Economy Test #6050
Economy Test #6050
Conversation
Amazinite
added
the
balance
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As with #5779, I'm mainly just tossing this out there for testing, feedback, and discussion purposes, and will focus on finishing it some time later. Any suggestions for things I might have missed and should look at are welcomed. |
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From my experience of recommending the game to friends and family, the general result was that most of them found the early game tedious, repetitive and not fun, and ultimately stopped playing before getting anywhere. I don't think making the early game shorter is a major problem, in fact I think it may be a good thing. |
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Speeding up the early game a little bit would be fine. However, giving people more to do and making it more satisfying to be in the early game would be even better. And yes, this might mean toning down the pirates a little. Or at very least make the random pirate merchant hunters more geared towards capture and less towards "blowing merchants to smithereeens." |
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This feels like the exact opposite way this problem needs to be addressed. However, I think you know my feelings on how ridiculously easy it is to make money in ES, and, more importantly, the need for variable difficulty, already: it's so broken I never actually play the game any more. Probably the only thing that has changed since we last discussed this is that I do spend a lot of time playing ESS. The difficulty curve there is steep enough to keep me engaged and having fun; in regards to this issue the crew shares and officers mechanics are helpful. Mike roped me in to commenting here, mentioning that a variable difficulty could be used to adjust profits, so here's a suggestion of how that could calculate:
Elsewhere, this same difficulty multiplier could be applied directly to things like the price of harvestables, mission payouts, minimum depreciation, etc. All that said, for vague purposes of realism I like the idea of the commodity base price being higher, though not the wider profit margin. |
Yeah, I was just thinking about earlier how the profit margins for trading are actually pretty fine as is, so instead of doubling the min and max prices, it makes more sense to double the max but add the max to the min. For example, instead of food going from 100-600 to 200-1200, it'd become 700-1200; keep the profit margins the same when trading, but up how much you get for stealing commodities. As far as difficulty settings and how those effect prices go, I feel like that's a conversation for another time. For now let's get the one difficulty setting that we have balanced, then we can grow from there. |
Trading commodities really doesn't need its profit margins doubled.
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I have my program set up so that we can alter the commodity prices every which way we want at this point, so making changes will be easy. Here's how the commodities vs asteroids stand right now:
Yottrite is suppose to be some exotic material that you need a jump drive to even access, so I think that it can stay where it is, but perhaps the other outfits can be brought down somewhat in their cost/ton but have their expected value per asteroid remain the same or increase. At the very least, the heavy metals and metals commodities have a mid range value less than many of the minable metals seems odd, so perhaps the commodities could also be further bumped up in price, or at least certain commodities could. Any specific suggestions for commodity and/or minable values? |
Yeah, that'd be alright. Instead of moving up the (before one has a mega fleet) lower bound of profitability, raising the price without affecting the margin could narrow the gap between plundering and capturing, maybe even make it worthwhile to harass an
I worry that with only one difficulty, we undermine that goal by having people pulling in different directions.
Have you checked out how that's balanced in Revamp? Both Kiko and Zitchas have merged my harvest balance branch into their respective projects, with alterations for junk and yottrite, respectively |
I have, and I mentioned looking at it under the "Tweak the mining experience" section in the PR description.
I think the difficulty levels are closer than ever given that choice starts were added recently (I imagine a difficulty selection would use a similar set up to the choice starts, so we can just copy over that work) and I have #5978 open, which would be the means by which the game difficulty could be altered. (Some sort of "difficulty modifier" on prices as you describe would be very easy to implement as a gamerule constant as I have it set up.) But insofar as we only have one difficulty setting, we have to work with what we've got, and if we're pulling in different directions (which in this case I don't see us doing), we can hold off until difficulty settings are a thing. |
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I think the most I'm comfortable with doing to minables is cutting the worth per ton in half for some of the higher quality minables but keep the worth the same for lower quality ones. We can then double the payloads. At the very least then players can fill their cargo holds twice as fast for the same worth per asteroid. I'll note though how the "metal" commodity includes aluminum, copper, platinum, silver, titanium, and various forms of iron, while the "heavy metals" commodity includes uranium, gold, lead, neodymium, and tungsten. Instead of trying to balance the cost per ton of these minables so that they fit within the min and max prices of these commodities, I think it'd make more sense to either just remove these strings from these commodities, or ignore the fact that these metals are listed in these commodities. |
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Honestly I think trading is definitely still faster and better than boarding in all cases in terms of money generation. It just doesn't start off that way. Boarding definitely dominates the early game. From what I've read of the posts leading up to here, it doesn't seem like you're really addressing that issue when it comes to commodity prices, as if you keep the profits the same, the early game is still just as slow as a cargo runner, and only make it easier for to salvage start (which to me is almost no different from a boarding start), since explosions often spread commodities anyway. Basically, I don't think touching commodities matters unless you're changing profit margins for cargo running, and cargo running is really only slow at the start, so maybe touching commodities is a mistake period. I say this since it'll affect your ability to expand your fleet via loans (more expensive cargo means less money available for buying ships). And yes, loans here are very important when considering the cargo start, since a larger fleet or a bigger ship makes it easier to make money, making the debt almost negligible. On that note, lowering interest rates or increasing the available amount of loans isn't necessarily a bad idea. I can't really comment on mining too much since I've yet to really commit to trying a mining run. I will say though that I am happy that there are ways to scan for minable asteroids though, since that used to be one of my major concerns with the mining start. As far as the raid fleets go I have mixed opinions on. My extremely well armed deep rivers really don't stop pirate raiding pretty much at all, and if I want to stave it off I'm forced to add in lower cargo value ships into my fleet. Also with my experience if I want to avoid the mechanic, it's just as easy as flying into Hai space and doing my runs there, where I can abuse mechanics (parking ships instead of taking them with me, then unparking them remotely while I'm in Hai Space) to do massive star barge farming there, without even considering the ability to buy star barges in Hai space because of missions later on. Basically I feel that raid mechanics keep me from considering human space for cargo running almost all of the time. The reason I feel conflicted on them is because I feel that it is appropriate to have some level of risk in contested space (anywhere that has space pirates). And since I pretty much avoid the raid mechanics in the early game, I can't really give solid advice on whether or not they should be adjusted. My small advice on the matter would be to give better security against raids in systems with higher security (e.g. the paradise worlds should always have less threat of raids, same with the free worlds after the free worlds campaign since you basically eliminated piracy down there). As far as jobs are concerned, the way I currently feel about basically all jobs are, unless they're on the way they're garbage. There are many reasons for that:
