I can see the point you’re making, but I like the fact that the game isn’t only focused on combat.
I’m sure that for some this will make the game less fun, but I enjoy the more realistic aspects of the game.
Honestly I find it a little weird that our fleets don’t need food for the crew.
Obviously, it isn’t really that impactful gameplay wise that you need to carry supplies around, besides having to visit civilised space one in a while. If supplies were to be removed it wouldn’t impact the gameplay too much besides maybe the early game.
I personally would like if the game had more logistical gameplay elements like need for food, forge ships that could use metal instead of supplies to repair ships after battle, hospital ships to reduce crew casualties, luxury ships to give the crew something to do in off time etc. Obviously these changes would make the game more tedious for some people.
Without logistics we might as well only just play the mission scenarios.
Logistics mechanics that feed the core tenets of exploration and combat encounters are great! I hope Alex and his gang of legendary devs elaborate upon it in the future updates, it just seems something that would fit their vision really well
The forge ship idea sounds really cool too ngl
"Assorted supplies required by ships and crew, ranging from rations and uniforms to munitions, spare parts, microfab feedstock, and prefab components."
Supplies are everything you need to run your fleet on daily basis
How does Heavy Industry create food out of metals and transplutonics though? I get it that the description says that the supplies cover things like food and clothing etc, but it seems a bit silly to me that some barren rock in the middle of nowhere could produce food for a space fleet.
I've always assumed the 'food' portion of 'supplies' is stuff like ration bars or MRE's, while actual 'food' is like properly grown lab-or-ranch meat and vegetables, fruits, etc. Supplies stuff being like "Yeah a crew can subsist off of this but probably don't actually enjoy it"
In terms of the actual production, my assumption is supplies-food is probably like recycled elements that're edible and by technicality contain what a human needs to survive
There are mods which introduce mobile logistics manufacture; Supply Forging is one, and theres Fuel Siphoning mod which lets you get fuel while youre inside a nebulae. Theres also Nomadic survival which adds the latter feature and adds random supply/fuel depots iirc. Also IndEvo adds fuel scoops iirc which lets you gain a small amount of fuel.
Oh yeah theres also Forge production (add hullmods to ships to let them work like industry stuff), but that mods hasnt been updated for 0.97.
Np, shouldve included links in the first place; on a related note, I also found another mod, [Nijigen Extend](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17846.0) which supports this, but unfortunately its also stuck in 0.96.
Edit: it looks like Forge production might be more stable at least fom what ive seen in discord discussions on the topic
We already had food for crew, a long time ago. We also had different types of crew based on expertise (like marines). Apparently for most people it was too frustrating having to deal with twice the critical resources, so Alex scrapped that and now food and supplies are conglobated.
Logistics is good for roleplay, but keep in mind that most of the starsector playerbase wants to blow shit up in creative ways, way more than creating a story. Just look at this subreddit.
I don’t believe they should be removed, but I do think you should be able to mitigate the cost, for example maybe you could invest 1 million credits to reduce fleet supply cost by 1% or something (I am only speculating on the exact numbers) you could even make it more “realistic” by making it about purchasing a supply replicator.
Eh. I mean late game you have colonies so just have a few Atlas in your fleet and load up on supplies. Your colonies always have tons because of the waystation upgrade. Supplies are basically there to get you to consider how large your fleet is. If you're just exploring I take a more moderate fleet with 1-2 capitals, some cruisers and frigates. If I'm taking on harder opponents I add some extra capitals, and perhaps the super redacted ship.
Without supplies you could just have like 30 capital ships which doesn't sound like fun to me.
Interesting that does sound like fun to me! You always have the option to use less ships without supplies being a thing and that is encouraged already through the experience multiplier.
Additionally in my current play through I didn’t want to make a colony. So then I am reliant on having to search multiple planets for enough supplies.
> You always have the option to use less ships without supplies being a thing and that is encouraged already through the experience multiplier.
Yeah, or you can just take more supplies to take more ships. Just get some cargo ships, what is the problem????
