Change to the insurance system.

[GarethGwill]

There have been other posts that touch on insurance/re-buy and engineer blueprints I'm sure, but here's mine.

I think the insurance system is backward. In the real world if you total your car, it's gone. That flash paint-job you spent $$$/££££ on? Gone. Your sat nav? Gone. Spandau Ballet CD? Gone. Yet in E, you Eject Eject Eject at Beagle Point in your heavily engineered AspX? Auto-magically re-appears at Hutton, exactly as it was, down to the funky smell and that weird stain you can't quite get out of the co-pilot's seat... And all the unique, random, unrepeatable engineer mods. It doesn't make sense.

Now I don't have an alternative to you re-materialising at Hutton or where-ever, but I have got a few ideas for what should happen to your ship.

1. You get the credit value of your ship, minus the rebuy cost, so you can build a new ship to the same spec as before.
2. You get an equivalent ship to the one you lost, minus any engineer mods.

These could just show up as extra options on the re-buy screen.

Wait, what happened to my engineer mods? Well, they're supposed to be unique, random, unrepeatable, right? So why are they on the new ship?
The third option is have the engineer keep any mod on file but you need to use the same mats you needed for the original mod. Don't have the required mats when you go off bang? You need to collect the mats then revisit the engineer you got the original mod from to get it back.

What does everyone think?

 

[Ktonos]

Τhe reappearing engineer modifications is something that puzzled me too.

In my opinion it would be really great if insurances were a gameplay aspect. I mean in a starport's contact menu you would have an entry like "insurance offers". You could lets say pick Accident insurance, Battle insurance or Stranded/marooned insurance. In anarchy stations you could encounter offers of insurance for destruction by Law enforcement etc. Each would cover the expenses if your ship is blown in a specific way. You would have to pay a weekly fee for each one of them. And in Engineer workshops you could potentially make a "modification insurance" contract.

 

[operant]

Insurance should be cheaper.
And you should get better engineered modules than you had before. As a 'free' market perk for competing insurance companies, which would have special deals with all the engineers. (Would be much quicker than the engineering grind too.).
This should be imposed on everyone else, not just me. Or failing that just me.
;-)

 

[NotHere]

You could lets say pick Accident insurance, Battle insurance or Stranded/marooned insurance. In anarchy stations you could encounter offers of insurance for destruction by Law enforcement etc. Each would cover the expenses if your ship is blown in a specific way.

If you own a Cutter, don't forget to purchase the flood insurance policy, too. Just in case those splendid 0g swimming pools life support coolant tanks on the side rupture.

You would have to pay a weekly fee for each one of them.

So not only is my insurance going to cover less (no mods), but you're going to raise my premiums (from 0) as well?! What's next, a yearly deductible? Differing rates for in-network vs. out-of-network coinsurance? "Sorry, Obsidian Orbital isn't in our network; you should've tried to have been blown to bits in Lave instead."

Heh heh. Joking aside, I'm very much not a fan of the idea of losing mods on death. It's a pain enough to get everything unlocked and engineered as it is today. I can only imagine how much worse it would be if we had this idea in combination with the G1-G5 grind per module that's being considered.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I suggested a while ago there should be levels of cover, which basically equate to artificial difficulty levels.

The current 5% rebuy is easy mode
Or hard mode, which is similar to what you suggested, where you just get the money for your ship.

But it's entirely optional which you pick, because personally, I can't be bothered to re-engineer my lolz bucket Eagle each time I fly in to a cliff at 650m/s Lol

 

[Ktonos]

What would in fact happen is that you would buy a mod insurance whenever you visit a new engineer. The only practical difference would be that each pilot would have an upkeep per week. I mean I've seen a couple of persistent criticisms of the game, one of them being how easy it is to make loads of credits.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I mean I've seen a couple of persistent criticisms of the game, one of them being how easy it is to make loads of credits.

It's easy to make loads of credits if you specifically want to make loads of credits. But if "fun" rather than "credits" is the aim, most activities don't make anywhere near that much money, and many don't pay at all.

I can make 50MCr/hour, if necessary. The actual act of doing so I think is fairly boring, so I tend to do other things which earn more like 0.5MCr/hour if they pay at all.

Putting any significant required money sink in that anyone consistently earning 50MCr/hour would notice in the first place would mean that on my normal earning rate I'd make a massive loss. So would anyone else doing RES hunting, or CG trading, or Thargoid fighting, or Pleiades station repairs, or exploration expeditions, or Powerplay, or canyon racing, or most other forms of "playing the game".