Hub and Archimedes from the same location in space with just a Trader, meaning that cargo capacity has no effect on trade if there is profit to be had. Just load up ~6000 units of something, have supply/day be -500ish, and lose only like 2 supplies in the fraction of a second reaching the other location to sell. Same goes for Jorgia and Shington Trading Hub.
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Okim

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3782 on: March 10, 2015, 11:23:32 AM »

May be it would be better for me to return vanilla rates and tariffs? :)

Pushover

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3783 on: March 10, 2015, 12:46:48 PM »

Vanilla rates and tariffs absolutely kill trading. It's barely possible to turn a profit with trade disruptions. 3 major things that I like more about Ironclads over vanilla is faster combat, closer stations within systems as well as more systems, and a better feeling economy.

Again, something as simple as increasing the distance of very close stations solves part of the problem, since trading in mass takes significantly more time. Simply buying thousands of units of something now will eat away at your supplies like crazy, since travel time is increased beyond 0.1 seconds. Even if the stations are as close as in the Nexus system, it would take several days at 0 burn to reach the destination, at the cost of hundreds of supplies.

All the low volume trading I described (Luxury goods, machinery/ship/weapon parts) is fine, with the exception of recreational drugs being 1-3 credits on some places. In vanilla, you make almost all your money from really high bounties. Jangala tends to offer a very high bounty, so you just sit there and kill pirates for a while. I like having the option to trade for a bit, look around for weapons for whatever ship you plan to make.

I'm not sure how much control you have over the economy. I might mess around with the commodities.csv sometime to see if I can make a better feeling economy for myself, but you would obviously have far better tools to change the economy around.
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SCC

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3784 on: March 10, 2015, 01:32:51 PM »

Spoiler

That feeling when you defeat a Hulk, a Raider and two HARPOONS with just 6 gunships (Gunner, Hunter, Rattlesnake, Rostov-H, Rostov-M & Stiletto).
[close]
And thanks for help with load screen, Okim.

Gabriel_Braun

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3785 on: March 10, 2015, 01:35:19 PM »

I personally think, given the nature of IC, that we've arrived at a potential impasse.  I'd like to think it's bridgeable somehow but it's not looking likely...
The economy system was designed around smaller-scale nations than those that exist in IC so either Alex needs to adopt a more liquid system or (sadly) IC will have to move to a more martial system again?
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Pushover

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3786 on: March 10, 2015, 04:06:25 PM »

Well, I personally don't have a problem with a slightly broken economy system like we have now. I think a slightly broken economy system beats vanilla's practically nonexistent economy system. As long as the freezing bug can be fixed somehow, this system works fairly well. There are also ways to make tons of money in combat in this game (for example, mugging the Marauders after they finish their scavenging mission), so I don't see why making tons of money through trading is such a huge problem.

What exactly causes the freeze? The game doesn't have enough supply of a good to display it or something?

The other way I can see trading working is to have delivery missions, just like bounty missions, where places need certain goods delivered by a certain time. A shipyard may ask for 20 ship parts in the next month, and pay you an additional bonus for providing them (say 10000 credits). So you would go to the scrapyards and shipbreaking centers to find 20 ship parts, sell them on the open market at the location, and the game would reward you. Some places would just need small amounts of goods, but maybe a large heavy machinery world would want a bulk shipment of 2000 metals, so you would either need to take multiple trips, or have a big cargo capacity. That said, this would be quite a huge system to write, since it's about as complicated as the bounty system.


Harpoons definitely fit the bill of demonic spiders. SO MANY ROCKETS! BURN DRIVE! STILL HAS A REAL WEAPON AFTER ROCKETS ARE FIRED! My thought is that the difficulty of a Marauder fleet isn't about how large it is, it's about how many Harpoon Wings it has. The RSF wing is also quite nasty, but less common because the RSF has more fighters to randomly choose from. They also stay in formation better it seems.
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Alzrius

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3787 on: March 10, 2015, 04:53:46 PM »

Trade disruptions happened fairly frequently in my game, especially ones that pushed the price of supplies fuel up to ~200 cr, which allows you to get a profit of about 140 cr per unit in most cases.  There were also several that raised the price of rare ore up to about 400, and one or two that decreased it at a nearby system to 50.  Since both supplies and rare ore are easy to obtain in large quantities and RSF freighters are so efficient and cheap, you can do this pretty much from the beginning of the game.
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Okim

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3788 on: March 11, 2015, 07:01:02 AM »

I wonder if it would be a good idea to switch Ironclads to entirely randomly generated systems? Certainly this is something to think of.

SCC

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3789 on: March 11, 2015, 10:41:56 AM »

The RSF wing is also quite nasty, but less common because the RSF has more fighters to randomly choose from. They also stay in formation better it seems.
But it makes sense for a interstellar empire to have some lethal fighter wings, right? For a scavenger pirates' support wing, it's at least surprising... And a pain in the ass. Also, it's not that additional weapon that makes them Demonic Spiders, not burn drive, but MULTIPLE SALVOS OF ROCKETS. You think it fired them, you evaded 'em and you're save now? WRONG. Hopefully update with fighter limited version weapons (if I understood correctly what Okim meant) will nerf them a little.

