Manipulate the black market.

[CasualGamer]

I was wondering just how much we can influence what they want to buy at premium price, and how exactly we could do it. Say when we have a pile of corpses after a raid.

They only want things we have, (I think), so equipping all weapon mods and combat Sims could reduce the options and increase probability of them wanting whatever I have a large pile of.
Similarly selling things we won't need and have only odd pieces of would prevent that item being in high demand.

Is that valid, and what other options are available?
What advice can any more experienced players give?

[TheCiroth]

So there is a mod for this, which does what you are thinking. You CAN do the same thing with out it, by sending out all the mods you don't want the market to want but its a bit of a pain in the butt.

[CasualGamer]

Thanks for the reply.

I don't fancy a mod if it basically fiddles the economy to make the game too easy.
maybe if it just did what i could do manually but saved me a few pain-in-the-butt clicks.

I was just wondering if there was a standard way of getting an early boost from say the first troop or supply raid, when supplies are at a premium.

[andanteinblue]

It seems the blackmarket "interested" list is just randomly picked from items available in your inventory. I'm not aware of any other ways of manipulating this aside from "putting away" items -- so equipping mods on weapons and putting gear on soldiers that you don't want to be mooched from you, and starting research to consume the corpses / items to remove them from your inventory.

This is the mod the other poster mentioned:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =873562794

It basically does this for you (i.e. you can mark your weapon mods and gear to be not-for-sale). It specifically says it won't let you tag other items (like corpses, PCS, and data pads, etc).

[CasualGamer]

Actually that mod looks pretty good. Thanks for the link.

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

Creator of that mod here. What you wrote in the OP is basically all there is to it. At the start of the month, the game checks whats in your HQ-Inventory and selects three random itemtemplates to be rolled as "very interested". Puttin stuff on your soldiers removes these items from the inventory, reducing the pool of possible rolls. All my mod does is get rid of the busywork and make this manipulation technique less click intensive. I also consciously restricted combat sims from going in the list, because there may actually be some decision making involved here (since you cant just remove them afterwards, except when you have that one continent bonus).

I do wonder if pavonis will modify the black market in the future, I am not sure if their testers ever bothered to manipulate the odds in this way. Because make no mistake: doing this does make the game easier, and my mod encourages this behaviour one could say.
I would suggest making the "very interested" multiplier lower in higher difficulties (down from 2 to say 1.5). Would be a simple ini-change. Would also be a good way to reduce the effect of rng a bit (because selling a bunch of trooper corpses for double the amount has huge consequences). But who knows, maybe with 0% supply raids becoming less viable, it wont be such a big deal in the future.

[CasualGamer]

Creator of that mod here.
...
I would suggest making the "very interested" multiplier lower in higher difficulties (down from 2 to say 1.5).

Thanks for the mod, it does indeed just remove the clicks to do it manually.
Yes, I think lowering the multiplier would be a good thing.

[trihero]

Hmm I'll give this mod a try. I have to agree it's not actually a cheat, it's just a way around tedious manipulation of the black market you could do yourself through a million clicks.