Pirate Missions

[ezra-r]

Hope these are not from a mod.

But in my last time playing I started seeing missions to kill civilians from the Sovereign Syndicate, they are usually lucrative, with a rep hit, but it's kind of nice like a way to help you do piracy

Odd thing is you stop getting offers of them from stations which deem you as enemy which is kind of puzzling.

Shouldn't you be able to get missions from an enemy faction from any station (in which supposedly they are infiltrated?)

To help it would also be nice if you get offers/missions from friendly station to temporatily hack enemyy station to let you dock or at least see missions to fix your rep or like the ones I mention.

[XenonSurf]

Yes I'm glad that these pirate missions exist, but my problem with them is: from the mission description you don't exactly know who you are working against and what the impact of reputation will be. So the only remedy is simply to Quicksave (better slot-save) before you start.
Also attacking a station or directly messing around a station is very tricky. I did never survive with my Skunk alone, and I did these missions only by reloading my save afterwards, again: rep trouble

In the end, I guess the big reward will not compensate for the abyssmal reputation loss and your work to get it right again at some point.
The exception is: you play as a pirate from the gamestart on. Then it's always worth ofc.

How much does your rep with SS changes? Does it really change?
And what I'm really curious to know: from where do you get special ships (small fighters) and the crew for your ships? On pirate stations? Other 'regular' hiring will be dismissed quickly for you as a pirate. AFAIK, only a mod will allow you to build a shipyard, this cannot be done in the regular Free Play, but I may be wrong here, I'm not a station expert.

XenonS

[Karmaticdamage]

Those missions are the easiest money in the game. 7mil to blow up civ transports. They show as neutral faction so the rep hit is tiny, you just leave sector and come back and all is well. Had 50mil in first 30 mins of a new game with a lucky string of them. This is a secret most people don't know about, they pass over those missions cause they think it will kill their rep. Ultimate immersion killer and get rich quick exploit.

[XenonSurf]

Maybe just after gamestart you won't lose so much rep, only little rep with the transport maybe but for sure: more rep with the nearest station. Also later in the game your 'booster' rep will cause the provisory rep time to be longer and longer...

So basically I don't know if it's worthwhile if you don't play as pirate from the start: In your example, late in the game you would get 7M to make a lot of missions to clean your rep later, not so good IMO. BUT: it depends which station you work against. In my case, with PMC = -29 it would not make any difference, and then yes: easy money

XenonS

[Karmaticdamage]

The civ transports are not apart of the station's faction that they are flying around, rep hit is minimal. What do you mean "booster rep"? Rep gained and lost is a fixed number on the various actions you can do in the game and that doesn't change regardless of how long you've been playing. Reputation has a hidden number score with each rank requiring you to obtain x amount of rep "points" to obtain. The actions you do in game each have their own fixed amount of rep points lost or obtained. One normal mission will give more rep points then how many you will lose doing a pirate mission as long as you don't kill the police.

[XenonSurf]

I will have to take a closer look at those pirate missions to see if they are that bad as for reputation.
I know from the XR code there's a variable time lenght for the duration of a given reputation, I don't know yet how it translates exactly. It's true that the points you get during your actions are fixed + a random factor that makes them vary slightly.

XenonS

[Karmaticdamage]

Pirate missions are the most broken, OP, exploitative way to make money in the game. The only reason this hasn't been nerfed is because no one talks about it or voices it to egosoft which leads me to believe that most people just don't know how OP it is or they don't want their exploit taken away.

[Santi]

Pirate missions are the most broken, OP, exploitative way to make money in the game. The only reason this hasn't been nerfed is because no one talks about it or voices it to egosoft which leads me to believe that most people just don't know how OP it is or they don't want their exploit taken away.

Seriously, making money in X Rebirth is not an issue, there are so many exploits it is silly trying to do a proper "from rag to riches" gameplay. Combat missions where stations do all the work, scrap metal, hacking ships for wares, salvaging wares after battles, boarding, crawling in vents, and the list goes on.

