Mining Sucks at X Series kind of levels...

[MAWotB]

I just dropped 5+ million credits into four heavily upgrades appollo's and a Pluto / Hercules Mining combo and can't believe I have to actively babysit this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing because of the encounter spawns and combat handling.

I have chosen the Appollo's specifically because of their 2.5k range advantage and 4.5k missile batteries over equal and lesser craft classes and yet with how the overworld view is designed, unlike the rest of the game I might add, the spawn of attacking hostiles if not caught immediately as the player, the time dilation doesnt automatically cancel like every other hostile encounter and as such allows a fleet to essentially merge with mine by the time i can press 'Enter'.

This means every time it happens one of my ships will inevitably spawn in the middle of their mass and get focused to death near instantly. I have already reproduced this twice. My ship choice specifically is meant to reflect my own current fighting style with the exact same ship setup, blow them up before they get into range. Between me and FOUR other Appollos, this shouldnt be an issue, even up to killjoys which make sense to me to risk losing a ship or more because of the damn rail gun.

I should not have to babysit a 5+ million dollar mining operation against a sub 2mill fleet in overworld. This to me is a huge oversight and reminds me of the x series bshittery with gunboats with full upgrades losing to standard 3 wing pirate raiders, obviously because of the dumbfire / dumbflight of larger ships. AI always sucks in these games as a player. I know that in previous content the dev recognised that there was / is an issue with this overworld view and combat. My suggestion is as simple for it currently is, force time dilation to drop as soon as hositles are detected, do the usual warning to the player, then use the forced situation of a 10k or higher mandatory spawn distance(dependant on ships highest weapon range).

So many other games force a minimum distance for combat encounters that are already hostile (story driven encounters where entities flip allegiance is entirely separate). This way ships with superior range get exactly that - SUPERIOR RANGE. The most prolific fleet is always that which has the greater armor, number, shields range and number of weapons. The sheer threat of approaching such a fleet is meant to be DEMONSTRABLE. Nothing short of a few dozens ships or a half dozen of superior class ships should be able to approach four appollo's on guard dooty. Even less with me present. Don't even try 'this game is meant to be harder' bs, whats the point of a strategic space sim if the strats are null and void to anything but the player. I hate dark souls logic in a strategy game. It doesn't work it is a contradiction.

I will always lean to homeworld style overviews for fleet combat because each ship performs according to its specific class and main weapon type, including flanking or broadside engagements. The same should be for higher range craft getting the early bird advantage of firing early and annihilating especially smaller craft with make up 5/6 of the worst attack fleet ive seen so far.

[MAWotB]

Both times ive lost a ~1m Appollo for a 400k mine run. Its absurd.

[MAWotB]

Also a concern, because ships will inevitably receive damage due to dumbfire / dumbflight, do I have to entrench a repair vessel to repair those ships or will they automatically repair for example on returning to a base? There is too little information and not enough clarity on 'safe' methods of automating passive income exactly like x series. This entirely reflects on code logic and not on simulation/situation logic. Why a 5 million mining operation is being assaulted instead of unprotected miners makes 0 sense. Also, combining a tactical overlay with player specific analytics merged with a time acceleration option is asking for f-ups. An entrenched stat tool should not be dominating a players view when time is accelerated and it doesnt automatically warn the player of ensuing combat is griefing - just straight up poor design. The only time these two go together is if the overworld combat is so perfectly balanced that the player can choose as an option to skip or ignore pending engagement warnings(which is thoroughly into RTS standards). which will be never as I have never seen a game successfully automate fleet style or any other style of engagements for accelerated viewing in RT.

[Draco]

Overworld combat is bad but it is bad in a really simple way, it only uses the base health and damage (before upgrades). so a single capital is going to be better than your apollos.

For shuttles give them some ablative fighters/gunships to take hits in the rare occasion that they get attacked. Put them on secondary burn

For miners you are probably going to want at least 2 frigates, I use 5.

Ships auto repair on dock, if you check the checkbox for that in the hangar screen in a base. Roaches etc keep ships that never return to a base alive.

You aren't the only one to notice that overworld combat can be counterintuitive. Imagine my shock when I found out shields dont factor into it at all.

