-->Grind Does Not Equal Interesting Game Play...

[Matthew94]

Strange as it might seem... I have never gone crystal hunting... my initial money comes from Data Vaults, Nividium mining and small building missions, the L Miners from War missions...
That said, I understand and respect people being frustrated at the significant crystal nerf as all play styles should be accommodated (at least to an extend). This is what "sandbox" stands for...

You can also hang around Xenon gates and sell the SETA components as they go for around 100k each or just bee-line to the abandoned Odysseus and sell it for 9 million and buy some miners.

[dtpsprt]

You can also hang around Xenon gates and sell the SETA components as they go for around 100k each or just bee-line to the abandoned Odysseus and sell it for 9 million and buy some miners.

Yep!!! Many ways to skin a cat (as the saying goes). FYI all crystals except Bandanite have been removed from the game....

[GCU Grey Area]

FYI all crystals except Bandanite have been removed from the game....

No, they haven't been removed:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p3qcjackudk8n ... 1.jpg?dl=0
All collected in my current 4.0 Terran game. I don't do much crystal mining - I don't have enough patience for quite that much mind-numbing tedium. I do however grab them if I spot some while doing other stuff (got quite a few while doing those mining instructor missions). Then I stash them at my HQ, just in case I ever need some crystals for a plot.

[spankahontis]

Strange as it might seem... I have never gone crystal hunting... my initial money comes from Data Vaults, Nividium mining and small building missions, the L Miners from War missions...
That said, I understand and respect people being frustrated at the significant crystal nerf as all play styles should be accommodated (at least to an extend). This is what "sandbox" stands for...

It WAS very profitable, best place I found was Argon Prime, it could bag me millions of credits in Crystals every half hour which was the first step I generally took to building my empire, hacking stations (if I had the decryption modules) followed by guild Missions for Antigone and the Teladi and then moving onto things like boarding ships or building stations for factions.

[XGamer]

Never really bothered with crystals, as finding them was way too obnoxious and grindy from the get go in my experience. Sure if you stumbled across some by accident take the money, other than that so there's better ways of making initial money, that is less grindy and annoying.

However I do generally agree that grind is not what this game needs, it did fine without it. However at some point during 4.0 development someone must have lost their mind, went crazy and decided that we must have grind and tons of it apparently.
As a result you now need 10+ times the amount of ships on your stations, building a wharf or ship yard is entirely pointless as it will simply never reach its ROI anymore in a single persons lifetime. On top of that you have to deal with manually finding and killing Khaak installations every couple days and are more busy with baby sitting your employees and replacing lost ships than anything else.

[GCU Grey Area]

As a result you now need 10+ times the amount of ships on your stations, building a wharf or ship yard is entirely pointless as it will simply never reach its ROI anymore in a single persons lifetime. On top of that you have to deal with manually finding and killing Khaak installations every couple days and are more busy with baby sitting your employees and replacing lost ships than anything else.

10x as many is a wild exaggeration. Was playing the beta while the mining changes were taking place. Added a few extra miners to each station but nowhere near as many as you claim. As for Khaak installations, I use L miners & simply ignore them. No need to hunt the installations if the ships they make are utterly irrelevant to your miners (Khaak don't have a weapon powerful enough to overcome the regen rate of even a single L class shield).

[XGamer]

As a result you now need 10+ times the amount of ships on your stations, building a wharf or ship yard is entirely pointless as it will simply never reach its ROI anymore in a single persons lifetime. On top of that you have to deal with manually finding and killing Khaak installations every couple days and are more busy with baby sitting your employees and replacing lost ships than anything else.

10x as many is a wild exaggeration. Was playing the beta while the mining changes were taking place. Added a few extra miners to each station but nowhere near as many as you claim. As for Khaak installations, I use L miners & simply ignore them. No need to hunt the installations if the ships they make are utterly irrelevant to your miners (Khaak don't have a weapon powerful enough to overcome the regen rate of even a single L class shield).

Off topic here. But nope, you can keep claiming that doesn't make it true. From maybe 14 ships -> 180 ships, single station. Of course it depends on the area and station, but it's ridiculous regardless. Same with shipyards, they never make their ROI in your lifetime with 4.0. Anyway I'm done with this hot garbage patch....