Essentially jobs in my opinion are NOT easy to fix. If you make them too valuable they'll easily be the number one method because they almost always get the best profit per ton/jump (at least I've never seen them drop below 100/jump, which is a very good cargo route). And if you leave them as they are they'll never compete with a pure cargo route. In my opinion the best part about jobs is that they have no investment cost, unlike cargo running which does (jobs give you the cargo for free). This does give some advantage in the early game, but you might not have a ship large enough to take on the good jobs. With that thought in mind, some high paying early jobs might not be a bad idea if there aren't any already (I've largely ignored jobs unless they're on the way and pay very little attention these days to their actual margins, especially in the early game). So what is the best way to deal with the capturing meta? Well I'm not sure it needs to be done really. In my experience all paths are viable. Capturing is probably the best in the early game but it tapers off significantly against cargo running in the late game. Jobs are decent for exploring and almost required if you're hunting down spaceport missions. Sadly the place jobs shine the most are in wanderer/coalition space, neither one new players can get into easily since it requires a jump drive. I'm pretty sure I mentioned to amazinite in a stream once that I thought that this issue was a non-starter anyway. The reason is not because boarding is good or bad. The major reason is that all paths are viable. If I had one qualm with boarding it is that there are some ships and technology that are only available by boarding. I consider this a problem because it encourages players to engage in the boarding meta leaving no other options, not to mention that makes money less valuable, since some important outfits can only be stolen. Can we address that? Well, to a degree I think so, but that most likely requires adding in more quest-lines where the technology is unlocked. However, I think pug, quarg, and archon tech will most likely only be steal-able if available at all. Strong chance Heliarch tech will remain only steal-able too, unless we get a war against the quarg going or something. |
I will confess that the PR description is exaggerated in describing capturing as the best method of income. Whenever these discussions come up, it's typically assumed that we're leaving out commodity trading fleets, as commodity trading is the only income method that scaled infinitely with your fleet size, whereas job running only scales up to however many jobs there are that can offer, and capturing only scales with your flagship's crew size, while plundering and mining scales with your flagship's cargo hold (although you can jettison cargo for your escorts to pick up and technically have those two methods scale with your fleet's size, but I imagine that doing that ends up slower than if you were to have just done commodity trading). So commodity trading being the only income method to scale infinitely inherently means that it'll always come out on top, but what comes along with that is that the player must continue to grow their fleet size, which isn't something that all players will do. I myself don't really like to have a massive fleet, so commodity trading on a large scale to make up a majority of my income isn't something I often do.
Well I'd say that salvaging and boarding can be very different playstyles, especially with how merchants will dump their cargo when threatened, so with salvaging you don't even need to be capable of disabling and boarding a ship. And having this salvaging playstyle be more viable is certainly one of the stated intentions of increasing commodity prices, as it's a playstyle that pirate NPCs partake in, and therefore should be somewhat viable for a player playing as a pirate. As far as commodity trading as an issue goes though, I don't really see it as that. Even if we shrunk the profit margins, all that's doing is slowing down the snowballing. If we increase the profit margins to make it more viable early game, then that just increases the snowballing in the late game. So commodity trading by its very nature is something you can't easily hold back. On another note, I don't really think that commodity trading should be seen as a sole form of income for the early game. When I'm trading commodities early game, it's because I want to make a little extra credits along whatever path I'm already taking.
I think that this is the biggest failing of the raid fleet mechanic; it isn't really something that hinders the player, it's just something for the player to avoid/get around while still creating a snowballing commodity trading fleet. So either we need to somehow have the raid mechanic always be relevant, or we'd probably be better off just removing it, and I'm honestly not too interested in doing the former.
I think it's funny that you say that, because for me it's the exact opposite; you see jobs as something you take if you can gain a profit along your trade route, I see trading as something I do to gain extra profit along a job route. I think that the important note about jobs though is that while each job individually might have a payment per jump of at least 100, if you're stacking multiple jobs to multiple different destinations, your payment per jump will be going down for each subsequent job given that you need to stop for the previous ones and likely won't be taking the quickest path to the final job along your path doing the earlier jobs. Another thing to note is how jobs likely won't completely fill your cargo hold. There's typically some empty space left over after taking a job, so jobs don't fully utilize your fleet's capabilities like commodity trading does.
Well I don't think the question is of viability, but how different income methods stack up against each other, and the general perception is that capturing is too strong. And since capturing has already been nerfed before, I'm simply looking into buffing other methods instead. Another thing to keep in mind though is playstyles. As I mentioned, not everyone is going to go for a massive trading fleet. Some like to have massive trade fleets, but others could prefer to plunder and capture ships, or to simply run jobs. I'd wager to guess that most players start off just taking jobs, then later expand into using other income methods as they become more familiar with the game. And with that in mind, the profitability of jobs generally feels like the worst method; I'd say that I prefer mining to job running, capturing is the undisputed king of early game income, and commodity trading is the undisputed king of late game income. So I don't see buffing jobs as too out of the question, especially given that jobs don't scale like commodity trading and don't utilize your entire fleet's capabilities like I mentioned. So even if jobs were buffed by a decent amount, the infinite scaling of commodity trading would still make it the best method in the end.
Well there are plans by @Arachi-Lover to have Heliarch technology be purchasable by the player through a Coalition storyline, some Korath technology can be purchased from the Remnant during their story, and the remaining Korath technology will likely be sold to the player during the end of the Wanderer campaign (whenever that happens), so I imagine that at some point, most of the tech that currently needs to be stolen will be able to be purchased. |
The question is certainly viability. As long as money retains its value, all paths lead to Rome. There is always going to be a "best" method, and with each method it should have its own risks. Boarding is extremely risky, especially in the early game, and therefore has the highest reward. Re-balancing to make it less rewarding may actually take away from the experience rather than improve it. That said, given the lead of boarding in the early game, giving some perks to the other methods probably won't change that much, even doubling them wouldn't be enough to keep people away from boarding ships in the early game, so there is still plenty of room for re-balancing. I'd just keep an eye on or ignore trading since it's absolutely the best way to make money in the late game.
And this also leads to the question of viability. The only time where viability doesn't matter in this case is if the player meta games. And if the player is meta gaming they will always do the best option making the whole matter moot, since you'll just change one problem for another, or simply be unable to fix it since it's unlikely that capturing will not be the early meta given its relative difficulty.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough. I think that less jumps are more appropriate for cargo running. So perhaps instead of saying jobs along the way, but jobs at my destination. After all, it's easier to make 75/jump over 2 jumps (price difference of 150), than it is over 6 (price difference of 450), and 75/jump is a fairly solid route, with anything higher usually deteriorating or requiring a jump drive. Adding in an extra stop in the middle will lower my profits significantly so I generally wouldn't do it. But you've also made my case of why I don't like jobs as much, since each stop will significantly lower my profits. Which is also why I suggested an early job booster might not be bad, it helps the newer players and might keep my attention as an older player. I'm simply worried though if jobs get boosted too much, cargo running will be completely drowned out unless you have a massive fleet. In human space there isn't much of a risk of that I think, but in wanderer/coalition space there is. It takes a reasonably large fleet to make a few hundred thousand credits in a single route (at 75/ton/jump it'd take 4k cargo space to do it which is like 8-9 behemoths or 4 deep rivers). Sure that is no match for boarding and capturing (which I feel caps out at around 20m or so per jump - run out of crew/cargo space, and for that much profit you'd likely have to land on a pirate world/world with pirates -- theoretically it could go higher if you play the jettison game, but I don't think that is worth it since you'll lose other stuff in the meanwhile). But like I said earlier, that's a little more risky so I'm okay with it being a higher reward. |
I understand that a best method will always exist, but I'm not looking to dethrone capturing or trading. I'm simply looking to make other methods (salvaging, mining, job running) less bad by comparison.
