1. The dead end that the player will meet if he/she fails to deliver. I get the joke, but I still think it's flawed. The player needs to be punished, but the no way out situation is too harsh. So I tweaked it so that, if the player returns to the monks too late, he will be stripped of everything valuable and if that's not enough, then it's a broke adder start time. Problem solved.
2. Random black monk punishers were too frequent and repetitive to my taste, so I tweaked them so that you rarely meet one and more rarely you see them punishing someone. Problem solved.
3. But then the real problem, the money lending business. The original mechanic is tied to jumps and I think that works brilliantly. From designer perspective, it's possible to roughly predict how many jumps are needed to do some business and still be able to pay back. That's good. Easy to make it challenging, but not impossible. But from players perspective that's just stupid, it's hard to reason why the loan is tied to jumps rather than time. So I switched it to time (as have been requested multiple times) and all of a sudden the loan time is either ridiculously small or long depending on the distance of the trade systems. I wrestled with it for a while and when I just could not find any sane way to balance it, I just ditched the whole conversion
.But now I've got a new idea
. How about making these money loans a transfer missions with a twist. And that twist is interest. The player wants to loan 20 000 credits. Black monks can do that, but for some reason they want you to pay back at some other named system. With an interest naturally. So you have to be there by time and you better have those credits and the interest. You need to trade/bounty hunt/mine whatever on the way to accomplish that.And the reasoning. The player is actually working as middle man in some shady money transfer gimmick. Money laundry maybe. That's probably something illegal, so to make it look like legitimate business, the money is in fact lend to the player with real interest.
So now we have a mechanic that gives a beginning player a nice credit boost at start and pushes him to travel the chart rather than "boringly" jump between two systems.
Does this sound worth pursuing?
.
) and so a loan that might be easy to pay off in one ship might be next to impossible in another. Likewise, if the player approaches the monks later in game then they might have a much bigger ship (e.g. Python ET) and much greater assets.
Admittedly I had some help from a viper pack (who were dropping like flies) but it was having a lot of trouble targetting the adder head on, so you might want to look into that.![[EliteWiki]](/images/elitewikismall.png){kind=small}
Alien Systems
