Community Challenge: WF Shortage

[redartrats]

Jul 11, 2016 15:26:45 GMT -5 Darth Cthoras said:

The real trouble I see with this sort of challenge is how few enemies even carry WF or rations, and of those that do, they typically have just a few. I can never rely on pirating to restock either one. 😭

Yeah, basically you cannot expect to ever have enough WF to fill your tank. The secret to this challenge is to figure out ways of doing without WF, for as long as you can possibly hold it off.

The first key point is that your ship is actually well capable of flying long distances with nary a drop of WF in your tank -- the price is that your crew morale drops and some crew may die collecting ice. However, if you have luxury rations, you can stave off the morale drop for a little while. But, assuming you add the challenge of not buying luxury rations, you have the same problem: enemy ships only sometimes carry luxury rations, and usually only a few units -- definitely not enough for long-distance interstellar flight. So what do you do?

One way is to just keep pushing on until they mutiny. But that can only go on for so long -- because every time they mutiny your captain loses 1 HP, and you only have 10 HP to spare. And buying healing kits from the tech doctor is very expensive -- between bribing your crew to keep them in check and buying repairs to your ship, there's simply not enough cash to go around to keep this up for very long. Of course, increasing strength / intimidate will help, but only by so much.

So you're doomed to live off crew morale in place of WF, except on the few occasions looting an enemy ship will give you a few units of WF / luxury rations. Viewed this way, you can think of morale as a kind of "alternate fuel", and there's one thing you can do to keep this "alternate fuel tank" filled: frequent trips to the spice hall. Oh yes, it's expensive, no doubt. So it's a balancing act between spice hall, bribing, and fighting for control during mutiny.

Although bribing seems like the safest way out, it's actually not as effective as it may look, because chances are, your cash is pretty low already, and so the morale restored by the bribe is at the most just a couple of points, which means another mutiny is on the way real soon. Fighting for control -- which requires a high strength build to have any hope of consistently winning -- costs you a few crew (no biggie, pick up more at the next spice hall) but restores morale to 5 or so. If you think about it, this is a free refuel of your "morale tank" up to half a tank!  Since recruiting new crew costs nothing, it seems to me that this is the best option -- as long as you're sure your strength is high enough to survive the fight.

So one approach to tackle this challenge is: pick a high-strength captain like a bounty hunter, loot as many ships as you can (so high difficulty, otherwise there aren't enough ships to loot), visit the spice hall frequently, always fight for control, and do bounty hunter contracts to pay for repairs, spice hall visits, and occasionally bribing the crew to make them happier. Also, try to keep Intimidate up; I think it reduces the frequency of mutinies even if morale has dropped to 0.

Using this approach is how I managed to survive 765 turns with 100K+ credits. Actually, I could have survived longer had I not been so reckless in battle.  Autopilot to a long-distance contract target is rarely a good idea; usually you want to plan your route ahead of time to have plenty of stopovers for repairs and spice hall visits. Also, blockade contracts and trade contracts are Evil(tm). They're good for "normal" captains specifically crafted for these kinds of contracts, but in a WF challenge like this one, they usually end up being the death of you, one way or another. Before my captain died I had just completed a blockade contract -- which took far too many turns in the middle of red space, causing way too many mutinies, encounters with hostile patrol ships, repairs, etc., and even though the pay was good it wasn't worth it. My captain was in a bad shape because of it, which probably contributed to his untimely death.

[Zer0Winds]

I did this with an explorer captain, on hard, got to turn 486, died with 6855 credits. I got lucky a few times during harvest and got enough to travel to a few different planets before being a refuel.... but only twice.

[redartrats]

Yeah, even with an explorer, the problem is that you have to be high level enough to be able to get enough WF out of harvesting. Well, even then, it's hit-or-miss. So it seems playing explorer would be quite tough for this challenge. I picked BH because high strength / intimidate is useful for keeping the mutinous crew under control.

(Having said that, though, you did pretty good... I just tried a BH again this morning with this challenge, and only got up to 410 turns. Guess I got cocky from a successful captain yesterday... sometimes with ST you just have to go along with where the game leads you, and take advantage of whatever opportunities arise. Adhering to a formula often doesn't work 'cos the game just loves throwing a monkey wrench into your plans and ruining everything.)

