There was a discussion on the UFO Discord yesterday which made me quite sad. To paraphrase somewhat:
L: I have 14 ships and I’m finding repairing them tedious. I want to upgrade them to the all-bells-and-whistles full protection suite of SRP, AWH, APT, RDL and STS.
Me: That’ll cost over 7 million credits per ship, but you’re one of the richest players in the game and that sounds like a very sensible late-stage gameplay mechanic.
The community: But adding those expensive addons makes your ships more expensive to repair overall, by a stupid margin.
L: Oh, I guess not then.
It made me sad because allowing a late-stage player to sink 100M credits into intangible assets for an incremental benefit sounds like a fantastic gameplay mechanic to encourage, but the balance of the high-tier ship parts is so off that it’s just not viable. It feels to me like the objective (encouraging players who can afford it, to spend capital up front to somewhat reduce their repair bills and substantially reduce their repair frequency) could be achieved with just a few balance tweaks:
- Increase the proportion of the repair bill that is fixed-price. Adding MFK/FLP was a good start here, but it’s very small: a fixed cost of ~4k against a floating cost of ~50k (most players I suspect will repair their ships at about 80% condition). I’d suggest adding another substantial fixed cost, perhaps one of:
- The capacitor used in the ship’s FTL engine. Pros: scales with ship advancement, substantially buffs STL-only puddle jumpers; cons: Beryllium requires engineers.
- One of the fuel pumps used in the ship’s STL engine. Pros: scales with ship advancement; cons: LFP requires technicians, BFP (as used in starter ships) requires engineers.
- A proportion of the SAR used in the ship’s bridge. Pros: scales with ship size; cons: complex production chain, requires technicians.
- The ADR used in the crew quarters. Pros: can be produced with just settlers; cons: very complex production chain that’s heavy on chemistry (of which we have too much already).
- Advanced repairs could displace simple repairs. A ship with RDS/RDL should require DRF repairs instead of SSC repairs, for instance, and ships with whipple shields and protective tiles should take no damage at all to hull plates. That would allow players to consider using advanced hull plates to permit high-acceleration builds, without the cost being prohibitive.
- (reduce the weight of AHP). As an aside to the above, AHP are currently unviable because their high weight means even HTE no longer has the thrust to accelerate the ship to the new maximum g-factor. Maybe add some NFI/NCS/MTC into the recipe and reduce their mass down to the ~7t range?
- Tweak the costs of shields/tiles down. I suspect that even with the above changes, the overall cost of advanced repairs will still be too high. In order to reach the ideal of an advanced ship ultimately costing slightly less credits and a lot less time to maintain, it’s probably necessary to also tweak down the cost of shields and tiles, maybe by increasing the number output from the recipe. I really like how complicated and varied the ingredients are, though