No, I understood what you meant. I'm just highlighting how taking multiple jobs that individually look like they're better than running commodities can result in a lower payout per jump when taken all together (which is perhaps just me echoing your ideas in different words), hence my suggestion that I don't think that increasing (lower end) job payments would encroach too much on commodity trading.
Which is why I put an emphasis on "especially on the low end" in the PR description. I think high end jobs, especially those jobs in Wanderer and Coalition space like you highlighted, are actually totally fine as is, and if I'm doing a job running playthrough I'll actually go to Coalition space to make credits. And while I'm not looking to make human jobs as good as Wanderer or Coalition jobs, I do want to make the low end human jobs better to run. |
Gave minable asteroids about 12.5-19% less hull. Lowered costs of higher end minables by up to half to be more in line with commodities. Increased payloads to account for loss in cost per outfit. Expected value per asteroid mined is either roughly the same or increased. Silicon's expected value has been doubled because 5000 credits per asteroid was pitiful. Lead's expected payout has been increased by 87.5% as well.
The cost per ton for minables and commodities now roughly covers the same space. Commodity prices range from 680 to 4340 credits. Minable prices range from 500 to 5000 credits (yottrie excluded). Also, there was a bug in my program that was only increasing the price of heavy metals and luxury goods by 400 in the previous commits, so now they have their much more increased prices.
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The numbers are now as follows:
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I'd maybe leave this to a separate PR, but instead of having some sort of mining laser that simply damages asteroids quicker, what about a mining laser with the mechanic that it increases the drop rate of minable asteroids? Then I could see dropping the worth of some of the minable asteroids per ton even lower, because the expected value would still go up as a result of the increased drop rate. I'm imagining some sort of weapon with a damage type that stacks like a status effect and can up to double an asteroid's average payload, with certain asteroids being more resistance to having their drop rate increased than others. |
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I would just like to point out that money in this game is really confusing. How much is a credit worth in relation to a U.S. Dollar? Nowadays, an ounce of platinum costs a thousand bucks. Did the price of most things decrease to to the plentiful supply of resources? |
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Trying to measure the USD value of a credit is an exercise in futility, not only because we're dealing with an entirely separate economy (single planet vs galaxy wide), but also because prices in game have been set to align with game balance, not align with supply and demand. |
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One thing that ES lacks that I rather miss from EVN was an excuse to use smaller ships. In EVN, hyperjumps took variable numbers of days: 1 day for small ships, 2 days for medium ships, 3 days for large ships. At the same time, rush deliveries were almost always too short to be completed by heavy ships, and there were even "urgent" deliveries (often legal documents or other small sized things) that were so tight that nothing but a fast ship running a straight line trip could complete it in time. While my memory is fuzzy, I got the impression that those rush deliveries (and especially the urgent ones) payed better than in ES, too. On top of that, there was an entire mini campaign (probably a dozen missions or so) around the player becoming a courier for a shipping company that unlocked better rushed/urgent deliveries. I think there might have been another smaller courier company delivery chain too. Anyway, the point is that it was both profitable and a solid reason to stay with a small ship and run the high priority urgent/rush jobs. Especially since there was no storing ships, so once you moved up to a bigger ship, it was hard to come back. ES is almost tailor made for having multiple ships and swapping out to a fast ship to do some job running and then back to a warship for the story missions. In ES, we have no such motivation. Doesn't matter what we are doing, a bigger ship is always better. Even if running rush deliveries in a bulk freighter with a top speed of <100 seems ludicrous. |
Literally banging my head on my desk at this "let's just ignore the lack of internal consistency," but I'll spare you the several paragraphs of rant I wrote as I find your latest numbers acceptable. Regarding raid fleets. I think these are a vastly underutilised feature of the game. Rather, I think we should have new types of raid fleets for non-human space, and some diversification of the extant raids. As for triggering them... I don't fully understand how this happens, because I've almost never encountered them. The one time I ever did have a fleet that the game considered raidworthy, I was getting raided every launch. So, in my opinion, I think the threshold for triggering them needs to be eased up, but the change of them happening once trigger-able should decrease. Ideally, I think they should scale in chance and size depending on how bloated with booty your fleet is. |
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@Zitchas |
@ravenshining Raid fleets specifically target ships with high cargo values. If you're using warships other than the Bactrian, you'll pretty much never encounter them. Yesterday I did some basic testing, and even a fleet of Bactrians fully armed has a hard time NOT triggering a raid fleet (wanderer tech equipped Bactrian barely breaks even on threat/cargo level). So what they do is one of two things:
So to make raid fleets available in alien space means forcing people to buy escorts for their cargo fleets, thus slowing down the growth of cargo fleets exponentially, and pretty much throwing a wrench in the Geocoris and Deep River as viable freighters -- at that point you might as well take the Bactrian instead, because the price of adding in the escorts makes up for the Bactrian's cargo inefficiency. I'll say it like I said it earlier, I'm pretty torn on raid fleets. On the one hand, I avoid them like the plague and on the other, I think some risk is necessary for clearly contested space. If you had to extend raids to alien fleets, I suppose the Hai and the Wanderers can kind of support them, since they have to deal with the Unfettered Hai. You could somewhat make an argument for raid fleets in Remnant space with the Korath, but I think it would be more appropriate just to have more Korath attacks in general. Can't see it at all right now for Coalition space, since the civilians aren't armed (therefore there is no one to engage in piracy), but maybe that'll change when more Coalition quest line is added. |
Well then what would you suggest? I'm very explicitly asking for feedback and ideas on this front, and saying "I was going to rant but I won't" without giving any alternative suggestion really doesn't help me in the slightest, and more generally doesn't help us resolve our issues. If you want me to go into more detail about why I'm thinking what I am, I can, but just ask next time. The margin between the cheapest and most expensive metal or heavy metal commodities is very small compared to the margin between the cheapest and most expensive minables. In order to have the minables fit into the margins of those commodities, we'd need all the minables to be very close to one another in terms of their worth per ton, so the the only real distinguishing factor between different minable asteroids would be their payloads, and I think that dynamic would yield rather boring gameplay. I will note though how we actually have three different values we can shift for how expensive asteroids are, and we're only shifting two of them; we could alter the payload of the asteroid, the cost of the outfits, or the mass of the outfits. Aside from yottrite, all the masses are 1 right now, so we're only messing with the former two attributes at the moment. So something we could do instead of having all the costs be close together is have the costs per ton be close together, but have the tonnage of certain outfits be higher or lower. That would result in a more interesting dynamic than having all the outfits be one ton with just their costs changing but all being close together. Even then, though, having all the costs per ton be so close seems to me like it'd still not be as dynamic, as you'd basically be gaining the same amount of credits for a full cargo bay no matter what you're mining, meaning that mining wouldn't be a matter of finding the highest value per ton, but rather finding whatever asteroid will fill your hold the quickest. And something also thrown into question is how "lead" is currently the second cheapest minable, but the "heavy metals" commodity is worth more than the "metals" commodity, and "lead" is in the "heavy metals" commodity while "platinum," the most expensive of the normal minables, is in the "metals" commodity, which would suggest that lead should be more expensive than platinum. I agree that we have a consistency problem here and I want to resolve it, I just want to know how people think we should resolve it, and I think that the removal of these strings from the commodities lists, at least in the cases where the commodity prices disagree with the minable prices that we agree on, would be the easiest solution. Something else I think worth keeping in mind though is that the strings under each commodity only actually show up as mission cargo, and you can't really tell which commodity list they're coming from. (You can certainly guess, but you're not told.) When you pick up metals or heavy metals normally, you don't actually know what metals or heavy metals they are (i.e. which string from the commodity lists), hence my suggestion that we could also just ignore the inconsistency, as the inconsistency really only exists when looking at the game's data, not when playing the game itself.
