Incursions don't provide enough money.

Flipilaria

So.

After doing three hard incursions (two devourers, and a leviathan) and about half of an easy one (trinaries), here's my loot.

-----------------------------------< Cargo at The Flipflakk >-----------------------------------
Material        Desc                      #      Owed   Location

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
repairkit       Ship repairing kit        ???            The Flipflakk
astromech       Semi-autonomous astromech ?             The Flipflakk
em_battery      EM battery                ?             The Flipflakk
kinetic_battery Kinetic battery           ?             The Flipflakk
thermal_battery Thermal battery           ?             The Flipflakk
just the metal  Just the metal bits of a  8             The Flipflakk
a flap of blubb A flap of blubbery skin   12            The Flipflakk
a frozen eye fr A frozen eye from somethi 9             The Flipflakk
a collection of A collection of organic d 7             The Flipflakk
a severed limb  A severed limb            30            The Flipflakk
the limp body o The limp body of an alien 5             The Flipflakk
the well-chewed The well-chewed corpse of 10            The Flipflakk
a skeletal cada A skeletal cadaver        14            The Flipflakk
the undigested  The undigested corpse of  12            The Flipflakk
an enormous she An enormous shell of spac 9             The Flipflakk
the imploded re The imploded remains of a 16            The Flipflakk
the severed tai The severed tail of a spa 7             The Flipflakk
the chitinous r The chitinous remains of  8             The Flipflakk
a stomach the s A stomach the size of a s 9             The Flipflakk
an immense leng An immense length of fibr 11            The Flipflakk
a jumbo-sized j A jumbo-sized joint of bo 17            The Flipflakk
a decompression A decompression-bloated c 4             The Flipflakk
the meat-stripp The meat-stripped corpse  7             The Flipflakk
a gargantuan ja A gargantuan jawbone      5             The Flipflakk
the nibbled-on  The nibbled-on corpse of  5             The Flipflakk
the tooth-marke The tooth-marked corpse o 11            The Flipflakk
a huge frigid l A huge frigid lump of fat 9             The Flipflakk
a collection of A collection of frozen or 3             The Flipflakk
a mammoth intes A mammoth intestinal trac 5             The Flipflakk
the munched-on  The munched-on corpse of  10            The Flipflakk
a delicate lump A delicate lump of fragra 7             The Flipflakk
the masticated  The masticated corpse of  7             The Flipflakk
the severed fin The severed fin of a spac 7             The Flipflakk
the half-eaten  The half-eaten corpse of  6             The Flipflakk
a colossal tent A colossal tentacle       12            The Flipflakk
the internal or The internal organs of a  8             The Flipflakk
the half-eaten  The half-eaten corpse of  11            The Flipflakk
the frozen corp The frozen corpse of a wh 9             The Flipflakk
an immense stin An immense stinger        6             The Flipflakk
the snacked-on  The snacked-on corpse of  5             The Flipflakk
a large chunk o A large chunk of fat      5             The Flipflakk
the gnawed corp The gnawed corpse of a W' 7             The Flipflakk
several frozen  Several frozen pieces of  5             The Flipflakk
an oversized ve An oversized venom gland  4             The Flipflakk
the mostly devo The mostly devoured corps 8             The Flipflakk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That resulted in the following marks gain:
A shudder passes over the ship as it lands, docked with Omni Station.
You hand over the junk stored in your ship, and your account is credited with
18160 Covenant marks.
[Marks]: Your mark balance has been adjusted by 18160.


After restocking my ship, that leaves me with a net gain of about 15,500 marks. That's not including Kinetic Batteries, which are currently not even for sale. Even excluding the cost of replenishing my repairkits (assuming a perfect run at every incursion), including the kinetic batteries this would leave me at about 15,000 marks for about 3-4 hours of flight. Which is probably what I can make in an hour and a half of bashing in the high level 40's, but without the benefit of exp gain (yes, I am aware I'm gaining captaincy exp, but that doesn't get me much considering my corvette can already handle hard incursions with no problem), and while taking on much more risk in a ship (getting blown up costs far more, especially if I can't recover my cargo).


Incursions do not provide enough marks, especially considering the risk/time involved. I flew well, took minimal damage, and I'm pulling significantly less than I get for bashing. This, after investing over 150k marks into this ship. At that rate, I'd have to do approximately 30-40 hours of incursions to break even. Again, this is compared to bashing, which offers minimal risk (I'm currently cloning at about 1000 a clone, as opposed to the 1000 I'd lose, plus another 300 for insurance, plus an additional 5-10k in marks to replenish my supplies if I couldn't get back to them in time/couldn't find them.

Proposed solutions:

1. Significantly increase the gain from incursions to be on-par with high-level bashing. I'm doing the hardest incursions in the game. I should be making comparable marks to level 75 bashing.

