Forums » Suggestions
transportation of goods / player-offered cargo missions
now, a lot of us who do a bit of trading or mining have to haul our resources around manually. this might be a nice way to control the flow of money, but the level of tediousness is somewhat annoying.
the simple solution is to have NPCs offer to move goods. to make this somewhat unusable for the current trade missions, I suggest three things:
1) the cargo system will deliver up to 100 cus per system per hour. if you're looking to move 500 cus of Apicene across six systems, well, it'll take a 6*(500/100) 30 hours to have it all moved. this makes this useful for large mining hauls, but rather useless to move 45 organic solvent crates across two systems.
2) you don't get XP for moving the goods, so if you used it for a cargo mission, you'd only get your standing fixed, no trade XP. apart from it taking much longer than travelling yourself.
3) cost. make the transports cost quite a bit. maybe 5%-10% of the value of goods, plus a set fee per system per cu. for moving 500 units of heliocene across six systems, 500 credits _per_ cu is a fully acceptable cost. it then becomes a question if you want to manually move all the cargo yourself and save money, or if you want to spend the money on the transport and mine or do something else instead. like logging off, for those who do that.
now, further down the line, add the possibility for players to do these missions. the issuing pilot would give a set of parameters with regards to the mission, likehow much money are you're willing to pay and by when must the shipment be delivered.
now, what happens if the player decides to run off with the cargo? well, first off, the player shouldn't be able to sell the cargo at normal stations, let's assume it's marked or tainted as soon as the mission is offered. I am however fairly certain that Corvus stations would buy the goods.
it should cause a pretty nice faction hit towards the transporter if the cargo is ever sold. if it is just lost, the faction hit should be smaller, but still exist -- unless the transporter guarantees the value of the items (ie, the transporter repays the value of the lost goods).
the simple solution is to have NPCs offer to move goods. to make this somewhat unusable for the current trade missions, I suggest three things:
1) the cargo system will deliver up to 100 cus per system per hour. if you're looking to move 500 cus of Apicene across six systems, well, it'll take a 6*(500/100) 30 hours to have it all moved. this makes this useful for large mining hauls, but rather useless to move 45 organic solvent crates across two systems.
2) you don't get XP for moving the goods, so if you used it for a cargo mission, you'd only get your standing fixed, no trade XP. apart from it taking much longer than travelling yourself.
3) cost. make the transports cost quite a bit. maybe 5%-10% of the value of goods, plus a set fee per system per cu. for moving 500 units of heliocene across six systems, 500 credits _per_ cu is a fully acceptable cost. it then becomes a question if you want to manually move all the cargo yourself and save money, or if you want to spend the money on the transport and mine or do something else instead. like logging off, for those who do that.
now, further down the line, add the possibility for players to do these missions. the issuing pilot would give a set of parameters with regards to the mission, likehow much money are you're willing to pay and by when must the shipment be delivered.
now, what happens if the player decides to run off with the cargo? well, first off, the player shouldn't be able to sell the cargo at normal stations, let's assume it's marked or tainted as soon as the mission is offered. I am however fairly certain that Corvus stations would buy the goods.
it should cause a pretty nice faction hit towards the transporter if the cargo is ever sold. if it is just lost, the faction hit should be smaller, but still exist -- unless the transporter guarantees the value of the items (ie, the transporter repays the value of the lost goods).
Very well thought-out and good suggestion.
[stamp of approval]
[stamp of approval]
Would be nifty for those times when you've mined 10,000 Pentric, but someone crashed the price at the station you had it stockpiled at. :P
[stolen stamp of approval]
-:sigma.SB
[stolen stamp of approval]
-:sigma.SB
thanks. the main idea is to make it feasable to move large quantities of goods around. today, it's just painful. :-)
hm, I found a possible exploit in doing this. the solution would be to make the calculated cost depend on the _highest_ price in either station. yes, you could solve procurement missions like this, but it'd take you some days to do so and you'd have to dish out the money beforehand for everything you wish to procure.
of course, the fix for this is to make procurement missions to get item <foo> less likely to be offered to the player if there is more than a certain amount of <foo> already in storage in the station. this means that you'd also have to keep _getting_ stuff for procurements, you can't just haul in the cargo first and then do the mission.
quite honestly, this would be a good thing.
of course, the fix for this is to make procurement missions to get item <foo> less likely to be offered to the player if there is more than a certain amount of <foo> already in storage in the station. this means that you'd also have to keep _getting_ stuff for procurements, you can't just haul in the cargo first and then do the mission.
quite honestly, this would be a good thing.