Fighting and trading (including ferrying passengers) have fairly close action/reward loops: you do the job, and you generally get your rewards when you are done. Exploration does not: you do your scanning, and then you have to wait at least as long as it takes you to travel 20 light-years before you get your rewards. (Unless you're doing Codex exploration, when you get your reward as soon as you dock at a suitable place. Which raises a lot of questions on its own ...) For serious exploration-for-money you have to wait until you're back in inhabited space to know if your goals have been reached ...
I'd like to suggest a quicker action/reward loop that does not do away with the current system, but allows the explorer-for-money to get better control of current status.
The idea is to have two exits from the FSS scanning mode: one that is the same as now, and one that is a report exploration status, and then exit.
The report should probably say what has happened during the current FSS session: how many bodies discovered of each type as well as any additional discoveries, such interesting locations, which is basically inaccessible outside FSS mode. Here would be a great place to discover if any terraformable bodies were found, which otherwise would require a rather painful click-through of each separate body description. It might also be a place to identify that some kind of non-stellar phenomena were observed: this is so easily missed or lost in current exploration gameplay.
It should also do some kind of award summary: how much would all current discoveries be worth when I get back? Bonus would of course be excluded: that depends on other things. But the basic awards should be possible to tabulate. (This is both for explore-for-money people, as well as a transparency issue: it's much easier to identify problems with explicit information, than having to rely on manual documentation.)
The summary should probably also be available elsewhere.
I'd like to suggest a quicker action/reward loop that does not do away with the current system, but allows the explorer-for-money to get better control of current status.
The idea is to have two exits from the FSS scanning mode: one that is the same as now, and one that is a report exploration status, and then exit.
The report should probably say what has happened during the current FSS session: how many bodies discovered of each type as well as any additional discoveries, such interesting locations, which is basically inaccessible outside FSS mode. Here would be a great place to discover if any terraformable bodies were found, which otherwise would require a rather painful click-through of each separate body description. It might also be a place to identify that some kind of non-stellar phenomena were observed: this is so easily missed or lost in current exploration gameplay.
It should also do some kind of award summary: how much would all current discoveries be worth when I get back? Bonus would of course be excluded: that depends on other things. But the basic awards should be possible to tabulate. (This is both for explore-for-money people, as well as a transparency issue: it's much easier to identify problems with explicit information, than having to rely on manual documentation.)
The summary should probably also be available elsewhere.
