tl; dr : for Odyssey missions - rewards taken as Materials reduce the cash reward by a predictable amount and the number of rewards can also (mostly) be predicted from the reward and the material offered. Current mission pay is limiting the number of mats you will see from a mission.
I was interested in why Odyssey (Foot) missions pay out more of some materials than others, so dug around a bit - I'm sure others have done similar, but I haven't see it written so here it is - feel free to shoot down stuff that is wrong. This was really a distraction from looking at why foot missions don't give INF+++++ / REP+++++ (much) (edit: More in a later post)
Material Rewards
The amount of credits given when you take the Materials option is predictable from the 'credit only' reward using the formula:
This also works when you negotiate with an NPC [1]
Material-Value is sadly not the value given by the Bartender, but seems to be unrelated but can be found by examining a number of missions. The ones I have found are given below and are not really surprising - Power Regulators and (useful) Schematics are expensive etc. It is a little surprising that Manufacturing Instructions are 'cheap', but that can be inferred anyway from the way they occur more frequently in large numbers as mission rewards.
Material Rewards per Mission
I wanted to look at why I never see something like 5 Power Regulators for a regular mission and this seems to be governed by a limit on the amount that the credit reward can be reduced. When looking at Material rewards the associated credits will always be above ~60% of the initial value, so your rewards will be 'worth' less than 40% of the initial reward (37% is the maximum I have in my stats).
It's not clear what the exact algorithm is - it seems like it is something like 'pick the number of mats that gives a percentage credit reduction closest to X%' where X varies depending upon the material value (from the above table) - this works exactly for 5000 (X = 32.7%) and 40000 (X = 20.5%) for the data I have [2], but not for other mat values, so there is something else happening. X reduces as the value increases (see [2]), further reducing the amount of credits available to pay for mats.
So, for example - if I wanted a mission giving 5 Power Regulators then using the above information:
Payouts for Foot Missions
Here is a table of the payouts I have seen per-mission type since Odyssey started (including non-foot missions for comparison). The mission count is how many I have done - where there are only a handful the data will be noisy. The names are from the journals - but mostly make sense.
Odyssey missions have 'OnFoot' in their title, and if you look at the maximum payout you can see why you don't see lots of Power Regulators - the maximum payouts are a lot less than the 1M required to see that reward (only exception being the recently added 'Protect' missions). In general Odyssey missions don't have a great range in payouts (that is given in the 4th column) .
Ian did great work on Horizons missions (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/rev-enging-mission-boards.543467/) showing how they scale with mission LS / LY values etc, but the only variation I see for Odyssey is with Threat level (higher threat levels gives more payout). Looking at restoring power to the same base from 15Ly away makes no discernible difference to payout, and the same with a 10LS vs 1M LS supercruise. Sadly it's not possible to see if mission rank (harmless -> elite) pays a part as this is not visible in Odyssey.
I'm not sure if Foot missions should have a larger range, though it does seem like if they were allowed to go over 1M then it would allow for the occasional '5 Power Reg' mission to appear, which might be nice. That would require missions to have more variation in payout than they have at the moment.
(I get the feeling this is also why we don't see INF+++++ or REP+++++ rewards often - the mission payments just not being large enough to support them. This is a shame as the original end-game of Odyssey was stated as 'you can play the BGS' - which at the moment is mostly not true as you cannot get INF or REP results anywhere near as efficiently as on a ship[3]).
That's the end - knock it down
Notes:
[1] Needs more investigation as you can get 5 Power Regs from an NPC, but not from a regular mission, though this could be just that the NPCs offer more credits. Investigation of this is hampered by the current bug meaning NPC missions don't go in the logs.