[Slashman]

As a result you now need 10+ times the amount of ships on your stations, building a wharf or ship yard is entirely pointless as it will simply never reach its ROI anymore in a single persons lifetime. On top of that you have to deal with manually finding and killing Khaak installations every couple days and are more busy with baby sitting your employees and replacing lost ships than anything else.

10x as many is a wild exaggeration. Was playing the beta while the mining changes were taking place. Added a few extra miners to each station but nowhere near as many as you claim. As for Khaak installations, I use L miners & simply ignore them. No need to hunt the installations if the ships they make are utterly irrelevant to your miners (Khaak don't have a weapon powerful enough to overcome the regen rate of even a single L class shield).

Shhhh!!! Your logic and common sense will break some folks' reality. Don't be the bringer of doom...

[grapedog]

However I do generally agree that grind is not what this game needs, it did fine without it. However at some point during 4.0 development someone must have lost their mind, went crazy and decided that we must have grind and tons of it apparently.
As a result you now need 10+ times the amount of ships on your stations, building a wharf or ship yard is entirely pointless as it will simply never reach its ROI anymore in a single persons lifetime. On top of that you have to deal with manually finding and killing Khaak installations every couple days and are more busy with baby sitting your employees and replacing lost ships than anything else.

Shipyards are still stupid profitable, even shipyards that have to buy every single item they need to produce a ship. My two shipyards in my current save, that buy everything they need from the map, average between them about 750 million EACH every game day. And that is with a unified paranid, and no xenon anywhere except Litany of Fury. If I decide to have the paranid go to war with everyone, I imagine my profits will shoot through the roof...

This was my first save, so I didn't know better. But now I do, and I limit myself to only one shipyard per game in my other saves, in order to keep the money machine somewhat in check.

If you're don't have a highly profitable shipyard/wharf, you're doing something drastically wrong.

[XGamer]

Shipyards are still stupid profitable, even shipyards that have to buy every single item they need to produce a ship. My two shipyards in my current save, that buy everything they need from the map, average between them about 750 million EACH every game day. And that is with a unified paranid, and no xenon anywhere except Litany of Fury. If I decide to have the paranid go to war with everyone, I imagine my profits will shoot through the roof...

This was my first save, so I didn't know better. But now I do, and I limit myself to only one shipyard per game in my other saves, in order to keep the money machine somewhat in check.

If you're don't have a highly profitable shipyard/wharf, you're doing something drastically wrong.

Why would anyone sell a complete (!) ship with weapons, shields, equipment 3 Sats, 1 Adv Sat complete together for LESS THAN what one would have to pay for a single Adv Sat? Or sell an entire ship including equipment, weapons, etc. for less than what the bare hull is worth? That's a stupid business decision and does not make any sense whatsoever.
It's neither logical, nor explicable.

[grapedog]

Shipyards are still stupid profitable, even shipyards that have to buy every single item they need to produce a ship. My two shipyards in my current save, that buy everything they need from the map, average between them about 750 million EACH every game day. And that is with a unified paranid, and no xenon anywhere except Litany of Fury. If I decide to have the paranid go to war with everyone, I imagine my profits will shoot through the roof...

This was my first save, so I didn't know better. But now I do, and I limit myself to only one shipyard per game in my other saves, in order to keep the money machine somewhat in check.

If you're don't have a highly profitable shipyard/wharf, you're doing something drastically wrong.

Why would anyone sell a complete (!) ship with weapons, shields, equipment 3 Sats, 1 Adv Sat complete together for LESS THAN what one would have to pay for a single Adv Sat? Or sell an entire ship including equipment, weapons, etc. for less than what the bare hull is worth? That's a stupid business decision and does not make any sense whatsoever.
It's neither logical, nor explicable.

I'm sorry that you're doing something drastically wrong... perhaps post a save and we can take a look at it and fix your shipyard so it will make money.

[SunGod1]

To be fair it is a single player game so you could MOD to avoid some grind.

