Expedition Searches have changed for the worse

Not sure why, but iron and titanium ore are almost never coming up in expedition searches for me anymore. I keep 3 explorers open to do small colony searches. Most of the time in the last couple of weeks, not a single iron or titanium colony is showing up. That's 27 colony's to choose from without a single iron or titanium one. The last time iron came up was one week ago.

It could be related to tier 3 becoming the active mode, that seems to be when these ores stopped showing up. I'm not interested in marble, hardwood, coal or any of the other cheap rewards. Please fix the expedition searches so that iron and titanium show up on a regular basis once more.

Thanks.

Are you getting small colonies on a short search? For the last 10 days or so, i've been only getting Tier2 colonies from the short search (Normal search returns Tier2 as well)...in other words, i cant do any expeditions because i'm not getting any Tier1 anymore. Ore or not...nada... Hopefully reboot (aka "maintenance") will fix this

Wujcio, yep, small colonies on all searches. I went from tier 1 to tier 2 after 6 expeditions. Tier two went for a few days, (2 expeditions), then went to tier 3. I thought the tiers were an XP thing, the more you do, the higher the tier goes, altho tier 2 duration was pretty short, so who knows. Have tried searches on all colony sizes, small, regular and large with the same results. All tier 3, no iron or titanium showing up on any of them.

oh i see, there's a three tier progression withing a specific colony size itself...ugh.... that complicates things... since it makes it difficult to conquer player owned colonies with just infantry. And using archrs/cavs seems prohibitively expensive....

I'm using mostly infantry with a few archers & cavalry where needed. If a colony has tons of archer camps I can't avoid and would force me to use too many cav I cancel and search for another one. If a melee camp is too strong for a single wave of 100 inf, for example 120 roughnecks, 80 inf & 20 archers will take it out with 80 inf & 13 or 14 archers lost.

My heaviest losses in tier 3 have been 300 to 325 inf, 60 to 80 heavy inf, 35 to 45 archers and 35 to 70 cavalry, depending on the layout. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out the attacks, which are different every time, and don't worry about the pseudo-economics of it all.

yes, that's what i mean... 300 inf = 1800 gc, 60 h.inf = 200 gc, 35 archers = 2000, 35 cav = 2500, totaling 6000+ gc in best case... still profitable with granite if it lasts for 7 days but give the amount of time spent...

as far as challenge, yes i like it too ...they just need to tweak risk/reward ratios