How do I reinstate Death Benefits and hinder boarding value even more?

[Mad_House]

Every single time that I reach the point where I can board ships, I become flooded with enough money and can fly pretty much anything I want to.

But. Before I started doing that, I was SO freaking satisfied with every little jolt of progress I made, and became quite attached to some of my ships in the process. Till boarding blew that out of the water of course, now I've got a bunch of Marauder Leviathans. I don't want that, and I have no self control so I'll make things easier on myself.

Also, is there a way to make it "illegal" to fly boarded ships, like a tag or modifier otherwise? I'd love to add a feature through my modding where I have to pay 3/4ths the hull price of a ship to make it "space-legal." I mean it's a fair trade-off that way, I can probably get myself back to earning everything, have fun with the mechanic when I absolutely need something, and not go too crazy? 'Cause as it stands, my flagship is optimized for capture and everything has a green laser.

[Grathagis]

In the data folder of human outfits, it shows an "illegal" tag on nerve gas. You might try and add that tag to a ship in your game save and see what happens. It is possible for ships to have built-in outfits, so I assume it should be possible. I haven't tried it yet though.

[hellminister]

got an idea, an outfit with the illegal tag to costs money to remov... what happenes when there a negative price on an outfit?

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

I've found the biggest thing that kills my enjoyment of the game is being able to capture ships at all. Having to actually buy ships for my fleet ends up feeling much more balanced. Sadly, the way I did this is with a plugin that just marks every single ship as "uncapturable", so there's no easy fix for the vanilla game.

I will say the result is worth it. Plundering outfits using a cargo flagship is still worthwhile, but you no longer just get vast sums of money from being able to sell captured bounty targets.

Edit: It's also had the nice side effect that bounty missions don't pay much more than selling plundered outfits, which makes outright killing targets worth doing to save time. That means no more spamming lasers in order to not overkill your target. It's a very liberating feeling, being able to play with the full selection of weapons, and not constantly holding back in order to board and capture/plunder.

[Mad_House]

So reflecting on the changelog, I found that it was in Version 0.9.6 that death benefits were eliminated - I went ahead with downloading Version 0.9.5 and it contained pretty much everything I needed to reconstruct the death benefit module, should plugins work directly with coding in the way my simple mind wants it to. I think I'm going to outright make this a viable plugin for share because I HATE passionately the idea of disabling any mechanism in the game, and understanding worker compensation to a degree, I can tie in a hefty "fine" that'll ostensibly force the player into a cost-benefit analysis of every ship they intend to capture.

If I'm right, running a 100k fine for every crewman lost might be a proper means to deter over-reliance on boarding - without marginalizing the system to the extent that you just don't want to deal with it at all. It'll incentive the capture of smaller ships, - penalize people like me that burn through crew like coffee to have the best and biggest, and help force participants to truly gauge their decisions in a rational, sound manner while retaining the ability to acquire the equipment and vessels they want after evaluating the expenses.

On top of that at the end, being combined with the Depreciation system will mean that you will outright LOSE money on some of these captures, if you're not thinking it through. You can farm Furies and Quicksilvers all day for instance to get by with at least some income (plausible), but ultimately that passenger contract is going to look even more appealing than spending all of your time in the South trying to harvest ships like it's a pepper garden.

Yeah I'm pretty happy with this avenue of approach. I'll have to see if I'm capable of making it work or not with the existing plugin system.

[Mad_House]

Okay, so it seems like everything coding wise is pretty much behind the .exe in the Steam version. .cpp and .h files are all not present.

However...

The Github version DOES feature all of these fancy schmancy files and I can go through them all willy nilly just like that. I'm thinking *MAYBE,* if I enroll a folder for the source code itself, I may be able to plug in some data to reinvigorate the crew fines system that way.

Developers, please feel free to chime in if you at any point have something that's going to Occam razor this messy trial.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

Not a developer but that's not how C++ source code works. You can't just have raw source code in a plugin folder and expect the game to "load" it. Not without shipping a C++ compiler with the game itself, and expecting every player to put up with 5+ minutes of load time to start the game.

[Rocket Witch]

Even without code changes, one thing you can easily do is modify the "game rule" for price depreciation (gamerules.txt in the data folder).

"depreciation min" 0.25

If you change the above line, to say 0.1, it will make the fully-depreciated price of 'old' ships and outfits 10% of their original instead of the default 25%. Captured ships and plundered outfits are always fully-depreciated upon acquisition, so lowering this value will lower the profitability of capturing. You could even set it to 0 to make capturing monetarily worthless.

Lowering the depreciation min will additionally have the effect of making ships and outfits you legitimately purchased worth less over time, so you may want to increase the "depreciation daily" and/or "depreciation max age" to make things lose value more slowly over time.

