A question on mission generation
- Thread starter PerchyPanther
- Start date
Yup.
It's all the secondary, unintuitive effects that have the most control over finding a good source of a mission type, rather than intuitive effects.
E.g doing deliveries from a none- state factions station with just one feasible target for delivery missions will be a better use of your time in terms of reward (whether monetary, influence or whatever) than a boom/ investment state faction which owns a station with many potential delivery targets...
Dunno - I always found it 'intuitive' that finding spots with few available targets would be better. ofc few targets with nice states should be even better, but I lose interest and wander off at that stage as it all gets too confusing
At some stage I really need to put some time into looking at how the game works out its targets for missions, I don't get much further than 'within ~20Ly' - and often there are many systems that could have missions but just don't. Hopefully Ian will be along soon to tell me
Hi there,
This is untrue.
The variable generator that determines which cargo to ask for only looks at the imports of the station in question, it doesn't search for any stations which can supply that demand.
Additionally, yes, economies can directly affect mission spawning. Certain passenger missions are more likely from tourism economies, for example.
Thanks,
Dom,
Interesting... I'm kinda curious then; what stops remote stations from spawning source missions then? If you go to, say, Skaudai CH-B d14-34, you'll only ever see mining or donation missions there; you'd never see a source mission ever (at least, in my experience I've never seen a source mission spawn).
It's intuitive from a game mechanic sense, but I don't get how that makes any economic or logical sense though?
Imagine this scenario: 10 extraction economy stations of a billion population each, all in range of a single industrial economy; given what I understand about how missions generate, that industrial economy would have literal hundreds of missions generated for it. The needs of that industrial economy would be met by a fraction of those needs thanks to massive oversupply. If that followed normal logic, there would be barely any deliveries, and they'd be paying peanuts.
Meanwhile, a single extraction economy in range of ten billion-population industrial economies should have those facilities screaming "JUST TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME JUST ONE TONNE OF GOLD!" due to the comparative scarcity of the goods. Alternately, a billion-population extraction surrounded by ten industrial economies should have hundreds of delivery missions running for it at any given time, as the sole supplier of minerals to a vast customer base.
But the reality is, I'm just as likely to get a board full of salvage or massacre missions as I am a board full of deliveries; it's why places like Sothis/Ceos work so well, and anywhere else that's in the bubble or surrounded by multiple potential customers, don't, and such conditions like the second scenario don't affect prices or rewards that much either. Finding good opportunities isn't about identifying locations with diverse and varying trade opportunities, it's about finding redundant cases where the mission board can't really generate much else other than yet-more-deliveries-to-the-same-location.
tl;dr the best opportunities for trade and delivery missions seems to revolve around finding the least amount of potential customers.... where any sane business operator would generally be seeking the most amount of potential customers.
EDIT: comparably it's like the issue of massacre stacking and seeking bounty hunting adventures. The best places to seek a fortune bounty hunting are where there's minimal pirate presence, instead of a region surrounded by anarchy factions (and also avoiding those Pirate Activity sites
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True. The great thing about this game (and the root cause behind many of the perennial threads on here) is that you can argue any situation from 2 points of view:
1) This needs changing to make more fun gameplay
2) This needs changing to make more realism
Ideally flip points-of-view every 5 posts for maximum damage
I'd argue that fixing it would make the game more fun. In the case of deliveries, instead of a single random backwater being constantly the best place to earn credits with deliveries because it can only generate a single route... seeking out good economic states with plenty of neighbouring trade opportunities should be the optimal place to seek out, which would open the door to a huge, diverse and ever changing set of places within the bubble.True. The great thing about this game (and the root cause behind many of the perennial threads on here) is that you can argue any situation from 2 points of view:
1) This needs changing to make more fun gameplay
2) This needs changing to make more realism
Ideally flip points-of-view every 5 posts for maximum damage
Bottom line for me is really; If i have to game the system rather than apply common sense to find the gold rushes, something's not really right.
Hi there,
Collect missions require at least one other station to exist within range, but do not care if it supplies that commodity. This is primarily to give a source for the pirate faction.
edit for clarity: One other station in a different system, within range (Allows up to 15LY but the guaranteed radius we know about is only 12LY), and with a criminal faction present.
Thanks,
Dom
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Thank you all for shedding light on it.
Aaah, that makes a lot of sense now, thanks!
I'm really liking the snippets comin from Dom - thanks @Dominic Corner - appreciated!
Most people already think mining prices are black magic. Not sure they'd be any happier with mission locations fluctuating even more than they do. In fact looking at the issue tracker it is stuffed with people raising issues because they don't understand the current game, so making it more complex would be ... interesting
All of these little insights from Dom are wonderful. Thank you Dom!
Agreed, Dom is just perfectly splendid, thank you very kindly!
Sure, but that's a learned behaviour, not a default expectation. Keeping on mining prices, if FD nerfed them at the start when it was pretty clear they were out of line (instead of almost a year later), barely anyone would have complained. Instead it was allowed to set in and become the status quo, and when FD changed that learned behaviour they were all up in arms over it.Most people already think mining prices are black magic. Not sure they'd be any happier with mission locations fluctuating even more than they do. In fact looking at the issue tracker it is stuffed with people raising issues because they don't understand the current game, so making it more complex would be ... interesting
Likewise the vast majority of trade routes, states and get ignored because the learned behaviour is that they really don't matter that much, and that a single, static location will be good near 100% of the time. In a game which prides itself on it's procedural generation, that's a bad place to be.
A basic fix to this would actually be less complex than what we've currently got to boot.
For example; currently, the best place to earn credits bounty hunting is to find a system where there's only one pirate faction within 10 Ly thanks to stacking massacres and assassinations. But that data is static, never changing.
The obvious procedural approach? It should be any system in Lockdown/Civil Unrest (and arguably war/civil war) that offers the best pay for bounty hunters. That's a far more intuitive, less complicated system, and if players are confused by "Oh, the civil unrest ended, better find another system in civil unrest" then maybe we really should just implement the button that says "GIEF CREDZ".
Which is the crux of my issue; for a game priding itself on the procedural, it sure is static.
My main complaint about the missions system is that it need to be greatly expanded into a multi step mission system at least for "special" missions. If you are confused as to what I mean, take a look at how mission work in other current (if not older) space games like No Man's Sky and X4. Thier mission systems are much more advanced.
I think I mentioned this in a post a while back, trading / transport missions only tend to go to an adjacent system (relative to range of course, a new Cmdr in a sidey would be screwed.
You could have missions that were to transport a load or even 1 box / ton to somewhere a little farther away, lets say 250ly which could pay extremely well because you would know that some where along the way you would be attacked and mass locked, by pirates so you had no alternative other than fisticuffs.
So you better be equipped to handle it.
This next system thing is pretty lame after all this time, then no magic would need to be involved as the mission had already told you where you needed to go.
Are there any missions that are further away than one or two jumps? for an experienced pilot of course as the ships minimal jump range would be around 25-30ly Combat Python.
I'm not sure I have ever came across any but maybe I'm not looking enough.
The specific gravity of cargo is not great either but I can live with that as I have to.
Pug
Broken can be relative and is probably why Developers Do Not directly respond to the masses in individual posts as every differing whim gets posted for the responding Dev/Programmer to fix or comment on.
He has been kind enough to respond directly to someone's thoughts on why this problem exists, or the reasoning or programming behind it. that's unusual enough to Thank the man. Thank you Dom.
Most would have to clear it with the 'boss' before responding, in fact he probably did have to clear it in some manner or another.
As our tendency is to jump on any little posted discrepancy and/or mistake and run a million miles with it.
Pug
Dom, i frequently see wing source palladium missions that pay 50,000,000 but require close to or more than 50,000,000 credits in actual product. This led me to believe that a hard cap of 50,000,000 was placed on missions. Recently though i saw a massacre mission for 51,490,000 million. I found it interesting that massacre missions seemed willing to exceed the 50 million mark but source and return missions would rather have me operate at a loss than exceed 50 million.