Posted January 08, 2021
So, I've got over 300 hours logged (though admittedly a non-trivial amount of that is from leaving drones or refineries running overnight) and I've put together a few thoughts I figured I'd leave for Don (the dev), especially since he's finishing the combat patch today, and none of this is related to that, so hopefully this is stuff he can think about as he shifts gears. I will note, my main goal has been to become an awesome crafter and most of my actions have been around trying to optimize that, with a bit of drone-mining and trade-net stuff to make money for crafting mats, and a bit of ground missions to get faction items and level up when I capped skills, plus a little space combat mainly to try it out. (I'll indicate which comments are balance vs. bug vs. QOL). I recently maxed crafting (and got salvage to 80) while getting ready for the new combat update.
1) *BALANCE* - Crafting is seriously overpowered. Seriously. Crafted items are, in most cases, better than looted items 1 if not 2 tiers better. For mods, my white crafted stuff is usually better than gold looted stuff. To be clear, I love this. I invested a lot of time salvaging everything I looted so I could learn to make it, and then, once my credits got to the point I could buy lots of resources without caring about the money, I would put on a TV show or movie, and just go through a craft-salvage loop to upgrade my schematics. Some sub-observations about this follow:
a) *QOL* - Being able to see progress to a locked schematic would be an immensely useful feature. I only upgraded schematics when I had something in the next tier around so I could go into salvage on that and see how close I was. Upgrading a schematic usually took about an hour for green to blue and an hour and a half for blue to gold (I haven't tried a gold to purple yet, because I don't have the purples I'd want to learn).
b) *BALANCE* - There are a few things where crafting seems really crazy.
i) Weapon Mods - uncapped finishing points that can boost stats are crazy. I'm getting about 50 dex and 35 per from mods, and that's been the case since about level 10 (I'm now level 25, but the improvements have been limited here).
ii) Armor - again, stat boosts are recipes for insane crafted items. My crafted greens were better than the purples I saw, because +7 perception on a gunner beat +2 to 3 random stats. Once I learned Blue, this became +9 per/dex. I had this around level 20 from salvaging from combat missions. I then decided to learn gold, which gives about +11 per/dex/int per piece. This took me six hours of craft/salvage loop, but it's amazingly good.
iii) Heavy weapons - Heavy weapons are usually limited because of the need to reload after each shot, which makes them fire less than once per round. But my crafted heavy weapons have a clip of 5, so I can shoot every round and still move a little.
iv) Cargo Expansion/Refinery - these are both uncapped finishing point items. With perks and 3 +finishing point gems, I managed a 16 point boosted Cargo Expansion, which, at green, was twice the space bonus of blues I saw on merchants. I also have a blue refinery at 91% that never wastes ore. Unless going over 100% means I can see negative waste values, there's no reason for me to go further.
As noted, I love that crafting is way better than drops, I've always hated inventory management in games with random loot, but when I can just salvage everything knowing I can build better, that problem is solved elegantly. But there may be a few places where it's too good. Crafting has allowed my level 25 main character to have 225 stat points from crafted items, and 162 from levels. Not to mention my level 15/20 supporting cast's similar gear. I generally let my main character do most of the combat to gain levels to keep up with crafting/salvage gains, even on the highest combat difficulty, passing other team members' turns doing nothing. I'm not sure if combat doesn't scale and I should be in further out regions, or if my gear is letting me kill everything too fast.
c) *BUG* - though I haven't used it in a long time, the +AP gem bonus *displays* AP gains that include perks increasing the bonus, but crafting ends as if I gained only 1 AP from the gem use, even when the display showed +3.
d) *QOL* - I feel like refreshing to get the stats I want on an armor piece or higher values before I start crafting, as a 0-cost action in-game, is a bit frustrating. While I can understand to an extent not starting crafting with all values at max possible, making the armor pieces with the collection of 3 stats I wanted involved a lot of refreshing until the right stats showed, which wasn't enjoyable. I'd certainly prefer something where perhaps starting values were at *CRAFTING LEVEL* percent of max, and any properties could be chosen instead of randomized. Though I do realize a fair amount of rewarding things in this game require persistence, so it's not totally out of character to require the best crafter armor to take the patience to get the right stats on a craft start. I just don't like the idea of something like that having the only cost being me sitting there pressing refresh stats until I see what I want. Relatedly, chosing the image would be a very nice feature - I made 4 beam rifles, one of each type, and wanted each to have a different image so I could keep them straight in my inventory at a glance. I had to go through a fair amount of tedious restarting to get the images right.