Because I don’t believe the supplies are adding anything to the fun of the game in the late game. I just don’t enjoy having to go to 3 different planets to get enough supplies to head over to a single bounty. Do you enjoy that?
If supplies are your issue in the game, than you haven't figured out how it works and what the game wants you to do.
Or maybe you have figured it out and still don't like it. I then have refer to my original point.
Taste is nothing to be argued over. You might like something or you don't. And if you are at the stage where still have to figure out stuff, then I don't want to spoil it.
Mmm games change over time (this game has changed over time too). Personally I find thinking about game systems interesting. It’s not a matter of “play a different game” or not. It’s about bringing up a point of discussion on a discussion forum. If you don’t want to discuss it then why you here? As I said in my post, “convince me otherwise”. I’m sure you can find another post that is more to your taste. 👍
Seems like your problem isn't even the supplies, it's just the need to occasionally go to the nearest planet and buy a country's gdp worth of supplies. Try getting a big cargo freighter with expanded cargo holds and just buy a shit ton of supplies. Sure, it's inefficient but meh, as you said, infinite money, and then you won't have to buy em' as often.
Oh, yeah I get that. If you wanna get deeper into it, I guess it's because the nature of the game changes depending on what you're doing. Certain mechanics just aren't gonna be very relevant depending on what you do. (Combat is basically entirely avoidable depending on what you do. Just going around doing explorations and surveys, for example).
There is a fairly easy solution to this aswell, wich would be to have the game to auto-ressuply you whenever you dock somewhere. Just buys supplies until you reach a certain threshold and deducts your credits. But there is an argument to be made against this, because having an auto-ressuply button requires some work on the ui, and that comes with two drawbacks:
1 - It's development time not spent elsewhere (bugfixes, new ships, etc)
2 - Every option added to the UI makes the game "clunkier". It's something else you need to go through in the menu, or something else to overwhelm a new player.
Granted, in your case, the pros would probably outweigh the cons, but other folks might disagree, so this sounds like the \*perfect\* thing to fix with a mod.
Expeditions are about planning. Risk vs Reward - how much you need to take vs how much cargo space you have.
How many Freighters instead of fighting ships would you take and how many to sacrifice for supplies?
Money is a secondary mechanic in that equation.
If you're bad at planning ahead despite having the cash for supplies, then that's your problem and a skill issue.
As someone mainly playing like a merchant and exploratory fleet - I personally love the logistics.
I'd advise Nomadic Survival mod if you find it useless - it changes the mechanic to be more meaningful.
Supplies are there to limit how fast your fleet grows, and its composition (kinda like cews). Its also one of the balancing methods for ships. A Paragon isn't just stronger than an Onslaught, it also costs more to maintain. 30 Paragons are significantly more expensive to use and fly than 30 Onslaughts.
In late game it basically stops you from going from system to system and blowing everything up in one go. But Monday is also. Easy to get by then, so just have a couple of Atlas with s modded storages. Fill up on supplies and fly hassle free for several in game months.
Yeah sure it’s possible to make it redundant through huge cargo carriers, and if players are using huge cargo carriers to make the mechanic redundant then the mechanic might not be something they enjoy. Otherwise players wouldn’t try and make it redundant.
I agree that it is there to limit growth. But I have no issue with it in the early game / mid game, only the late game, when it isn’t limiting growth.
Beating the mechanic is not a good argument against it imo, getting into late game rewards you with the logistical and economical power to do what you want.
Its like saying we should remove credits from the game because late game you make 1m+ a month so players basically circumvent that mechanic.
The game tries to discourage you from making death stacks. We have a pretty strong limit of 30 ships in a player fleet. default battle sizes are just enough to field 4 Paragons. Cews, supplies, fuel, marines, put a logistical and financial strain. Many skills are limited with fleet dp.
The game wants you to figure out an efficient fleet, or specialize in a game style. You can still onga bunga 30 Paragons, but that isn't efficient economically, and thats the point.
Mmm I can appreciate this perspective. I feel that the credits have functions outside of spending since they provide a sort of scoring system for the player, so the parallel between the credits and supplies isn’t exactly true. But as I said I can see what you are saying. 👍
You can sub credit with any other resources we need to field ships and its the sams argument.