[2] These are all the values I get for X - though as I said above, most are not perfect fits so I don't think I have it exactly correct:
[3] foot CZ are useful for BGS work, but ideally missions would be too
I was interested in why Odyssey (Foot) missions pay out more of some materials than others, so dug around a bit - I'm sure others have done similar, but I haven't see it written so here it is - feel free to shoot down stuff that is wrong. This was really a distraction from looking at why foot missions don't give INF+++++ / REP+++++ (much) (edit: More in a later post)
Material Rewards
The amount of credits given when you take the Materials option is predictable from the 'credit only' reward using the formula:
Credits-with-Materials = Credit-only-Reward - 10,000 - Number-of-Material * Material-Value
This also works when you negotiate with an NPC [1]
Material-Value is sadly not the value given by the Bartender, but seems to be unrelated but can be found by examining a number of missions. The ones I have found are given below and are not really surprising - Power Regulators and (useful) Schematics are expensive etc. It is a little surprising that Manufacturing Instructions are 'cheap', but that can be inferred anyway from the way they occur more frequently in large numbers as mission rewards.
| 5000 | Atmospheric Data,Combatant Performance,Maintenance Logs,Mineral Survey,Mining Analytics,Operational Manual,Reactor Output Review,Recycling Logs,Risk Assessments |
| 10000 | Chemical Formulae,Chemical Inventory,Combat Training Material,Evacuation Protocols,Health Monitor,Manufacturing Instructions,Production Reports,Production Schedule,Stellar Activity Logs,Surveillance Equipment,Weapon Inventory |
| 15000 | Audio Logs,Ballistics Data,Chemical Experiment Data,Digital Designs,Gene Sequencing Data,Patrol Routes,Radioactivity Data,Security Expenses,Spectral Analysis Data,Topographical Surveys,Troop Deployment Records,Weapon Test Data |
| 20000 | Biometric Data,Blood Test Results,Chemical Patents,Clinical Trial Records,Genetic Research,Medical Records,NOC Data,Pharmaceutical Patents,Settlement Assault Plans,Surveillance Logs,Tactical Plans |
| 40000 | Compression-Liquefied Gas,Ionised Gas,Power Regulator,Suit Schematic,Weapon Schematic |
Material Rewards per Mission
I wanted to look at why I never see something like 5 Power Regulators for a regular mission and this seems to be governed by a limit on the amount that the credit reward can be reduced. When looking at Material rewards the associated credits will always be above ~60% of the initial value, so your rewards will be 'worth' less than 40% of the initial reward (37% is the maximum I have in my stats).
It's not clear what the exact algorithm is - it seems like it is something like 'pick the number of mats that gives a percentage credit reduction closest to X%' where X varies depending upon the material value (from the above table) - this works exactly for 5000 (X = 32.7%) and 40000 (X = 20.5%) for the data I have [2], but not for other mat values, so there is something else happening. X reduces as the value increases (see [2]), further reducing the amount of credits available to pay for mats.
So, for example - if I wanted a mission giving 5 Power Regulators then using the above information:
- 5 Power Regs at 40k each = 200k
- X is 20.5% for a 40k Power Regulator
- So the total mission reward would need to be more than 1M credits. Which brings us to:
Payouts for Foot Missions
Here is a table of the payouts I have seen per-mission type since Odyssey started (including non-foot missions for comparison). The mission count is how many I have done - where there are only a handful the data will be noisy. The names are from the journals - but mostly make sense.
