Ok, I've been very slow to follow or respond to this thread...partly because I've already explored some of these issues in Switeck's Shipping OXP.
In my OXP, certain ships were rarer. Boa 2's and Kraits were less common simply because 1 is a semi-new model and the other is out-of-production and dwindling.
Boa 1's were much cheaper than Boa 2's (300k vs unchanged ~495k) because I never saw any point to them otherwise...they're still 50% more than Pythons!
Fer de Lances got extra equipment installed by default but kept the original stupid-high price.
I think we can almost abandon fixed-in-stone roles for NPC ships, if anything those are only fit to increase or decrease the odds of seeing them in those roles from default.
While I can't see an Anaconda in a bounty hunter role, I can a Boa 2...and fully equipped, it's scary.
Likewise, all the freighter types can be pirates at least rarely. They become the "mothership" a pirate group is built around. Once again, a Boa 2 in this role is probably best avoided. Even an Anaconda could be bad news on account of all the missiles it's carrying. Maybe traders and pirates could have random number of missiles, weighted lower in safer systems?
Even the composition of traders and pirates should depend more than currently on systems -- an anarchy should not have poorly-armed solo traders wandering around in weak ships, they typically should show up in (small) groups of 2-7 ships. Anacondas could have more variety than Cobra 1's for escorts. Nonstandard mix-ups could be possible, like 2 freighters and 1-5 fighter/escort types. Maybe even give Adders a minor extra role here -- tagging along with Anacondas or Pythons that they can at least barely keep up with. Asps might be escorts as well, but typically only found in especially dangerous systems. A Cobra 3 could be either a fighter or a mothership/freighter depending on the makeup of the rest of the trader (or pirate!) group. Overall, this will raise the variety and sense-of-danger levels found in the core game while still keeping ship numbers about the same as before.
In World War 2, convoys were organized into slow and fast types depending on ship types. Likewise in Oolite a fast convoy could be restricted to ships at least 0.3 LM speed. This means the only freighter types possible are Boa 2s and Cobra 3s. A slow convoy could have anything, since having fast escorts even with slow motherships is still useful. May not be necessary to code this, as just creating random groups of 2-7 ships may accidentally cover this anyway. OXPs can add more specialized and/or larger convoys as desired.
An odd side-effect of this minor convoy system is it will create larger empty spaces between ships in dangerous systems assuming roughly the same number of ships per system as before.
The player will have to choose the relative safety-in-numbers of tagging along close to one of these slow-moving trader groups or mad solo dash to the main station and hope not to stumble across off-lane Deep Space Pirates (OXP) along the way. As it should be!
A rare courier type (typically Cobra 3's, Fer de Lances, and Asps) might inject all the way to the main station. These were "Joyriders" in my OXP, unfortunately my OXP lacked the finesse to only set ships to that type if they had injectors and were fast to begin with.
There's almost no point in "stocking" a system with many traders/couriers heading for the sun -- they're easy to miss if you're trying to go there yourself. Bounty hunters would have little reason to run that route if pirates are likewise seldom there due to the difficulty in finding such traders. So too would Police ships.
I'm not comfortable with many/most pirates having their bounties reduced to 0. Solo bounty hunting is a high risk vs reward role to begin with. Each pirate ship in a pirate group should probably be worth more than they would be solo as well...from the notoriety gained from working together. "The Dalton Gang"
Lone pirate bounties can be low such as 10-20 credits, but with gangs they may be worth 30-50 credits each. Making them worth more than Thargoids seems excessive. The bounty-boosting tricks in Oolite v1.76 and earlier probably shouldn't apply...at most they can reach 127 credits unless created higher than that by an OXP.
Opportunistic traders that attack the player when nobody else is around should be rather rare, especially in safer systems and for new players. This could be a surprise event the player "earns" by going somewhere dangerous or after a couple weeks gametime.
How a ship is outfitted should entirely depend on where and how it's encountered.
A lone pirate is likely to have a beam laser and maybe an ECM, fuel injection is a good backup in case things go badly for it.
Other equipment should be possible but less likely.
Rear-mounted lasers are an extra frill NPCs could have, especially in more dangerous systems.
Traders doing "milk runs" in supposedly safe systems are likely to have fewer escorts and be less poorly equipped even than pirates, since repairs are cheaper that way and attacks are deemed unlikely.
"Core" democracy/corporate state systems in Galaxy Chart 1 could be a little safer than any other Galaxy Chart, to give new players a little more security. Anyone who uses a Galactic Hyperdrive should be well-equipped. This extra safety may only last till a Galactic Hyperdrive is used...or the player indulges in piracy. It could be time-based too, so after a few weeks/months "things get worse"(tm) in-universe without the player doing anything useful. While this may be player-centric, we have a big problem with getting and keeping new players who often find docking to be a challenge and fighting pirates even harder. It won't change whether they've earned Elite status, if anything it may make Elite harder to get with fewer pirates to kill.
A lone pirate may be a hard but winnable fight...at least till missile/s hit the player's ship. Nearby traders, bounty hunters, and certainly police should "throw the poor dog a bone" by sometimes ECMing pirate missiles chasing the player's ship.
What really kills new players is pirate groups, so these are reduced in "safer" systems.
Disembodied wrote:There might be a way around this, and around the Furball OXP problem too: use the pre-existing odds calculation system, and make stations count as very powerful ships. Galcop main system stations would be extremely powerful, and hostile to Offenders, Fugitives and Thargoids (although I don't think the bugs use odds calculation, so that won't make any difference there). But it should, I think, mean that most pirates would be scared off by the station's presence - but a very powerful pirate fleet could still attack ships within the aegis (or, more specifically, within scanner range of the station).
Heck, make stations very powerful ships! Stations could have missiles, probably of the hardhead type for main stations, for defensive purposes. Quicker to launch than defense ships! The launcher probably should be pointing away from the normal docking port, just to avoid accidental friendly fire.
Thargoids in general have little reason to head to the main station, instead they should mass up along the space lane and head to the witchpoint...maybe wait there for a minute and head back down the space lane if they don't get any action. If they run into max-sized convoys + police/bounty hunters, they'll need roughly equal numbers just to have some survive that fight. Having only 1 or 2 show up at a time is pretty much a joke event. Even a group of 10 that stick together typically get wiped out in my Switeck's Shipping OXP within <30 minutes by random trader traffic, despite having Thargons that follow them around!
Cody wrote:[pirate boss mode] I've got a pack of a dozen or so loyal, experienced followers, and I'm hanging-out in an industrial anarchy system cursed by dreadful civil war (Edxexe, for example - a nice place to do business).
Economy-wise, somewhere fluffed as having a civil war likely won't have lots of cargo for sale at its main station...but it might be willing to pay more than normal FOR cargo! That's because the system should have more pirates plying its shipping lanes.
Stocking up on Furs is already hit-or-miss, even an Adder isn't guaranteed to fill its hold with Furs at a poor agricultural system's main station.
Minerals are too plentiful at main stations at least on the rich industrial side. Rock Hermits would have "more", but they're set too high and flip over back through 0. So it's a little bit hard to play the role of miner without my OXP and Ore Processor OXP.
Gold is the same way, but probably should be kept rare due to its nature.
If anything, rather than simply greatly reducing the profits between RI<->PA systems, change things around at the other systems. A Mostly Industrial system for instance pays poorly and has little worthwhile for sale currently, yet I'd expect such a system to have a much larger and active economy than a Poor Agriculture. Their demands might be for more computers that they appreciate and can immediately use than a Poor Agriculture. They might have (simple?) machinery for sale that an Agriculture-type desperately needs. A Rich Agriculture might have more Liq/Wines and Furs, but at higher prices than a Poor Agriculture. Better to be able to fill your Cobra 3's hold than to get a great price on only 1-4 TC of Furs. Food price range between RI and PA can be slightly larger, since it's so low-profit that it almost only matters to new players starting out. No freighter types can fill up on food without using cargo contracts.
The whole environment is coming alive ... This creates interesting possibilities for OXPs like the old Dictatorships and Commies: in-system stations could start to effect the distribution and behaviour of NPCs. It might mean that they would need to be judiciously placed, perhaps just off-lane - or that certain non-Galcop stations would have to have their own relationship with in-system pirates.