2) *BUG/BAD DESCRIPTION* - The mining perk which claims to reduce waste in refinery by 5% seems to actually reduce *cost* in refinery by 5%. Base cost dropped from 25 to 23 when I took this, which was *immensely* valuable. After that perk, I would constantly keep my hold full of purchased platinum and always be refining it for about 30% profit margin (buy ore at 229, refine at 23 per, sell refined at 6900). It's not a severely overpowered way to get money, but at minimum, the perk description is wrong, if this is WAI.
3) *BALANCE/POSSIBLE EXPLOIT* - Trade-Net allows me to take out a delivery contract on cheap minerals (potash, feldspar, phosphate) promising to deliver 2 million units for 5 a piece. I can then go off and do things for an hour (run a combat mission, for instance) and new Trade-Net deals will be available. This can include contracts to pick-up 2 million units at the same station at a cost of 1 a piece. This means, with an investment of 2 million credits, patience, and luck, I can get a payoff of 8 million profit for just showing up without having to move the cargo. Because there is 0 cost to having these delivery contracts, I can keep about 10-15 of them open while I do other things, and just check back to see if I won any lotteries. It seems reasonable for stations not to offer sales of resources you have outstanding delivery contracts for. While end-game credit balance doesn't seem to be a problem (the profit margin on my ship part crafting is obscene with legendary warp drive schematics), the 400% profit margin on these investments seems like a potential early-game credit spike that may not be WAI.
4) *BUG* - My Ion Beams can do hull damage by bypassing shields. Even when shields are already down. While this was nice as it gave me a way to end a fight where I had only Ion Beams and was fighting more than one enemy, so even with all ships disabled, I couldn't board anyone, it seems to at least not make sense in terms of in-game logic. An ion beam does no hull damage when hitting the hull, but with shields down, it can bypass those shields to do hull damage. Also, if this is fixed, a loaidng tip warning players to have at least one non-ion weapon in case they find themselves fighting more than one enemy might be worth having - even if my ion beams disable everything, without hull damage capability, the best I can do is disable all attackers and run away.
5) *BUG* - When I put a trigger grouping into a weapon, then remove it, the weapon then only has single fire as an option, rather than what it had before. That said, with crafted weapons, it's trivial to make weapons that have all fire modes, which makes trigger groupings useless. Relatedly, crafted weapons seem to have different fire modes by default than looted weapons (SMG default crafted is single, but looted SMGs have burst/auto only).
6) *QOL* - An in-game bug report option would be nice. Especially one that could automatically upload screenshots/game logs. It would have meant most of the things I tagged as bugs I would have reported a long time ago.
7) *BUG* - Buying a new ship while refining ore results in a ship without a refinery still refining ore, and that refinement being performed with 0 waste. Didn't test with swapping ships.
Edit: Removed bug that was fixed in today's path, added bug I forgot to mention.
1) *BALANCE* - Crafting is seriously overpowered. Seriously. Crafted items are, in most cases, better than looted items 1 if not 2 tiers better. For mods, my white crafted stuff is usually better than gold looted stuff. To be clear, I love this. I invested a lot of time salvaging everything I looted so I could learn to make it, and then, once my credits got to the point I could buy lots of resources without caring about the money, I would put on a TV show or movie, and just go through a craft-salvage loop to upgrade my schematics. Some sub-observations about this follow:
a) *QOL* - Being able to see progress to a locked schematic would be an immensely useful feature. I only upgraded schematics when I had something in the next tier around so I could go into salvage on that and see how close I was. Upgrading a schematic usually took about an hour for green to blue and an hour and a half for blue to gold (I haven't tried a gold to purple yet, because I don't have the purples I'd want to learn).
b) *BALANCE* - There are a few things where crafting seems really crazy.
i) Weapon Mods - uncapped finishing points that can boost stats are crazy. I'm getting about 50 dex and 35 per from mods, and that's been the case since about level 10 (I'm now level 25, but the improvements have been limited here).
ii) Armor - again, stat boosts are recipes for insane crafted items. My crafted greens were better than the purples I saw, because +7 perception on a gunner beat +2 to 3 random stats. Once I learned Blue, this became +9 per/dex. I had this around level 20 from salvaging from combat missions. I then decided to learn gold, which gives about +11 per/dex/int per piece. This took me six hours of craft/salvage loop, but it's amazingly good.
iii) Heavy weapons - Heavy weapons are usually limited because of the need to reload after each shot, which makes them fire less than once per round. But my crafted heavy weapons have a clip of 5, so I can shoot every round and still move a little.
iv) Cargo Expansion/Refinery - these are both uncapped finishing point items. With perks and 3 +finishing point gems, I managed a 16 point boosted Cargo Expansion, which, at green, was twice the space bonus of blues I saw on merchants. I also have a blue refinery at 91% that never wastes ore. Unless going over 100% means I can see negative waste values, there's no reason for me to go further.
As noted, I love that crafting is way better than drops, I've always hated inventory management in games with random loot, but when I can just salvage everything knowing I can build better, that problem is solved elegantly. But there may be a few places where it's too good. Crafting has allowed my level 25 main character to have 225 stat points from crafted items, and 162 from levels. Not to mention my level 15/20 supporting cast's similar gear. I generally let my main character do most of the combat to gain levels to keep up with crafting/salvage gains, even on the highest combat difficulty, passing other team members' turns doing nothing. I'm not sure if combat doesn't scale and I should be in further out regions, or if my gear is letting me kill everything too fast.
c) *BUG* - though I haven't used it in a long time, the +AP gem bonus *displays* AP gains that include perks increasing the bonus, but crafting ends as if I gained only 1 AP from the gem use, even when the display showed +3.
d) *QOL* - I feel like refreshing to get the stats I want on an armor piece or higher values before I start crafting, as a 0-cost action in-game, is a bit frustrating. While I can understand to an extent not starting crafting with all values at max possible, making the armor pieces with the collection of 3 stats I wanted involved a lot of refreshing until the right stats showed, which wasn't enjoyable. I'd certainly prefer something where perhaps starting values were at *CRAFTING LEVEL* percent of max, and any properties could be chosen instead of randomized. Though I do realize a fair amount of rewarding things in this game require persistence, so it's not totally out of character to require the best crafter armor to take the patience to get the right stats on a craft start. I just don't like the idea of something like that having the only cost being me sitting there pressing refresh stats until I see what I want. Relatedly, chosing the image would be a very nice feature - I made 4 beam rifles, one of each type, and wanted each to have a different image so I could keep them straight in my inventory at a glance. I had to go through a fair amount of tedious restarting to get the images right.
2) *BUG/BAD DESCRIPTION* - The mining perk which claims to reduce waste in refinery by 5% seems to actually reduce *cost* in refinery by 5%. Base cost dropped from 25 to 23 when I took this, which was *immensely* valuable. After that perk, I would constantly keep my hold full of purchased platinum and always be refining it for about 30% profit margin (buy ore at 229, refine at 23 per, sell refined at 6900). It's not a severely overpowered way to get money, but at minimum, the perk description is wrong, if this is WAI.
3) *BALANCE/POSSIBLE EXPLOIT* - Trade-Net allows me to take out a delivery contract on cheap minerals (potash, feldspar, phosphate) promising to deliver 2 million units for 5 a piece. I can then go off and do things for an hour (run a combat mission, for instance) and new Trade-Net deals will be available. This can include contracts to pick-up 2 million units at the same station at a cost of 1 a piece. This means, with an investment of 2 million credits, patience, and luck, I can get a payoff of 8 million profit for just showing up without having to move the cargo. Because there is 0 cost to having these delivery contracts, I can keep about 10-15 of them open while I do other things, and just check back to see if I won any lotteries. It seems reasonable for stations not to offer sales of resources you have outstanding delivery contracts for. While end-game credit balance doesn't seem to be a problem (the profit margin on my ship part crafting is obscene with legendary warp drive schematics), the 400% profit margin on these investments seems like a potential early-game credit spike that may not be WAI.
4) *BUG* - My Ion Beams can do hull damage by bypassing shields. Even when shields are already down. While this was nice as it gave me a way to end a fight where I had only Ion Beams and was fighting more than one enemy, so even with all ships disabled, I couldn't board anyone, it seems to at least not make sense in terms of in-game logic. An ion beam does no hull damage when hitting the hull, but with shields down, it can bypass those shields to do hull damage. Also, if this is fixed, a loaidng tip warning players to have at least one non-ion weapon in case they find themselves fighting more than one enemy might be worth having - even if my ion beams disable everything, without hull damage capability, the best I can do is disable all attackers and run away.
5) *BUG* - When I put a trigger grouping into a weapon, then remove it, the weapon then only has single fire as an option, rather than what it had before. That said, with crafted weapons, it's trivial to make weapons that have all fire modes, which makes trigger groupings useless. Relatedly, crafted weapons seem to have different fire modes by default than looted weapons (SMG default crafted is single, but looted SMGs have burst/auto only).
6) *QOL* - An in-game bug report option would be nice. Especially one that could automatically upload screenshots/game logs. It would have meant most of the things I tagged as bugs I would have reported a long time ago.
7) *BUG* - Buying a new ship while refining ore results in a ship without a refinery still refining ore, and that refinement being performed with 0 waste. Didn't test with swapping ships.
Edit: Removed bug that was fixed in today's path, added bug I forgot to mention.
Post edited January 08, 2021 by Patroklos