A game has to be hard to beat, silly hard to beat, otherwise it does not bring that competitive streak all gamers have that make people stick to a game and when they beat it, they set it as a standard of overcoming the odds and a measure of your skill.

[DiArmada]

A game has to be hard to beat, silly hard to beat, otherwise it does not bring that competitive streak all gamers have that make people stick to a game.

except that when the first sign of trouble arise a lot of people run to Youtube for play-throughs instead of finding solutions themselves.

[GCU Grey Area]

Seriously, making money in X Rebirth is not an issue, there are so many exploits it is silly trying to do a proper "from rag to riches" gameplay.

Why does that make it silly?

All exploits are entirely optional. You also don't need to craft scrap metal, do combat missions or boarding ops, steal stuff from stations, etc if you don't want to, particularly if that would ruin any feeling of accomplishment.

One of my most rewarding XR games was a pure trade/build game. ALL profits were from trade - i.e. no boarding ops, no combat missions, no quick & easy means of gaining cash at all other than through trade. That's not to say I didn't do any fighting, but it was only ever to protect my stuff.

Made me value every single ship I owned, forced me use M class freighters for my stations (because early on I couldn't afford better) & every time I raised sufficient cash to build another section to a station, or buy another Arawn for my defence fleet, it felt immensely rewarding.

[Santi]

@DiArmada

Yes but that is really optional and outside of the game, something easier to make a choice than when it is in game.

@GCU Grey Area

I did a pure trader in Rebirth too, and it was a very very good experience, but then there are so many exploits that you cannot deviate one inch, the list of things you cannot do is huge compared to the ones you can, becoming a bit silly in my opinion, one tiny boarding and bam! 15 million profit and the whole balance broken.

I expect to do a pure trader/fight/mining gameplay later on for added difficulty, not at the start to add some kind of challenge to make money. It is an issue as well because you find yourself really quickly with multiple fleets and nothing to do, for those playing empire gameplay.

[Nanook]

...
All exploits are entirely optional. You also don't need to craft scrap metal, do combat missions or boarding ops, steal stuff from stations, etc if you don't want to, particularly if that would ruin any feeling of accomplishment....

The problem with this attitude is that it limits the gameplay for those who don't want exploits, but still like to do those sorts of things. Making it too easy can spoil the fun for a lot of players, but telling them not to do it because it's too easy is even worse, it seriously limits their options. Such exploits shouldn't be completely removed, but they should be made appropriately difficult to accomplish, and thus the 'exploit' part removed.

[GCU Grey Area]

...
All exploits are entirely optional. You also don't need to craft scrap metal, do combat missions or boarding ops, steal stuff from stations, etc if you don't want to, particularly if that would ruin any feeling of accomplishment....

The problem with this attitude is that it limits the gameplay for those who don't want exploits, but still like to do those sorts of things. Making it too easy can spoil the fun for a lot of players, but telling them not to do it because it's too easy is even worse, it seriously limits their options. Such exploits shouldn't be completely removed, but they should be made appropriately difficult to accomplish, and thus the 'exploit' part removed.

I also enjoy those sort of things every now & then. If I want to play the game that way that's precisely what I do. I certainly don't feel my options are limited by the choices I make in each game. Indeed currently playing a rather combat heavy game using the CWIR mod (which I highly recommend by the way) which is entirely unlike that trader/builder game I mentioned earlier.

Doing quite a lot of boarding in this game, collecting a lot of salvage, even crafting metal alloys whenever I have enough scrap metal (though every piece of scrap must be salvaged from the battlefield, none is bought).

However I place other limitations on such a game, e.g. all ships MUST be obtained by boarding, all station building materials must be acquired the same way, or by outright theft from the stations which make them, and so on.

[Slashman]

The problem with this attitude is that it limits the gameplay for those who don't want exploits, but still like to do those sorts of things. Making it too easy can spoil the fun for a lot of players, but telling them not to do it because it's too easy is even worse, it seriously limits their options. Such exploits shouldn't be completely removed, but they should be made appropriately difficult to accomplish, and thus the 'exploit' part removed.

