Protectyon after the Plot: Demand, Business, Exploit?

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Sorry for double post, but the above is long enough.

Second tide after the cue change: my 2 Astrids managed to sell 5 protectyon each. That's 10 of 18 stations in the Avarice sector. The rest got the free gift from I don't know where... just can't find it in the scripts


/edit/ps
Good news. I have at least 3x "RIP Protectyon Delivery Raleigh (Condensate)" ships in Avarice now and they're actually buying protectyon from Tidebreak. I still own Tidebreak so I'm able to monitor the situation.

Bad news. Progress is going slow due to the massive stock Tidebreak constantly received before modding it. Tidebreak still sitting at 22930 m³ of condensate and I fear I'll have to script-drain that station if I want to see any results in my lifetime
I just don't yet know how to write a cue that will tigger only once when the mod gets installed / first activated. I don't want to reset Tidebreak every hour - I'd rather fix it once, then let it run on the modified cue.


/edit/ps
Good news. It really does seem fixable! In addition to my previous endeavours I began to harass the lately discovered ships named "RIP Protectyon Delivery Raleigh (Condensate)" and made them drop their cargo. I just blew that loot up since my stocks are full to the brim and there's generally too much of that stuff circulating. So now with Tidebreak out of the picture and the RIP Raleighs losing their stock I'm slowly getting close to making it a business. At least the Raleighs I just "emptied" came to my station a short while after, just to buy my protectyon at 27k

Also captured one of them and added it to my protectyon store's traders list. The Astrids go for everything - useless as subortinate protectyon traders - but the Raleighs only do protectyon and nothing else. They filled Tidebreak up until its price dropped below my selling price of 27k.. so I assumed the RIP Raleighs would buy at Tidebreak, but it doesn't have any sell offers. I returned it to faction.civillian, but I guess I broke it... or it doesn't sell when stock is below a certain value... no idea.

Looking at the cue TidebreakCondensate in setup_dlc_pirate.xml

Code: Select all

<add_tradeware object="$TideBreak" ware="ware.condensate" allowbuy="false" allowsell="true"/>

...maybe I actually "fixed" it? Before I could buy and sell - now I can only sell to Tidebreak - maybe that was the intended behaviour all along? Again, no idea. And buy/sell are ambiguous in this context. But right now I'm able to make some coin selling protectyon, so who cares

[Baldamundo]

Being somewhat lazy I've put that into my mod "Casual Story Mode", which aims to ease out some of the crazy numbers Egosoft considers "appropriate". Tho it's just been an idea so far and only changes the 15 million to pay VIG into this:

Code: Select all

<set_value name="$Ch10_BribeAmount" exact="(([[15000000, (player.money / 1Cr)i / 3].min, 150000].max)i)Cr"/>

Meaning the amount to pay changes based on the player's cash. By default it's 1/3 of the player's cash, but min 150k and max 15m Cr. Mod comment:

Spoiler

Show

This should hurt but not be an impossible wall to climb for players that just started their game.
Poor soul: Can we expect the player to work a bit to gather 150k? Hunt some crystals... seems feasible.
Normal guy: We'll take a third of your current balance. Thank you.
Rich prick: Okay, you'll get off the hook for the original 15 million credits.

Here's the mod: vxCasualStoryMode-v0.zip
If anyone likes to test the Tidebreak change but doesn't want to change the bribe amount: just delete ./vxCasualStoryMode/extensions/ego_dlc_pirate/md/story_thefan.xml from the mod directory after extraction.

Could you not set it to scale off the player's total assets stat? Otherwise it's very easily exploitable by just dumping all your liquid cash on something to drop the price.

BTW is there a summary somewhere of the different outcomes for this quest overall?

Sounds like either way you have to go to war with VIG, but if you oppose the Northrivers you get the station blueprints to set up your own protectyron supply (albeit that's currently pointless?) and a chance to capture the two Astrids...whereas if you side with the Northrivers you get what?

[Imperial Good]

5.10 is changing the mechanics behind the protectyon sold at Tidebreak to better reflect what Northriver is meant to be doing lore wise. It will be much more profitable for the player to provide protectyon.

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5.10 is changing the mechanics behind the protectyon sold at Tidebreak to better reflect what Northriver is meant to be doing lore wise

Awesome! I love when my mods go obsolete

Btw: Right now it works very well for me. Since Tidebreak doesn't receive full resupplies anymore and the RIP Raleighs got encouraged to "reconsider" my protectyon sell offer, the Avarice stations actually drop down to 1/5 and even 0/5 protectyon before my and RIP's Raleighs resupply them. Even my selling price of 27000 works really nice now and my Raleighs keep Tidebreak close to 1k of protectyon - just above the new "Northriver resupply trigger point"

[palm911]

IS THIS still a thing?

i mean can you make money from pretection? or not yet?

[NightmareNight91]

Just side with the twins, you get well over a hundred mill after selling free ships and stuff and the outcome is the same, just different rewards.

The fact that I can't automate a ship to go to leap of faith and pick up protectyon and distribute it means I will never bother with it after the plot. There's no real incentive when you can just spam advanced electronics or computronic substrate and make millions.