Agreed that they are very underutilized/underdeveloped. I've just concluded a poll on the Discord server asking about raid fleets, and here were the results. So raid fleets are here to stay with the ability to toggle them, defaulted to on, coming in the future. We had some lengthy discussions after I posted this poll though, and raids being underdeveloped is something we discussed, among other things. I wrote down a bunch of ideas as to how raids could be improved and put them on my todo list. Tell me what you think about some of these and if there's anything missing that I could look into: I think an overhauling of the raid system is outside of the scope of this PR, though, so this is something I'd handle later. |
…stead of by some factor based on how perpendicular it is Behavior should be similar (i.e. the flotsam loses perpendicular motion), the main difference just being the direction of the deceleration. The previous method measured how perpendicular the pull was from the flotsam velocity and applied a deceleration along the flotsam velocity according to that. Behaviorally this was like applying an additional drag force against the flotsam's direction of travel, with the drag force scaling with how perpendicular the flotsam is to the direction of pull. The constant 0.01 was just an arbitrary scaling factor and its relavence to the outcome was difficult to grasp. For example, if the constant were 1, then the flotsam would still have some perpendicular motion. This method instead applies a deceleration to the flotsam's velocity that is perpendicular to the direction of pull. Behaviorally this is like pulling the flotsam's velocity toward the pull velocity. The constant 0.01 can be seen as the percentage of how much of the flotsam's perpendicular motion is killed. For example, if the constant were 0.1, then 10% of the flotsam's perpendicular motion is killed. If the constant were 1, then absolutely all perpendicular motion would be killed. I find this difference in how understandable the constant is to be beneficial.
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That's a great idea, though it'll require some balancing with warships. The flaw is that acceleration isn't all that important in an ongoing chase. Ships in ES currently get up to full speed within seconds or less, and when appeasement happens a fleeing merchant will likely already be at max speed, as will be their pursuer - in fact, the fleeing merchant may be going faster than their max speed if the pirate is using hit force weapons. So dumping and running over more cargo will make as much difference as it does now: almost none. We'd have to, as I suggested, refactor the top speed mechanic, or add a mechanic that applies some force to a vessel when it dumps or recieves cargo, for that to have an impact. |
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It'd be a bunch more math, but implementing some sort of variable max speed that kind of aproximates what I'm told would be the situation in real life could be useful. From what the physicists tell me, theoretically any ship with sufficient force can accelerate to the speed of light, or, for the classical purists, to an infinitesimaly small but significant velocity just shy of the speed of light. 99% of c with additional 9s after the decimal point depending on available power and stuff. The significant limiting factor is that the amount of energy it takes to increase the velocity goes up exponentially. I'll leave the math and the specific curves to those more adept at it. But it basically means that for, say, a freighter, reaching speed 100 is super easy, 200 is not bad, 400 is challenging, 800 is very hard, 1600 is going to take a long time flying at full burn in a straight line, 3200 is probably going to take hours of real time flying in a straight line to achieve, etc. So, what if we gave all ships an infinite max speed. Or to protect the poor programming, gave it a very high number that is hard to reach, but still finite. Then we play with the acceleration graph so instead of acceleration being a linear thing, it has an exponential curve where the "max speed" is equal to, say, about 50% of c. We'd pick a value that works best, but the point is that the listed "max speed" should be the point at which they player is going to have to fly for a very long time in a straight line to get noticeably faster. Say, about how fast the player would be going when accelerating in a straight line for, say, 5 minutes. We'd have to play around with the curve a bunch to get those max speeds to roughly line up with where they are now. The end result would be a system where the ability to change mass could be much more influential than it is now, and where ships can just keep on accelerating indefinitely - but it will be increasingly unrewarding to do so. If done properly, it may well result in a situation where the world's physics feels much more realistic without changing the close-quarter gameplay too much. |
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While I find it amusing to contemplate accelerating a ship to the point I'm completely unable to control it, since we have the hyperdrive I'm not entirely sure it matters. Besides which it's not nearly as easy as it sounds to achieve near infinite speed because there will always be a gravitational pull of some stellar body forcing the ship into an elliptical orbit, so you'd have to be at a point where such stellar bodies have a limited affect on you to begin with. Put it the most simply, unless you're trying to make the game a pure space sim like kerbal space program (which is a great game) I wouldn't worry about realism. In any case I'm not really in favor of changing the weights and measures either, and for a similar reason. The elements of a game need to be easy enough to understand that the average idiot could figure it out. Whatever you do underneath the hood of the game can be extremely complex, but what the player sees should be simple. Unless the point is a pure simulation like KSP, which ES definitely is not. |
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The gravitational effect of stellar bodies should probably be more of a factor at low speed, really. I'd love it if all stellar bodies exerted a mild gravity effect, but that's neither here nor there. If you really wanted to go full realism, ships in ES are already going like 200-400 c if you measure by how long it takes to travel within the Sol system. Making that realistic is not a goal of mine at current system sizes. The point is, acceleration matters very little to gameplay at the moment. If we had higher speeds across the board, then acceleration (and therefore mass) would take a larger role, overburdened ships would travel noticeably slower, appeasement and harvesting would have a greater impact, and fighters would be faster. It doesn't have to be infinite or uncontrollable, it just needs to take a minute or so to reach. It doesn't even have to be a uniform max 1c. For example, in one of my favourite, most realistic sci-fis, ships have a maximum attainable sublight speed moderated not by the physics of thrust and the speed of light, but by the strength of their shielding against the relativistic particles that will assail them at relativistic speeds; civillian ships with poor shielding tend to top out at 0.6 c and well-shielded military ships at 0.8 c. |
Missing a payment of any kind (crew payments, maintenance costs, loan payments, fines) still decreases your credit score by 5. Your credit score now only increases by 1 per day if you meet at least one of two conditions: 1) You have successfully made a mortgage payment. 2) You have successfully paid your crew AND your credit score is below 600. This means that in order to get a perfect credit score you must interact with the bank instead of just being able to pay off the first loan and cruise to a perfect credit score. This also means that you won't gain credit in your starter ship after paying off the loan, as starter ships have no crew to pay. You are not rewarded for paying off fines, as the bank doesn't want to encourage illegal behavior.
