Advisor (trade)

[wabboo]

Summary

If you don't know something, you can ask an advisor for assistance. Advisors are available on most stations (similar to the authority contact). All advisors work the same way, but each advisor is specialized in a specific field. This thread will be about advisors in general and more specifically the trade advisor.

Common advisor mechanics
Advisors can only give advice in the context of a region of space. So advisors aren't all knowing. The closer something is, the better they can give advice:

• Perfect knowledge radius (0ly-40ly).
• Referral knowledge radius (40ly-80ly).

In the perfect knowledge radius the advisor can respond directly to a question, while in the referral knowledge radius the advisor will tell you to go to a specific advisor on another station. Questions that you will be able to ask are pre-formatted (not freeform) and therefore will be easier to be implemented. Enlisting the services of the trade advisor will cost the player a small directly payable fee (like 1000 credits) for realism sake.

Answers will be text based, although having hyperlinked destinations in that text would be extremely useful. Answers can also be forwarded to your mail, so you have a copy when you're not on the station.

Trade advisor

The trade advisor helps commanders with their trading needs and all questions are focused on trading on the market. This also means the trade advisor can support commanders with trading missions from the mission board.

Currently I can think of two questions that are useful:

1. Where can I buy <commodity>?
   When you ask this question, you need to also select which commodity you want to know this information for. The trade advisor can respond in three ways:
   • The trade advisor gives the buy location that is closest to the advisor.
   • The trade advisor refers to the closest advisor that knows the answer.
   • The trade advisor doesn't know.
     
2. Where can I get a good sell price for <commodity>?
   When you ask this question, you need to also select which commodity you want to know this information for. The trade advisor can respond in two ways:
   • The trade advisor gives the location of the highest sell price within the perfect knowledge radius and because a trade advisor exists with a higher sell price in the referral radius, will also give the location of that advisor.
   • The trade advisor only gives the highest sell price radius, because the other trade advisors in the referral radius have the same or lower prices.

Selecting a commodity is done through an additional dialog. Each question will have a dialog that is tailored to that question, but for both trading questions the following dialog would proabably be appropriate:

Finally the answer will be shown in the answer box and you have the ability to copy the response to your mailbox:

Final thoughts
Will this be enough to lessen the need to consult external sites like inara.cz and eddb.io and provide an in-game solution? Unfortunately no, because those external tools don't take information propagation in the simulated universe into account. Therefore they can have more data accessible through commander data mining. It does however provide a plausible in-game mechanism for commanders to obtain said information.

This thread is about the trade advisor, but there can be more advisors. Such advisors could include:

• Exploration advisor
  Has rumors to interesting sites. This could help in guiding players to new/existing content, like: guardian ruins, thargoid sites, megaships, abandoned bases, etc.
• Bounty hunter advisor
  Can give information on where a player/NPC is. Can be tied to bounty hunter missions which are more vague and require a bit of detective work.

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

It would also be good to see an outfitting advisor or shipyard advisor, so you could select a ship and appropriate modules and get told the closest station to buy them at. Ask in Li Yong Rui space and you'll get good deals.

 

[wabboo]

It would also be good to see an outfitting advisor or shipyard advisor, so you could select a ship and appropriate modules and get told the closest station to buy them at. Ask in Li Yong Rui space and you'll get good deals.

You'd probably want to combine those into a single advisor (upgrade advisor maybe?). I recognize the need for it as well (because I use eddb.io to locate sell locations).

 

[[VR] Dr Gentech]

You'd probably want to combine those into a single advisor (upgrade advisor maybe?). I recognize the need for it as well (because I use eddb.io to locate sell locations).

Yeah agreed, maybe a shipwright?

I think these suggestions are really good. It bugs me a lot that you need to use tools outside the game to play.

 

[wabboo]

Yeah agreed, maybe a shipwright?

I think these suggestions are really good. It bugs me a lot that you need to use tools outside the game to play.

Yep, good one: Shipwright