Making money!!!

[Jan]

Ok, i know this topic is a old one.

But i have taken quite a few missions to get rid of raiders here and there to earn some credit so i can finally start buying ships. But i allways end up out of ammo, and i then have to use money to buy new ammo. Im not coming out of this never ending story. (yes i have allso visited the abandoned reasearch station 495504 times. But as soon as i get the credits it burns up in equipment and repairs :/

Strategy/tip anyone? i allways try to hold on to my loot for as long as possible, im trying to fill up my cargo hold so i can sell it in one big deal.

And last to the developer; How are the Oracle of RPG theese days? Been thinking, im playing the game on a laptop with the minimum of allmost everything "designed for school work etc". If you should guess, maybe you know... What would be the size of the game the day its finished?

[Stellar Tactics]

Hi Galge - Here is a thread that covers a few strategies for making money in the current build. The information still applies for space combat, mining etc.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/10/1694919808738261088/

There are several things you can do to manage the cost of ammo. I will be tuning this when I get to alpha so cost -vs- reward are a bit more balanced.

1)[updated] Keep an eye on range for all turrets that use ammo. Range falloff works as follows:
--green - high chance to hit
--yellow - moderate chance to hit
--orange - low chance to hit
--red - no chance to hit - out of range and the turret idles
--Missiles generally always hit right now unless an enemy ship is using chaff.

2) Spend your credits on the most powerful engine you can get first. Check the power rating on the warp engines that are for sale. You want a warp drive with a very high power generation rating. Over time you will eventually end up with a legendary.

3) Once you have a powerful warp drive, migrate your weapons to beam weapons. These have more range and draw from your warp drive with no ammo cost - great for farming incursions. I recommend at least one or two ION beams which will tear through enemy shields.

The tips above should reduce your ammo costs and you will see your profit go up considerably. Not to mention that enemy ships occasionally drop nice equipment for your ship.

As far as the final size of the game, hard to say. The current development build is over 6 gigs right now. I've added tons of content for the next content update - hundreds of procedural assets for the universe. Right now there are literally millions of possible locations explore in the development build. Once this next content update is ready I'll continue to add content - new enemies, story content, features, graphic enhancements etc.

[justaname]

Personally I used a different approach for space combat. Your starter ship has very strong shields - make use of them (note: this is for normal game difficulty - haven't played it on hard).

1) Turn down all 2vs1 encounters. Obviously your starter ship hasn't the best gear to deal with two opponents at once
2) Scan the enemy. If you read "Heavy Ion" run, if you read "Heavy Ion x2" run faster - you can win these encounters (at least on normal difficulty), but end up with a severly damaged ship. There's a high chance you get killed if you try to fight a ship with 2 Heavy Ions at this stage.
3) Don't replenish your ammo. Use the ammo you start with to win several battles (you should be fine to do at least 4-5 battles) and use the loot to buy cheap ION Beam(!) weapons. Also: Missiles are a good bet early on. They deliver heavy damage for their cost and in general you'll find missiles as loot quite often. So a Heavy Missile Launcher with some better stats is a good investment - but don't buy an expensive one. You want to upgrade your warp drive as soon as possible after you upgraded your weapons.
From here on you should be able to win all 1vs1 encounters. But I still would keep an eye on opponents with 2 Heavy Ion weapons. These are still dangerous until you can afford to upgrade all your gear to exceptional. From there on you should be able to destroy them, before they can take down your shields.

Battle encounters: I like to play sitting duck. With a "weak" warp drive and a lot of beam weapons you'll need all of the energy you can get. So shortly before I'm in weapon reach I put the slider for my engines to the far left, so I won't move at all. The one for my shields goes to the far right.
Your shields are divided in four independent areas. I use "A" and "D" so the tile with my battle shield takes the incoming fire. Once you see that this area is severly weakend, turn the ship, so another shield area gets targeted by the incoming fire (and the weakend one can recover). Don't forget to adjust your battle shield with "Q" or "E" to the new position.