[jerryfanfan]

What? Shields and armor don't matter? Well they really ought to, it doesn't feel right that tactical combat and overworld combat would be so different.

[MAWotB]

This is just more fuel to the fire. There is so little value in mining, you may as well get a cargo ship full of ore sitting in space with a huge contingent of larger class ships to just eat the autospawn raiders for free consistent passive income.

[MAWotB]

Originally posted by Draco:

For shuttles give them some ablative fighters/gunships to take hits in the rare occasion that they get attacked. Put them on secondary burn

Rare? you can get two spawns in the time a hercules / pluto fill eight pods.

[jerryfanfan]

It's unbalanced right now, due to a specific mechanic for reducing mining returns not applying to one of the mining vessels.

Mining is worthwhile, but only if you use the Tug from the MU faction.

Also farming the pirates by doing loops with your cargo ship is not goona work. If you beat them back they will become neutral and won't attack you for a long while. They only become hostile once every couple of minutes

[Draco]

Originally posted by jerryfanfan:

What? Shields and armor don't matter? Well they really ought to, it doesn't feel right that tactical combat and overworld combat would be so different.

This is what I said, lol. If anything, investment in security should be encouraged. But now I follow the ImHelping Frigates Only Doctrine. He uses 2, I use 5 (fleet limit, that is respected in overworld combat so only the first 20 fighters, 15 gunships, 10 corvettes, 5 frigates, 2 destroyers and 1 cruiser will attack during attack rounds, cycling in reserves when a ship dies, I want as many guns firing as possible, so 5 it is)

For predominately overworld bound ships like trade ship escorts all you need is engine optimization, and only if the ship isn't as fast as the engine optimized trade ship. The fleet leader, usually the trade ship, should have fuel capacity and gate refuel. Unless it has been changed already, sensor shield won't stop pirates locking onto it, and they don't need gate hack to use locked down gates.

[Draco]

Originally posted by MAWotB:

Originally posted by Draco:

For shuttles give them some ablative fighters/gunships to take hits in the rare occasion that they get attacked. Put them on secondary burn

Rare? you can get two spawns in the time a hercules / pluto fill eight pods.

Shuttles, like Hermes, will typically move between a base in a matter of (time compressed) seconds under secondary burn, and so can only be hit in the second or so they are within the zone of influence of a base and not using gravity drive, or if they cross an asteroid field for some reason.

This is why I don't suggest an escort that is there to ward off any attack, you'll only get hit by fighters, those corvette and frigate teams are almost always left in the dust, Hermes goes 'meep! meep!' and flies off to make you more money.

They actually visit bases so frequently that they remain one of my best money makers throughout
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2012867480

[MAWotB]

Originally posted by jerryfanfan:

It's unbalanced right now, due to a specific mechanic for reducing mining returns not applying to one of the mining vessels.

The word for this is broken, not unbalanced, and thats not just for the mining, the combat is oversimplified. A 1.1 million apollo loss for maybe 400k ore return is plain broken. Strategies should never be balanced against any other. Each vessel has to be balanced in its singularity to allow standalone performance, IE player AND wingman, to then function the hive mind that is a fleet.

This game is in 'full release' state and has glaring issues. This to me is still in alpha. So all I can glean from this is dont even dare touch cargo / freight until frigates are secured which is 10+ million per craft. This defeats the whole concept of using mining / trading as an alternative to combat, because my god hours of combat only in a light corvette is retarded. The only way to accelerate combat is as ive said to fly backwards and annihilate smaller craft in succession to just kite the bigger stuff. If this is how combat logic works then there is no point having a fleet ever fight in overworld, and as I suspected as is the exact same with x series, you have to have the superior number of capital class ships with full tech to ever feel 'safe'. Games that are only for the masochistic that are not by design need to be remedied.

[jerryfanfan]

Wow over 300 frigates?

I'd say some aspects are unpolished and buggy, but at least not totally broken.

Trading works great right now, you just get some basic freighters and set them as waypoint traders, pick up goods where they and produced and deliver to where they are consumed. Income is pretty decent, maybe 1 million per ship every 10 minutes. I never assign any escorts and I've only ever lost maybe 3 freighters.

