A cornerstone feature of this modification is going to be procedural text generation: e.g. flavour text for station descriptions, shop/station-sector descriptions, trade item descriptions, merchant family descriptions, and so on.
I would like to see this mod being incorporated into the main game itself. Releasing it is not enough.
Here are some relevant threads I have dug up:
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Planets (project cancelled): a cancelled project, with neat ideas on how to incorporate planets into the game.
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Trading and larger star network mod: a cancelled project, with some example code that I can use...well, if someone has a copy of it!
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Why can't we trade with Ferians?: generally makes me think of how to increase trading connections between humans/neo-humans.
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Trading Profit: from the horse's mouth itself:
georgemoromisato wrote:Perhaps NPCs are competing with the player. For example, imagine that the player finds an ice farm willing to pay 100% profit on fuel. The player might run to a fuel depot to buy fuel. But the catch is that someone else might sell to the ice farm first, in which case, the player can't sell (either because prices change or because the ice farm no longer wants the fuel).
georgemoromisato wrote:Perhaps the player can buy information about prices. For example, the player can pay 1000 credits to learn that a station in the system is paying 100% profit on a certain item; or that an item is for sale at a certain stations.
-----------------------------georgemoromisato wrote:Right now there are only a few station types that you can reliably sell to: ice farms, hotels, corporate enclaves. At minimum we should increase this set: medical centers (buy meds), food processors (buy fuel and organics), energy generators (buy rad shielding), etc. Ideally we should design this set so that it is (more or less) obvious what the station wants to buy.
I like the idea of dynamic events shaping trade needs. An example of a dynamic event could be important trade routes being destroyed, and the goods being stolen, creating a dire need for those items. The player then has to "find" the goods needed, quickly before an NPC does!Shrike wrote: * We can have weapons manufacturers that buy metal and sell guns/ammo/armor (a good place to start are the makayev/rassiermesser plants).
* We can have helium regolith being made into fuel....somewhere.
* We could have hospitals or medical centers that require medicines, or stations that have an outbreak of illness and pay for anything the player has that can help.
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I'd like to be able to fix this up somehow.TVR wrote:A major limitation is how gates are like black holes to NPCs, they swallow them up and never spit them out the same way again. NPCs can't cross systems, thus they can't really participate in intersystem trade-route fun, actual competition for example.
There is an old thread that contains a long discussion about how to give "out of sight systems" life, but the conclusion was that the engine couldn't support it efficiently. I think it should be possible to create such "life" if the game engine (C++, rather than TransLisp) was periodically updating events there based on numerical calculations. Maybe this should be one of the first features of the mod.FourFire wrote:I'd like to see a possible implimentation which saves the data on ships, and maybe even runs the systems on either side of the current one (at a slower speed), (next system over paused) with persistent ships traveling from system to system... on their intersystem missions.
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Instead of celestial objects, it could be political/safety considerations. Or, merchant family tensions, for instance. Or perhaps...the loss of navigation beacons through large nebulae...TVR wrote:If say celestial objects orbited around while out of system, now that would make trade routes dynamic and navigation tricky - risk/reward.
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-------------------------------------------------------TVR wrote: Blockade running to supply a besieged station would definitely be interesting. As would something like being slipped a tracking device with a large commodity exchange purchase, and then having to fend off a pirate ambush. As mentioned, temporary shortages are exciting, because unlike static trade-routes, temporary trade-routes can't be solved - it is something that forces the player to consider survivability versus maneuverability versus cargo space as they race around, and, of course, risk/reward.
This is a very important point that I would like to address -- I don't want NPC competition to simply be frustrating.TVR wrote:Salvager Nomads are NPCs competing with the player, and last I knew tended to draw hatred for that competition. For my part, I despise them because they perfectly know every wreck as soon as it happens, never seem to be deliberately attacked, don't mark or scuttle wrecks once they've looted them, and don't interact with the player. In short, they're a loot-leech, not "competition".
If the trader-NPCs were actual characters, who have player-style limitations and could be interacted with (at least provide decent conversation in the Trafalgar Bar), then yeah, they'd be a good thing. If all they do is cheat me out of my reward for the past hour's work, then I go looking for a mod to fix the problem.
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Some more quality polemics from TVR:
==============================================================TVR wrote:Currently, stations of the same type are completely interchangeable, there is no difference between one hotel station and another for example - they all buy the same things at the same price! This causes trade routes to be nothing more than a back-and-forth fetch quest...
I propose this solution: A station's buy and sell prices should depend on the quantity of the commodity that the station already has.
The gameplay effects of this proposal: no longer will the player have to deal with...buy limits and [fixed prices] - even with linear topology and static station inventories, the player will be encouraged to explore and find new stations to trade with as older stations reach commodity saturation...in fact, the dominant trade route should become multi-hop, as the player can get the best price by evenly distributing a commodity over as many stations as possible (AKA selling retail). Of course, the player would have to consider fuel cost and time spent versus relative profitability. The commodity exchange at each CW station would also become like a real-life COMEX, making it possible to arbitrage and trade between different CW stations, rather than having them all buy and sell the same things at the same price.
Industry chains: well, that's my title for the thread, because that's the idea it gave me.
There are goods -- they have to be processed into being more interesting things which can be sold for more. In order to process them, you'll need to somehow help set up an intermediate station located at an appropriate place (get investors, and so on). Or, convince an existing station to switch over to doing your style of work. In any case, the point is: product chains. Industry.
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UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Another thread by George, which I have to take notes on at some point.
http://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.p ... ding+trade
http://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.p ... ding+trade
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Please do comment.