I'm placing this in General Discussion rather than Suggestions because, frankly, I figure Schema has a better and far more complex solution in the works as it is, whereas what I'm proposing here is merely a temporary quick-fix, posted mostly to generate discussion and hear what other people think.
Right now the recipe system is a bit overpowered. It's very easy to "re-roll" the recipe for the item you want until you have a version that uses 2 to 4 samples of an item with a base cost of 1 credit, and has no other ingredients.
Now, first, a disclaimer: I like the recipe system. Exploring pirate stations and scraping together base items to gradually build a library of recipes, and then networking them together to create any item in the game from raw materials, is a lot of fun.
Except... nobody does that. At the moment the single biggest problem with the recipe system is that you can duplicate items with "block-ships" and use the blocks you get to buy recipes until you have the cheapest imaginable recipe for that item, which takes the fun out of the entire system.
Therefore, we are at a bit of an impasse in the game at the moment. You can't make recipes fun without preventing block ship spawning, but the best way to stop block ships would be to have purchased ships cost the player the blocks they are made out of, rather than the credit cost of those blocks. Unfortunately, at the moment that change is impossible, in the current state where shop stock is extremely limited; there's no way you could possibly gather enough of every block you'd need to spawn even a medium-sized ship into a multiplayer server.
Enter the recipe system. With the right raw materials, any item in the game can be created in any quantity you want. The problem, however, is that without block ships, it would be nearly impossible to get to 5000 count of any item that you can't salvage from a pre-generated structure. Dirt, rock, and low-level ores are easy to gather from planets and asteroids. Glass, lights, power cells, and certain colors of basic hull are easy to pull from space stations. But what about reinforced hull? Salvage beams? Plexdoors? Ship Cores? Recipe costs would need to be reduced to a level that is easily attainable, but not easily-spammable.
Behind recipe spam, the second biggest problem is the "cornucopia loop." By re-rolling recipes until each has only one ingredient requirement, and then chaining those recipes backwards until you find one that loops back to a previous point in the chain, you need only to feed enough raw materials in to level the recipes to the point where the input cost is less than the output cost, and you have effectively created a cornucopia machine. At that point, you need only find a recipe for a L5 ore that draws from one item in that loop, and you have infinite credits.
Fortunately, this issue is the easiest to fix, because it hinges on two factors:
Both these key elements can be removed entirely with one simple change: make all recipes require 3 different input items. Not only does this effectively triple the average level a cornucopia machine's recipes must be, it also prevents simple loops.
This by itself, however, doesn't solve the L5 ore problem completely, because players can still eventually develop a looping web of extremely cheap raw material recipes, and then link three of them to a recipe for one extremely expensive object, L5 ore or otherwise. Thus, recipes need some sort of natural staging, whereby extremely cheap ingredients are not used in recipes for extremely expensive items. The simplest solution, in my opinion, is to limit the ingredient pool for a random recipe to items with no less than 50% the base cost of the item the recipe produces. Since the "cheapest" recipe in terms of block count is 6 input items per output, this would mean that recipes are lossy at first in terms of base credit value; 300% cost at level 1, 150% cost at level 2, break-even at level 3, and 75% cost at level 4.
Right now the recipe system is a bit overpowered. It's very easy to "re-roll" the recipe for the item you want until you have a version that uses 2 to 4 samples of an item with a base cost of 1 credit, and has no other ingredients.
Now, first, a disclaimer: I like the recipe system. Exploring pirate stations and scraping together base items to gradually build a library of recipes, and then networking them together to create any item in the game from raw materials, is a lot of fun.
Except... nobody does that. At the moment the single biggest problem with the recipe system is that you can duplicate items with "block-ships" and use the blocks you get to buy recipes until you have the cheapest imaginable recipe for that item, which takes the fun out of the entire system.
Therefore, we are at a bit of an impasse in the game at the moment. You can't make recipes fun without preventing block ship spawning, but the best way to stop block ships would be to have purchased ships cost the player the blocks they are made out of, rather than the credit cost of those blocks. Unfortunately, at the moment that change is impossible, in the current state where shop stock is extremely limited; there's no way you could possibly gather enough of every block you'd need to spawn even a medium-sized ship into a multiplayer server.
Enter the recipe system. With the right raw materials, any item in the game can be created in any quantity you want. The problem, however, is that without block ships, it would be nearly impossible to get to 5000 count of any item that you can't salvage from a pre-generated structure. Dirt, rock, and low-level ores are easy to gather from planets and asteroids. Glass, lights, power cells, and certain colors of basic hull are easy to pull from space stations. But what about reinforced hull? Salvage beams? Plexdoors? Ship Cores? Recipe costs would need to be reduced to a level that is easily attainable, but not easily-spammable.
Behind recipe spam, the second biggest problem is the "cornucopia loop." By re-rolling recipes until each has only one ingredient requirement, and then chaining those recipes backwards until you find one that loops back to a previous point in the chain, you need only to feed enough raw materials in to level the recipes to the point where the input cost is less than the output cost, and you have effectively created a cornucopia machine. At that point, you need only find a recipe for a L5 ore that draws from one item in that loop, and you have infinite credits.
Fortunately, this issue is the easiest to fix, because it hinges on two factors:
- The level of the average recipe in the chain must be at or above the number of items the recipe requires
- Recipes must be easy to link together into long chains
Both these key elements can be removed entirely with one simple change: make all recipes require 3 different input items. Not only does this effectively triple the average level a cornucopia machine's recipes must be, it also prevents simple loops.
This by itself, however, doesn't solve the L5 ore problem completely, because players can still eventually develop a looping web of extremely cheap raw material recipes, and then link three of them to a recipe for one extremely expensive object, L5 ore or otherwise. Thus, recipes need some sort of natural staging, whereby extremely cheap ingredients are not used in recipes for extremely expensive items. The simplest solution, in my opinion, is to limit the ingredient pool for a random recipe to items with no less than 50% the base cost of the item the recipe produces. Since the "cheapest" recipe in terms of block count is 6 input items per output, this would mean that recipes are lossy at first in terms of base credit value; 300% cost at level 1, 150% cost at level 2, break-even at level 3, and 75% cost at level 4.
