SSHHHH !!! don't give them any ideas. Its those raw materials that just drive me crazy. I get SRV fever quite easily.
GL HF Commanders
Manufactured Materials
- Thread starter KellyR
- Start date
GL HF Commanders
I made up my own lore on this that avoids sleepless nights thinking about the absurdity of it. Each scoop mechanism has a way of breaking down whatever material it collects into just 1 gram of mass.
In the 34th Century that's all you need to extract what's required from it. So even thousands of units still only have a mass of a few kilos, which means the "Materials Storage Unit" is easily transportable by a Commander wherever he/she goes.
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Silicon is used to grow ingots from seed crystals. Those are sliced, polished and marked for crystal lattice direction. You can have all the sand you want, you won't have an ingot.
Actually you can buy them for money. You can sacrifice about 2 million from a payout and take materials instead. But you still have to do the mission to get the opportunity.
You cannot buy materials straight out. Trading them and buying them are not the same things.
Trading is buying or selling in kind. Is there a qualitative difference?
Yes there is a qualitative difference. How many credits do you have? Try to buy 1 MEF. Now run a mission worth 5 MEFs. Qualitative difference = your credits got you 0 MEFs and your mission got you 5 MEFs. So the quality of your credits is lower than the quality of your mission completion, as far as the owners of the MEFs are concerned.
Oh come now. The only reason that's the case is because FD make it so; and that's the whole point of the thread. If FD allowed us to buy MEFs then........we'd be able to buy MEFs. Sorry, I see no reason to abandon my original point.
They do... sometimes.
I agree with the sentiment, though.
I'd much rather FDev took most/all or the regular mat's away from Encoded USSs and, instead, made Encoded USSs a better-defined thing.
Either make them shipwrecks containing data-terminals in deep space or, perhaps, make them satellites in orbit near to planets, both of which could be scanned for data.
It wouldn't hurt to expand on the variety a bit, though. Perhaps there could be "deep space probes" which could be found and scanned or "rescue beacons" which could be found and scanned too?
I dunno.
Maybe FDev are resigned to the fact that the Jameson crash site has pretty-much negated ALL other existing gameplay related to finding Encoded mat's so they just aren't bothering to develop the mechanic further?
Also, if they're going to tidy up Encoded USSs, perhaps they could transfer all the surplus mat's back to Combat Aftermath USSs?
They used to be decent "lucky dip" USSs but are now (IMO, at least) utterly redundant and to be avoided - along with any other "scenario" USSs.
So basically keep the power level of engineered modules but get rid of materials and use credits instead? Because why would you need to buy currency with another currency?
I just never understood how they register as "encoded" when they have nothing in them that would transmit an encoded signal.
I usually avoid convoy USS unless it's in an anarchy system and I can gather some HG mats from big ships. Every single ceremonial comms USS I drop into is empty. I must be late to the party all the time. I'm hoping to catch that ship sometime and end their party.
No, but if I have enough money, i.e. dollars, I can buy an ingot. Or I can buy the polished silicon wafers that they use to make computer chips.
Everything of value is currency.
Credits are so easy to come by, that materials are essentially the new currency.
If you could buy them, everyone would do a spot of core mining, then go make a fully G5 murder boat.
Then promptly start to complain that there's nothing left to work towards in this game.
Keeping credits and materials separate is the way to go.
If you could buy them, everyone would do a spot of core mining, then go make a fully G5 murder boat.
Then promptly start to complain that there's nothing left to work towards in this game.
Keeping credits and materials separate is the way to go.
That would depend on prices.
No price would make sense.
1 million for an Improvised Component?
I could buy thousands.
10 million? I can still buy hundreds.
100 million? Ok... How do manufacturers afford these... I can still buy as many as I'm willing to mine VOs for.
1Bn. Plain ridiculous. But I could still buy one.
And people have far far more money than me, so even billions doesn't put them off.
I'd rather they just fixed the spawning of materials so it's possible to find everything, if you know where to look.
OK, so you've accumulated a lot of money. Why does this make it wrong for you to buy lots of stuff? Isn't that the whole point of money?
And why is any price "ridiculous"? If, say, 1 billion credits is very easy to get, then clearly, stuff should be expensive. If it's very difficult to get, then stuff should be cheap. That's all. It's a matter of finding the right price. That's all.
It doesn't matter what you propose, someone will always argue against it. Every time.
Tardy reply time
Firstly its "Dav's Hope" my bad. Secundo its got Mats lying about. You pick them up, log out log in, repeat as many times as you want.
Firstly its "Dav's Hope" my bad. Secundo its got Mats lying about. You pick them up, log out log in, repeat as many times as you want.
I do agree that giving up on credit value is unnecessary. There are ways to bring back the value of credits, which all missions and other aspects of the game still use as rewards. There's no reason to rely on engineering to be the new goal when the rest of the NPC world doesn't rely on it.
"Easy to get" is a relative term. There are people IRL who found fortunes relatively easy. The economy in the bubble has to be based on not pricing new players out of the game, and taking into consideration the cost of commodities themselves. Gold rushes should not cause inflation, since many people (think about explorers out for months) aren't participating but would be negatively affected.