Hi,
I find that now crashed ships are all not worth to get, and that means that Transmission Towers, Antena Beacons, all this game part has become useless too.

The apparent logic with the new system is that if you lack cash then you can switch to a ship with many slots and repair the slots as cash is comming in, BUT why should you? Why would you ever abandon the (always) better ship you have? Or you have bought it already or you have put a lot of work in it already, and now you should do all over again, LOL ???. Also the ship classes are pretty meaningless, it's all about the slots you have, if you install upgrades you improve engine performance, weapons etc. so the classes are pure cosmetics IMO. With this new system, there are 2 main flaws that need correction asap:

- Mostly you have only 2-3 operating slots when picking up a crashed ship, other 6 slots will have the minimum equipment + 1 upgrade (which all mostly need repair), the other slots need repair for a lot of units. Please explain what you are doing with 2-3 operating slots ?? You can do plain nothing, not carrying anything. And every ship you abandon will be so much better already.

- Buying a new ship immediately will save you cost and time to gather and repair the broken parts of the crashed ship, you are faster making money by not switching to crashed ships because you will have more slots usable for trading, and finally the price for equivalent ships compared to a ship where you repair all slots may even be CHEAPER.

These 2 points are enough of a demonstration to show how useless crashed ships are now. In the Foundation you needed some careful comparison of your ship to know if it was worth to change, and that game part was much more interesting, BUT: there was no reason to ever buy a ship, and this is easy to correct:

Solution for better usage of ships:
Please introduce the possibility to SELL ships with some meaningful net loss (-50% and more, even less for a crashed ship) compared to a new ship, and keep all crashed ships as there were in Foundation, or at least highly reduce the cost for slot repairs or make that game part more appealing. Give the player a SENSIBLE reason to change to a crashed ship !!

For me that's almost a NO GO for the Pathfinder, I will seriously think to re-load the Foundation.

XenonS

To me, the biggest downside to trading ships, even in Foundation, was the effort involved in rearranging the various elements so that they would complement each other and be linked (where possible) to the basic function; shield enhancements all in a column underneath the shield icon, for example. With the technology bits all randomized, it's a pain to disassemble and then reassemble them into a reasonable configuration. If only technology could be "moved" as easily as a pile of Thamium9!

With the extra storage available in the storage vaults and the freighter (and now the exocraft), I quit upgrading ships at 32 slots. My current little "bug" is fast, has good enough firepower and good enough shielding. And it looks cool. ;-)

The damanged ships were mostly a source of salvaged material. Trade over to the damanged ship, strip everything down, save to the exosuit, and then trade back. Got a lot of goodies that way! Sadly, that's less useful now. But, you can still usually pick up something and there may also be an electron vapour canister or two laying around...

Actually the items laying around on the crash site are worth MORE than any items inside the crashed ship. No matter with what ship I visit the crash site, give me only ONE reason to make me switch to the crashed ship ! All I will have is maybe a better Upgrade placement possibility as an advantage, but that's not enough to make up for the horrendous costs in repairing the slots...

XenonS

I agree Xenon. Getting rich through ship salvage was perhaps a bit too easy, though the Foundation update made it harder than it had been, Some adjustment was desirable, but the new update makes crashed ships worthless. In a game which is a bit lacking in activities, it seems an odd decision to remove one.

The system of buying ships makes more sense now, and I like the ship class system. However, there should be a way to sell a ship without acquiring another one. As it stands, I don't think there is any way to reduce your number of ships, you cant even dump one.

I do understand that the game design is such that a player must always have a ship with him, so the ONLY possibility to sell ships would be a menu where you could sell or trade in the ships you have in your freighter (and still keeping your current ship). They should implement this, it's odd that you will stick forever with the ships you buy.

If you find a 17-slot ship on the crash site when your current ship is 36-slot, then you are simply out of luck I guess, but that's what happened to me the last 3 times...If you could find one with much more slots - around the slot number of my current ship that would be OK. I would then experiment what value I can trade in if I repair all or part of the slots, this should be roughly equivalent to be fair.
Maybe the situation of crashed ships is not so terrible after all, it's only that up to now I didn't yet see any advantage in it, always bumping in small ships not worth to take...

XenonS

You can have more than one Ship now in your freighter... change to a little ship and take the new crashed ship is always a good chance to have a Class S ship. This is very good for Hyperdrive (Class S Explorer gives you +50%). The new Ship Class is very usefull since you can own 6 ships.

Wow, well that IS a big change from the original game. You used to only find ships either 1 level below your current slots or 1 level above (so in the case of your 36 slot ship they would be 35 or 37).

In a way that always bothered me as it was too uniform a thing, so IF the crashed ships slot levels are now fully random that would make more sense imho. As a gameplay change there should be some way to better manage this part of the game, so you can fully live a 'scavenger' life if you choose.

As with many of the games designed features, they are not always fully fleshed out, but then with such a small team and small (ish) resources, i can understand why this happens.

I'd like to be able to 'claim' these crashed ships and maybe just sell the co-ordinates to an NPC somewhere, along with being able to take out any choice bits of equipment to keep for my own ships. It is completely possible to fully flesh out the scavenger role with the right game design.

Yes, I figure out now that Classes are important because of the increased percentages of different aspects.
My objective should be to get a S-Class for every kind of ship so I can use an Explorer for hyperdriving far away, a fighter for these emergency calls and ressource piracy, a Hauler to explore planets with a good cockpit, a small crappy C-Class shuttle with little slots to go hunt crashed ships. That's the thing to do IMO.
I have bought a 17-slot C-Class fighter for 2.2M (too much, II shouldn't have but I had to start somehow, finding crappy ships isn't that easy!), then exchanged it for a crashed 19-slot A-Class fighter with only 2 slots free but with perfect upgrade alignment. 455.000 trade-in value compared to the 780.000 of my abandoned ship. Repairing the first slot cost 127.500, but then this doesn't add-up completly to the overall value, it will yield 555.000 instead of 582.500 trade-in.

I wonder what happens with the new vehicles, say you travel for hours with a vehicle and then find a crashed ship. Can you switch to it and abandon your vehicle? Will you have to abandon your ship that is miles away? My guess is you would only find empty crash sites that avoid this dilema.

XenonS

You can find crashed ships with Alien Conversation, Signal Scanner or in Observatory easy...

And yes... i buy a very cheap ship in my freighter (Not by interchanging the old ship but adding my existing fleet) and looking for a Class S Ship and change the cheep one to the crashed one...

you have the right idea here.. this was my plan too :)

looking at price for what you get crashed ships are still cheaper to fix up early game... once you get more then 20 slots its nolonger cheaper to get a crashed ship.. as an example i got a fighter from my starter last night... i came in under 200k savings from using the crashed over buying the same slot and class fighter in a station i found.