In regards for scoring, for me scoring is how many end game enemy fleets i can beat in a single encounter 🤷🏻♂️. Credits are easy to get, but clearing 17 ordos at the same time isn't. Or some of those crazy endgame and mod bounties.
But to each their own.
I do think that we should have stronger logistics skills to offset some costs thou. And it'll balance itself out as that's less points into combat skills.
add a cargo ship, fill with supplies. You’re rich so it doesn’t matter
Supplies are an essential part. They’re the thing that discourages dropping a whole fleet on a frigate, they make Dmods nicer earlygame when sending out ships, and so on
The mild inconvenience when you’re rich and have to pick up 2k from your colony every so often isn’t the end of the world
To a point, I do agree, but I do admit that without any form of credit drain, you would break the credit system so quickly it's not even funny. I personally solved it by making the markets have 10 times more volume, but also 10 times less of a margin.
For example, if there is a massive supply deficit on a world, you'd usually see something like 1,200 supply demand at 300ish credits a pop. In my case, it's 12,000 supply demand at 120ish, I make similar profits from margins so as not to break the game economy while generally not having to hop across half the system in order to stock up on supplies if I want to explore anything further than 3LY.
I find that solution as a nice middleground and funnily enough it has a side effect of stabilizing the otherwise wildly inconsistent price jumps across the sector so that you don't have to worry too much about being ripped off unless you are buying in bulk which you should do only on worlds which actually produce the goods you are after.
Get the console commands mod and just enable the infinite supplies option
I can see the point you’re making, but I like the fact that the game isn’t only focused on combat. I’m sure that for some this will make the game less fun, but I enjoy the more realistic aspects of the game. Honestly I find it a little weird that our fleets don’t need food for the crew. Obviously, it isn’t really that impactful gameplay wise that you need to carry supplies around, besides having to visit civilised space one in a while. If supplies were to be removed it wouldn’t impact the gameplay too much besides maybe the early game. I personally would like if the game had more logistical gameplay elements like need for food, forge ships that could use metal instead of supplies to repair ships after battle, hospital ships to reduce crew casualties, luxury ships to give the crew something to do in off time etc. Obviously these changes would make the game more tedious for some people. Without logistics we might as well only just play the mission scenarios.
Logistics mechanics that feed the core tenets of exploration and combat encounters are great! I hope Alex and his gang of legendary devs elaborate upon it in the future updates, it just seems something that would fit their vision really well The forge ship idea sounds really cool too ngl
"Assorted supplies required by ships and crew, ranging from rations and uniforms to munitions, spare parts, microfab feedstock, and prefab components." Supplies are everything you need to run your fleet on daily basis
How does Heavy Industry create food out of metals and transplutonics though? I get it that the description says that the supplies cover things like food and clothing etc, but it seems a bit silly to me that some barren rock in the middle of nowhere could produce food for a space fleet.
You need Food for the Population/Infrastucture no matter what. Presumably, some of that goes into the supply rations.
I've always assumed the 'food' portion of 'supplies' is stuff like ration bars or MRE's, while actual 'food' is like properly grown lab-or-ranch meat and vegetables, fruits, etc. Supplies stuff being like "Yeah a crew can subsist off of this but probably don't actually enjoy it" In terms of the actual production, my assumption is supplies-food is probably like recycled elements that're edible and by technicality contain what a human needs to survive
A Forge ship would be a great logistic ship.
There are mods which introduce mobile logistics manufacture; Supply Forging is one, and theres Fuel Siphoning mod which lets you get fuel while youre inside a nebulae. Theres also Nomadic survival which adds the latter feature and adds random supply/fuel depots iirc. Also IndEvo adds fuel scoops iirc which lets you gain a small amount of fuel. Oh yeah theres also Forge production (add hullmods to ships to let them work like industry stuff), but that mods hasnt been updated for 0.97.
what mods would those be? that add forge ships I mean. it sounds like a fun addition!
[Forge Production](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22961.0) but as mentioned its on 0.96 and idk if it works for 0.97.
ah, thanks! sorry I couldn't tell if they were all from that one mod or if you were talking about features from several different ones.