From here it depends on the opponent: Weak opponent means I deactivate missiles to save on cost. I might also lower the shield energy if the enemy can't do enough harm to my shields (there is a percentage value ingame and if it stays above 90% you are good to go). Strong enemy means I deactivate a beam weapon after my energy runs out and thus make more use of my missile launcher.

You'll never need to buy ammo from here and can upgrade the ship to your liking (well remember you need to upgrade your warp drive if you haven't done so yet). I'm not sure when it's the right time to fight two opponents cause I'm a bit over cautious here, but once you have rare ION beams, shields and warp drive you're good to go for sure. Don't mind if your energy runs out quickly - your enemy dies quickly as well.
Because you start out with basic ION weapons fights at start will take some time. With better weapons/warp drive this will speed up. Later on you won't need your missile launcher at all - at least as long as you use your starter ship. Haven't played that much with a different ship type.

[Reef]

you dont need to avoid ships with ion weapons. heres how. only give them one side of your ship to shoot at. when your shields get close to 75% switch sides. use this method and they will never get through your shields, even 1v2s( all my ship gear is exceptional quality)

[Jan]

I realize that i was thinking the wrong way. I have been flying arround in at 10 dollar store space ship all this time :p

Have a good shield now and looking forward to be spending credits on equipment instead of just saving for a new ship.

And a whole other thing, shouldnt the sun be dangerous by now or is it soon to come?

[nottrusted]

Originally posted by Galge:

And a whole other thing, shouldnt the sun be dangerous by now or is it soon to come?

As far as I know it is dangerous, if you get too close to the sun your ship will take constant damage.
That has changed a long time ago, I think at the point when space combat was implemented.
If you don't take damage though, then we have a bug and it is somehow reverted to the old way.

Please let us know if you really don't take damage, so that Don can look into that.

regards
Arb

[Jan]

I took damage, but it had to be really close, like allmost on it. The gravity well was like one second from tutching the sun.

[Rackminster]

IMO, if a weapon is out of range, it shouldn't be firing and wasting ammo. The crew member in the Gunnery seat should have their pay docked for doing that.

I'm just a few hours in, and had one successful fight. It cost me close to 1000 ammo with each weapon type you begin with. I got back 20-50 for each in loot and felt a little jilted. I got a $6000 reward, and ammo is $19 each. I burned up like $50,000 in ammo to get $6,000.

I'm willing to bet I spent that entire fight shooting blanks because I was out of range and only hit accidentally sometimes. Until this thread, I had no idea I was literally shooting into the void and throwing money away.

It'll be nice to see that balanced. Maybe swap things around so players start with "No Ammo" weapons - but make them weak. When you move up, you start buying strong ammo-requiring weapons and leave the free stuff behind.

The game really needs a built-in ship combat tutorial.

[Stellar Tactics]

[updated] I just took a look at this. Turrets won't fire, they will only idle if out of range (red). They do fire if the range is above red which indicates out of range. Sorry for any confusion - it's been a while since I last looked at the turret code. I think I can do a few things here to ease the initial cost of ammo in combat. Perhaps lowering the cost of ammo would be a quick fix. I'll look into it for the next patch. I have a lot of work left to do with the space combat system and a good bit of tuning. I may update the range indicators too. I think they could do a better job of displaying each turrets range.

Combat and mining tutorials will go in for the next content update. For now there is a space combat tutorial in the guides section.

Rackminister - I also saw your comment about movement and looting. That is much improved now in the development build with less interruption time and closest team member looting. That will also be in the content update when it comes out.

[Roberto]

I really wouldn't bother about reducing ammunition price, when craft come in You propably could make craftable all munitions type without a problem. With current build the only problem is limited ammo quantity for a ship that some inexperienced players would ignore: You should try avoid to equiping turrets which use same type of ammo to prevent it quick depletion. It is apply to space combat along with ground combat as well. (4 peeps with shotguns maybe rocks, but doing long mission theres's 90% chance that You will end up fighting with fist&melee or using random dropped loot weapons which your team isn't trained with.)
As for space combat selling loot from 2-3 incursions will cover cost of all ammo used for sure.
After changing weapons to beam type only all the problems with ammo cost will be reduced to missile buying only