I want a Contact-Contact. Badly.

[grävling]

Right now, many of my games are frustrating, because I know what I want to do, but I cannot, because I am waiting for the RNG to bless me with the sort of contact I need to do it.

i.e. I want to buy special armour, I want to hire a diplomat, I want to hire a pirate or 3, I want to offload a huge quantity of looted Fighter Weapon components, but none of the right sort of worlds have a black market, I want to buy 14 points of pardon from Clan Zenrin ... I know what I am looking for, but the game is not giving me it.

I'd really like it if there was a person I could go to, and for some hideously outrageous sum of money, or some sort of horribly dangerous and complicated mission would introduce me to the proper people I need to meet in order to progress with my goals -- i.e. let me select what the reward would be (what I am looking for).

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll keep working to improve.

You can get Talents that help you find new contacts, or pay for introductions.

[fallen]

Also important to note that you can pick Contacts during Captain creation. If there is something you really know you want to have, pick that Contact.

[grävling]

Apr 9, 2017 16:48:03 GMT -5 fallen said:

Also important to note that you can pick Contacts during Captain creation. If there is something you really know you want to have, pick that Contact.

It doesn't work that way. Ex-Mercenary isn't available at the start. I won't know which Pardoning people from other houses I will need until I have managed to annoy some people in this game, and even when I was making contacts my B choice I only ended up with contacts who were in my house, whereas I want a pardon from somebody else. There is no way to ask for a contact that has Pirate recruits from the start, either. The talents that drop contacts are indeed very nice, but there is no way to steer them. Last game there was a period of about 3 hours, real time, when I had scores and scores and scores of contacts, and got more all the time, but every single one that mentioned 'Pirates' came from somebody who already handed out some other sort of special recruit.

What I want is a way to not have to passively wait for the game to eventually deliver what I am looking for, but a way to do something in-game to drive things.

[fallen]

In that case, the best thing you can do at this time is fund the bill for introductions.

[xdesperado]

Actually what grävling is asking for sounds like the perfect fit for the Fixer contact.
Fixer's are supposed to be all about making connections between different parties for a profit.
They don't sell you the guns they put you in contact with the people who do for a price. They don't personally operate in the blackmarket but they can hook you up with someone who does buy and sell goods outside of legal channels. They can't grant a pardon personally but if the money/deal is right they can make the proper introductions to someone who can.
Make some special missions or like the badger queen suggests a large payment that lets you select the types of contacts your looking for.
Even if they don't have a contact of proper type/faction already they should be able with time/resources to make that connection for you.

With that sort of ability if they are a starting contact they wouldn't need a lot of other benefits to be very attractive choice because their biggest benefit is the ability for a player to have some ability to tailor the sorts of contacts they want/need in game.

[Officer Genious]

Apr 9, 2017 20:42:40 GMT -5 xdesperado said:

Actually what grävling is asking for sounds like the perfect fit for the Fixer contact.
Fixer's are supposed to be all about making connections between different parties for a profit.
They don't sell you the guns they put you in contact with the people who do for a price. They don't personally operate in the blackmarket but they can hook you up with someone who does buy and sell goods outside of legal channels. They can't grant a pardon personally but if the money/deal is right they can make the proper introductions to someone who can.
Make some special missions or like the badger queen suggests a large payment that lets you select the types of contacts your looking for.
Even if they don't have a contact of proper type/faction already they should be able with time/resources to make that connection for you.

With that sort of ability if they are a starting contact they wouldn't need a lot of other benefits to be very attractive choice because their biggest benefit is the ability for a player to have some ability to tailor the sorts of contacts they want/need in game.

Then the question is how to balance that so that picking the other contacts at creation isn't useless. I'd say a 30k charge to a Prince/Smuggler/whatever of a random faction would make things interesting.

[fallen]

We've done some balance of Introduction prices in the next update.

Being able to reliably introduce across Faction lines would certainly be interesting.

Starting Contacts in the next update start with higher Rep and higher Influence for every priority level you put them up in the next update.

We will probably also play that into Traits in the future, really pumping the starting contacts if you give them priority.

[grävling]

I think the thing that is driving 'put contacts on a low priority' isn't that the choice needs to be made more attractive. Of course this will be more fun, and worth doing for that sake alone, but you can enhance it all you like and as long as the thing we would all dearly love to place on the lowest, or second lowest priority, the Ship, cannot be traded up later in the game, you will find that we're still, in our terms, 'wasting a high priority choice on it'. The mortality rate of level 1 captains and level 1 crew trying to fly such a ship may indeed mean that, in our terms we are wasting 2 high priority choices, as we take rather more experience than we wanted, except that we need it to fly this monster ship.

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback!