Shrike wrote:
Mining is barely profitable as-is. Nerfing loot = the system gets worse, not better.
If high level ores can't be looted from two fairly easy to beat enemy factions(which right now give loot that is more than generous enough for the difficulty of killing them), their value can be raised accordingly without further unbalancing the loot economy.
Keep in mind that mining is a money making mechanic. Right now, it is much, much easier and more economically efficient to acquire the sellable resources it provides through combat, making it less viable.
In terms of the ferians, I suspect they may need some buffs.....it used to be that swarms of miners were actually extremely dangerous. Over time, this became less of a thing...the plasma torch is now pretty terrible. The warriors are generally fine apart from some rather odd AI issues. I think when/if the torch gets re-designed....ferian farming will once again be a bit of a risk.
Swarms of miners would be a decent threat if they could catch up to the player. Right now, dealing with them amounts to just casually drifting along and shooting at them from outside their pitiful range.
I'd suggest making them fast enough to threaten the player, but adding a chance per miner of gating on station destruction instead of attacking, in order to keep the possibly hundreds of miners per hive from becoming *too* lethal. (Alternatively, we could be nice to people with weak computers and reduce the number of miners spawned per station)
Warriors are definitely threatening enough right now. If the miners were capable of supporting them, they'd be a reasonable challenge to even endgame - equipped players.
The warriors target whatever destroyed the colony, even if the player got it to 99%.
Already ticketed. Glad to see I'm not the only one who enjoys finding these things.
Since warriors that spawn before the colony is destroyed can fire over top of it, the warriors that spawn afterward will kill it for you and all the work is done. It may be a good to turn off friendly fire for ferians.
That's a bit of an inelegant solution, don't you think? Just store the most recent thing the station sicced warriors on, and send the avengers after that if the station's killer belongs to one of the Ferian factions.
They're not really much of a threat if you're careful about it. If you have a friendly station to retreat to, the friendlies can pick them all off for you if you wait for it.
That's a universal issue for enemy factions. The Ferian miners suffer more from it due to their speed, but that needs to be buffed regardless.
-Upon station destruction, have a ferian vessel gate in that takes the ore from the station, like corporate stations do. I'm not sure if this makes sense for zoanthropes to do, but if they have masters supervising the operation then maybe it makes sense.
If Ringer canon lets them have ships, that could work. Of course, the only time it would manage to take anything is when a Xeno Worldship blows it up, as a player can always just toss the ore in a crate if it doesn't fit in cargo, and I'm still counting on the Xenos eventually becoming smart enough not to commit suicide by Ferian poking(it doesn't make sense to attack a docile faction that's effectively made up of animals, unless they want to exterminate microsaurs and salmon too).
Make CW/Corporate neutral with ferians angry at the player - this would make things quite a bit more difficult.
I've always thought this would be a good idea. Of course, it would raise the question of why the government is unwilling to help an innocent-for-all-it-knows citizen who is being attacked by feral beasts.
Making ferians not give loot doesn't make mining any better. In EP it may make it worse since you seem to need to both mine and farm ferians to get enough of the rare ores for the armor fabricator to outfit yourself with anything high level at a level when it's still useful.
That system has lots of issues, the fact that the armor generally isn't worth the effort to make being one of them. Nerfing a loot source that the player can only access with the skill or equipment not to need the armor anyways(and is several systems away from the shipyard that makes it) would not be throwing a wrench into a perfect machine.
There's also the fact that ore can be bought in huge quantities from UAS stations, too. The game's economy isn't exactly stingy in terms of the credits it gives out.