[XGamer]

Why would anyone sell a complete (!) ship with weapons, shields, equipment 3 Sats, 1 Adv Sat complete together for LESS THAN what one would have to pay for a single Adv Sat? Or sell an entire ship including equipment, weapons, etc. for less than what the bare hull is worth? That's a stupid business decision and does not make any sense whatsoever.
It's neither logical, nor explicable.

I'm sorry that you're doing something drastically wrong... perhaps post a save and we can take a look at it and fix your shipyard so it will make money.

It's not that it isn't making _any_ money. It's the fact that it isn't making what it ought to make, by simple business logic.
You just don't sell a package of stuff for considerably less than what a single component going into it costs, at least not long term if you want to survive.

I actually ran a test and it turns out that on SETA it makes ~72 mill in 3 hours of game time. Which translates to a mere ~575 million / day. In addition in between it was more like 450 million a day after approximately 2 hours. So there is obviously quite a bit of variation going on.
In the event that orders are consistent 24/7 and taking the 3 hour average it's ~24m / hour, which isn't even a Rattlesnake an hour in terms of payout.
That shipyard costs about 600 million and takes several days to construct, which does not include the ships required to keep it afloat, nor any money spent on blueprints for the modules or the ships/equipment.

Regardless of how much a shipyard does or doesn't make, it is highly stupid to be selling entire ships for less than what even a single component on said ship costs, let alone for less than half of the base hull without anything. It's illogical and stupid. Nobody would do it.

[XGamer]

To be fair it is a single player game so you could MOD to avoid some grind.

It's a single player game, so no need to nerf the game to death and force everyone the grind that very few people asked for (if any) or enjoy.
If you want more grind, you can always mod the game to add more too...
Similarly if you thought earning money after having invested days upon days building a wharf, was somehow undeserved, you could've modded the game to reduce the income.

There is something to be said for wanting to play a vanilla game.

[Slashman]

To be fair it is a single player game so you could MOD to avoid some grind.

It's a single player game, so no need to nerf the game to death and force everyone the grind that very few people asked for (if any) or enjoy.
If you want more grind, you can always mod the game to add more too...
Similarly if you thought earning money after having invested days upon days building a wharf, was somehow undeserved, you could've modded the game to reduce the income.

There is something to be said for wanting to play a vanilla game.

Yes but then you accept what the vanilla game gives you to work with or you mod it. That works both ways for the people who want it easier and the people who wanted it to be less of money printing venture. Who is right? No one can say.

However I think it is more desirable to have it be harder to make money from a shipyard than not with so many additional ways to generate cash in the game. I mean you could argue that shipyards were not as well thought out as they could have been when introduced...but steps have been taken to correct that. Either live with it or mod it...its your choice.

[XGamer]

However I think it is more desirable to have it be harder to make money from a shipyard than not with so many additional ways to generate cash in the game. I mean you could argue that shipyards were not as well thought out as they could have been when introduced...but steps have been taken to correct that. Either live with it or mod it...its your choice.

Well I'd argue it was fine the way it was, certainly more logical than right now.

Which way you choose to make your money should be up to the individual player though.
Some people might make billions grinding through stealing ships and selling them repeatedly.
Others might not like to do any of that, and spent time grinding repetitive missions for some change.
Others build an empire and grind their way to a shipyard, spending hours putting it together, literally billions upon billions to buy blueprints and wait days for it to eventually be finished to make their money back.

Whichever way you choose to make your money, they should all be viable options and people should be able to enjoy to play the game in their way. Yet they nerfed a single one of the aforementioned options heavily, namely the third one. All the nerfs they did in 4.0 affect the third way to make money, but not in the slightest any of the other ways.
I'd also argue that if you go through the effort of doing the empire way, it is not unreasonable for that to eventually make more money an hour too, seeing how it takes a crapton of money and time to get there in the first place.

[GCU Grey Area]

Off topic here. But nope, you can keep claiming that doesn't make it true. From maybe 14 ships -> 180 ships, single station. Of course it depends on the area and station, but it's ridiculous regardless. Same with shipyards, they never make their ROI in your lifetime with 4.0. Anyway I'm done with this hot garbage patch....

Wow, 14->180? Really? What on earth were you doing? If I had to guess huge mega-complex supplied entirely by a single low-yield core sector, totally reliant on the bug which meant that miners would continue to gather resources even in sectors which were utterly depleted?

