Suggestions on how to improve the mod

[sabrecat]

I havent had problems with income, a nice tactic is to send the troop carrier to chase the flying target but not intercepting it, as soon as it lands it will prompt for a ground assault.

Good point. If the OP is shooting things down, that could account for the seemingly weak return on attacking shipping.

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[GarlandSP]

Good point. If the OP is shooting things down, that could account for the seemingly weak return on attacking shipping.

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The diference is significant, as you will be able to capture engines, hellerium-115 and craft weapons that pays well in the market.

[legionof1]

Better too much info than not enough info. Also indeed, if you fall into the I-must-control-everything trap, it can get really tedious. Chill out, sit back, and enjoy the journey instead of being obsessed with optimization and finishing the game. Making that 1000 points a month to keep positive score is really easy.
snip...

I agree too much info better then too little, but the density makes finding the info you after a progressively slower progress as the game goes on.   
I was referring not so much to control as to the fairly frequent need to empty out the stores post mission and moving things around to produce what you want. The uber do everything base doesn't exist in Piratez. Some amount of fiddly shuffling will occur.   

[Yglorba]

EDIT:
And yeah, I absolutely agree that the market should 'heat up' if you're selling too much, leading to a drop of the prices, but it would require new engine code (and not a simple one). Depends if anyone wants to code such a thing.

I don't actually think that would improve the game.

Here's the problem:  It would effectively mean that in order to make decent income from manufacturing, you'd have to constantly micromanage it by changing it to whatever is profitable at the moment.  It doesn't strike me as an "interesting" decision (because the correct choice is always just to sell whatever makes the most profit), it'd just be annoying busywork.  It'd effectively push the game even further into being Grog Sales Simulator, because now the player would have to spend significant amounts of time managing their sales empire...  which isn't really good for a pirate mod.  Basically, the grog situation is thematically odd but isn't a huge deal from a gameplay perspective, whereas implementing a detailed economy would cause non-pirate-y stuff to intrude into gameplay more often in a way that isn't very fun.

I'd just leave it as it is.  My experience is that a single raid on a landed frighter can get you on the order of $1.5 million, even before you consider selling hostages.

However...  while this is an engine improvement and not an X-Pirates improvement, it might be useful to have the option to sell things from the loot screen.  That would make it easier to say "I don't want these things that I just looted" and right-click to sell all the ones you just got, rather than having to go through your entire inventory back at the base to pick them out.  (And if you want to eg. keep enough guns for your gals but don't need any additional ones, it's a pain to constantly sell the excess -- whereas if you could sell them from the loot screen, it'd be easy, because you could just right-click the up arrow next to the guns you looted to sell all of them while keeping the ones you already have.)

[ivandogovich]

I don't actually think that would improve the game.

Here's the problem:  It would effectively mean that in order to make decent income from manufacturing, you'd have to constantly micromanage it by changing it to whatever is profitable at the moment.  It doesn't strike me as an "interesting" decision (because the correct choice is always just to sell whatever makes the most profit), it'd just be annoying busywork. 
<snip>

I fully concur!  ^^

However...  while this is an engine improvement and not an X-Pirates improvement, it might be useful to have the option to sell things from the loot screen.  That would make it easier to say "I don't want these things that I just looted" and right-click to sell all the ones you just got, rather than having to go through your entire inventory back at the base to pick them out.  (And if you want to eg. keep enough guns for your gals but don't need any additional ones, it's a pain to constantly sell the excess -- whereas if you could sell them from the loot screen, it'd be easy, because you could just right-click the up arrow next to the guns you looted to sell all of them while keeping the ones you already have.)

  *Mind-Blown*  I love this!  Meridian??? is this possible?? That would be terrific!

[Arthanor]

+1 to selling from loot screen!

[Yankes]

What if you sell too much and you get retaliation mission? :>

[sambojin]

I don't see a huge difference. Everything on the Bonny isn't on the Blackmarket screen, thus you're not using it if it's sellable.

You get notified when you can't restore Bonny socks straight after a mission.

Is it just another BM screen you're asking for, with less stuff that you probably should have already sold on it?

Fair enough, you want some base stocks, but this isn't a huge difference.

[Bloax]

It would be pretty big, actually.

So yes, do want on the lootsellscreen.

[sabrecat]

I think sambojin was replying to the comment about base reserves for defenses?

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[Meridian]

*Mind-Blown*  I love this!  Meridian??? is this possible?? That would be terrific!

I like it the way it is.... simple and easy to understand.
But since you ask so nicely, I will probably add a button to switch into "sell mode" or something like that. We'll see...

[Dioxine]

Yeah I haven't thought this through. Better to leave the economy alone. Also in all reason, the operation is too small to affect global prices in any way.
But a sell counter could be useful in itself. Some items would have them. With sell counter, you could add new researches, enemy missions or maybe simply some sort of one-time prizes or penalties after some set threshold is met... wouldn't that be cool... (and if someone wants, this could be further used as a base for price manipulation in other mods).

[Arthanor]

Have a bunch of mercs playing TBI (Terran Bureau of Investigation) after the traders complain of too many fake credit chips on the market? Launch a special retal (with landings as they investigate) in every region as they sweep the globe to try to find the source.

That'd be a cool tradeoff for the mass economy: Become too big, you might get busted, stay small, you might never finish and get crushed without notice under the feet of the big factions. Now you try to remain somewhere in the middle.

[Loengrinn]

So here's my take on all of this talk:

Does it thematically fit that you produce metric shittons of grog to sell on market to fund your crew and operations?  Probably not.

Does it work well as a game mechanic?  Hell, YES.

While there's a lot of things that have changed from vanilla to this mod, almost all of which is super in depth and wonderful, when the game requires you to manage certain resources to keep playing, making that more complicated may not be the better solution.  Even if it breaks the immersion a little.  So while producing X-grog to offset your maintenance costs is a little not-so-pirate-y, it makes sense from a purely gameplay perspective.  If you have an alternative that doesn't bog you down in TONS of micromanagement, that might elicit a better response and I'd be all ears myself.  But in game with SO much to do already, making something that works as it should more complicated for little to no reason is probably not constructive.

That being said, I agree about making looting ships would make it feel more thematically fitting.  BUT, I also understand Dixione's argument about adding purely "sell only" items is actually just going to clutter things up more.  While it would be more fitting of the feel of the mod, it isn't entirely necessary.  Would it be cool and fun and give incentive to attack that large cruiser that could be carrying tons of cargo but has units up the wazoo?  Sure.  But does it unbalance things?  That's debatable, and I'm probably going to end up siding with the dev on this one, regardless of what I'd "like to see".

Lastly, and this is kind of not important since it's been stated that coding the market thing would be hard and I can't see too many people willingly taking on that headache, but I'm really against that idea.  Unless you'd like to throw in different items to manufacture that take no materials, you're just shooting yourself in the foot.  This comes back to the realism/game balance argument above.  It makes much more "sense", but needlessly drags you down into managing things that don't add any major value to the game.

Just my 2 cents.

[Dioxine]

Attacking a cruiser still brings you a fortune. After selling all these engines, plastasteel, Hellerium, and plasma guns, you're several millions richer.