Lestradae wrote:I have no problem with a fugitive crimelord player being hunted through the whole Ooniverse by any head hunter, GalCop and naval vessel in existence - actually, becoming a crimelord by buying certain stations does that to you. Your fugitive rating will go through the roof and basically you have no chance in hell to have it go down again until you sell the yakuza station or buy another one with a really good lawyer team
Because of these options in OSE, any solution that denied a player carrier docking would have to have a really viable alternative. It doesn't need to be pretty (it actually shouldn't) but to for example restrict the player then to only anarchies or even feudal systems seems a bit overly harsh to me.
So any viable alternative would need some sort of fugitives underbelly of the Ooniverse, free ports for pirates, well-hidden, and something akin to Frame's save anywhere that really worked with the future 1.73 Oolite imho.
Hope that makes sense?
L
I agree that the game would be improved if making a career of piracy became a truly viable alternative – but I don't see anything wrong with making it a difficult decision. Basically, pirate players' money-making opportunities are greatly increased, because they don't need to buy low and sell high: they just steal anything they want, and it's all profit. The downside would be that, for the dedicated pirate, there are few safe havens. I think having a scattering of free ports throughout the galaxy around most Anarchy, many Multi-Government and several Feudal worlds, where stolen goods can be traded advantageously, combined with a small number (8 per galaxy?) of actual renegade systems, where the main station itself is pirate-run and where Fugitive players can safely dock and save, would be a good compromise. OK, life is difficult: but it should be. Being a Fugitive shouldn't be an easy option.
Trading prices in the free ports (i.e. small, secret bases in the low-end systems) should be the inverse of the main system prices. The economy in pirate-owned systems, though, would be based on the planet's economy, as the citizens have no choice but to trade their goods through the station. Prices for things like firearms though should be high, and slaves low.
In the pirate systems there should be almost no Clean ships at all: the whole legal setup should be inverted. A Fugitive player, with a sufficiently high criminal and Elite rating, should go pretty much unmolested by other pirates there (as long as he doesn't start shooting up the neighbourhood). There could be occasional police and navy sorties made in those systems, though, and all the local criminal fraternity should band together to help fight them off.
I don't know if this is possible to do, but it would be interesting. These systems would be no-go areas for honest traders, and pure hunting grounds for bounty hunters, who'd jump in, shoot up the locals and jump out again, because hey sure as hell wouldn't be welcome in the main station!