Eggsploiter exposedI just paid 1.2 billion credits to fill my carrier with tritium.If that sounds like a lot then fleet carriers aren't for you. I'm surprised all the aspects of fleet carriers have been made as cheap as they are considering how easy it is to make money in this game currently.
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No seriously, finding low priced tritium was a fun little part of bulk trading,
and FD killing it off is sad.
Doesn't that mean that the fuel is cheap, though, if it's cheaper to earn the money by other routes then buy the fuel. The cheaper they make Tritium, the worse the "mine something else and buy tritium" vs "mine Tritium" ratio gets. If Tritium cost 4k/tonne to buy, then you'd spend ten minutes money ore mining, or 8-10 hours mining the Tritium. Isn't what this is suggesting is that Tritium should be about 10x more expensive, so that "mine it or buy it" is more of a cost-benefit decision?
Also, it's really not expensive when you consider what it can do. Jumping a carrier Sol->Colonia will cost ~5000t of Tritium and 4.5 million in wear-and-tear, for a total cost of around 275 million, give or take, if the Tritium is bought at average prices. If you were transferring ships from Sol to Colonia with the standard NPC ship transfer, 275 million would let you transfer roughly 200 million worth of ships (one high-end Python, or an E-rated Cutter, or something like that) ... the Fleet Carrier of course lets you move your entire fleet for the same flat fee. That's incredibly cheap and the Fleet Carrier is about four times as fast as ship transfer over most distances.
Though of course more expensive tritium means "deep space Tritium mining" is more viable as a way to make money. Still probably needs to be a little bit more expensive for that, though.
Meanwhile you can trade certain other commodities for a similar bulk trade margin to the old Tritium one ... currently seeing at least a 62k price spread on Gold, for instance.
Yep, but part of the fun was using most of the tritium to fuel your carrier, and for a player based economy.
Selling real, useful tritium to carrier owners was much better then buying unobtanium at alpha caeli and sell it at beta caeli.
Your 1.2 bil today means 2000 pirates kills or so.
In mining terms that will be at least 1500t most expensive mined & sold.
With 4000 prices that could be 100t mine or 150 pirates kill.
Sorry but its kind of dumb pay or mine tritium by yourself IN MY OPINION...Look..U have a Carrier, u can carry large ships, medium ships, small ships, jump using a wormhole...U have the technology to do all of this..BUT theres no automatic drones to mine tritium for u ?
Make a module for carriers and the tritium will be refill by 50tons per hour or something like that.
Make a module for carriers and the tritium will be refill by 50tons per hour or something like that.
No you literally have it backwards, because of the low availability of Trit, even in hot spots, if you try to mine it, it's 8-10 hours of work to fill 1000 T vs the proportionate cost of going to mine a money ore for an hour and use those funds to purchase the same 1000t of fuel.
However, to use the Money Ore method requires you be near a station to buy it, and subsequently near a station that also sells Tritium, which means it directs you to cluster in the bubble. And the reason Fdev has "balanced" trit's distribution the way it has is because of it's expense. If they were to make it more plentiful without subsequently dropping it's price, it would just become another Gold Rush object, and we don't need that.
It is because of it's price and limited availability is why carriers are clustered in the bubble, which is causing all sorts of game issues, Orange Sidewinders, Scarlett Kraits and other error messages I've never seen before carriers were introduced.
If Fdev wants players to spread out without disrupting the trade markets, they need to A) drop the price to the point of it just not being profitable to use as a trade good. B) Make trit hotspots rarer but lush with trit in distribution. (Perhaps restrict trit hotspots to specific system types. And distribute them in more pathway like manners then regular hotspots.) That way you still have to hunt for them, but when you DO find them, you can fill up your carrier in a much more reasonable time and move on.
Players should be encouraged to spread out, NOT cluster the way they have with carriers and honestly Trit's price is really one part of an even LARGER issue at play here.
It's not an exploit, but it is bad game design though.
That is completely a matter of opinion. Give me a grindy sandbox over a force fed questline/story any day. Also, the fact that this game has virtually no pay-to-win makes the grind so much sweeter. The grind filters out the weak.
Yeah, if the game play is fun, I can get your point. The key then is balancing grind to pay off just before even the most enjoyable game play starts to become annoying. To give the hit of accomplishment at regular intervals to relieve the grind pressure.
This is why I keep using the "Oasis in the Desert" design to how Trit mining should work, moving the grind pressure to another activity that is ore enjoyable and has chances of incidental side routes and events to pop up.
Re-fueling the FC is now in such a sorry state that if I hadn't filled it when I first bought it, I probably wouldn't get one now.
Mining - great if that's what you like, but I don't enjoy mining and I'm not spending all my game play mining just to re-fuel my FC. I want to use it to move my fleet, not as a mining platform.
