The problem isn't that cost of the maintenance is too low. The problems are two:
1) Credits are EASY to come by in Oolite.
2) Uber-ships in Oolite are the equivalent of a Mclaren F1 that seats 35 people.
I've said it before, trading in Oolite fiction is a barely-scrape-by existence. But Oolite-Gameplay, trading is the road to riches. You want a new Uber-ship? Just go do some milk-runs, or a few cargo contracts. Look - It's raining money! Think about it- with as easy as it is to get credits via milk-runs, why would ANYONE turn to piracy?
The other end of the problem is everyone wants/builds ships with the cargo capacity of a C-130, the maneuverability of an F-22, and the armaments of an A-10 Warthog. If you get low on credits, you take your F1 out and do milk runs. Tell me, is someone going to use their F1 in RL to deliver pizzas for some extra cash?
Yes, there are all sorts of handwavium explanations / justifications. And I'm not even saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that bumping the cost of maintenance isn't going to make any appreciable difference until other underlying issues are addressed.
I found that milk runs take a long time if I want to buy an uber ship. I have >5200 kills now so I did quite some flying around and trading. Still, my ship + credit balance are "only" somewhere around 780k Cr.
Most of the money actually came from missions, notably Random Hits (somewhere around 8k per hard mission), Assassins Guild (current contract is worth 70k Cr, earlier ones were also in the five figure range), and Trident Down (six figure range).
Most of my spending goes to hackers nowadays (between 10k and 25k from memory) to clean my status after doing a mission for the Assassins. This also happened before I started working for them, then because of a stray laser hit on a GalCop vessel. Sometimes I get badly burnt in battle and have to repair one of those military enhancements afterwards, they also cost upwards of 20k Cr.
Long story short: I think that milk runs aren't too bad balance wise. What unbalances the game are the high rewards from missions, especially Trident Down (I hope it actually was Trident Down that I'm talking about).
Regarding McLaren F1s with 35 people: Take a look at this article, it seems we're getting there. The article is in German, you can get a machine translated version here.
Yes, there are all sorts of handwavium explanations / justifications. And I'm not even saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that bumping the cost of maintenance isn't going to make any appreciable difference until other underlying issues are addressed.
Very true. Money isn't a good way of balancing ships – largely because, as you say, it's easy to come by. To be honest, though, that's not going to change, because of the simple trading system in-game. Equally, though, we're never going to be able to stop (and nor should we even think about trying to stop) people writing their own uberships. One person's uber is another's nicely kitted-out – and anyway, nobody's forcing anybody to use any OXP ships they don't like.
I still think a variable equipment cost multiplier (say, from 0.5 or even 0.25 for an Adder to 2 or 3 or higher for the fancier/bigger ships) would be a nice refinement of the game, though. The cost increases would be across the board: all equipment, including fuel, would be affected. It could make Adders, Morays, Pythons etc. more attractive and more playable as ships and give a rounder feel to the game. It would probably be best to set these by hand, rather than by formula, though. Would this be OXP-able?
The best guard against ubericity is, ultimately, the game in your head. The most stringent in-game restrictions I face are the ones I impose on myself, e.g. I don't shoot innocents, and I always try to pick up escape pods even if I have to dump some valuable cargo to make room. It's role-playing, really.
Last edited by Disembodied on Wed Sep 29, 2010 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The problem isn't that cost of the maintenance is too low. The problems are two:
1) Credits are EASY to come by in Oolite.
...
I've said it before, trading in Oolite fiction is a barely-scrape-by existence. But Oolite-Gameplay, trading is the road to riches. You want a new Uber-ship? Just go do some milk-runs, or a few cargo contracts. Look - It's raining money! Think about it- with as easy as it is to get credits via milk-runs, why would ANYONE turn to piracy?
While I agree with the statement that credits are easy to come by in Oolite, I don't agree with your analysis.
In vanilla Oolite trading is by no means the fast track to riches. It is in fact not as easy as "You want a new Uber-ship? Just go do some milk-runs". In a Cobra III you can make a profit of about 1000 credits per milk-run if you're lucky (35t x 30cr as price difference). And how often do you have to repeat that before you can afford your Uber-ship? At least a couple of hundred(!) times. That's not exactly fast, although I agree with you that it's also not a barely-scrape-by existence. And the first couple of dozen times you're doing it only for pimping up your Cobra, not even starting to save for a better ship.
No, that credits are too easy to come by is nothing but our own fault (the collective "we" of us scripters), exactly because it takes a lot of time in vanilla Oolite to build up money. So a couple of scripters went and made get-rich-fast(er) OXPs. And that's the reason why credits are so easy to get nowadays. It's not Oolite's fault, but our own's, because of our impatience with the tedious trading routine of Oolite.
I had a post prepared but it was just waffle. I don't know the point I'm trying to get across. Ship balance is definitely an issue, even with the standard ships there's no incentive to use anything but the most kick-@$$ ships. Unless you're a masochist I really can't see why you'd ever want to fly an Adder, or a Cobra MkI, or any lowly ship like that. Generally, the way to go is survival, which means get the biggest ship you can that matches the speed of the fastest ships, but gives you the optimum shield protection too.