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That looks like a good change, in regards to the credit score. Makes sense. |
I strongly disagree. Acceleration is paramount if you're trying to dogfight or run away (although I generally prefer brawling). Acceleration is also the only thing that matters when it comes to turning, which is very important when you're trying to slow down and make hyperjumps. Is max speed important? Well yeah, with a low max speed acceleration wouldn't matter nearly as much. But if takes me a minute to hit that max speed, I'm not realistically ever going to get there with the current scale of systems. It's no different from having an uncontrollable max speed that is near infinite that I mentioned earlier. What exactly does it do? Add realism? Make you overshoot where you want to go? It's fun to contemplate but that's all the merit I find in it. Now onto the second spot. The reason I object to changing weights and measures has nothing to do with it's viability to gameplay. It's because it adds complexity to something that should be simple. If I'm running a fully weighted down ship, and I unload cargo my speed should uniformly speed up. That is simple and easy to understand. If it doesn't do that, then I have to consider all sorts of other factors, such as what exactly it is I'm hauling, that is not easy to understand (for all I know you're hauling inflated bags of air, it takes up a lot of space but has almost no weight so dumping it would effectively do nothing). You might think measuring things in tons is wrong and cubic meters more appropriate, but it's easier to measure in tons and therefore the unit of measurement. If you wanted to measure in both tons and cubic meters then it gets even more complex. And the reason you're doing this is because you want to make appeasement seem more viable as a player option? Something that most players probably will never do because it's easier to bribe pirates or just save scum? I'd rather take appeasement out than change weights and measures to make appeasement more appealing. If you're going to make the game more complex there had better be a really good reason for it, such as making the game a simulation, but ES is clearly not a pure simulation game. |
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I think I might have mis-explained what I was after. I didn't mean that each cargo should have it's own weight - I agree that would be too complex, although I doubt it would actually cause that many problems. I was more making the argument for just increasing the mass of the cargo overall. Instead of a unit of cargo weighing 1 ton, have it weigh 5. All cargo, doesn't matter the kind or whatever. Call it symbolic for the much larger trading capacities ships would actually need to have in order to have the economic weight that we give them. And as far as units goes, cubic meter is what makes sense - volume. Our cargo holds are pressurized, from the looks of it, and things like the expansions, bunks, etc all seem to make it pretty clear that when they say they are taking up 20 space, they are taking up a volume of space, not a mass. |
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Technically cubic meter would probably be more appropriate when you consider that the insides of a ship are filled with volume. But I find that cubic meter is less viable when you consider that all units are uniform when it comes to slowing down the ship. Even in your example, making one cubic meter take up five tons of mass is still uniform when it comes to slowing down the ship. Even with compression we're still not at the bag of holding level (or Tardis level for you Whovians) where one ton of food occupies the same space as one ton of lead. The game also specifically says tons when you pick up mineables and commodities for the record. Regardless of the unit of measure actually used as long as it is consistent with units to mass ratio I'm fine with it. So if you wanted to make every unit of space equivalent to five tons, I wouldn't complain nearly as much, even though I'd really rather you didn't especially with that combat test PR that Amazinite is working on. Assuming that PR goes in, everything is already going to be much slower without you weighting down ships with heavier units. |
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Chiming in again - and going back a few threads .... I quite like the
values on commodities introduced in this pull. It's a relatively minor
change that I believe enhances game play. It really does help expand
options beyond capturing pirates. I mean capturing is still vastly more
profitable in the long term, but trading is a viable means of generating
revenue, and in early game, so is mining.
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The point of having one cubic meter have 5 mass is specifically to skew the mass distribution of ships so that cargo is a larger percentage of the total mass. So it would not apply to outfit space or anything else on the ship. Just cargo. Otherwise, everything stays the same and there's no point. |
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@Zitchas And that would still significantly slow down the already significantly slow freighters. The only way to offset it would be to change the freighters mass to be lower to compensate, but that would be a direct buff to unloaded freighters, so that seems unlikely to happen at the same time as you bumped the weights of commodities/mineables. Which means the net of this change would be to slow down ships, whether or not your intention is to skew the mass of a ship. Like I said before, as long as the units are uniform I won't complain nearly as much because that's still keeping it simple, which is my main objection, adding unnecessary complexity. Ideally though outfits would get the same treatment, since most outfits have similar mass to outfit space, and outfit space here directly correlates to cargo space. I understand this doesn't fit your purpose though. However after listening to your purpose wouldn't the easier solution to be to make freighters (specifically freighters) lighter? Still skews the mass distribution but doesn't change the weights and measures. I'm not honestly sure which one would be easier to change either, plenty of commodities and mineables, and plenty of freighters. I know more than just freighters carry cargo by the way, it's just that your change is most notably pointed at people that haul cargo, and the Bactrian is probably the only other ship that would be hampered that isn't technically a freighter. Waaaait a minute, is this a backdoor nerf on the Bactrian? That poor ship gets so much hate even though it's a piece of garbage. Overpriced jack of all trades ship the Bactrian. I wouldn't even use the darn thing if it wasn't the best boarding ship in human space. |
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Actually, this is intended to be a buff for unloaded freighters. That's actually a fairly significant reason for it: So that an unloaded freighter (slow) can dump all its cargo and "transform" into a significantly faster freighter, while the chasing ship that hopefully picked up the cargo goes from being a speedy warship to being a slower warship. Outfits shouldn't have the same space to mass ratio as cargo, though. For an analogy, comparing a pallet full of CPUs (high density) with a CPU installed in a tower, where there's massively more space, air pathways, and whatnot. And no, this has nothing to do with the Bactrian. I have a strong dislike for that ship, but that has no bearing in this. |
Here it does manage to be important, currently, though it could stand to be more important.
Only for the first two or three seconds. Then it's all down to thrust and drag.
Flat out wrong, so why is @Amazinite thumbs-upping this? Acceleration has no bearing on turning. Turning is steering force over mass, acceleration is engine thrust over mass.
That's my point and the idea.
I didn't say make it uncontrollably fast or infinite, infinite was Zitchas's idea. Just a few times higher. IMHO ships in ES don't really move very fast relative to their size, and I often find this slowness boring. Besides, the highest max speed is rarely obtained anyway with this idea.
