Newcomer / Intro Warning: Hidden costs of Shipyard!?

[the100thmonkey]

As I said in a reply above I don't understand why ship hulls have a 10% loss on their sale but components don't.

Actually, this was due to blowback from players in Alpha/Beta testing, I believe - there were complaints that running a ship and upgrading was too costly.

And make sure you visit the "repairs" menu on the left-hand side occasionally, and don't fixate on "repair all" - the overall ship integrity takes damage too. That's much more expensive to repair - about 9,000cr/1% on the Asp.

 

[Aquamonkey]

Yeah sorry I forgot the point of a game was to obfuscate information and push players out to 3rd party information sites to actually play.

What's obfuscated? The component prices are plainly listed in the outfitting screen. If you CBA to check the prices before you dump all your creds and come up short, that's your own fault.

 

[Ancipital]

"I'm sorry I don't subscribe to the current mindset that to play a game you need to spend hours at a time reading through third party sources for essential information."

Sources such as ... The Forums?

More to the point, people were doing this with the original Elite, with overly-earnest discussions on ancient BBSsen, as well as the endless hints and tips in computer magazines (remember those?). Calling it "the current mindset" is just strange and wrong.

 

[EntropicLiquid]

Disclaimer ... I haven't got the game (yet) but just had to query this.

...And make sure you visit the "repairs" menu on the left-hand side occasionally, and don't fixate on "repair all" - the overall ship integrity takes damage too. That's much more expensive to repair - about 9,000cr/1% on the Asp.

My interpretation of your comment above is that the "repair all" (emphasis mine) doesn't actually repair everything that could be damaged. Is that correct?

If so that surely must be a bug rather than a deliberate UI and gameplay obfuscation.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Disclaimer ... I haven't got the game (yet) but just had to query this.


My interpretation of your comment above is that the "repair all" (emphasis mine) doesn't actually repair everything that could be damaged. Is that correct?

If so that surely must be a bug rather than a deliberate UI and gameplay obfuscation.

If that's how you want to interpret it, I guess you can call it an oversight at worst.

 

[EntropicLiquid]

If that's how you want to interpret it, I guess you can call it an oversight at worst.

Heh - at worst you could call it a deliberate trap for the unwary beginner. But hey, it's just semantics. All software bugs are oversights; even the "oops our uninstall program deleted everything on your HD because it's using an environment variable we haven't set" ones

Still, if the game still behaves in the same way when I eventually get around to buying it I'll raise it as an issue. At least it's likely to be an easy one to fix.

 

[Sapient6]

Disclaimer ... I haven't got the game (yet) but just had to query this.


My interpretation of your comment above is that the "repair all" (emphasis mine) doesn't actually repair everything that could be damaged. Is that correct?

If so that surely must be a bug rather than a deliberate UI and gameplay obfuscation.

I don't think it's a bug. Ship integrity is an optional and highly costly repair. Some choose to leave it at 0% because the only thing that does is weaken your total hull strength by 30%, and because it's cheaper to blow your ship up than do a full ship integrity repair.

 

[unicron]

So...

Trading in ships to buy a new one, it costs you money to NOT sell all the compontents on it first?

So say you have a 2M cr ship.

(as an example, not exact numbers)
-Selling all the weapons, utility and internals that can be sold, downgrade everything to 1E where you cannot sell: Then trade in for 10% off the new-price: 1.9M cr returned

-Selling the entire ship and compontents in one go: 1.5M cr returned?

I thought I was losing a few credits on the compontents too? Buying @ 189.600 and selling at 179.500 or something like that. I did notice selling my previous ships (with all components) got me a somewhat meager trade in value.

 

[the100thmonkey]

Heh - at worst you could call it a deliberate trap for the unwary beginner. But hey, it's just semantics. All software bugs are oversights; even the "oops our uninstall program deleted everything on your HD because it's using an environment variable we haven't set" ones

Still, if the game still behaves in the same way when I eventually get around to buying it I'll raise it as an issue. At least it's likely to be an easy one to fix.

"Unwary" or "doesn't bother to look in prominently placed menu items in the main UI?"

If you can't be bothered to check out main menus, you shouldn't computer.

There might be a bug somewhere, but it's not in the game! Should programmers do all the thinking for users? It's a main menu item!

 

[EntropicLiquid]

I don't think it's a bug. Ship integrity is an optional and highly costly repair. Some choose to leave it at 0% because the only thing that does is weaken your total hull strength by 30%, and because it's cheaper to blow your ship up than do a full ship integrity repair.

Good argument for it not being a bug.

Does that mean that Ship integrity uses a non-linear scale when calculating the repair cost? e.g. 1% wear costs 1% of the hull value; but 5% wear costs 8%; and 100% wear costs > 100%.