[See edits] Suggested fixes for inconsistent artificial progression & economy nerfs

[Arisaya]

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Edit 2:

I did some up-to-date testing & checking in game around the shipyard stuff, rather than basing it off of old posts I saw, and came up with this suggestion instead: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=462023#p5226198
Also edited the title to reflect whats being asked for, and the fact there are now different suggestions designed to make things inconsistent.

As of this time, for slow pilot ranking, its just not meaningful enough to really be kept in the game as a mechanic so unless someone can prove that things become actually way too OP if pilots level up at a rate similar to literally every other job in the game I still advocate that particular nerf against the player is just completely arbitrary confusion for new players.

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Edit 1:
To clarify:
I am not asking for the game to be considerably easier - I'm asking for it to not have obtuse and contrived anti-QoL features.
These mechanics are *not* really penalizing veteran players at all, they are just QoL annoyances.
These mechanics only penalize new players who don't know any better and have to ask around.

I dont even play in a way that would really benefit from these things being changed - the main benefit to me is in not having to explain this stuff to new players and being like 'trust me, underneath all these incomprehensible design decisions is a game you can enjoy' to their looks of skepticism.

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Original post:

I'm talking about things like:
* selling ships from a shipyard is subject to a huge penalty (essentially giving the AI a 75% discount or something)
* pilot leveling is ridiculously slow
* miner leveling (as slow as it already is) is capped

From the discussions I have seen, the vast majority of players hate these things - either new players who struggle with them because they suffer through it while not even realizing that these issues are actually mechanics rather than bugs, or veterans who just dont want to deal with the busywork bypassing them entails.

All of these things are trivial for an experienced player to work around, they literally only serve to add annoying busywork of navigating menus and making extra clicks for an experienced player, while making the game much more frustrating for a new player who doesnt understand the mechanics of the game well enough to bypass them.

[Edit 2: This section has been superseded by the following post based on much more accurate current (7.0 beta) in-game checking: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=462023#p5226198]
Selling ships to the AI:
- If you want money, just set all your factories to trade internally till the last product you intend to sell (or make an all-in-one factory), and then sell the final product for the smallest increment under 'normal price', because the trade AI simply buys for "less than normal price" and sells for "higher than normal price" rather than explicitly trying to buy lower than the sell price, for performance reasons
- OR, very slightly more economically efficient and you can force the AI to take your materials whenever you want even if they are saturated, but requires manual steps: build ships manually and then order them to an AI shipyard to be sold
Both of these are actually inferior from a gameplay mechanics perspective for the AI player, because they aren't getting completed ships they can use, but rather materials. Selling a ship to their shipyard only results in it being scrapped, and the materials were already just materials, while to the actual player they make no difference because its just money.
Also by the time you actually get your own shipyard, you are most likely operating off of an internal economy, or just building fleets (via war missions) for the terrans on repeat for huge profits.
A new player who has just reached endgame for the first time instead just finds themselves getting ripped off by their shipyard constantly just selling stuff for a huge loss to the AI until they discover they need to disable that.

Ultra-slow pilot leveling, leveling caps:
- every other job type levels up way faster - its just pilots that level like beans, so new players are constantly complaining about this because its not obvious how to bypass it.
- economy ship pilot level & auto-commands can be bypassed by simply making a small depot station and utilizing the commander's level to extend their ranges. This is not at all obvious to a new player.
- non-capships (S, M) die so often whats the point of giving them high level pilots? Especially the civilian ships - a pirate or kha'ak sneezes on them and they just explode.
- powerleveling pilots in capships is easy enough
- new players keep thinking autominers are bugged for not increasing past 3*
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Note:
The kha'ak anti-mining mechanics (makes anything but L ore miners utterly pointless, hurts the AI economy far more than that of a veteran player) and 7.0 beta 1-3 crisis are also really bad for the game in their current states, and while I think the latter should be temporarily removed to completely rework, I dont think either lacks a place in the game, AFTER receiving serious changes at least. As a result I don't list them as things that should be completely removed, unlike these weird arbitrary penalties listed above.