Okim, what you mean by "randomly generated systems"? Positions of them, theirs content, both? At first glance, it would make more sense to make systems manually, because not everything is good with randomness and Starsector is more made for manual than procedural generation, but hey, we're talking about positions of rocks or gas balls in space. Empty space. Positions are practically only different costs of supplies and/or fuel to get there.

Oh, and one more thing: fighting Kansas for 6000C? Nope, I'm good. Though it's nice thing to roll over two times more frigates than you have at once or (what seemed unlikely) crushing two FFS carriers with two Laws and Janitor wing escort. And even without casualties!

Pushover

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3790 on: March 11, 2015, 10:55:22 AM »

The RSF wing is also quite nasty, but less common because the RSF has more fighters to randomly choose from. They also stay in formation better it seems.
But it makes sense for a interstellar empire to have some lethal fighter wings, right? For a scavenger pirates' support wing, it's at least surprising... And a pain in the ass. Also, it's not that additional weapon that makes them Demonic Spiders, not burn drive, but MULTIPLE SALVOS OF ROCKETS. You think it fired them, you evaded 'em and you're save now? WRONG. Hopefully update with fighter limited version weapons (if I understood correctly what Okim meant) will nerf them a little.

Okim, what you mean by "randomly generated systems"? Positions of them, theirs content, both? At first glance, it would make more sense to make systems manually, because not everything is good with randomness and Starsector is more made for manual than procedural generation, but hey, we're talking about positions of rocks or gas balls in space. Empty space. Positions are practically only different costs of supplies and/or fuel to get there.

Oh, and one more thing: fighting Kansas for 6000C? Nope, I'm good. Though it's nice thing to roll over two times more frigates than you have at once or (what seemed unlikely) crushing two FFS carriers with two Laws and Janitor wing escort. And even without casualties!

The Harpoon and the SU-252 both have 3 fighters that fire 2x122mm Rockets. Part of the problem is the Burn Drive, since the Harpoon will overshoot your ship, then sneak up from the side, whereas the SU-252 generally comes at you from the front 90 degrees.


I think there's a few things to potentially look at before trying anything huge. The biggest problem I ran into when messing with Ironclads' economy is that high stability worlds are a place where you can sell anything. Ignore basic economics of supply and demand, just sell to a high stability world for more credits than selling to a low stability world with 0% of its demand met. Perhaps just lowering the stability of many high stability places would change the economy a bit. What also may work is changing trade disruptions to be +50% price and -25% price, rather than +100% price and -50% price.
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Gabriel_Braun

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3791 on: March 11, 2015, 11:57:32 AM »

I wonder if it would be a good idea to switch Ironclads to entirely randomly generated systems? Certainly this is something to think of.

Hmm, totally something to think about Okim!
It could be explained in lore that the nations are spread over galactic distances and that each playthrough occurs in unique convergence points?
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TrashMan

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3792 on: March 11, 2015, 02:34:38 PM »

Random generation cannot match hand-placed goodness. Especially if you want consistency in your universe.
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CrashToDesktop

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3793 on: March 11, 2015, 02:48:45 PM »

Random generation cannot match hand-placed goodness. Especially if you want consistency in your universe.

Actually, considering the systems are so small in this mod (which I greatly enjoy), a randomly generated system could be very, very detailed.  I'm not very fond of Exerelin's generation system (mainly because all asteroid belts have the smallest possible width), but this is a different mod, so I shall withhold my judgement. :)
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Pushover

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Re: Project Ironclads TC 9 (8/3/2015) [0.65.2a] - ship requisition system
« Reply #3794 on: March 11, 2015, 03:48:13 PM »

OK, the more I look at the economy system, the more I find how broken it is. I tried decreasing the stability of everything to 1, under the idea that stability would be based on the modifiers (military base, outpost, regional capital, etc) it would drive the economy to supply/demand. Unfortunately, as the demand gets met on a planet, it increases the stability of the planet, driving up the prices, meaning that now more places want to trade with that planet, filling its demand even more. Also, despite the no variability in the price of Planet/Asteroid scanners according to the csv file, without trading hubs (stability 10), the price of a scanner is variable based on stability.

Stability seems like a super broken mechanic from the base game, where trading is nonexistent. Right now if you don't care much about rep (and when you can pay just 1k per rep point, you really don't care), you can already flood the black market of a station, dropping its stability by a ton. This makes all the other goods cheaper, and then you can buy up the open market. Haven't run many tests to see if I can make a ton of money from it, but the logic of the port being: "So I hear we just got a TON of hand weapons smuggled in yesterday." "Yeah, I'm gonna have to drop the price of my metals to about half of what it was now!"

I think just reducing trade disruptions' impact, or possibly just trying to factor in how many fleets were lost into supply/demand would solve some of the trading problems. Right now, trade disruptions don't make a lot of sense. It feels like the logic goes something like this: "Sir, we lost 2 fleets of ships carrying a week's worth of fuel to us this last week, but we still have enough fuel for another few months." "DOUBLE THE PRICE OF FUEL FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS!"


I'm pretty sure making a procedurally generated economy not broken is even harder than making a handmade economy not broken. If you have an idea to make it work, then it could be fairly awesome. However, given how broken the economy system is already, I'm hesitant, and don't think anything more than touching it a little bit is going to be worth the time investment.
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