Oolite Bulletins

Hm. There still seems to be an unlimited spawning of new pirates. I spent some time in the system (finding the abandoned hermit) before going to the pirate hermit, and I found at least 30 pirates around, possibly more than 40. Not all of them were aggressive, but it was still very difficult to gain air supremacy (27 kills, and lost equipment and cargo, including the gem stone and gold pods mentioned in my previous post... ). And new pirates kept launching, although their number was still way above the minimum.

The behaviour seemed much better than before, they attacked in groups, and they didn't flee without reason.

Too easy to find yes and/or too frequent and/or not dangerous enough. Q-bomb detector+injectors with fuel recommended though.

I've also seen an amazing miner hermit selling 63 platinum (in an anarchy though). Precious metal trade seems even more effective than with olde hermit markets. So perhaps the pirate hermits should be more vicious such as several heavy pirates launching in addition to the mob outside. Since they only appear in monarchy and below it can't be used to balance this. Or make the markets dependant on system risk.

Some luck could be added too: Not every abandoned hermit must contain a little treasure. Some of them could only spawn some metal plates and pods with cheap goods. And one in fifty or hundred could contain a real treasure!

And to make it a little more difficult, give the pods a little momentum, but not too much.

Fritz wrote:

For a Jameson, this would be a fortune!

A virgin Jameson at Lave: sell all 3 missiles and the pulse laser, buy 8TC of furs/platinum and top-up with food, jump to Zaonce (reasonable chance of a clear run), dock and sell all for about 650Cr (with a favourable dice roll), buy fuel scoops and 4 missiles, go find an abandoned hermit... piece of cake!

Fritz wrote:

For a Jameson, this would be a fortune!

I'm not sure, I would go treasure hunting with a pulse laser .

Fritz wrote:

Hm. There still seems to be an unlimited spawning of new pirates...

I'm fairly sure, I'm not spawning any more pirates than necessary. What I'm suspecting here, is that those are core pirates that don't leave the station vicinity. They use configurationSetDestinationToPirateLurk in their ai and the documentation says: "If currently on a lane, set the destination to the current position". If the hermit is on a lane, they would possibly never leave the vicinity. If that really is so, again my AI knowledge is limited, then the core AI needs some tweaking.

Anonymissimus wrote:

Too easy to find yes and/or too frequent and/or not dangerous enough.

I don't think they need to be dangerous, just laborous to find. I'll move them to another location and we'll see.

Anonymissimus wrote:

I've also seen an amazing miner hermit selling 63 platinum (in an anarchy though).

You lucky... The only thing changed, is that the capacity is doubled. That means that without this oxp you would have got 31 units for sale. Maybe doubling the units is too much. Something like 75% more might work here?

Fritz wrote:

Some luck could be added too: Not every abandoned hermit must contain a little treasure. Some of them could only spawn some metal plates and pods with cheap goods. And one in fifty or hundred could contain a real treasure!

That depends. If they are really hard to find, then the frequency should be higher and vice versa. I'll make them harder to find and we'll see how that feels.

Fritz wrote:

And to make it a little more difficult, give the pods a little momentum, but not too much.

Good idea. I'll make it so.

Thanks all for testing and commenting. I'll tweak it and get a new version ready a bit later.

What about the chance of a pod or two being infested with vermin?

This one was easy to spot - and all is well, pirate-wise.

Version 0.16. Now you might (hopefully rarely) stumble upon an abandoned rock hermit. If on the other hand you want to search them, it's possible, but (again hopefully) laborous. Markets have been tweaked again to hopefully work better.

* Abandoned rock hermits are now positioned to a high orbit of the planet. Harder, but not impossible to find.
* Average of pods from abandoned hermits has been toned down a bit. Anything from 1-15 is possible with strong bias to the average. And some might break into rocks.
* Released pods now have a little initial velocity.
* Markets of mining products have been tweaked. Quantity of minerals has been seriously toned down to give room for mining. Quantities of processed mining products have been tweaked and re-tweaked to hopefully give a bit more quantity than core does.

Download: https://app.box.com/s/xu0vy16wu1v0zlue1dfldebsvtrvakjz

Cody wrote:

...all is well, pirate-wise.

Disembodied wrote:

What about the chance of a pod or two being infested with vermin?

I think that sounds better than it actually is. I'm not in favor of negative effects that I can't anticipate or react at. Wasn't there some cargo pod oxp that did something like that?

spara wrote:

Wasn't there some cargo pod oxp that did something like that?