[TroubledRabbit]

well - there was once saying among programmers/designers: 'if some of your creations was modded out, you just have made a mistake and wasted your time'

(it was actually more vulgar in origin )

[charlie1024]

Well, you at least can get experienced pilots using Terraforming. That feature is relatively hard to get, but X series takes many hours to get your empire bigger, personally I think that's okay.

Rather, detailed description will be needed to understand the game. Actually, this game is 'War economy management simulation game'. Many management games always need the management ability of the player. It's not a game's fault.

Also, actually, if you build a wharf or shipyard, you can even set the ships price to 150% of the original. Even though, AI will buy your ship(Incredibly!). Isn't rather unfair for AIs they must buy your ship for 150% price?

Also, non-capships even can survive in many quantity. For example, 50 Katanas will very easily kill even some Ks. You'll lose some ships, but after many battles, you'll easily get experienced pilots. Consider how XEN commands their S/M ships.

Even, you have known in 7.0(Public Beta) XEN has been very weak compared to the previous versions? From 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 Public Beta, XEN has been gradually weakened. I remember when I played 4.0, the Splits had hard times to survive from XEN.

[Axeface]

From the discussions I have seen, the vast majority of players hate these things

I dont think this is correct. Online discussions almost never represent reality. For example, I am swimming in credits in my games and I hate how easy it is to get them, and then later, how they mean nothing. So I disagree very much with the idea of removing caps - in fact I'de want them to add more limitations and nerfs.
As for pilot levelling, I dont think the fundamental idea that the player generally needs to play a hand in their employees reaching their full potential is a bad concept, in fact I like it - I just think the way the game goes about it needs a lot of work. I'de rework the entire system but I would never want npcs to just all reach max level by themselves over time, that would be horrible.

[Arisaya]

To clarify:
I am not asking for the game to be considerably easier - I'm asking for it to not have obtuse and contrived anti-QoL features.
These mechanics are *not* really penalizing veteran players at all, they are just QoL annoyances.
These mechanics only penalize new players who don't know any better and have to ask around.

My aggravation with these mechanics comes from trying to help new players get into the game, and then having to explain all these workarounds that should not be necessary, but are, because of these mechanics that don't work as you would intuitively expect.

1) Removing the income limiter on player shipyard sales merely makes it another option to sell things to the AI that the AI factions will actually benefit from (outside of fleet building missions).
It does not increase the actual income of a veteran player, because the player can work around this manually anyways.
In fact, I personally would not really benefit from this change because I dont even sell ships to the AI factions - the only benefit to me is in not having to explain completely non-obvious mechanics and their workarounds to new players that I'm trying to get into the game.

Also, 150% ship price from shipyards is +50% above the already nerfed buy price, so its still 'a bargain' for the AI.

Credits are basically pointless once you have a shipyard beyond buying the last blueprints you need, finishing some of dal busta's missions, and getting the achievement for 1 billion credits that you only need to do once.

2) Pilot ranking is basically meaningless in most circumstances, but it would be really nice if it wasn't an opaque exception to the rules that constantly keeps confounding new players because its the only thing that basically doesn't level up and they can never figure out why until they go and look it up or get told.
Small ships with 5* pilots will still die, especially IS. Tanky big ships with 1* pilots are basically unbeatable in a big enough blob when OOS because the AI will never bring a big enough blob of their own to go and fight them.
Trade ships get a little bit more efficient in their flight but honestly it just doesnt seem to be a significant difference.
The only place I've seen pilot skill really make a big difference is in L miners because mining ships for some reason get an inordinately huge buff for having a high ranked pilot (something like +80-90% more mining efficiency, I recall). But at the same time.... you can make up that difference by just... buying another miner with a 0*-1* pilot. Miners are not that expensive, you can easily afford them by simply having the free early-game mission ships or derelicts grab up drops from xenon combat zones on repeat.
Sure, you unlock some orders and stuff too, but beyond a new player or someone in early game, who is going to be running trade ships and mining ships on autotrade or automine without a station to support anyways? By late game, if you are trying to support the AI factories, you might as well just use 'fill shortages' which only needs 1*...