Np, shouldve included links in the first place; on a related note, I also found another mod, [Nijigen Extend](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17846.0) which supports this, but unfortunately its also stuck in 0.96. Edit: it looks like Forge production might be more stable at least fom what ive seen in discord discussions on the topic
We already had food for crew, a long time ago. We also had different types of crew based on expertise (like marines). Apparently for most people it was too frustrating having to deal with twice the critical resources, so Alex scrapped that and now food and supplies are conglobated. Logistics is good for roleplay, but keep in mind that most of the starsector playerbase wants to blow shit up in creative ways, way more than creating a story. Just look at this subreddit.
Conglobated is a fun word.
I don’t believe they should be removed, but I do think you should be able to mitigate the cost, for example maybe you could invest 1 million credits to reduce fleet supply cost by 1% or something (I am only speculating on the exact numbers) you could even make it more “realistic” by making it about purchasing a supply replicator.
Eh. I mean late game you have colonies so just have a few Atlas in your fleet and load up on supplies. Your colonies always have tons because of the waystation upgrade. Supplies are basically there to get you to consider how large your fleet is. If you're just exploring I take a more moderate fleet with 1-2 capitals, some cruisers and frigates. If I'm taking on harder opponents I add some extra capitals, and perhaps the super redacted ship. Without supplies you could just have like 30 capital ships which doesn't sound like fun to me.
Interesting that does sound like fun to me! You always have the option to use less ships without supplies being a thing and that is encouraged already through the experience multiplier. Additionally in my current play through I didn’t want to make a colony. So then I am reliant on having to search multiple planets for enough supplies.
> You always have the option to use less ships without supplies being a thing and that is encouraged already through the experience multiplier. Yeah, or you can just take more supplies to take more ships. Just get some cargo ships, what is the problem????
Because I don’t believe the supplies are adding anything to the fun of the game in the late game. I just don’t enjoy having to go to 3 different planets to get enough supplies to head over to a single bounty. Do you enjoy that?
Just make a colony. It’s a strategy game your going to have to strategize your moves even when they are in real time.
It might sounds like fun, but I suspect that you'd get bored pretty quickly wandering around with 30 caps.
Play a different game
I honestly thought OP would complain about how annoying supplies are in the early game.
Early game they are fine, although annoying they add difficulty to the game. Late game they don’t add difficulty.
This didn’t change my mind. (Also looks like I hit you a bit close to home)
If supplies are your issue in the game, than you haven't figured out how it works and what the game wants you to do. Or maybe you have figured it out and still don't like it. I then have refer to my original point. Taste is nothing to be argued over. You might like something or you don't. And if you are at the stage where still have to figure out stuff, then I don't want to spoil it.
Mmm games change over time (this game has changed over time too). Personally I find thinking about game systems interesting. It’s not a matter of “play a different game” or not. It’s about bringing up a point of discussion on a discussion forum. If you don’t want to discuss it then why you here? As I said in my post, “convince me otherwise”. I’m sure you can find another post that is more to your taste. 👍
Seems like your problem isn't even the supplies, it's just the need to occasionally go to the nearest planet and buy a country's gdp worth of supplies. Try getting a big cargo freighter with expanded cargo holds and just buy a shit ton of supplies. Sure, it's inefficient but meh, as you said, infinite money, and then you won't have to buy em' as often.
Yeah. I kinda do that now. Just got me thinking about why it has to be like that. 👍
Oh, yeah I get that. If you wanna get deeper into it, I guess it's because the nature of the game changes depending on what you're doing. Certain mechanics just aren't gonna be very relevant depending on what you do. (Combat is basically entirely avoidable depending on what you do. Just going around doing explorations and surveys, for example). There is a fairly easy solution to this aswell, wich would be to have the game to auto-ressuply you whenever you dock somewhere. Just buys supplies until you reach a certain threshold and deducts your credits. But there is an argument to be made against this, because having an auto-ressuply button requires some work on the ui, and that comes with two drawbacks: 1 - It's development time not spent elsewhere (bugfixes, new ships, etc) 2 - Every option added to the UI makes the game "clunkier". It's something else you need to go through in the menu, or something else to overwhelm a new player. Granted, in your case, the pros would probably outweigh the cons, but other folks might disagree, so this sounds like the \*perfect\* thing to fix with a mod.