[wiki]Pods OXP[/wiki] - I like the idea, imaginable if a pirate group left behind a hermit then put some traps within. A reqire in manifest could do the job.

spara wrote:

Markets of mining products have been tweaked. Quantity of minerals has been seriously toned down to give room for mining. Quantities of processed mining products have been tweaked and re-tweaked to hopefully give a bit more quantity than core does.

You're doing a great job so far. I didn't have a chance to play the latest verion and your judgment on balancing is very good, but that last point made me worry a bit.

About how much more are we taking? Enough to make players jumping in and out of systems to buy more and more gems instead of doing milkruns? some hermits (in vanilla at least) are quite near to witchpoints. taking up that cheating-like strategy would lead to players breaking their own gamefeeling, if this makes sense.

Lowering them again might help, or even better, creating a day counter(dayChanged()) to let some time pass till a hermit refilled its storage with trasurecommodities would be easy to implement, leaving the higher material amount of mining hermits intact and deal with the problem.

A little statistics of rock hermit markets (precious metal trade only), using SH 0.15: http://postimg.org/image/o8mdqj7yn/

Please compare to the fact that a single trade cycle with cobra 3 cargo (35TC) between poor agrarian and rich industrial main stations yields ~3000cr.

spara wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

What about the chance of a pod or two being infested with vermin?

I think that sounds better than it actually is. I'm not in favor of negative effects that I can't anticipate or react at. Wasn't there some cargo pod oxp that did something like that?

True, it might be a PITA, especially if it's hard to see the connection between cause and effect. Some sort of clue - e.g. an odd scuttling sound and/or a "biological contaminant detected" alert on scooping - would probably be necessary.

Thanks again for testing and quick reports.

Markets in 0.15 were quite broken, as Anonymissimus quite clearly demonstrates, so I made some big fixes in 0.16 and have now tweaked them a bit further in 0.17.

Here's a breakdown of current market changes:

_Mining base_

* To enable small scale mining around the hermit, the capacity of minerals has been upped (31 -> 62). At the same time the quantity of minerals has been toned down to give room for selling.
* The quantities of some of the mining products feel so low that it feels a bit fruitless to visit a hermit, so the quantities have been gently upped.

_Smugglers' den_

* To enable smaller scale mining around the hermit the quantity of minerals has been toned down to give room for selling. (capacity kept at default 31)
* The quantities of some of the mining products feel so low that it feels a bit fruitless to visit a hermit, so the quantities have been gently upped.
* To characterize the hermit, the capacity of restricted goods has been upped (7 -> 15) and special quantity rules have been added.

_Pirate haven_

* No more mining, so specific mining product rules have been removed.
* Salvage from piracy (slaves, alloys) capacity upped (15 -> 31)
* Stoled goods (meaning about everything else) capacity upped (7 -> 15)

As can be seen, the changes are not really massive, just trying to add flavor and make them a bit more useful. How do the markets now feel? Do they work as intended?

Download: https://app.box.com/s/ctwx3431se704uljpr7a0o6hf3w5f9db

Disembodied wrote:

spara wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

What about the chance of a pod or two being infested with vermin?

I think that sounds better than it actually is. I'm not in favor of negative effects that I can't anticipate or react at. Wasn't there some cargo pod oxp that did something like that?

True, it might be a PITA, especially if it's hard to see the connection between cause and effect. Some sort of clue - e.g. an odd scuttling sound and/or a "biological contaminant detected" alert on scooping - would probably be necessary.

Actually I could edit the texture of the cargo pod and add a picture of the vermin in question to it. The infested pods could then be visually identified. Only abandoned hermits would rarely spawn these.

Spara wrote:

[...] gently upped.

Sounds totally fine.

Anonymissimus wrote:

A little statistics of rock hermit markets (precious metal trade only), using SH 0.15: http://postimg.org/image/o8mdqj7yn/

Please compare to the fact that a single trade cycle with cobra 3 cargo (35TC) between poor agrarian and rich industrial main stations yields ~3000cr.

I took your statistic and made some calculations on my own. I tuned the selling prices a bit down, to what I most of the times find at mainstations (40.5,75,22 -> 39.5,71,20) and got a total profit of 424,6 Cr per hermit grocery run. I also took the most favourable values of Furs and Computers from [wiki]Commodity Calculator[/wiki] (I hope its still up to date.) and got a maximum of 2492 Cr per milkrun with a cobby.
One milkrun gives you more profit per run, but the question remains how many hermit visits and witchjumping into and out of the system can you fit into the same realworld time, when the hermit is in close proximity to the witch point.

But then I gave it another thought. A hermit close to the witchpoint in some systems (if occurring) would be a general vanilla problem (even with vanilla hermits) and therefore not Spara's problem to deal with