Explorer Rank - Does "Sight Seeing" reward less than "Cartography".

[Bru Warden]

I hear that to get to Elite Explorer Rank you need to earn ~$350M in exploration credits.

I am at a Rank of Ranger at 1% and did a Sight Seeing run that made me $27M (No cartography), and my Ranger Rank increased to 4% (3% increase). The math basically says I need to make ~$850M to go from Ranger to Pioneer; whereas the fan base estimates it would be $81M.

Does Cartography get full points towards earning the Explorer title, and Sight Seeing gets reduced (I.E. 1/10th credit value earned goes to Exploration)?

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[EDIT] Based on below - Sightseeing has a 1/10 credit penalty towards Exploration rank, while Cartography is a 1:1 credit ratio - This is based on $350M credits required to gain Elite from nothing.
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[ReeNoiP]

Things don't always update straight away, but my experience have been the same as yours. There seems to be a "penalty" on sight seeing missions compared to scan data.

[Bru Warden]

It was updated and current in this case. I think the penalty is reasonable for sightseeing, otherwise I would have Elite in Exploration with less than 20 runs (~6 Hrs play).

[Bru Warden]

I did ~$8M cartography run and gained 11% Ranger rank in Exploration; this lines up with ~$350M credits required to get to Elite from nothing.

Conclusion: Sightseeing has a 1/10 credit penalty towards Exploration rank, while Cartography is a 1:1 credit ratio - This is based on $350M credits required to gain Elite from nothing.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Bru Warden:

Conclusion: Sightseeing has a 1/10 credit penalty towards Exploration rank,

It's probably back from the times, when sighting missions were giving you 50-100Mil Cr for an hour or so of flying. And reaching the Elite rank in just several hours doesn't go well with the whole ranking idea of this game.

[Bru Warden]

Originally posted by Dolphin Bottlenose:

Originally posted by Bru Warden:

Conclusion: Sightseeing has a 1/10 credit penalty towards Exploration rank,

It's probably back from the times, when sighting missions were giving you 50-100Mil Cr for an hour or so of flying. And reaching the Elite rank in just several hours doesn't go well with the whole ranking idea of this game.

From what I've been doing, you can still do that. The $27M run only took 15 minutes, so that averages $108M an hour, although I think $20M per run ($80M per hour) would be closer to reality for rerunning the same missions.

[Uriel]

I fail to see how "sight seeing" could even be considered exploring :P

Basically, from what I gathered here and there, plus my own experience :

- Honking in a system will get you some credits, all the time.
- Using the FSS scanner will reward you some more credits for each scanned world (and asteroid belt ?)
- Actually going to a world and having your auto-scan scan it also gives a bonus, but I think it overlaps with FSS. Not sure about that one.
- Mapping a planet will give you even more bonus.
- Being forst to map / discover something adds more bonus
- Efficency bonus for using less than the target number of probes
- Some worlds are way more valuable than others ; don't waste your time with icy bodies.

So, sight seing will provide less cash than actual mapping, which in turn should obviously provide less advancement, all possible penalties being ignored here. So even if sight seing had no penalty, it would still be less profitable in terms of advancement.

TLDR : if you wanna rank up explorer, you're better of exploring.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Bru Warden:

From what I've been doing, you can still do that. The $27M run only took 15 minutes, so that averages $108M an hour, although I think $20M per run ($80M per hour) would be closer to reality for rerunning the same missions.

That's why the reduced rank progression. The missions payout is too high, to account it all for the rank progression.

Originally posted by Uriel:

I fail to see how "sight seeing" could even be considered exploring :P

You are traveling to places, scan tourist beacons, learn new things about those places... It's pretty much says "exploration" to me.

Have you ever actually read what the tourist beacon scan returns? That's some very interesting info.

So, sight seing will provide less cash than actual mapping, which in turn should obviously provide less advancement, all possible penalties being ignored here. So even if sight seing had no penalty, it would still be less profitable in terms of advancement.

Not really. We are talking about the mission payouts going toward the rank advancement. And those payouts are usually much higher than what you will get the same time with just mapping. And they are being added on top of what you will map during your sighting mission.

[Uriel]

Well, f*** me sideways and call me Nancy... It took your post to realise "sightseeing" was actually a mission type, and not just an euhemism for "I'm going to a system and casually travelling around, why doesn't that pay as much as thourough exploration and scans ?".

Guess I still have much to learn. Thanks for the lesson :)