2. Incentivize higher-level captaincy to make lower captaincy worth it. Right now I'm a level 13 captain. I can do hard incursions in my corvette with minimal difficulty. The risk really comes from lag or computer failure. I know we have pirate refineries, but I'm not sure where to find them/if they're even worth it. I haven't heard anything about this. Maybe we can add incursions on a difficulty from 1-10, with level 10 being profoundly good mark gain. Or maybe we can add additional mechanics similar to the pirate refineries. My only incentive to gain a better captaincy right now is to get a bigger ship, mostly for RP purposes. I guess for cosmpiercers too, but that's eh.

Maybe we can add in ship quests as well. Or really anything else that makes captaincy worth it.

3. Add a WARP TO INCURSION function, in tandem with increasing the speed at which incursion mobs spawn. Most of my time is spent flying from incursion to incursion, or flying around looking for mobs. Decreasing this would increase the marks-per-hour on hard incursions. Additional incursions may also need to be added for this.

4. Add 'treasure trail' style loot drops to incursions, OR add something similar to armor/weapon drops in bashing. Maybe we can find (and sell) ship components/modules/ship mods. Maybe we find a treasure map leading to a more dangerous instanced incursions. Or one that triggers an open-pk incursion. There's a lot of options here.



I want to do incursions. I want to support the ship economy function. Right now, I'm just not seeing a reason to do that. 

Nykara

While I feel your pain, devourers are a really bad marker for the amount of money you're going to get. There are three whole devourers in an incursion, and flying out to do it IS a total waste of time. 

Flipilaria

Nykara said:

While I feel your pain, devourers are a really bad marker for the amount of money you're going to get. There are three whole devourers in an incursion, and flying out to do it IS a total waste of time. 

Then Devourers are a broken incursion. Unfortunately, that's all that was available. The fact that a major part of incursions is also just sitting around waiting for the right incursion is a bad system design too.

Steve

Devourers are avoided by experienced pilots for this reason. And the experienced pilots do sit around and wait for the right incursions; I haven't had one at a convenient time at all this week. But incursions can pay off big time.

I don't think adding features for the sake of incursions as they are currently implemented is the way to go about improving them. Personally, I think the incursion system will see a rework, and after that will be the time to talk about adding new features (if necessary). In the meantime, though, it would be nice to do things like decrease the delay between spawns, to adjust the number of monsters spawned in incursions like Devourers, and to adjust the frequency of incursions generated (which runs the risk of putting too many marks into the game, subject to the economy limit -- not a bad thing, overall, but not something I'm in a position to speculate about right now).

Hard ship incursions (that don't run like cowards) pay very, very well, and bashing doesn't come close for me for marks per half hour.

edit: I forgot to lead with that I do sympathize and think that changes should be made before too long because the system's pretty bare bones and it isn't always apparent what kind of return on time invested there will be, without prior knowledge

Rhindara

Okay.

Devourers: Only three ever spawn, with varying junk drops. Yes, they suck, but it's also only three mobs. You're only really losing money on these if you take several voidgates to go find them. I can agree that they're annoying and it would be great if they'd get a buff.

Leviathans: On hard, these should get you ~15 - 18k, like all other hard organics. 

Easy trinaries: Easy incursions are never a big money maker, and organics always give substantially less than ships. Really though, easy incursions are meant for grinding you up to a corvette. They really shouldn't be used to gauge how lucrative incursions are as a whole.

Everything you've done here were organics. Back in the day, they gave the exact same payout, so there was absolutely no point in being strategic and using different ammo types and running actual risk against ships. Now they give you less captaincy and less marks, and ships give you more captaincy and more marks. To compare, as mentioned before, hard organics net you ~18k. Hard ships get you ~25k-28k.

Incursions generally take 45 minutes to do, start to finish. That's ~15k to ~28k per 45 minutes. Yes, you have to spend money on supplies, but if we assume, for the sake of argument, it takes 30 batteries for one incursion, that's 8,550 at the highest current market price for batteries (285). Repairkit costs are going to be variable, but in general as long as you're not using autorepair (which you should never do because it will actively waste your repairkits), you should be fine. I often go entire incursions without having to repair until I get to a station, and repair while docked at a station uses 0 repairkits. Astromechs are similarly going to be a rare purchase unless you're constantly repairing while being fired upon, which is how you lose them (aside from you know, blowing up and not being able to recover them). All that taken into consideration, you've made a profit on these incursions that are absolutely doable in a stalker, even now that we're out of its glory days.

The final big difference between incursions and bashing is that, unlike bashing, there is no marks cap. You can absolutely outpace your marks gain doing incursions vs bashing, if you know what you're doing. I suppose the only real thing that I can agree with in the OP (aside from that devourers suck) is that, if you don't know what you're doing, incursions can seem like a huge waste of time and money and effort. This is why I wrote an exhaustive guide for Song to try to alleviate this issue for newer pilots. A deeper tutorial somewhere that walks people through the ins and outs probably wouldn't be a bad idea. However, I really don't think the solution is dumping more money into incursion rewards.