Mining is great too, but you have to do MU missions to get to the good miner. I never had a problem with losing ships.

[Draco]

Originally posted by jerryfanfan:

Wow over 300 frigates?

Not enough. Never enough.

Before I killed off the beggars and reborn, they were paying for themselves, literally. I had a fleet of 5 ronins with 10 roaches and 10 swordfish as ablative armor in each ore field, the pirates would send over some frigates, corvettes, and filler fighters. One meets the fleet in a field and suddenly I get spammed with kill messages. The 8 million those frigates in that screenshot are eating per cycle was covered every cycle by bounties alone! Then I went and took over the bases like an idiot. Still making a profit though.

Originally posted by MAWotB:

The word for this is broken, not unbalanced, and thats not just for the mining, the combat is oversimplified. A 1.1 million apollo loss for maybe 400k ore return is plain broken. Strategies should never be balanced against any other. Each vessel has to be balanced in its singularity to allow standalone performance, IE player AND wingman, to then function the hive mind that is a fleet.

FYI that is for a heavy frigate, light frigates cost 2 million, about 600k if you build it at an owned base. Before that point I just use smaller, cheaper, faster traders guarded by crap fighters and set to primary burn. Still got some caterpillars I set up early on running around, escorted by gremlins. Mining, though? Always sucks, but you can use 2 Anubis corvettes to safeguard miners for a little while in the early game. Once the killjoys and Racers come out you want 2 light frigates at least.

[BootlegZoke]

Originally posted by MAWotB:

This is just more fuel to the fire. There is so little value in mining, you may as well get a cargo ship full of ore sitting in space with a huge contingent of larger class ships to just eat the autospawn raiders for free consistent passive income.

man... ok let’s try to address some things

Mining outpaced transport in income for me. Hint Tugs are better than Pluto’s. I gave them each two Anubis corvettes and took no losses for hours and hours and hours in overworld.

Hermès shuttles don’t really need an escort, on secondary boost and proper upgrades for overworld travel make them faster than most things, the costs of escorts and hassle of replacing any cost efficient escort for them don’t work out.

Catapillar mk2’s also basically do not need an escort for your first trader fleet (sub 100 mil liquid cash on hand) I would just build as many cat mk2’s as you can after maxing out in hermès shuttles for the easier money. You can upgrade to hurculeses from there giving each two anubis for escort. You don’t have to wait for frigates at all.

When you are about to go to war with a significant faction, You’ll want to upgrade your escort, and frigates and corvettes are probably a good idea, at nearly all other times it’s a waste. Have had only 1 loss in 24 hours of afk farming with dual anubis escorts. Frigates just seems to be complete overkill.

I do get your point, the engagement range being “litterally on top of each other” is pretty annoying sometimes.

[MAWotB]

Throwing optimised strategies at a new player without explaining them is counter intuitive. Also that mining has to have 'shuttles' instead of cargo vessels to be viable because of these guaranteed raider spawns and lacking combat automation, defeats having the vessels in the game. The fact that cargo vessels are apparently better off doing trading runs with escorts like I had tried is key information that SHOULD be presented as the forefront of a solution. Giving me end game solutions when im barely 10 million in is useless to me. I cant magically reproduce a scalable system if I have no idea how to start or WHERE.

[Ydyp]

As you probably already have gathered from the previous posts the Anubis is a great overworld escort ship because of how the overworld dmg calculations work, at least until Chaosavy gets around his todo list to rework the overworld combat simulation.

So for now you can indeed go with the Anubis which has decent all long and mid range dmg even without upgrades. Also do not upgrade you ships you use for pure overworld escorts as at this time only a few upgrades do work on overworld and none of them helps with combat. So you can save the costs to use for yourself or in other spots.

As for miningships I mostly send them to belts where I have a small warfleet patrolling it, so that even lowers the risk of losing them smaller as that is only when they are in transit, and for mining ships that mine far away from their destination station, I assign a few mining support traders to them so those mining ships do not have to leave the belt ever and are protected by the small warfleet patrolling the belt which is also generating a small income due to independent miners paying for the patrol.