[Zer0Winds]

My current captain for this challenge is ongoing.

Merchant
Currently turn 244
Over 70k credits.
Using custom starting ship which has 0 fuel consumption in green space. Really useful. Really, really useful. Not a large cargo hold but with lack of fuel I still make a few thousand per good trip. Bad trips only a few hundred.

Still, a mechanic officer makes it so much easier even, with a pilot officer... if only I had them. Alright, I'm going back in-game to see how far I can get.

[Zer0Winds]

Turn 487 with 57013 credits.
I lost quite a bit from pirates, then over Cadar Pavonis, I accidentally pressed blockade... got money... pressed it again... more money... I had pressed blockade so many times... only failed twice, and ran into two warships. FEAR MY SHIP THAT'S ONLY BIG ENOUGH TO FIT EIGHT CREW!

Anyway, I'd gotten greedy and died to the second warship. But still, 57k credits... as a merchant(ish), without buying water fuel. I'd harvested a little bit whenever needed, but due to the zero consumption, I never needed more than like, five.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: 1 Tactics... What was with that blockade...?!

[redartrats]

This is interesting. So does this mean that if you start with a high-sails ship and buy sails upgrades to minimize WF consumption, you might be able to actually survive without ever buying WF? Well, that, plus pilot/intimidate, but I doubt you could get those up to the high levels needed to survive the early game.

Using a custom ship with zero WF consumption seems like cheating though.   But, I have to admit, it's a very, very clever idea.

[Zer0Winds]

The ship itself sucked, any hostile ship could out maneuver me, and take me out in one shot. Fair trade-off, I think.

EDIT
Hull: 7
Armor: 1
Engines: 5
Sails: 5
Crew: 8
Hold: 14
Guns: 4
Torps: 0
Slow
Low

[bookworm21]

Well I went all in on difficulty

Name: WF #2
Turns: 109
Final level: 3 (rookie)
Difficulty: impossible
Class: explorer
Ship: vae Victis
Extra rules: no purchasing luxury rations

Will probably try again with a different class - explorer just wasn't cutting it for me

[Zer0Winds]

Anyway, is it truly cheating, unless stated in the rules; "No zero consumption custom ship"?

[Darth Cthoras]

Jul 13, 2016 0:21:40 GMT -5 Zer0Winds said:

Anyway, is it truly cheating, unless stated in the rules; "No zero consumption custom ship"?

Obviously the answer is to buy the Ship Designer and Captain Designer. Give the Trese Bros the monies. All the monies.

[poryg]

Jul 11, 2016 14:57:45 GMT -5 fallen said:

Total Turns + Difficulty + Profession is probably a good metric!

Actually, with custom stats builder having profession in the equation is rather irrelevant. 

[poryg]

Jul 12, 2016 10:54:40 GMT -5 redartrats said:

Jul 11, 2016 16:00:53 GMT -5 Darth Cthoras said:

Actually, my shortest lived Captain died on turn 3, en route to finish starting quest. To an Alien. Siiiigh...

This has happened to me before too!! One of the reasons I decided to dedicate several captains to Alien-hunting.

Incidentally, an ongoing Explorer captain on Hard that I'm currently playing started off encountering a Xrangg Alien at 57.28AE. That's like within the first year of his career! (And him being a non-combat explorer too.) Fortunately, it was only a lvl.1 Alien ship, but still... My captain was forced into a boarding battle (it was board or be boarded -- couldn't escape) and only barely managed to finish off the Alien captain before things turned really ugly. They outnumbered my crew 80 : 45, and was 69 : 37 by the time the battle was done -- the trend was not promising, as you can see my crew was dying faster than I could kill the Alien crew. It was a good thing this wasn't a captainless terror AI...

On lv 1 the 80 crew against you isn't that much of a problem due to low intimidate skill of the alien captain  

[poryg]

I will join you guys soon as well. This challenge sounds like so much fun!

[bookworm21]

It does require a new approach!

Extra kudos for all that extend the shortage to luxury rations as well

[poryg]

Well, I have about five or six approaches in mind and I haven't even started yet what is for sure is that I won't go on any difficult difficulty for this challenge, so crazy is my maximum for now.