Cubey

Incursions are amazing money. If you find them less profitable than on-foot mob grinding then you're doing them inefficiently: using small guns too much (waste of batteries), firing from outside of optimal range or even worse - autofiring with your weapons, or using wrong ammo types/firing all your guns at once when fighting ship type incursions.

Incursions are also incredibly boring and I feel like falling asleep while waiting for mobs to spawn, 2 at a time every so often for over half an hour - at least with grinding you're the one who controls the pace. And yes, the devourer incursion needs fixing and it was like that since release.

Rylek

As mentioned, you picked some bad ones. There are three 'origins' for incursion population. A sort of 'organic' which tend to be the easy ones and have pretty meh loot. A 'machines' branch which tend to have decent loot, but run a lot. and then humanoid which are a mixed lot for AI and loot, but the good ones are very good for making marks.

Reeloc

Ever since I got a cruiser, I've done hard ship incursions with it, and I always go after the ones that "don't run like cowards," as Steve described. (Bushraki, Nabians, Selassians, Breakers, etc.) I've found that doing hard ship incursions can be quite profitable, even when using supplies from the Ship Forge. 

As Rhin has already mentioned, "Hard ships get you ~25k-28k." The usual supplies I need for my cruiser cost around 9-12k marks, (at least 20 batteries), so even when there were no spacers selling supplies, I could get by with the Forge's overpriced daka. 

NOW, with people selling batteries, (and other ship supplies as well) at prices way cheaper than the Ship Forge's, incursioning is something good to get into, especially if you have the time to pour into it. As Cubey said, incursions CAN indeed be boring. :P

I'd like to point out that in order to make the most out of an incursion, (as in to be able to clear out all mobs in an incursion before the timer runs out), you'd need to...
1.) get into an incursion zone with the timer at at least 75% or higher, and
2.) have around 45 minutes to spare.

Something else I'd like to note though is the fact that is that the only people who do Devourer incursions are those who...
A.) want to clear them so that the next incursion shows up already, and
B.) have no idea that they'll most likely be wasting more than they'll earn from Devourer incursion

There's no big and immediate reward from doing Devourers. 

The only reason I clear Devourer incursions is so to make room for the next incursion (which I always hope is a ship incursion, lol)

Cubey

@Rylek

That's not quite accurate. There are only two types of incursions, organics and ships - the difference being that the former don't have shields and drop less loot/captaincy exp. That machine branch you describe is actually all organics from a mechanical perspective. It just also happens that three out of four types of these incursions (binaries, trinaries, rogue ai but surprisingly enough not mining drones, I think) also happen to be runners, and runners are the worst.

Cleax are also runners, at least their organic version (there are two types of cleax incursions, small organic scouts and larger ships). So are vendals, who are both runners and ships, and worse than the worst.

@Reeloc

Was anything changed regarding the way incursions spawn? Back when I used to play, clearing an incursion wouldn't cause a new one to pop. A new incursion would appear only when an old one's timer reaches zero, even if that incursion had all its ships shot down (and thus disappeared from the INCURSION LIST) way before the timer ticked down.

So clearing devourers is pointless because either way you have to wait. That, or rules have changed and it somehow missed me or was stealthily not acknowledged in an announce post.

General advice for would be incursion hunters:

I find destroyers to be the best ship class for hard incursions, because they are more maneuverable than cruisers and pack enough firepower to trivialize the encounter, assuming you stay on top of things and don't let more than a pair of enemies be active at once. If you use the 4/1/2 version (and you should), equip one of the bigs and the medium cannon with EM batteries, the other big cannon with thermal, and fire only when the enemy is in optimal range and not moving very fast. Even shielded targets die to 1-2 salvos, and you're not even using small cannons so each salvo is at most 3 shots. Saves a lot of batteries, and thus marks.

Zhulkarn

Clearing incursions will make new ones at the same difficulty appear after a short while. I also clear Devourers but only if they are close to where my ship is and if lucky a decent incursion will come next.

Paqu

I have always wanted those Devourers removed. Having 2 of them taking up the hard slots of the incursion list is mostly disheartening. They are too easy, squishy and at times don't even fling something against your ship. The very opposite definition of 'Hard'.  Add that to the very low reward that comes with it. I understand that the Devs might have some lore planned for this little bastards that will make them out to be more terrifying than they are now, which is perhaps the reason for not removing them. But in the meantime, can I please request to the devs to add a (perhaps temporary) feature whereas clearing such incursions will produce the next incursion to replace it to be no more than 5 zones from it? That will make all the effort of piloting your ship throughout space to deal with these monsters a little more worthwhile.

Steve

For a little cross-post action... In the kinetic battery thread, which Nykara dredged up, I posted, among some other thoughts, that I think that INCURSION LIST should show whether something's a ship or an organic. (Or, HELP INCURSIONS should be updated to include that information. Preferably, both.)