analysis of minigames: i feel exploration is underserved

[daveal]

I took the awesome filterable talent table from here:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/101bneiqNOoV7DoaCN5BzHeILhXfmdIwBh1YKhVLEmQk/edit#gid=0

And built a small summary of talents by minigame.  This counts how much effect each minigame has by talents available to main crew, and by talents only available to officers/recruits if you can get them. 

My conclusion is that the exploration minigame is much harder than the others, unless you use officer classes and/or find the proper contacts with recruits. 

All the other minigames have talents available to main crew; not a single talent available to main crew affects exploration.  This is made worse because it is also the only minigame where main crew can't even provide dice.  Only explorer and exo-scout provide exploration dice.

In the below table "Yx" means a talent available to main crew at level x, and "Nx" means a talent only available to officers/recruits at level x. 

Minigame       Reroll  Remove Replace     Win
Black Market   N1      Y1     -           N1,N8
Blockade       Y5      Y8     N1,N5       N11
Exploration    N1,N5   N5     N8,N11,N11  N11
Patrolling     Y1      Y5     N5,N5       N11,N11
Spying         Y5      Y8,N1  Y5,Y11      N11

For example, the upper right entry "Black market, win, N1,N8" refers to the talents (cut from the talent table):
Backroom Deal Smuggler 1 Win When attempting to access a Black Market, replace a risk card with a Market Access card
Underworld Renown Smuggler 8 Win When attempting to access a Black Market, replace a risk card with a Market Access card with Contact Influence bonus

[drspendlove]

I'm pretty sure this is a side effect of the fact that they're still working on the other explorer-focused classes.

[daveal]

As long as one of those new classes is a main crew, that will be great.

[drspendlove]

Ah sorry, I totally glossed over two critical sentences you provided in your original post. My apologies. Your point stands -- I agree.

[drspendlove]

Is there also a game design path where you could imagine this asymmetry being a good thing? What would need to be changed for this to be a desirable state to be in?

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll keep marching to the roadmap and I am sure we'll get there.

[daveal]

That is a challenging game design question. I find exploration pretty under-whelming anyway, especially since many of the results now involve driving to some system you never heard of and picking up a half load of plants to sell for a hundred credits. I can avoid missions where exploration is listed in the mission steps; but so many of the higher reward missions have "steps to be named later". Assuming equal distribution between patrol, spy, blockade and exploration, chances are 1/4 of these mission steps will involve this task, for which (in my current game, which may be an outlier) I have no dice, and don't seem to be able to get dice. So, no, I can't think of any desirable path where sucking at exploration is good.

[fallen]

Jun 18, 2018 21:56:41 GMT -5 daveal said:

That is a challenging game design question. I find exploration pretty under-whelming anyway, especially since many of the results now involve driving to some system you never heard of and picking up a half load of plants to sell for a hundred credits. I can avoid missions where exploration is listed in the mission steps; but so many of the higher reward missions have "steps to be named later". Assuming equal distribution between patrol, spy, blockade and exploration, chances are 1/4 of these mission steps will involve this task, for which (in my current game, which may be an outlier) I have no dice, and don't seem to be able to get dice. So, no, I can't think of any desirable path where sucking at exploration is good.

Fascinating stuff. Was just arguing with a player two days ago who was hell bent on just how OP exploration is. But that is the kind of result of a system with so many layers. One captain/crew/wilderness zone/selling plan is one man's gold mine where its someone else's trash.

[daveal]

Is the other player commenting that exploration is OP at the *start* of the game? Or once you get to midgame with exoscout recruits? You have previously shows a screenshot of a late game player's stash with many dozens of artifacts. I am sure that if you can get your exploration dice pool up, it is easier. I have discarded my previous game of Zenrin with no exo-scouts, and perhaps because I am a glutton for punishment or something, I have started a javat explorer run.

[xdesperado]

daveal you can have a very good exploration dice pool more or less from start of game, but like most other things you have to focus on that as a main part of your game strategy which means your likely going to suffer in other areas.

That said the dice pools are the easy things to build, what takes time is getting the talents to be successful at whatever card game is required for a given activity and honestly unless your running a very large ship with lots of leveled up crew you more or less have to specialize in one or two specific activities and just do your best to avoid the other types of card games.

[daveal]

Jun 19, 2018 8:54:48 GMT -5 xdesperado said:

daveal you can have a very good exploration dice pool more or less from start of game, but like most other things you have to focus on that as a main part of your game strategy which means your likely going to suffer in other areas.

What do you recommend for getting an exploration pool early? Obviously we can assign our officers to be explorers/exoscouts, and (sometimes) pick up exoscout recruits. If you don't know to put a retired explorer as one of your first four contacts, you will be stuck. What other tricks are there to reach the OP state of exploration? 

For all the other games, your main crew will have a chance to pick up almost all the good talents, but that is not possible for exploration.

[drspendlove]

Quick potentially tangential question: Why aren't you mentioning getting explorer recruits? They make far better explorers than exo-scouts. They're harder to come by, sure, but am I missing something?

[fallen]

I would suggest taking Retired Explorer as a Starting Contact.

[daveal]

drspendlove, Sure, if you can get them. I hardly ever find contacts who offer explorer recruits. Among the contact types offered at startup, the only contact who could give these is exo-scout. I don't know the percentages for a contact type offering different types of recruits, but I am pretty sure the vast majority of exo-scout contacts offer exo-scout recruits.

fallen, there is a parallel thread at steam where I wrote:

Two slightly different points. First, if you are a beginning player doing an explorer build, you may not realize that the retired explorer is a *requirement* to put in your *first four contact slots* (it is order dependent). I don't see how it is possible to do effective early, or even mid game exploration without that. Any suggestions welcome.



Second, if you are focusing on some other kind of build besides explorer, your dice pool for the other minigames grows automatically and you can build up card tricks for them by occasionally selecting a main crew talent. Explore doesn't build up at all and you can't get card tricks. While you can try to avoid any mission with an explore component, you get them pretty often as "more tasks will be defined later".

[fallen]

Jun 19, 2018 11:17:43 GMT -5 fallen said:

I would suggest taking Retired Explorer as a Starting Contact.