Again, I dont see myself really benefiting from this, because I like to set things up once and never touch them again unless something actually gets destroyed and I have to go and replace it, which I loath doing because I have to go find which identically named factory happened to lose an L miner to khaak, manually queue up a replacement, and then not forget to reassign it once its done building. I set up my factories with the ideal number of miners based on 0-1* efficiency, any * gain above that doesnt matter - they will end up filling up with inputs and then the miners will just be sitting around waiting for the factory to free up enough room, but I dont care because its completely hands-free. Similarly I only really use fleets with L and XL ships with only manually deployed fighters for interception duty, again, because replacing ships is a pain, so why should I bother with ships that will get killed, when I can simply stack 5 asgards to defend an empty station plot on top of a gate and call it a day? (The empty station plot trick makes re-assigning them to defend it easier than reconfiguring area defense every single time)

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As for more difficulty, give me some real game-mechanics derived difficulty, not forcing a bunch of extra clicks to do things or slapping random artificial caps and nerfs on the player or teleporting piles of kha'ak onto the players assets with no real strategic or tactical counterplay than to hard-cheese the system and trick the game into dropping them onto the NPCs instead.

I would certainly appreciate some *actual* improvements to late game difficulty that aren't just weird artificial friction, like more resource rich xenon systems for the xenon to power their economy with, better xenon ship loadouts, some strategic AI for the xenon that will prioritize threats more appropriately, etc - and also some QoL to go with them like surface element targeting hotkeys for only L turrets or engines, and the ability to toggle on automatic subordinate replacement for a station or fleet.
Adding anti-QoL friction that also confounds new players because there is no indication how it works is NOT a good way to build the game.

[LameFox]

I can understand from a balance perspective why they nerfed the shipyard/wharf profits but it really does feel super cheap and disappointing the way it was done. Nothing to mechanically create difficulty, just 'you are the player, therefore this arbitrarily sucks for you'. Balance should not be so blatantly artificial IMO, especially in a game where the steam store page is boasting about how 'realistic' its economy is.

[Axeface]

I dont see it like that at all. It makes perfect sense that the player doesnt get the entire sum when mass producing someone elses designs/patents whatever you want to call them, there would be up front fees to purchase the rights (blueprint cost) and then further fees every time you produce it, I headcanon the reduction away as that. So I see it as the opposite, being able to purchase a blueprint and then get full rights to profit from it is odd - much like it is odd to purchase an employee and then never pay them again.

[LameFox]

I mean you can imagine it however you like but the game does not, as far as I have seen, make even a cursory effort to make that difference seem reasonable in-universe. I'm not going to give them credit for what players tell themselves.

[Axeface]

I mean you can imagine it however you like but the game does not, as far as I have seen, make even a cursory effort to make that difference seem reasonable in-universe. I'm not going to give them credit for what players tell themselves.

Yes with this I very much agree.

[BitByte]

I dont see it like that at all. It makes perfect sense that the player doesnt get the entire sum when mass producing someone elses designs/patents whatever you want to call them, there would be up front fees to purchase the rights (blueprint cost) and then further fees every time you produce it, I headcanon the reduction away as that. So I see it as the opposite, being able to purchase a blueprint and then get full rights to profit from it is odd - much like it is odd to purchase an employee and then never pay them again.

With this logic if player accepts "build station" mission and gets for example 10M cr from it her/him should handover 50% from it to factions whom sold the blueprints?
Or even by building own station and from all sales what station makes they would pay 50% to factions whom sold blueprints.
Nope that really doesn't sound fair. Or at that point blueprints prices should be just "peanuts" (small amount of credits).

With shipyard and wharf nerfing still allows make profits (yes it just takes way much longer to payback all blueprints you buy). The side effect was that equipment dock became useless and unprofitable (it only consumes credits and never became profitable). I had EQ (S/M + 4*L + XL maint modules) in Second Contact II when X4 was in version 4.x and it just required all the time more and more credits ever there was visitors. Since I started replace maintenance bays with facrication bays (I had 2 L fab bays ready from 4 and missing XL fab) and station turned to be profitable. So for me this was clear indication - stay away from L and XL maint bays as them are useless. S/M maint bay can be used as part of shipyard if own wharf is in another sector.