Tritium - cost and available inventories are absolutely dismal. There's currently only one station on the board with decent supply and it's a medium pad outpost so loading time is tripled.
It's not just the cost, the time, or the availability - IT"S ALL 3 COMBINED that turn the FC into little more than an FC re-fueling game that takes more time than it should if you actually bought an FC to actually play ED.
Exploration
Combat
Trading
are also a big part of ED
Historically re-fueling has not been MAJOR game play.
I have about 13k on board after an Exploration trip, and if things stay as they are, that will be my last exploration move with my FC.
Tedious, time consuming, expensive re-fueling adds nothing to ED but non-sense.
Tritium should be plentiful if you mine it, on the order of 1000T/hr
It should be affordable if you buy it - They should just move the decimal point so that buy/sell #s are 10% of what the are currently.
And there should be sufficient supplies so that you don't have to wait for a parking spot in a system to buy Tritium.
FD pulls this all the time - "Here's something we think you might like, but we're going to make it so irritating you'll wish we hadn't bothered, hahahahaha."
Dumb and dumber
Mining - great if that's what you like, but I don't enjoy mining and I'm not spending all my game play mining just to re-fuel my FC. I want to use it to move my fleet, not as a mining platform.
Tritium - cost and available inventories are absolutely dismal. There's currently only one station on the board with decent supply and it's a medium pad outpost so loading time is tripled.
It's not just the cost, the time, or the availability - IT"S ALL 3 COMBINED that turn the FC into little more than an FC re-fueling game that takes more time than it should if you actually bought an FC to actually play ED.
Exploration
Combat
Trading
are also a big part of ED
Historically re-fueling has not been MAJOR game play.
I have about 13k on board after an Exploration trip, and if things stay as they are, that will be my last exploration move with my FC.
Tedious, time consuming, expensive re-fueling adds nothing to ED but non-sense.
Tritium should be plentiful if you mine it, on the order of 1000T/hr
It should be affordable if you buy it - They should just move the decimal point so that buy/sell #s are 10% of what the are currently.
And there should be sufficient supplies so that you don't have to wait for a parking spot in a system to buy Tritium.
FD pulls this all the time - "Here's something we think you might like, but we're going to make it so irritating you'll wish we hadn't bothered, hahahahaha."
Dumb and dumber
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Right, I get what you mean now.
Unfortunately I think this is basically because laser mining is a terrible way to obtain bulk cargo - it can't reasonably be that much faster, and certainly not ten times faster, because the limpets won't physically cycle through the cargo hatch that fast. For the sake of mining in general - including of things like Lepidolite, Liquid Oxygen, etc. - there needs to be a way to mine this stuff that's much faster than laser mining but only works on low-value commodities.
(Frontier's current solution of making even the basic minable commodities cost 5-figure sums is definitely wrong long-term, though I can see why they did it as a stopgap measure now)
I don't think that's true.
I think carriers are clustered around the bubble because ... that's where most of the things you can do with a carrier are, the vast majority of commanders aren't into long-haul exploration at all, and bringing your own carrier on an exploration trip has marginal extra utility over packing a full set of exploration gear into a conventional ship and stopping off at a DSSA or other public carrier if you need repairs / want to cash in some data.
The bubble systems which have enough carriers to go Orange Sidewinder ... are generally the especially interesting ones - CGs, engineers, other hotspots - which would still be full of carriers even if half the current carrier population did suddenly head off into deep space.
(Making fuel a complete non-issue for carriers might well encourage some people to buy a new one and take it exploring, so sure, why not ... but I don't think that would change where most of the existing bubble ones are at all)
Question. How did you FC owners who complain about the cost of Tritium get so rich in the first place? I've been playing 5 years and am double Elite and I don't have FC money. Seems to me if you have earned that kind of cash, you should easily be able to make enough to buy fuel.
Earn money is easy. Problem is to keep that level for long and still play fun game. What I earned during the years I can waste on carrier in months.
If Inara is "the board" you're referring to... you won't find much if you use the "Best Exports" tab. It seems to be looking for prices which are a certain amount below average. I wasn't finding anything much in Large-pad stations.
But then I checked "Exports", which lists all sell prices in nearby stations. Sorting the results in price order, it turns out there's a lot of it at just over 50k/t in Large-pad stations in the middle of the Bubble. It was presumably hiding just above the "Best Exports" price threshold.
A non-issue... ???
Even using a Cutter at a starport takes quite a bit of time to fill a FC. It takes 27 @750T/trip to move 20,250T of Tritium to the FC.
If you can find enough to meet your needs...
And, fine - I don't mind spending the time to do 20+ round trips - but then add the cost and the fact that it's hard to find enough to fill the tank and things just become unreasonable.
I don't mind it taking some time and costing a bit - the question is, "what's reasonable?"
Wing assasination missions for me... coupled with pooling credits/selling ship & modules from 3 accounts into 1... Or, explicitly, not by mining!