There was a thread on the Galaxy Legion forums asking about vendoring a ship part that came from a mission reward. This mission reward in particular is distinct. Normally you can only equip a set number of an item (2 cloaking devices, say) and the way you get more cloak is to research bigger cloaking devices. This mission reward adds to your cloak but doesn't take up any such slot. You can use it and it doesn't impact your ability to use any other cloaking device. (Well, it occupies space on your ship so there is a cost to use it, but you can unequip it and store it in your cargo hold if you don't want it on right now.) Eventually you will research substantially larger and substantially more efficient cloak modules so the question was at what tech level he should consider vendoring this minor cloak module.
There are two ways you can sell the module. If you've ever used it and it's in your ship as a module then you get a trivial amount of money for it. For reference I make 7731 times that much money per hour. Eventually your ship will be big enough to hold everything possible so the small amount of cloak has some benefit. The very small amount of cash really has none at all. So the answer if you'd ever equipped the module is that it's never right to sell it.
The second way is to sell it before you ever use it. In that case you get a different type of currency: complex tech parts. This is a reasonably rare currency with a few important uses. It's used in a mission chain with some pretty great rewards. It can be used to build some ship modules. And perhaps most importantly it can be used to upgrade a legion base. The bigger the base the more production everyone in the legion gets every day so upgrading the base is quite useful. Eventually your ship will be big enough to use every module you get but the bigger base helps you get to that point faster.
I made the point that I wish I'd sold off my mission reward for the complex tech parts because I wanted to upgrade my base and felt that was better than having access to a little more cloak in the long run. Most people disputed this claim (they're higher level so they both have more room for the cloak module, have more sources of complex tech parts, and likely have full legions and therefore need fewer parts per player to upgrade their base). One argument was interesting. Their claim was you could get enough parts by killing some NPCs which were recently added to the game to get all the parts you could need. This is interesting since that NPC seemed really bad to kill to me, but I realized I haven't really looked at it in detail.
When we upgraded our base to level 3 it took 250 tech parts. Andrew and I got most of those by doing a mission and vendoring the reward. (This reward was a planet attack building and doesn't really have any marginal benefit regardless.) To get up to level 4 it will take an extra 4750 tech parts. That specific mission only can be done 5 times so we weren't going to get 4750 parts from that alone. Mostly we've just ignored the need to get tech parts and have sat at a size 3 base for a long time.
I thought it might be enlightening to compare that mission to killing the tech part NPC to see how they compare to each other. Clearly we were willing to do the mission for tech parts to upgrade the base so if they're even comparable then killing the NPCs probably makes sense too, right?
At any rate, the mission took 1225 energy, rewarded 2710.5 experience, and gave 28.5 tech parts. Per tech part you're spending 43 energy and getting a 2.21 experience per energy ratio.
The NPC takes 55 energy, rewards 135.5 experience, and gives 1.5 tech parts. Per tech part you're spending 37 energy and getting a 2.46 experience per energy ratio.
The NPC is just better than the mission in this comparison. Killing an NPC also spawns a new NPC which might have fantastic rewards. Doing the mission gives you a mission complete which can give a minor reward. The mission only gives 142.5 tech parts total. The NPC can give an unlimited amount but you're restricted by how many spawn. It certainly seems to be a good long term solution to the tech part problem.
I still think I'd vendor the minor cloak module if I got the chance again, but it no longer seems as critical to do so. Taking out the NPCs when they spawn seems like a reasonable line of action instead.
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