[Arisaya]

Ok, some corrections to ship data based on actual in-game verification in 7.0 vs really crusty old posts about selling ships from your internal economy:
...Its kind of an inconsistent mess even worse than I was previously aware

According to modders, the nerf is a 0.25x multiplier (1/4th) on ships sold by the player. If you lock sales of your ships to 0.25*1.5, you get a final sales price of 0.375 = 3/8ths, slightly better than 1/3rd, but its close enough so I'll just use 1/3rd for the sake of some following comparisons.

Hulls (the actual bare hull with nothing on it) has a huge *base* assembly markup, about 5x. (Base = before the player-specific nerf is applied)
Components, although its not consistent, do not have an assembly markup anywhere as big. This seems to be ~2x-3x, for example, the ATF main cannon is 2.4x.

The markups are impacted by the stock levels at your shipyard, unless you always set it to 150%.
If an NPC buys a ship with the minimum preset, you can actually make a significantly better profit off of the hull parts selling them as part of a hull at +150% sales price
If an NPC buys a ship with a maximum preset though, you might be breaking even or losing money, rather than selling the materials used to make the component directly, especially considering that the NPC shipyards and stations are more likely to be starved for parts
This leads to the whole equipment docks going bankrupt problem, where even at 150% markup you are selling components to them usually at a loss - though I suppose you can simply make them with no cargo capacity, so all they can do is repair, which requires 0 resources but you still get paid for it.

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If you sell parts to the NPC factions, dont sell your hull parts - keep those for your own stations & ships, but you can totally sell your other finished components since you are getting a better deal on direct trades for them even at average price.

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If you sell a ship to an NPC shipyard, it appears to have a smaller markdown (multiplier of ~0.75x, but its hard to be exact due to ware levels in the NPC shipyards which impacts it a little bit but less than you would think), which is still around twice as good as letting them buy ships from you, and guarantees a profit regardless of configuration (your best profit will be selling swarms of small min configuration ships but w/ max software to them, as software is free and on a small ship, the software + hull markup will dominate the price)

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What I recommend to produce a consistent and clearly telegraphed gameplay experience to the player:
Remove the shipyard sale price slider - this thing is a misleading artifact of 3.0 and older versions and only serves to trick players into thinking they have some control of the profits from their sales.
Change the base build markup on everything to exactly 2.5x (+150%) instead of 5x - yes this makes some things cheaper or more expensive, but only noticeably cheaper if you are buying only min config ships. On average the components should be "about the same". Hull component costs for economy ships could simply be bumped up a bit to compensate for this, but not too much as that will probably kill the NPC players.
Display a "build markup" in the materials breakdown list for when a player buys a ship from the NPCs, so they know what is going on.
Display a "build markup" in the player's shipyard or equipment dock UI.
Set the build markup to some fixed value that is consistently more profitable than selling individual components, but can be less profitable than what the AI is getting, like +75% (1.75x). At that value, that should in turn make player shipyard sales about 0.7x the NPC shipyard sales, technically this is a bit less than ~0.75x from simply selling ships for salvage, but this can be basically regarded as the 'afk tax' or you can adjust the values to be more or less profitable than it depending if you want to reward the player for actually giving the NPC useable ships.

This system:
1) guarantees the player is rewarded for actually bothering to build ships for the NPCs rather than just sell them wares
2) gets the player roughly equivalent rewards for letting them order ships as opposed to selling ships for salvage
3) eliminates player confusion about what the heck is going on behind the scenes with the pricing of stuff
4) removes that misleading price adjustment slider which is nothing more than a trap
5) doesn't appreciably change the player's earnings for better or worse beyond what they can do right now in the current balance

[BitByte]

There's also 1 thing which some may not notice - If NPC buys ship from player you don't improve reputation from that.
But if you sell already built ship to NPC that will generate reputation.
Same thing is with other trading so that's why station and auto traders / miners are playing keyrole in the game.