Post 4.0 Resource/Trade Nerf Hammer or What?

[MHDriver]

I just pulled out my oldest vanilla save game where I pretty much run the galaxy with over 94 station, 650 trade ships, 25bil in assets and I let it run for a couple of days. What a total let down this vanilla game has become. Even with the addition of the Split and Terrans with over +10 and +20 respectively and trading with them my average trade payment due went from around 30 mil per transaction pre 4.0 to 120k per transaction post 4.0. If this is a game design choice I have to ask did ES just hire someone from FDEV or what because this is just ridiculous. I guess it's back to modded games from now on.

[Midnitewolf]

The devs have really seemed to have decided that the pace of the game was really too fast, if you can call several hundred hours just to get to the point where you can actually do fleet battles too fast.

Honestly I don't get it either. The nerfed the hell out of Crystal Mining to the point it is beyond tedious and not worth the effort which means it takes much, much longer to get your feet under you and get a few mining ships running to help jumpstart your personal economy. Then they nerfed the crap out of income earned from ships sales, down to about 10-20% of what it was before. They also from what I understand, nerfed the hell out of resources so getting the mining resources and they wares they produce is much, much slower. Everything they do just slows things down and makes the game feel much more grindy and I really just don't see the point in a game that literally can take 500+ hours to reach any sort of end game as is.

[GCU Grey Area]

Have also seen a noticeable drop in the profits from my trade fleet, though nothing on the scale of the OP (using modded ships? Don't think vanilla's got anything that can carry anywhere close to a 30 million cargo on a single trade run). Nevertheless have still noticed a big shift in profitability & what my freighters are mostly transporting.

In my current game best trade runs I'm finding are almost all low end intermediates (even had them trading Graphene, which I'd normally never bother with). Most shipyards & wharves seem to be chock full of everything they need (e.g. ARG shipyard: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmv4ipb2l246w ... 1.jpg?dl=0), but in particular they're very well stocked with exactly the sort of high value wares (Antimatter Converters, etc) I could rely on in previous games to bring in the big profits. Would estimate that my trade fleet (currently 8x Okinawa, under manual control) is currently bringing less than 1/2 of what I would normally expect.

Don't think it's an intentional Trade nerf however. My suspicion is it's due to the bugged Xenon - they're not destroying nearly as many ships or stations as they did in my pre-4.0 games, thus not generating as much demand for ship/station components & it's that lack of demand which is so detrimental to the profitability of my trade fleet.

[Raptor34]

Have also seen a noticeable drop in the profits from my trade fleet, though nothing on the scale of the OP (using modded ships? Don't think vanilla's got anything that can carry anywhere close to a 30 million cargo on a single trade run). Nevertheless have still noticed a big shift in profitability & what my freighters are mostly transporting.

In my current game best trade runs I'm finding are almost all low end intermediates (even had them trading Graphene, which I'd normally never bother with). Most shipyards & wharves seem to be chock full of everything they need (e.g. ARG shipyard: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmv4ipb2l246w ... 1.jpg?dl=0), but in particular they're very well stocked with exactly the sort of high value wares (Antimatter Converters, etc) I could rely on in previous games to bring in the big profits. Would estimate that my trade fleet (currently 8x Okinawa, under manual control) is currently bringing less than 1/2 of what I would normally expect.

Don't think it's an intentional Trade nerf however. My suspicion is it's due to the bugged Xenon - they're not destroying nearly as many ships or stations as they did in my pre-4.0 games, thus not generating as much demand for ship/station components & it's that lack of demand which is so detrimental to the profitability of my trade fleet.

Either that or there was an economy buff. Even without my intervention at all, the factions are pumping out factories somehow. Like there is 6-8 Claytronics fabs right in Eighteen Billion.
Did the Xenon ever give that much pressure? Back then they were pushing into Ianamus Zura but still not kicking the Teladi out and yet their economy is nowhere near as strong as it is now. The Hewa Twin cluster shouldn't be giving that much of an effect.

[GCU Grey Area]

Did the Xenon ever give that much pressure?

Suspect they did, Hatikvah's in particular tended to be a outright warzone in my previous games. Almost always some variety of carnage going on there whenever I flew through the sector, not remotely unusual to see several burnt out freighters & warships floating near the gates to Silent Witness & the Xenon sectors to the north. Definite contrast in my current game, particularly since ZYA captured Tharka's Cascade XV from the Xenon (ZYA are doing suspiciously well too). Hatikvah's is completely peaceful now. Suspect that's a big reason why the ARG shipyard's gone from being one of my best customers in past games to being utterly useless (for trade purposes) in my current game. It's just not building many ships, because very few of them ever need to be replaced.

[MHDriver]

Have also seen a noticeable drop in the profits from my trade fleet, though nothing on the scale of the OP (using modded ships? Don't think vanilla's got anything that can carry anywhere close to a 30 million cargo on a single trade run). Nevertheless have still noticed a big shift in profitability & what my freighters are mostly transporting.

In my current game best trade runs I'm finding are almost all low end intermediates (even had them trading Graphene, which I'd normally never bother with). Most shipyards & wharves seem to be chock full of everything they need (e.g. ARG shipyard: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmv4ipb2l246w ... 1.jpg?dl=0), but in particular they're very well stocked with exactly the sort of high value wares (Antimatter Converters, etc) I could rely on in previous games to bring in the big profits. Would estimate that my trade fleet (currently 8x Okinawa, under manual control) is currently bringing less than 1/2 of what I would normally expect.

Don't think it's an intentional Trade nerf however. My suspicion is it's due to the bugged Xenon - they're not destroying nearly as many ships or stations as they did in my pre-4.0 games, thus not generating as much demand for ship/station components & it's that lack of demand which is so detrimental to the profitability of my trade fleet.

No perhaps I wasn't clear. In the map view which is where I tend to spend most of my time you have "cr due from trades" figure that shows an aggregate of current trades and that was the figure I was referring to. So all of my trades across the map would average 30mil at any give point in time pre Split & Terran DLC. Post DLCs it shows a constant 120k+/- due from trades for the same amount of ships and stations active. Perhaps that is more clear..

With respect to the Xenon influence currently. In the save that I was referring to, the Xenon were reduced to just stragglers in just a few of their home systems and the economy was driven by the faction wars I suspect. Once I loaded the save post 4.0 the Xenon sprang to life with large raiding parties attacking many of the split sectors which did not appear to affect the economy at all as the Split did not react at all. They built no defense fleet or even rebuilt the destroyed stations so I saw no increase trade activity from them. Of course the Teladi just expanded into all of the empty Split sectors which should have boosted the trade. The addition of the Terrans to the economy really had very little impact.

[GCU Grey Area]

No perhaps I wasn't clear. In the map view which is where I tend to spend most of my time you have "cr due from trades" figure that shows an aggregate of current trades and that was the figure I was referring to. So all of my trades across the map would average 30mil at any give point in time pre Split & Terran DLC. Post DLCs it shows a constant 120k+/- due from trades for the same amount of ships and stations active. Perhaps that is more clear..

Pretty sure that number at the top of the map is mostly for manual trades, sold ship equipment, etc. In particular don't think it include any trades made by stations. In most games I run a manually operated trade fleet & only tend to get a particularly high number there when that fleet has a large number of trades in the queue for each ship. In the early-mid game it's often my primary source of income & I try to always keep it up around 40-50 million. Late game, when I've mostly changed to station-based income I rarely see numbers anywhere near that order of magnitude. Sometimes it drops to 0, even with numerous ships assigned to my stations with active sell orders in their queues. Not sure it's a good indicator of what's going on in the economy as a whole.

[MHDriver]

No perhaps I wasn't clear. In the map view which is where I tend to spend most of my time you have "cr due from trades" figure that shows an aggregate of current trades and that was the figure I was referring to. So all of my trades across the map would average 30mil at any give point in time pre Split & Terran DLC. Post DLCs it shows a constant 120k+/- due from trades for the same amount of ships and stations active. Perhaps that is more clear..

Pretty sure that number at the top of the map is mostly for manual trades, sold ship equipment, etc. In particular don't think it include any trades made by stations. In most games I run a manually operated trade fleet & only tend to get a particularly high number there when that fleet has a large number of trades in the queue for each ship. In the early-mid game it's often my primary source of income & I try to always keep it up around 40-50 million. Late game, when I've mostly changed to station-based income I rarely see numbers anywhere near that order of magnitude. Sometimes it drops to 0, even with numerous ships assigned to my stations with active sell orders in their queues. Not sure it's a good indicator of what's going on in the economy as a whole.

I don't think that is the case as I don't have any free traders in my save game. All trade ships are assigned to one type of station or another including mining ships.

[GCU Grey Area]

I don't think that is the case as I don't have any free traders in my save game. All trade ships are assigned to one type of station or another including mining ships.

Well, this is what I see in my games:

Current 4.0 Terran game, with active independent trade fleet = 35 million due from trades.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/56qnx6nl26veq ... 1.jpg?dl=0

Old 3.0 Split game, without active trade fleet, but has 1 big production station & dozens of freighters selling the stuff it produces = 0 due from trades.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1020phuif7p2b ... 1.jpg?dl=0
The highlighted sale of Drone Components alone should be worth around 500k, but this is not shown in the 'due from trades' element of the map.

[MHDriver]

I don't think that is the case as I don't have any free traders in my save game. All trade ships are assigned to one type of station or another including mining ships.

Well, this is what I see in my games:

Current 4.0 Terran game, with active independent trade fleet = 35 million due from trades.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/56qnx6nl26veq ... 1.jpg?dl=0

Old 3.0 Split game, without active trade fleet, but has 1 big production station & dozens of freighters selling the stuff it produces = 0 due from trades.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1020phuif7p2b ... 1.jpg?dl=0
The highlighted sale of Drone Components alone should be worth around 500k, but this is not shown in the 'due from trades' element of the map.

Well I certainly can't explain it. I can say only that I have no independent trade ships running so I don't know how it works then.

[paraskous]

Oldest save? It didn't occur to you to check for neccessary changes and look if everything still works? You can always load your old save. But don't expect the world to behave like it did in 1.0.