Nope. This is pure gameplay: making acceleration and mass matter more, so smaller and empty ships get a boost, and, pertinent to this PR, make it easier for an appeasing merchant to escape.
If where you are going is specific, like a planet, then the autopilot will just reverse you sooner, so you will not overshoot.
The speed increase isn't adding any new mechanics. Wrong again.
Yes. This is exactly what I propose to have happen. As opposed to the current behaviour, where this is less likely, because a ship is probably already going it's max speed, which is unaffected by mass.
Yeah, I agree with you on this one. Again seems like you're replying to Zitchas's idea despite quoting me.
No, it's to make it more viable for the AI, to make triggering it in other ships more meaningful to the player. |
It isn't a buff to unloaded freighters -- unloaded freighters already move as fast as unloaded freighters are going to move. It's a nerf to loaded freighters. I will grant you that it might slow down an approaching warship while you get a speed boost, but that's already the case. So you just exaggerated it a little bit without buffing anything.
I think you missed my point. My point was that if you're making something heavier per unit you should make everything heavier per unit.
The current behavior is that a loaded down ship has slower acceleration and turning than an unloaded ship. I will admit if your point was to improve the max speed because of a lower mass, then I must have missed it. I have no qualms with increasing max speed based on how much mass a ship has.
Try flying with a penguin in remnant space, it overshoots with the autopilot every single time, or at least that is what it feels like to me.
First let me say that I find it inappropriate to call out names like this. If you find something I said incorrect then I'm happy for you to correct it, but I find this disrespectful. Please don't do this in the future. And you're incorrect anyway. If you apply just steering on its own, the only thing your ship will do is spin. It will not slow down, or turn around. You need acceleration to stop and change direction. |
Yes. But in a straight line chase, as often happens when a merchant is fleeing a pirate (or fleeing the player), this doesn't matter beyond the first few seconds. Once both ships are up to speed, acceleration loses relevance.
Well, factoring mass into speed, the more complex idea, would be improving max speed because of a lower mass. The simpler, no-new-mechanics idea of just raising max speeds across the board, would make it more likely to increase the current speed of a ship that sheds mass, because it will still be accelerating if it has not yet reached its max speed.
There are problems with the autopilot, especially for ships like the Penguin that have reverse engines. Might this make that problem worse? Maybe. But it doesn't change the shape of the maths, and the autopilot needs fixing anyway.
I find it inappropriate for Derpy to be approving a flawed rant aimed at me, especially after his last comments to me were rather dismissive, and found the tone of your message extremely disrespectful myself. So I got a bit harsh on you both, and maybe I should not have responded in kind. Let's both agree to turn the heat down a few notches.
Yep. That's not what I or the engine define as "turning," though, you're getting into more abstract concepts of manoeuvrability - which is fine, though somewhat irrelevant to the idea of buffing appeasement. |
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I agree, Ravenshining, things are getting a little warm here. Might I suggest that everyone go play ES for an hour or two? |
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Just an FYI: I've played the heck out of this pull request in the last while, doing everything from modelling early-entrant behaviour, exploration, mining and straight-up mass cap-fleet-building behaviours. There is a definite increase in general playability - a little less "grindy" once a player gets out of the gate. I dunno what this old geezer's vote matters in the scheme of things, but I'd strongly support the tinkerings here being melded into the next release. |
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Hey folks. For some reason I figured I'd do a simple test run of this PR, playing right out of the gate with a shuttle and plying a hybrid passenger/freighter approach. Both runs got a lot of the same missions (Pookie, Alphonse's lizard, TMBR 1, Scientists to Wei, Scientists to Wolf-Reyat star, retiring couple.) IN both, there was no capping; shipping/passengers only. Taking jobs that paid OK, moving other goods as possible. I found the critical difference was that in the EC PR line, I often found luxury goods as the highest profit for transport from one place to another, but often had insufficient cash on hand to purchase a full load, and often had so little cash flow that another, less-profitable commodity was the only reasonable option. Results (Net worth) Do with that as you will. |
…ersation Reduced the raid chance when you get warned about your fleet's raid attraction from about 50% to about 14%. From part of #6050.
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I've directly committed the change to the pirate raid warning mission given how small of a change it was. 248ca93 |
Regarding the value of captured ships. Perhaps all captured ships are give a 'scarlett letter per se'. These ships and all containing items therein would sell into a newly introduced currency system (skroles?). The skrole could be used to purchase ships and modules, but at a higher rate. Ideally they be would be used either alone or in conjunction with normal currency, modified. The ships and modules bought this way would not inherit the 'scarlett letter'. Perhaps there are other illegal activities within the game they could be used for ... Just an idea. |
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Closing this as I'll be reopening it in bits and pieces later taking the feedback gathered from here, so there's no point in keeping this one open and maintaining it. |
Content (Balance)
Summary
It's no secret that boarding and capturing ships is the most profitable action a player can take (in the early to mid game), not only in terms of game time but also in terms of real time. This has remained true even after the addition of depreciation to the game, having all plundered and captured goods be 25% of their original cost. Even if we were to lower this worth even further, plundering and capturing would still remain an excellent way to get your hands on new outfits or ships without needing to buy them. (As such, we're still looking to ways to make plundering and capturing more difficult, such as with #871.)
Given that we've already nerfed boarding and capturing once though and it still remains one of the quickest forms of gaining credits, we should perhaps begin looking to other forms of income that we should buff instead of attempting to nerf capturing down to the level of everything else.
This PR seeks to do something similar to #5779, making a number of changes to various parts of the game all at once with the goal of creating a more balanced outcome, only while that PR is focused on combat balance, this PR will be focused on economy balance. #5772 appears to have overstepped its initial objective of combat balance and gotten into the territory of economy balance as well, making changes to minables that I will discuss below, so I figured I'd tackle my own, separate economy changes in a new PR.
Explanation of changes
Increase all commodity prices, but maintain the same margins.
During a new playthrough recently, I was busy mining while watching a battle on the other side of the system between some pirates and merchants. When merchants feel too threatened, they will spew their cargo all over the system as a distraction, and pirates will move to begin picking the cargo up. I realized though that the worth of those commodities was far lower than the worth of the metals I was mining, so it seemed to me like it would make zero sense for the player to actually use scaring merchants into dumping their cargo as a method of income. (This heavily ties into an issue like #4628.)
Another thing I realized (and that has been outlined in the changes made to minables by #5772) is that having minables be worth more than commodities doesn't make too much sense. Reason being is that minables are raw materials, whereas commodities are typically processed goods, in some cases made with the resources from minables, and therefore commodities should be worth more than raw materials. While this is a realism argument and the reason that minables are worth more is likely a game balance situation, I think that it's possible to have both game balance and realism in this case. All we need to look at is the difference in obtaining minables versus obtaining commodities.