If so, very different situation here. My setup during my 4.0 beta game was a distributed network of smaller stations supplying my HQ (which nevertheless did end up getting quite big: https://www.dropbox.com/s/it2je17hd3x05 ... 1.jpg?dl=0). However all of those supply stations had their own blacklisted areas of the map (so they wouldn't be competing with each other for resources) & as a whole they were gathering resources from I'd estimate at least 1/3 of the map. Didn't have to make nearly so drastic a change to keep my setup running adequately throughout the 4.0 beta mining changes - just needed to add a few more sectors to each station's travel blacklist & a few more miners to compensate for the longer journey times to get to those new sectors.

[Slashman]

Which way you choose to make your money should be up to the individual player though.
Some people might make billions grinding through stealing ships and selling them repeatedly.
Others might not like to do any of that, and spent time grinding repetitive missions for some change.
Others build an empire and grind their way to a shipyard, spending hours putting it together, literally billions upon billions to buy blueprints and wait days for it to eventually be finished to make their money back.

If you've spent billions on top of billions then you were already rich and therefore not making money at an accelerated pace really doesn't put you out does it? I mean you already spent billions to put up the shipyard...those billions could have been spent on fleets or other stations so I'm failing to see what the issue is here. The shipyards are not unprofitable...they are simply not as profitable as you want/believe they should be...two very different things

Whichever way you choose to make your money, they should all be viable options and people should be able to enjoy to play the game in their way. Yet they nerfed a single one of the aforementioned options heavily, namely the third one. All the nerfs they did in 4.0 affect the third way to make money, but not in the slightest any of the other ways.
I'd also argue that if you go through the effort of doing the empire way, it is not unreasonable for that to eventually make more money an hour too, seeing how it takes a crapton of money and time to get there in the first place.

They nerfed an option that was too good to something on the level of the other options. And you can absolutely enjoy the game in your own way...it is simply not sanctioned officially by Egosoft.

[grapedog]

Off topic here. But nope, you can keep claiming that doesn't make it true. From maybe 14 ships -> 180 ships, single station. Of course it depends on the area and station, but it's ridiculous regardless. Same with shipyards, they never make their ROI in your lifetime with 4.0. Anyway I'm done with this hot garbage patch....

Wow, 14->180? Really? What on earth were you doing? If I had to guess huge mega-complex supplied entirely by a single low-yield core sector, totally reliant on the bug which meant that miners would continue to gather resources even in sectors which were utterly depleted?

If so, very different situation here. My setup during my 4.0 beta game was a distributed network of smaller stations supplying my HQ (which nevertheless did end up getting quite big: https://www.dropbox.com/s/it2je17hd3x05 ... 1.jpg?dl=0). However all of those supply stations had their own blacklisted areas of the map (so they wouldn't be competing with each other for resources) & as a whole they were gathering resources from I'd estimate at least 1/3 of the map. Didn't have to make nearly so drastic a change to keep my setup running adequately throughout the 4.0 beta mining changes - just needed to add a few more sectors to each station's travel blacklist & a few more miners to compensate for the longer journey times to get to those new sectors.

crystal mining, shipyards, 3 star pilots, autotraders, mining.... some people cannot adapt, cannot figure out new ways to do things...

[dtpsprt]

Yes but then you accept what the vanilla game gives you to work with or you mod it. That works both ways for the people who want it easier and the people who wanted it to be less of money printing venture. Who is right? No one can say.

However I think it is more desirable to have it be harder to make money from a shipyard than not with so many additional ways to generate cash in the game. I mean you could argue that shipyards were not as well thought out as they could have been when introduced...but steps have been taken to correct that. Either live with it or mod it...its your choice.

Indeed you are right... but I have to say that some nerfs are really preposterous:
The nerf to 1/10 to shipyard profits, the "final" nerfing on crystals (made me think that all other crystals except Bandanite were removed, one Steam validation proved me wrong), the nerfing down to 5% of original values on the resources around the "ring" (and even those are already "in use" by NPC's).
It shows some "lack of thought" for all kinds of players who use the game, vanilla should not be "accommodating" to only one (maybe two) types of players or the "sandbox" should be taken out of the description.