While you can just edit the vanilla files themselves, ideally you would make a plugin that changes this key and its value so your changes will survive updates: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky/wiki/CreatingPlugins

[Mad_House]

I've settled for giving every single ship a self-destruct trigger upon any boarding attempt, minus mission-specific ships whereby "SAFE" variants will be featured similar to what's already there in code.

	attributes
		"self destruct" .33

	add attributes
		"self destruct" -.33

It can all be easily plugged in for each ship; such as:

ship "Arrow"
	attributes
		"self destruct" .33
ship "Arrow" "Arrow (Safe)"
	add attributes
		"self destruct" -.33

1/3rd of the time just seems like the ideal ratio to me. Occasionally you can still capture ships, but you're going to loot outfits more often because you aren't going to risk losing the entire bounty. It's RNG heavy compared to what I'd prefer, because every loot attempt is a dice-roll as to whether or not it blows before you can access the boarding screen or before you breach the airlock, but there's a good chance of it happening, enough to deter dependency & addiction to the mechanic.

I am addicted to boarding. I don't do missions because I know I can board a pirate and make the same amount or more than a chain of missions will offer. Hence dependency. This will be broken if I think everything I try to board will blow up, or if my crew costs for any losses will haunt me - only one is possible, therefore I will do that to remedy the situation.

Now all of that said, if you save scum you can always circumvent the issue, it's just a matter of if you realize doing the same thing over and over for a different result is worth your time.

Originally posted by Rocket Witch:

Even without code changes, one thing you can easily do is modify the "game rule" for price depreciation (gamerules.txt in the data folder).

"depreciation min" 0.25

If you change the above line, to say 0.1, it will make the fully-depreciated price of 'old' ships and outfits 10% of their original instead of the default 25%. Captured ships and plundered outfits are always fully-depreciated upon acquisition, so lowering this value will lower the profitability of capturing. You could even set it to 0 to make capturing monetarily worthless.

Lowering the depreciation min will additionally have the effect of making ships and outfits you legitimately purchased worth less over time, so you may want to increase the "depreciation daily" and/or "depreciation max age" to make things lose value more slowly over time.

I like this. Really like this. The only aside is I'd also want to slow down depreciation even more for things you legitimately acquire, because it's going to hurt therefore make you try to sell faster which adds another need to the gameplay loop. Alternatively, if there was some way to separate the cap; plundered or captured assets get 0.05 of their value, whereas owned assets depreciate to .25%. That difference would be pretty ideal. I've seen in game some items dropping to .24% occasionally, which means there may yet be a way to get something beneath .25% and I just haven't figured it out yet.

Originally posted by Rocket Witch:

While you can just edit the vanilla files themselves, ideally you would make a plugin that changes this key and its value so your changes will survive updates: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky/wiki/CreatingPlugins

I want to make a thumbnail for the Waverider so I can add it as a Lionheart-manufactured warship. IDK how though, other than asking the devs to include it. That's pretty much the stage I'm at in plugins; I'm starting my next play-through with a Lampyrid (+20 outfits +20 engine space) given to me by James at the end of the tutorial.

[Rocket Witch]

Originally posted by Mad_House:

I want to make a thumbnail for the Waverider so I can add it as a Lionheart-manufactured warship. IDK how though, other than asking the devs to include it.

You can download the model from the assets repository: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky-assets/blob/master/ships/waverider%202.79.blend
The filename 2.79 means it was made in Blender version 2.79, and probably rendered using the "Blender internal" rendering engine exclusive to such older versions of the software.

See also the .xcf file for the postprocessing stuff ( https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky-assets/blob/master/ships/waverider.xcf ). The methodology by which 90% of ES assets are postprocessed is outlined here: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky/wiki/CreatingShips#artistic-tricks

If you just want something you can work with, here is a bad render done in Blender 2.80 using Eevee:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/24308846265308094/260A21F3C3500684635EF24A816C3249C1A876B1/

Lore-wise, in my opinion it makes more sense for the Waverider to be manufactured by Megaparsec in response to Lionheart's Headhunter essentially being a better version of the Quicksilver.

[Mad_House]

Oh wow definitely, I don't know why I blanked on Megaparsec but you're right, it even matches the aesthetic straight up like a larger Quicksilver.

I went ahead and messed with the akamaihd file you shared since I'm so far gone on Blender that I'd probably spend the whole day tripping up, since your post I've managed to get a basic start on this baby;

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3424386468

I'm not *quite* sure on it, thinking that maybe I need to go just a wee bit darker, but apart from that I'm finding it satisfactory. Just feels a little more "drawn" than I'd intended it to be while still getting a near-match to what's already in the database as far as comparable pieces.