| mission | min | max | range | average | mission count |
| Chain_HelpFinishTheOrder | 10,000 | 1,924,410 | 1,914,410 | 935,008 | 45 |
| Chain_PlanetaryIncursions | 165,955 | 1,694,408 | 1,528,453 | 882,418 | 10 |
| Chain_WrongTarget | 556,663 | 4,687,782 | 4,131,119 | 2,557,856 | 13 |
| Mission_Assassinate | 177,118 | 4,758,198 | 4,581,080 | 2,164,827 | 177 |
| Mission_Assassinate_Legal_Corporate | 22,560 | 4,560,119 | 4,537,559 | 1,390,690 | 140 |
| Mission_Collect | 81,278 | 23,814,714 | 23,733,436 | 1,633,586 | 162 |
| Mission_Collect_CivilLiberty | 85,589 | 2,817,558 | 2,731,969 | 505,744 | 22 |
| Mission_Collect_Industrial | 89,931 | 50,000,000 | 49,910,069 | 17,044,140 | 591 |
| Mission_Courier | 16,293 | 863,644 | 847,351 | 97,560 | 320 |
| Mission_Courier_CivilUnrest | 16,781 | 1,082,456 | 1,065,675 | 143,946 | 19 |
| Mission_Courier_Elections | 18,135 | 542,681 | 524,546 | 104,804 | 247 |
| Mission_Courier_Expansion | 18,005 | 170,820 | 152,815 | 108,648 | 50 |
| Mission_Courier_RankFed | 21,686 | 59,002 | 37,316 | 31,648 | 12 |
| Mission_Delivery | 25,659 | 10,788,843 | 10,763,184 | 2,030,185 | 163 |
| Mission_Delivery_Boom | 270,700 | 35,361,712 | 35,091,012 | 7,622,841 | 108 |
| Mission_Delivery_Democracy | 221,446 | 27,889,628 | 27,668,182 | 3,296,422 | 24 |
| MISSION_Disable | 812,243 | 1,934,451 | 1,122,208 | 1,404,534 | 27 |
| MISSION_DisableMegaship | 208,025 | 1,324,086 | 1,116,061 | 507,934 | 676 |
| Mission_DS_Collect | 52,986 | 378,058 | 325,072 | 244,356 | 312 |
| Mission_DS_PassengerBulk | 24,304 | 271,940 | 247,636 | 112,809 | 94 |
| Mission_Hack_BLOPS_Elections | 510,266 | 2,452,488 | 1,942,222 | 1,952,319 | 65 |
| Mission_Hack_CivilUnrest | 460,874 | 2,207,522 | 1,746,648 | 1,810,458 | 22 |
| Mission_Massacre | 23,142 | 41,309,916 | 41,286,774 | 4,624,186 | 32 |
| Mission_Massacre_Conflict_CivilWar | 2,042,404 | 35,862,996 | 33,820,592 | 14,076,790 | 22 |
| Mission_MassacreThargoid | 274,000 | 4,762,000 | 4,488,000 | 1,427,500 | 22 |
| Mission_Mining | 100,000 | 50,000,000 | 49,900,000 | 13,574,055 | 105 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Assassination_Hard_MB | 144,889 | 298,522 | 153,633 | 194,873 | 9 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Assassination_MB | 117,786 | 263,116 | 145,330 | 147,553 | 133 |
| Mission_OnFoot_AssassinationIllegal_Hard_MB | 192,077 | 425,359 | 233,282 | 283,932 | 24 |
| Mission_OnFoot_AssassinationIllegal_MB | 161,963 | 366,895 | 204,932 | 232,153 | 52 |
| Mission_OnFoot_AssassinationIllegal_NCD_MB | 228,101 | 508,760 | 280,659 | 351,432 | 17 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Collect_Contact_MB | 53,627 | 58,170 | 4,543 | 56,111 | 114 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Collect_MB | 53,605 | 58,159 | 4,554 | 55,873 | 574 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Defence_MacGuffin_MB_LiquidCanister | 826,798 | 2,837,968 | 2,011,170 | 1,339,577 | 10 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Delivery_Contact_MB | 70,781 | 77,086 | 6,305 | 74,059 | 86 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Hack_Download_MB | 135,899 | 305,159 | 169,260 | 210,683 | 25 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Hack_Download_Offline_MB | 279,838 | 306,883 | 27,045 | 294,460 | 33 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Hack_Upload_MB | 139,602 | 306,322 | 166,720 | 210,714 | 18 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Heist_Covert_MB | 211,432 | 466,669 | 255,237 | 302,353 | 28 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Heist_MB | 137,050 | 299,833 | 162,783 | 209,544 | 26 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Massacre_MB | 218,678 | 235,651 | 16,973 | 229,132 | 20 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Onslaught_Offline_MB | 171,803 | 390,508 | 218,705 | 246,515 | 324 |