There would have to be big changes to the game to make using a variety of ships viable. For example, the Pirate AI should be tweaked (assuming it doesn't do this already) so that it's more prone to attacking larger ships. There's no point attacking an Adder to get cargo. The stats on all the ships would need a major overhaul too.
I think another key is making certain ships have clear advantages for certain career choices. This sort of exists already but as has been stated there are too many ships that would make the Royal Caribbean cruiseliners blush for space, and a McClaren F1 blush for speed all at the same time.
I'll have to think about this some more, these are just random thoughts at the moment.
@ McL
"In a Cobra III you can make a profit of about 1000 credits per milk-run if you're lucky (35t x 30cr as price difference). "
yeah, and first you've got to do the runs from 100cr that allows to buy buy those 35 tons!
ah, fond memories of my first Elite runs. 100cr to 113Cr and the next trip's fuel cost taking up most of that profit!
What I did a couple of times in Elite, with a new commander, was to sell my pulse laser. It made for an ‘interesting’ start to the game. Of course, that option is not available in Oolite.
I would advise stilts for the quagmires, and camels for the snowy hills
And any survivors, their debts I will certainly pay. There's always a way!
It really doesn't take that long before you can max out the cargo capacity of a Cobra MKIII (including cargo bay extension) with computers. As soon as you can max it out with computers then you can max it out with anything. Buying precious metals with surplus cash and holding on to them until you get the maximum profit can also help speed things along.
Well, if somebody just wants to "be rich" or have an insanely uber ship, they can just hack it. Which is fine, I guess, since this is a single player game. Whatever makes you happy.
It's not all that hard to make money in Oolite. The first night or so, things are pretty tight. But once you've got enough made to be able to fill your cargo hold with things like liquor or computers, you start making progress. If you don't buy every upgrade as soon as you can afford it, runs start getting profitable quicker. With the starter Cobra MKIII, get the cargo expansion and the injectors and stick with just that for a while, and within a week or so, you have some cr to work with.
I took the advice of Mr Gimlet, and sold the starter Cobra after I had some cr banked, and bought a used Boa Cruiser. Best early game move I made, financially. Big cargo bay, easy to fly, fast enough to run if there's too much trouble. "Fast enough to run" does not here mean "effortlessly outrun opponents", I mean with some evasive action and maybe spending a missile or two to keep them busy while you get your rump out of there. Inside of less than a month of gameplay, I had made my first million cr. Then I sold off the Boa and bought a new Cobra and decked it out.
Why a Cobra MK III? Well, it's sort of the "traditional" Oolite ship. In my opinion, it's better balanced to be a fighter than a trader, but it can make enough to keep up with repairs and to keep its tank full. Not a great money-maker for trading, in my experience. But it's maybe the best "wanderer" sort of ship.
Anyway, I didn't find it tedious. I had fun flying and mapping out trade routes to build up enough cr to be able to try new ships and toys. I fought very little with the Boa, when I got the Cobra is when I started working on my ranking for a while. Then I found The Feudal States OXP and the Random Hits OXP. With those you can definitely make some money fighting in a Cobra. The fighting involved with the wagers in The Feudal States doesn't count to your ranking, but it doesn't have to be fatal either. I found the idea of betting on my fights attractive. Lots of good practice there, and with those two OXPs, you have plenty of reasons to go into Anarchy and Feudal systems. It's a different style or phase of gameplay.
I like to keep my cr balance around 1.5 million and my status clean. I try to never have an empty cargo hold. I keep my ship's safe pretty packed.
What's the point of this long babble? Well, pretty much *any* OXP other than pure eye candy can be considered "uber" by some people. Even something as simple as "M-Pack (rusties)" to allow for trading in for a used ship early on as Mr Gimlet advised is something that wasn't in the original Elite. But since the game is single player, it's the balance that *you* like that matters. If we ever went multi-player, then most OXPs would pretty much end up disallowed since they'd provide at least some degree of "unfair advantage". They'd have to be considered and either adopted into the core game or disallowed.
But that isn't likely in the near future, and so "your own personal Ooniverse" is one of the great strengths of this game. Tailoring the game with OXPs to have just what you find makes the most nearly perfect space game for you.
I like trying ships, probably a lot of people do. But there's only a very few where I have a "branch" in my savegames to keep them. I like keeping a "pure branch" in my savegames that is just me and my Cobra MKIII. The ranking and status in my sig-line are always that branch. But I have branches with an Imperial Courier, a Smiv's Boa Clipper, a Griff Krait and the latest addition was Thargoid's Vortex. They're all uber in their way, but they have features I like where I fly them often enough to warrant keeping a savegame branch just for them.
It's all a matter of personal tastes so far as ubericity or avoidance thereof. For me a ship with *just* cranked up stats isn't really "uber". The uber ships I like are the ones where there's a reason and a logic to why and how they have their uber features or abilities. There is a balance between the uber factors and the drawbacks. And having them in my personal Ooniverse as ships I may encounter makes the fights *much* more interesting.
But that's just what *I* like. For another player, "strict mode" may be exactly what they want, or they might want just eye candy OXPs. It's all cool. Now what we could use next would be some "Uber cops", and maybe the potential for pirates to find out through the grapevine when a commander has more than a ton of "precious" in the ship's safe. That would logically be a ship where pirates would sometimes band together and set up an ambush in hopes that bit of rich booty. LOL