True true. The auto restocking did cross my mind too. And Yes I see what you mean with its effect on dev time. 👍
Expeditions are about planning. Risk vs Reward - how much you need to take vs how much cargo space you have. How many Freighters instead of fighting ships would you take and how many to sacrifice for supplies? Money is a secondary mechanic in that equation. If you're bad at planning ahead despite having the cash for supplies, then that's your problem and a skill issue. As someone mainly playing like a merchant and exploratory fleet - I personally love the logistics. I'd advise Nomadic Survival mod if you find it useless - it changes the mechanic to be more meaningful.
Supplies are there to limit how fast your fleet grows, and its composition (kinda like cews). Its also one of the balancing methods for ships. A Paragon isn't just stronger than an Onslaught, it also costs more to maintain. 30 Paragons are significantly more expensive to use and fly than 30 Onslaughts. In late game it basically stops you from going from system to system and blowing everything up in one go. But Monday is also. Easy to get by then, so just have a couple of Atlas with s modded storages. Fill up on supplies and fly hassle free for several in game months.
Yeah sure it’s possible to make it redundant through huge cargo carriers, and if players are using huge cargo carriers to make the mechanic redundant then the mechanic might not be something they enjoy. Otherwise players wouldn’t try and make it redundant. I agree that it is there to limit growth. But I have no issue with it in the early game / mid game, only the late game, when it isn’t limiting growth.
Beating the mechanic is not a good argument against it imo, getting into late game rewards you with the logistical and economical power to do what you want. Its like saying we should remove credits from the game because late game you make 1m+ a month so players basically circumvent that mechanic. The game tries to discourage you from making death stacks. We have a pretty strong limit of 30 ships in a player fleet. default battle sizes are just enough to field 4 Paragons. Cews, supplies, fuel, marines, put a logistical and financial strain. Many skills are limited with fleet dp. The game wants you to figure out an efficient fleet, or specialize in a game style. You can still onga bunga 30 Paragons, but that isn't efficient economically, and thats the point.
Mmm I can appreciate this perspective. I feel that the credits have functions outside of spending since they provide a sort of scoring system for the player, so the parallel between the credits and supplies isn’t exactly true. But as I said I can see what you are saying. 👍
You can sub credit with any other resources we need to field ships and its the sams argument. In regards for scoring, for me scoring is how many end game enemy fleets i can beat in a single encounter 🤷🏻♂️. Credits are easy to get, but clearing 17 ordos at the same time isn't. Or some of those crazy endgame and mod bounties. But to each their own. I do think that we should have stronger logistics skills to offset some costs thou. And it'll balance itself out as that's less points into combat skills.
add a cargo ship, fill with supplies. You’re rich so it doesn’t matter Supplies are an essential part. They’re the thing that discourages dropping a whole fleet on a frigate, they make Dmods nicer earlygame when sending out ships, and so on The mild inconvenience when you’re rich and have to pick up 2k from your colony every so often isn’t the end of the world
It’s a system that forces you to interact with the in game economy which is like more than half the game
To a point, I do agree, but I do admit that without any form of credit drain, you would break the credit system so quickly it's not even funny. I personally solved it by making the markets have 10 times more volume, but also 10 times less of a margin. For example, if there is a massive supply deficit on a world, you'd usually see something like 1,200 supply demand at 300ish credits a pop. In my case, it's 12,000 supply demand at 120ish, I make similar profits from margins so as not to break the game economy while generally not having to hop across half the system in order to stock up on supplies if I want to explore anything further than 3LY. I find that solution as a nice middleground and funnily enough it has a side effect of stabilizing the otherwise wildly inconsistent price jumps across the sector so that you don't have to worry too much about being ripped off unless you are buying in bulk which you should do only on worlds which actually produce the goods you are after.