I agree. Bad balance is bad balance. It's not 'differing playstyles'. It's making one playstyle ridiculously easy compared to the others so that doing the others has no meaning past role-play. And even then, why would you role-play someone who likes to take the least efficient route?

A high-reward activity needs to be balanced out with appropriate difficulty.

Likewise a safer activity needs to have its rewards kept at a level that actually encourages a player to make a meaningful choice between the two.

[GCU Grey Area]

And even then, why would you role-play someone who likes to take the least efficient route?

Because sometimes the less efficient route is more fun.

I have just spent the last several hours attempting to steal a PMC patrol group. 1 Taranis + 3 assorted Suls guarded by several dozen fighters & more drones than was easy to count. Couldn't take them on in a straight fight, I was considerably out-gunned, so it's been innumerable hit & run attacks, first to draw out the fighters & drones a few at a time, then go after the engines on each of the capitals in turn to separate them, then destroy weapons & shields, then finally board each one.

It's taken all evening & I'm still not quite done. Was there a more efficient method of getting hold of 4 capitals? Probably - could have got a shipyard to build them for me in a matter of minutes & those would have been pristine, not a bunch of mangled burning wrecks that'll take a while to fix up.

Guarantee you though, that wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun.

[Nanook]

...
It's taken all evening & I'm still not quite done. Was there a more efficient method of getting hold of 4 capitals? Probably - could have got a shipyard to build them for me in a matter of minutes & those would have been pristine, not a bunch of mangled burning wrecks that'll take a while to fix up.....

I think you're missing the point, and inadvertently agreeing with us. Those are two different game mechanics - buying vs stealing. What we're saying is the difficulty for each should be roughly equivalent so that you feel satisfied with the game doing it either way. Buying isn't necessarily easier, just different, since you'd have to go to all the trouble of getting the funds to buy them.

By the same token, stealing ships shouldn't be so easy as to discourage players from going the buying route. The amount of effort should be similar, so that no matter a player's style, everyone enjoys the process. Making stealing/boarding ships too easy would probably spoil the whole process for you. And making getting money too easy and being able to buy those ships with little effort is just as bad.

After all, there is a difficulty setting for those who want it easy overall. No need to make one mechanic significantly easier or harder, is there?

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

All mission rewards should be calculated using a difficulty multiplier.

This would be a fractional value that decreases with lthe evel of difficulty chosen by the player.

This couled be a slidiing scale the player could set independent of the overall dificulty level.

"Game Balance" is highly subjective what is easy for some is diffcult for others.

Lets the player decide.

[GCU Grey Area]

I think you're missing the point, and inadvertently agreeing with us. Those are two different game mechanics - buying vs stealing. What we're saying is the difficulty for each should be roughly equivalent so that you feel satisfied with the game doing it either way. Buying isn't necessarily easier, just different, since you'd have to go to all the trouble of getting the funds to buy them.

Not sure we're agreeing exactly - personally think the balance between buying & stealing ships is reasonably good. Wasn't always that way. In early versions boarding was indeed far too easy & there were some complaints about it (including from me - loved the basic mechanics, but it was so trivially easy I didn't find it much fun). Since then (patch 3.0?) boarding was made harder & IMO there is now much better balance between the 2 primary methods of obtaining ships.

[XenonSurf]

Ok, I now have done some of these missions. You work for the Sovreign Syndicate but apparently if you succeed you WON'T improve your rep with them, mine is blocked at -26.

Also you don't lose any reputation for the station (or faction) where you mess around as long as you don't kill police ships that will start to chase you once you kill these 'Civilian' ships. These are the little ships that don't appear on your radar and you have a hard time to spot. Just locate their travel line comming from a highway. I think you need to kill 6-8 of them to get a 'Mission success'. Surely not a big deal, just some target practise...

A clear Money Dyson Sucking Machine

XenonS