silly exploit

[Deoxy (OP)]

Let's say you have a small commercial shipyard lying around and nothing else particularly pressing to do with it.   Let's further stipulate that you need maintenance supplies, and your industry is busy right now with more pressing things, or that you are short of Uridium or Gallicite (needed to make the supplies you need).

Behold, one of the the silliest exploits I have ever found in any game:

1.  Make a ship that is nothing but a bridge, an engineering section, and a crew quarters.

2.  Add Maintenance Storage Bays.   A lot of them.

3.  Make said ship (it will be CHEAP).

4.  Transfer the 1000s of free maintenance supplies back to your planetary stockpile.

5.   Scrap said ship.

6.   Lather, rinse, repeat.   You actually recovery the maintenance bays, but they don't seem to cost anything, give anything for scrap, or shorten the build time for the next one (bummer).

Basically, for the one-time retooling fee, you can make thousands of maintenance supplies for 3/4 of the cost of the ship. . .  the one I tried cost 60 duranium and small change (less than 10) of mercassium, neutronium, and corbomite, and I got 46,000 maintenance supplies out of it.   That is, by the time I scrapped the ship, it cost me about . 001 duranium per maintenance supply and about . 0001 or less of the other stuff.

Silly?  YES.   Funny?  Well, I thought so.   A silly exploit of the fact that "maintenance capacity" comes full for free.

As far as I can tell, you can also immediately take the MSP from any new commercial ship, too (they will never need it), but that's such a small amount as to be pointless.

[EarthquakeDamage]

I already do that.  Building maintenance supplies directly is far too expensive compared to the free ones new ships get.

[sloanjh]

Um.....  It's a lot easier just to go into SM mode and add however many maintenance supplies you want directly ("SM mods" button on the 1st tab of the F2 screen).

Remember - the goal isn't to keep you from cheating at solitaire; the goal is to keep you from accidentally messing up your game.

That being said, there's probably a good case for logging this as a bug - my recollection is that fuel tanks start empty; maintenance bays should probably do so as well.  I have a vague recollection that the cost of the maintenance supplice in an engineering section are supposed to be built into the build cost of the component.

John

[Deoxy (OP)]

Um. . . . .   It's a lot easier just to go into SM mode and add however many maintenance supplies you want directly ("SM mods" button on the 1st tab of the F2 screen).

Remember - the goal isn't to keep you from cheating at solitaire; the goal is to keep you from accidentally messing up your game.

That being said, there's probably a good case for logging this as a bug - my recollection is that fuel tanks start empty; maintenance bays should probably do so as well.   I have a vague recollection that the cost of the maintenance supplice in an engineering section are supposed to be built into the build cost of the component.

John

This is the same argument people make in Dwarf Fortress.   OF COURSE I could give myself stuff with SM - that's not the point.   Exploits show weak spots in the game - as you said, it might be considered a bug.

In this same vein, I noticed that components that have broken down are still salvaged when you scrap a ship, and they appear to be fixed and fully overhauled for free as part of using them in a new ship.

[Deoxy (OP)]

And, as an update to this silly exploit, here comes something that makes this even sillier:

Refitting a ship to itself is free.  It resets the maintenance clock (there's a bit of an exploit in itself)... Misread the log, there - it lowers the clock BY zero, not TO zero

... and it refills the maintenance supplies as well.

So, to update the exploit, if you have a spare shipyard sitting around, you can
1. make a ship with nothing but maintenance storage bays
2. empty said bays
3. refit ship to refill said bays for free (takes 5 days... or whatever you set that value to when you created the game)
4. go to 2

Lather, rinse, repeat - other than start up cost (retooling shipyard, building one ship) and "opportunity cost" of shipyard not doing anything else, it's completely free.

Yay for silly exploits getting sillier!  Heh.