Your thoughts please on the BGS and Odyssey?
- Thread starter Marcus Machiavelli
- Start date
Tangentially, I'm really interested to see[1] if there's significant negative effects that can be achieve sans missions with this stuff. It would be great, for example, if theft[2] also counted as a negative action i.e stealing files, breaking into sealed canisters... as well as sabotaging things (I hope things like the... pyrolitic catalysts(?) which are used to sabotage industrial/agricultural facilities can be market-bought to fuel sabotage activities independently.It would be nice if disabling bases counted as a negative for the local faction. Will be interesting if in 6 months all bases belong to the system controller, gonna get a lot of wars real soon
Even if just security guard kills = negative security, and civilian staff kills = negative economy, it's at least something I can do while Hostile (which is equally a write-off for most missions right now)
[1] Though these days, with the bubble getting so full I'm imagining it'll be hard to get accurate measurements these days. It's a write-off in my area of space, compared to year 1 where someone in local chat once said to me "Wow, I never expected to see someone out here!"
[2] It's actually a major bugbear I have with things... basically the only damage caused by theft is when you sell items to a black market owned by a non-anarchy faction. It's pretty crazy that the faction you steal off isn't negatively affected in Economy/security depending on the item.
The prices would have to be very good to compete with regular trading because you can only trade with settlements in medium or small ships (which I find awesome, but can also become a gimmick if profit is too low). This is probably one of the things that may require a second balance pass after the initial release and some usage data has been collected.Will the commodity prices at the EDO bases be useful? Dav said they will be better than other locations. I'm not a big BGSer, so can't remember if profit affects influence
This is also one of the things that I'm very curious about how FD will handle this... Odyssey missions take a lot longer to complete, which is great IMO as they finally feel like proper missions and not like a quick run to the grocery shop. The "5 minute adventures" we generally had so far were one the least appealing things in the game for me. However this means that Odyssey missions need higher parameters (reputation, influence, payout) than the Horizons missions to account for the much longer duration. At least higher than in the alpha for sure.
Really, what I hope they do (and is what everyone told me was going to happen when I complained that Odyssey wouldn't fix the issues the space-game currently has, but has not happened at least in the Alpha) is go back and redo all the space-based missions to make them just as involved as the Odyssey missions.
As I mentioned previously... it looks like Source/Deliver space missions were absent from the Alpha. TBH, this wouldn't be the worst thing on earth, as they kinda just supplanted standard trading. Massacres are still in, because ungh, but whatever. But if salvage missions actually involved getting out, cutting open something then getting back into the ship (requires spacewalking, I guess...)... megaship missions actually involved more complex security override processes and ship-based weapons to replicate things like the arc-cutter on a ship-level scale, with opportunities to hack security responses and such... that would go a long way to addressing the imbalance and giving a fresh look and feel to the missions.
Well, we saw the answer to that in the alpha - the new 'infiltrate m/s' mission that was just scanning a (public) data point. Most disappointed I've been in a while, could at least have been hacking the data points (at least that is illegal and so deserves the 'infiltrate'/criminal tag).
Megaships, undockable space outposts and scenarios are an entire chapter in the book of "Missed Opportunities"
EDIT: No, I'm going to have this rant.
"Scenarios" as they are shouldn't be the "random opportunities in USS" or "addendums to a larger activity e.g CZs". They should be the core mechanic driving missions, undertaken in a procedurally generated manner. We kinda get that with some scenarios already, like the "Recover the Black Box" Combat Aftermath Threat 1 sites in CZs.. you scoop the black box[1], which has it's effects, but then a spawn of enemies jump in. You can flee, or nix them all for bonus credits and BGS effects.
I'm not saying Scenarios should just be for-missions, but things like "Take out the power relays" could be offered up as missions, and equally offered up as a dynamic activity as they currently are if you arrive at a megaship without a mission. Once you've taken out the power relays, the scenario can fork three ways.
- That's it, get out of dodge.
- Now you've taken out the power relays, hijack the cargo (Oh derp, that's broken)
- You've taken out the power relays, but a security detail has arrived sooner than we expected, take them out for this substantial bonus.
All three can have associated credit and BGS effect rewards. And even then, once you successfully hijack the cargo, have a high chance of spawning a mission to deliver it to a nearby anarchy faction.... I just don't get why missions aren't the entry-point to a procedurally-chaining series of events, which could also be encountered just by visiting things, and are chained together by procedurally executed scenario mechanics.
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Well EDO mission payouts are still the same as in the alpha, miniscule compared with ship missions. The influence and reputation at least is similar, although the missions take much longer and almost all require you to go back to the mission giver. Being allied with the faction doesn't seem to afffect this at all (might be a bug).
Dislike :/
That's sure what I thought, but in the (few) systems I've checked where the controlling faction owns all stations/outposts/bases they ended up owning all the settlements, too. In one system where a single other faction held an installation the controlling faction still owned all the settlements. I haven't looked yet at systems with a broader mix of ownership.
In my home system there won't be any wars because of the change. YMMV.
Interesting. I haven't had time to check that many places yet, but out in Colonia - where most systems pre-Odyssey only had a single asset or maybe two - the ownership seems to have been spread out a lot, and we've got a huge pile of pending conflicts all over the region.
Yup... a whole bunch of conflicts now pending for assets i've never heard of
Also, I went to a single-pad settlement (one where it's just a single-faction mission board). Once again Source/Deliver missions seem completely absent from the boards, and the market, well, prices didn't seem any different. Time will tell?
I saw a whole bunch of source/delivers at a normal orbital station (if anything, more than it had a few days ago) though I didn't have time to check many mission boards.Yup... a whole bunch of conflicts now pending for assets i've never heard of
Also, I went to a single-pad settlement (one where it's just a single-faction mission board). Once again Source/Deliver missions seem completely absent from the boards, and the market, well, prices didn't seem any different. Time will tell?
Welp, when the servers come back, I'll check again.
working the same system pre- and after-patch from the base game, i can see no difference on source/delivery
Yeah, i spotted some now... finally...
Potentially interesting effect - the new bases come with populations. I'm seeing shifts of between 5k and 200k increases, presumably dependent on the number of landables, which will be a rounding error in most systems but could have visible effects on the smaller ones.
total population changes? (i know one system which got a population increase with horizon)
Yes, total population changes - search for "population change reported" in the alerts section of https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/progress or https://whdb.sotl.org.uk/progress for some sample values.
The last system I checked out yesterday did have multiple ownership of both stations and settlements, but since it was seemingly based on who owns what already I wouldn't expect additional conflicts there.
In those Colonia systems, did you find that factions who hadn't owned any assets before now owned settlements? That's the circumstance I expected to see but haven't, yet.