Minables are obtained by, well, mining asteroids. It's a very low cost, low risk endeavor, especially if done in a well defended system. There are more high risk regions with greater amounts of high price asteroids, but these are still ultimately low cost to mine. All you need is a single ship and some lasers, maybe an asteroid scanner if you don't want to manually aim. Early game it's even possible to bribe pirates and have the profit from what you mined outweigh the cost of the bribe.
Commodities on the other hand are obtained in two different ways. The first is buying them from a planet then selling them somewhere else. Compared to minables, this is a more high cost endeavor, but is still low risk. Given that you need to purchase the commodities before selling them for profit, the actual profit margins on selling commodities is lower than what is earned for selling minables. The trade off though is that commodities are more scalable than mining, given that you can use your entire fleet to buy and sell commodities but mining is effectively only an early game method of income.
The second way to get commodities though is to steal them, either through boarding or through getting a merchant to dump them. This is both low cost but high risk; once you have a ship capable of plundering or scaring merchants, it costs you nothing to do so, but there is a high risk in that you could be destroyed in combat. The benefit of this risk though is that you obtain commodities without having needed to purchase them, removing the costs associated with normal commodity trading.
So there is certainly room for both balance and realism with this system. Commodities can be made such that they have lower profit margins than minables when buying and selling for trade (the reason being that trading commodities are more scalable than mining, so we can't have trading commodities be better than mining for the early game), but higher profit margins when stealing commodities (rewarding players for taking a risk).
To that end. I've currently at least doubled the max price of all commodities in all systems while adding the change in the max price to the min price. For example, food previously had a min price of 100 and a max price of 600. This has been changed to a min price of 800 and a min price of 1300. This causes profit margins on trading commodities to remain the same while greatly increasing the worth of stolen commodities. Commodities now occupy a range of 680 credits per ton at the low end to 4340 credits at the high end, up from a previous 100 on the low end to 1520 on the high end.
This substantially increases the viability of playing as a salvager, a playstyle that is particularly fitted to pirates. I will note that this does technically buff boarding and capturing by increasing the worth of captured ships, but players who are capturing will typically be capturing ships that tend to have lower cargo values, while players who are salvaging will tend to harass ships with higher cargo values, so even though both playstyles gain from this, the salvaging playstyle gains more (and I would say also becomes a relevant playstyle where before it wasn't).
This change also impacts commodity trading by slowing down the rate at which one can buy new freighters, given that the invested cost of buying commodities is now higher. While this is a nerf to this playstyle, I think it's a reasonable one, as commodity trading is still infinitely scalable, and buffing salvaging necessarily has to come at the cost of commodity trading anyway.
Tweak the mining experience.
This is a companion change to the changes made to commodities, including the tweaking of minable prices such that commodities are generally worth more per ton. Overall though there's a general sense that mining simply isn't a worthwhile endeavor. #5772 decreased the worth of minables per ton while increasing the payload of each asteroid and generally reducing their hulls so that they can be mined faster. While I think that making mining quicker and increasing asteroid payloads is a good direction, I don't think that decreasing minable worth per ton is the way to go, or at least not by how much #5772 did. Reason being that it's already fairly easy for a Sparrow to fill their cargo hold and sell it for a reasonable amount of credits per day spent mining, and reducing the worth of minables just means that a Sparrow would need to spend more days mining to make the same amount of credits.
Along with this has been an idea to create a dedicated mining lasers of some sort to making mining quicker. I'm not too against this idea, but I'm not particularly for it, either, given that part of the original intention behind minable asteroids was that you could use any weapon you want to mine them and just have higher hull damage weapons be better at doing so, so a mining laser would necessarily either need to have massive hull DPS for its size, or we'd need to introduce a new mechanic for certain weapons to be able to do increased damage to asteroids.
A concern that I do hear though is the lack of any ship that is truly dedicated to mining. Most NPC mining is done by interceptors and some light warships, but these ships have rather small cargo holds. You can't really use freighters for mining though given that they typically lack guns, and the smallest freighters that become somewhat viable as mining vessels are too expensive, and mining really loses its value as a form of income by the time you can get your hands on them. So perhaps some sort of interceptor sized dedicated mining vessel that travels relatively slowly for an interceptor but has a cargo hold comparable to a light freighter is in order. Such a ship seems like it could fill a reasonable niche with the changes made by #5779.
To the end of addressing this issue, I've at most cut the cost per ton of minables in half while increasing the payload of the asteroids to compensate. This results in most asteroids having about the same expected value, although on the low end of silicon and lead, I did increase the expected value of mining these asteroids given that their original expected values seemed very low to me. The worth of minable asteroids per ton, excluding yottrite, now occupies a range from 500 credits to 5000 credits, close to the 680 credits to 4340 credits that commodities occupy. This isn't quite strictly "processed goods are always worth more than raw materials," but is much closer than it was before.
While the reduction in the worth of minable asteroids per ton does reduce how much a full cargo hold is worth, the increased payload means that it should be easier to fill your cargo hold in the first place, and the same expected value per asteroid means that while asteroids have been made worse in terms of income per game time, they've actually become better in terms of income per real time, also helped by the fact that all minable asteroids have had their hulls reduced by anywhere from 12.5% to about 19%.
Beyond just tweaking the worth of minable outfits and the payloads of asteroids, I've also created two new weapon types geared toward mining.
The first involves a new "prospecting" weapon attribute that increases a counter on any minable asteroid being hit. This value increases the default 25% drop rate of a minable asteroid according to the equation
.75 / (1 + toughness / prospecting), whereprospectingis the amount of "prospecting damage" that was applied to the asteroid before it was destroyed and `toughness' is an attribute inherent to minable asteroids that determines how resistant they are to having their drop rate increased.For example, the mining laser that I have currently created has a hull damage per frame of 1.9 and a prospecting per frame of 0.1, while a silicon asteroid has a hull of 350. It takes 350/1.9 = 185 frames for a single mining laser to destroy an asteroid. In that time, it will have applied 185 * 0.1 = 18.5 prospecting to the asteroid. A silicon asteroid's toughness is 37, meaning that the drop rate of a silicon asteroid destroyed by a mining laser will go from 25% to .25 + .75 / (1 + 37 / 18.5) = 50%. Given that the prospecting applied to an asteroid is a factor of how quickly it was destroyed versus how much prospecting was applied per frame, using multiple mining lasers doesn't further increase the drop rate of an asteroid, only increasing the speed at which the asteroid is destroyed.