| Mission_OnFoot_ProductionHeist_Covert_MB | 214,581 | 485,741 | 271,160 | 356,753 | 29 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Reboot_MB | 81,855 | 179,998 | 98,143 | 119,041 | 1632 |
| Mission_OnFoot_RebootRestore_MB | 121,160 | 214,503 | 93,343 | 158,881 | 1135 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Salvage_BS_MB | 82,662 | 178,063 | 95,401 | 102,804 | 23 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Salvage_MB | 82,559 | 179,452 | 96,893 | 121,307 | 38 |
| Mission_OnFoot_SalvageIllegal_MB | 111,495 | 247,282 | 135,787 | 166,540 | 15 |
| Mission_OnFoot_Smuggle_Contact_MB | 113,102 | 123,319 | 10,217 | 118,173 | 54 |
| Mission_PassengerBulk | 82,432 | 1,764,325 | 1,681,893 | 598,141 | 39 |
| Mission_PassengerVIP | 207,524 | 1,991,751 | 1,784,227 | 585,133 | 92 |
| Mission_Salvage | 19,131 | 2,416,565 | 2,397,434 | 1,075,641 | 86 |
| MISSION_Salvage_Expansion | 278,605 | 1,207,074 | 928,469 | 671,227 | 15 |
| MISSION_Salvage_Illegal | 111,202 | 1,782,163 | 1,670,961 | 810,957 | 136 |
| MISSION_Salvage_Refinery | 19,131 | 2,403,219 | 2,384,088 | 859,301 | 78 |
| MISSION_Scan | 80,723 | 3,529,032 | 3,448,309 | 2,140,450 | 238 |
| Mission_Sightseeing | 782,800 | 11,723,000 | 10,940,200 | 3,745,511 | 70 |
Odyssey missions have 'OnFoot' in their title, and if you look at the maximum payout you can see why you don't see lots of Power Regulators - the maximum payouts are a lot less than the 1M required to see that reward (only exception being the recently added 'Protect' missions). In general Odyssey missions don't have a great range in payouts (that is given in the 4th column) .
Ian did great work on Horizons missions (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/rev-enging-mission-boards.543467/) showing how they scale with mission LS / LY values etc, but the only variation I see for Odyssey is with Threat level (higher threat levels gives more payout). Looking at restoring power to the same base from 15Ly away makes no discernible difference to payout, and the same with a 10LS vs 1M LS supercruise. Sadly it's not possible to see if mission rank (harmless -> elite) pays a part as this is not visible in Odyssey.
I'm not sure if Foot missions should have a larger range, though it does seem like if they were allowed to go over 1M then it would allow for the occasional '5 Power Reg' mission to appear, which might be nice. That would require missions to have more variation in payout than they have at the moment.
(I get the feeling this is also why we don't see INF+++++ or REP+++++ rewards often - the mission payments just not being large enough to support them. This is a shame as the original end-game of Odyssey was stated as 'you can play the BGS' - which at the moment is mostly not true as you cannot get INF or REP results anywhere near as efficiently as on a ship[3]).
That's the end - knock it down
Notes:
[1] Needs more investigation as you can get 5 Power Regs from an NPC, but not from a regular mission, though this could be just that the NPCs offer more credits. Investigation of this is hampered by the current bug meaning NPC missions don't go in the logs.
[2] These are all the values I get for X - though as I said above, most are not perfect fits so I don't think I have it exactly correct:
| Material Value | Optimum Percentage of Reward |
| 5000 | 32.7% |
| 10000 | 26.5% |
| 15000 | 24.9% |
| 20000 | 23.5% |
| 40000 | 20.5% |
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