"No-selling" mode

Post ideas & suggestions you have pertaining to the game here.
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Derakon
Militia Lieutenant
Militia Lieutenant
Posts: 175
Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:53 am

Most of the fun of the game is in going out, getting into fights, and finding the rare intact items that you can make use of. The only reason to pick up a lot of the items in the game is to sell them -- they have no intrinsic value to the player except that they can be converted into cash. Unfortunately, this tends to mean that you spend a lot of time flying around with a hold full of nominally-valuable, functionally-worthless items as you await the next station that you can sell things to, constantly shuffling items in and out of the hold as you find an incrementally more value-dense item.

Personally, I don't find the "shopping minigame" to be all that much fun. I do it, because I'd be a fool not to -- the game rewards selling things far too highly. But there's no real reason why it has to reward that behavior. I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be a controversial suggestion, but hear me out...what if there were a game option that made it impossible to sell things? You could still buy items, but no shop would be interested in purchasing things from your hold.

Obviously, since currently most of the player's income comes from selling gear they find, this option would need to provide an alternate source of cash; perhaps the easiest "solution" would be to make gold and platinum cash cards more common as drops. Not so common that you'd have as much cash as a player dedicated to scraping every last credit out of every system would have; maybe 50% of that at most*. And conversely, since the player would no longer need to dedicate hold space to junk, it might be necessary to constrict the size of the hold so that you can't carry a hundred hull patches. Or it might not be.

To pre-empt an anticipated rebuttal: while yes, I could simply choose not to sell things, so long as the game rewards the behavior, like I said, I'd be a fool not to sell things. The point is to design the game such that the things that are fun are also the things that the player is rewarded for doing. It's a lot easier to abide by a conduct when you choose the conduct at the beginning of the game, and then the game enforces it for you from then on.

And for those of you that enjoy selling, that's why this would be a game option, not a requirement.

* Or you could cut it down even more, and give the player just enough cash that they could afford to refuel, repair armor, and install newly-found gear. A hypothetical "live off the land" mode where you just can't afford to buy new equipment, and instead have to make do with what you can find. This might get impractical in the late game, mostly because I don't think many ships have 500MW reactors, but that's not an insurmountable problem.
JohnBWatson
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1452
Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:17 pm

I think a better idea is to rework the loot system to be more similar to other roguelikes. Make wrecks and intact loot a lot less common, and limit the number of capital ships any given station can call, while reducing the number of pieces of equipment sold by each merchant.

In most roguelikes, loot and merchants are a lot rarer, farming is either non - viable or impossible, and each merchant only sells a handful of items, making it impossible to load up the same set of equipment for every playthrough. This adds a lot of replayability, because it forces the player to make due with a different set of items each run. It also removes the hassle of selling so many things - especially since that 'only kind of good' weapon might be worth using.
NIGHTHAWK620
Militia Lieutenant
Militia Lieutenant
Posts: 129
Joined: Sat Aug 06, 2011 2:24 am
Location: WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y.

How about getting the items you find fixed and/ or repaired and/ or modified like the weapons station does ..... or expand on the Tinkers fixing reactors, devices, shields etc....
NH620
relanat
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 941
Joined: Tue Nov 05, 2013 9:56 am

Missions could be expanded to provide more income.

The "save the ag station" mission is always good because it provides so many credits.

Maybe you could "save" people stranded in wrecks by giving them LOX, food or water. Or transporting them to the nearest station. You could be rewarded for that.

Or using a tractor beam to tow a disabled ship to the nearest repair station could give a cash reward.

I like the idea of setting the game style at the start. giantcabbage had a great idea of a three level game. "Casual" where you get everything, "Normal' same as current game start, and "Hardcore" where you start with a bare minimum of features. Awesome.

There could also be an option to have "Normal" games, "No selling" games, "Mining" games, etc.
Stupid code. Do what I want, not what I typed in!
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