The second new weapon is a "tractor beam" weapon mechanic. Any turret with the "tractor beam" weapon attribute will behave similarly to an anti-missile turret, except instead of automatically targeting missiles, it will automatically target any flotsam that is within its range (i.e. its velocity, since anti-missile turrets and by extension tractor beams all "create" 1 frame projectiles), applying a velocity toward the tractor beam equal to the value of the tractor beam. For example, a turret with
"reload" 1and"tractor beam" 2will pull on a flotsam with a velocity of 2 * 60 / 1 = 120 velocity per second. Tractor beams also apply a slight additional drag to flotsams that they are pulling on, with this drag being the strongest on flotsams that are traveling perpendicular to the tractor beam pulling on them, causing flotsams to fall quicker toward tractor beams instead of potentially orbiting your ship as they get pulled on. Should you have multiple tractor beams, using opportunistic turret firing will cause each tractor beam to pull on a separate flotsam, while focused turret firing will cause each tractor beam to grab the first flotsam it can, even if another tractor beam on your ship is already pulling that one. Given that tractor beams attract flotsams, this means that tractor beams work on both minable asteroid debris and dumped cargo from merchants.While a new ship that is dedicated to mining isn't something I'm opposed to, I think it's something that can be left for another PR.
Remove raid fleets?
Raid fleets are basically only a nuisance for freighter players who like hauling around lots of cargo. Their intention is to balance against snowballing freighter fleets hauling commodities, but I'd argue that they hardly even succeed in that, only slowing down the snowballing of freighter fleets by requiring a player to buy more warships. So we're effectively just hampering one playstyle without really impacting any others. And there's certainly an issue of players running into the raid fleet mechanic without having any idea what's going on, ruining their experience. (See #6049 for one such example.) What I'd say is even worse though is how raid fleets only appear in human space, meaning that a player is free to snowball their freighter fleet anywhere else in the game just so long as they don't bring all their ships to human space. So really, the whole raid fleet mechanic fails on multiple fronts, and I feel like is something we should just do away with. While this does make hauling commodities a more attractive option than it might have already been, I really don't see it as too big of an issue. If we really wanted to stop players from creating fleets that snowball (which I don't think should be a goal of ours), we'd implement something like #4665 that would just flat out prevent a player from creating a fleet above a certain size.
And in any case, I think that trade prices fluctuating is a better balance against snowballing freighter fleets than anything else. Increasing the cost of commodities as is done in this PR is also a nerf to snowballing freighter fleets, as while the profit margins have remained the same, it now takes more of an investment up front for the same amount of cargo, so the profit as a percentage of the costs has actually decreased, which will slow down any fleet snowballing, even if only by a slight degree.
If we wanted to remove raid fleets, I would relegate them to a gamerule (#5556) instead of outright removing them.
I've reduced the threshold for the raid warning mission to appear from requiring that the player have a 49% to spawn a raid fleet to a 14% chance. This is to make it clearer to the player when raids are appearing, as the previous threshold was far too high to really help the player, and they're probably getting swamped by raid fleets long before reading ~50% attractiveness.
I've just concluded a poll on the Discord server asking about raid fleets, and here were the results.
So raid fleets are here to stay with the ability to toggle them, defaulted to on, coming in the future. We had some lengthy discussions after I posted this poll though, and raids being underdeveloped is something we discussed, among other things. I wrote down a bunch of ideas as to how raids could be improved and put them on my todo list:
I think an overhauling of the raid system is outside of the scope of this PR, though, so this is something I'd handle later.
Ensure that commodity prices on pirate worlds are generally middling to high.
On top of the commodity price changes across the board, I have also gone through and increased the price of commodities on pirate planets such that each commodity is at least middling in terms of its base price, up to a maximum of 10% greater than any base price in the rest of the game. The reason for this is to lean harder into the improvement of pirate gameplay via salvaging commodities from merchants, providing players a safe location where they can get at least a middling profit on stolen commodities, and sometimes even the best possible price in the galaxy.
TO BE ADDRESSED
Increase job payments, especially on the low end.
Jobs are perhaps the most obvious form of income in the game, giving you a simple mission to complete for a predetermined reward. With plundering and capturing being such a profitable venture, though, jobs are greatly overshadowed. Some job payments on the low end are also absolutely pitiful, having the player travel several systems just for a few thousand credits. You practically make as much money trading alongside doing jobs with the small missions like that as you do from the job payments themselves. So while I think that higher end jobs are in a fine spot, with certain jobs being able to pay out hundreds of thousands or even millions of credits, the lower end jobs definitely need to see an increase in payments.
Have jobs offered scale more appropriately with a player's current capabilities.
We are limited by the UI in just how many jobs are able to be offered at once. A way to buff job running would be to prune those jobs which the player doesn't want to do while offering more jobs that the player does want to do. This could be achieved by using conditions to get a sense of what the player's fleet capabilities are and offer jobs which are appropriate to them. For example, if a player is only equipped with warships, then perhaps less passenger and cargo jobs should offer while more bounty hunting and escort jobs do. But if the player is in a freighter, we should offer more cargo jobs and less combat jobs.
We should also be able to check if the player has a hybrid fleet. Perhaps if the player has a high cargo space and high DPS, we provide cargo jobs that spawn pirates to worry about, or have hybrid escort/cargo jobs.
FURTHER QUESTIONS
Increase impact on trade prices from player selling large amount of cargo?
Terin has suggested that he thinks that the fluctuation is far too low at the moment, saying how he traded 500k goods at a 300 credit profit, and the price of the good he sold on both ends only changed enough to reduce his profits per run per ton to 250 credits.
There have also been suggestions to perhaps make it so that different planets have different resistances to having their prices changed. Perhaps populace, developed planets can hardly change their prices, but underdeveloped planets are much more susceptible to having their prices changed by massive amounts of trade.
Cap number of commodities able to be bought per commodity per day?
Put a cap on just how effective a freighter fleet can get by only having so many commodities able to be bought per day.
No, I'm not interested in creating an entire economy simulation where planets have X production of commodities per day and Y consumption of commodities per day where the number of commodities remaining versus production and consumption is what determines the commodity price. This would just be a simple "You can only buy A tons of food per day and B tons of heavy metals per day."
Not as keen on this change, it's just an idea that's come up that I think is worth discussing.
Potential issues with these changes
By making everything else in the game more profitable, we make the climbing of the tech ladder much easier, effectively making the early game shorter. I don't think that this is necessarily a good thing, as we shouldn't be trying to fast track the player though sections of the game. Every section of the game should be enjoyable to some degree, and the early game above all else should be among the most enjoyable given that it's where all new players start, and I think that part of the enjoyability of the early game is seeing yourself slowly progress. Part of the reason for the addition of depreciation was to slow down the early game, after all.
So with the ability to earn credits being greatly increased with this PR, the early game may end up becoming too short. The obvious solution might be to increase the price of outfits and ships (certainly not to the same degree that the profitability of various actions has been increased because then we'd just be back to square one but with bigger numbers), but then that also just feeds back into making plundering and capturing more profitable. So perhaps along with increasing the cost of various items, max depreciation would be increased; increasing the cost of everything by 25% and reducing the max deprecation from 25% to 20% would leave plundering and capturing as profitable as before while slowing down the progression of purchasing new outfits and ships, but leave other forms of earning credits more profitable than plundering/capturing by comparison due to them being untouched.