Adding the opportunity to hire NPC pilots who can unload or load cargo to the fleet carrier. With a higher risk of being caught by pirates and the loss of the ship and cargo. In my opinion, it is an extreme waste of time and it is very boring to load or unload 20,000 tons of cargo. This will allow pilots to do other things or missions. This will avoid repetitive and boring game play in my opinion.
Hire NPC pilots who can unload or load cargo to the fleet carrier.
- Thread starter Mor
- Start date
In theory, it should work. But in practice this is not the case. Even if you give relatively good prices for buying or selling. The cargo can stay for months and the prices of the stations change quickly. This will be a good opportunity for those who trade. You load something from the station with the help of the NPC and then unload it elsewhere. Personally, I have tried to see if it will be possible to unload the FC from other players. The price I gave was high. In the best case, it is unloaded at 1/3.
Nah, NPC are not supposed to interact with your carrier market. NPC ships land on carriers, but that's only for show.
(unless something changed that I'm not aware of)
While I agree with you and understand that there is probably nothing else but BGS and your local PC (performing transaction calls) to handle these interactions, it would still be a bit fishy if you see NPC ship landing at your FC with empty cargo bay and flying away a minute later with a full cargo of commodity you put on sale (not sure if that is the case).
Would be nice if one day Frontier could implement some sort of distributed BGS, which would (not relying on servers) simulate market economy with e.g. 5 minute tick time. Distributing and balancing computation load amongs active players.
I suspect there'd be more bug reports if they did randomly trade, given the deliberate player-to-player trades that they could mess up.
Given the relatively small size of the dataset - a few hundred thousand stations, a few hundred commodities - and the fact that the majority of it is Odyssey stations which might get a visitor a week and so there's lots of shortcuts possible ... there's nothing in that which couldn't run off a single basic server in terms of complexity. (They do have multiple market servers, but not because the simulation itself is complicated)
Distributing a simulation across thousands of highly unreliable nodes would be massively overcomplicating it for what's actually needed here.
I haven't tried cargo scanning them but I'd expect that they just have whatever cargo the system economy gives them and don't change it over. Otherwise it'd be a very easy way to duplicate in-demand cargoes: put it on sale, pirate the leaving NPCs, put that on sale too.
The market simulation currently runs on a ten-minute cycle.
Given the relatively small size of the dataset - a few hundred thousand stations, a few hundred commodities - and the fact that the majority of it is Odyssey stations which might get a visitor a week and so there's lots of shortcuts possible ... there's nothing in that which couldn't run off a single basic server in terms of complexity. (They do have multiple market servers, but not because the simulation itself is complicated)
Distributing a simulation across thousands of highly unreliable nodes would be massively overcomplicating it for what's actually needed here.
But then why is that number not including a number of FCs? Maybe it is somehow related to the FC jump countdown? So that until FC jumps further it can be "ticked" at least once.
It is quite annoying that NPC may jump not taking into account a factor of disruptive mass. Maybe the possibility of such an "exploit" is the only reason of FC markets not to function correctly.
Because the way that the market is currently simulated doesn't have any need for FC cargo levels to change without player intervention.
The basic NPC economy is assumed to be steady-state if no players act, so will gradually return to an equilibrium level (determined by the political BGS states, population size and economy) in the absence of player activity. A Fleet Carrier doesn't have a defined equilibrium level because it doesn't actually produce or consume anything - it just stores it - so they're effectively always at equilibrium and only player activity shifts that.
(If you want to handwave that as "the NPCs do buy the cargo from your carrier, but an equivalent volume of NPCs sell the same cargo to your carrier so you don't run out of stock", go ahead)
I would expect it to work one way - if you set sell price lower than at system local markets - the amount of commodities stored on FC will decrease over time, the faster the more difference in prices. And the same way with the buy cost - just other direction. There could be some timeouts to propagate market prices information within a system, which one could reduce by transporting one chunk of commodities manually. That's in theory.
Not sure if that's the same with PP - expansion/fortification triggers. There are certainly NPC ships generated in the system which are "supposed" to deliver PP cargo, and upon destruction they may even drop that type of cargo. But I am in doubt it affects the actual amounts.
I would like to see in both cases there was some multiplier based on player activity to "generate" NPCs activity to deliver cargo. But maybe it will require too much dev effort and computing power to support this feature.
The amount of computing power required would be minimal. There's not that many carriers, lots of them have no meaningful market, or are in uninhabited systems, or are selling at well above the normal market prices (e.g. Tritium) specifically to players, or have restricted docking, or some other reason that this trade wouldn't take place. They could quite easily implement it so that if you're in a condition where your goods could be profitably transferred to a local market, the NPCs did do that without any need for actual player intervention - I can't imagine given some of the things they have implemented in the BGS that it'd be much effort.
However, I very much doubt that they will - it'd let you get a substantial amount of passive income from a fleet carrier with the only activity needed be to jump it occasionally between a couple of systems and reset the market. The principle of the game and especially of the BGS is that if you want something to happen, you either have to do it yourself or convince another player to do it for you. NPCs making your bank balance tick up just for owning a carrier - or making trade CGs considerably easier by letting NPCs load the carrier while you sleep, even if you did still need to unload it yourself - really doesn't fit with that.
The discussion here has shifted from the original idea. And it is to be able to hire NPC pilots as we now hire for combat purposes. But here they will be able to buy or sell according to pre-set parameters. At greater risk of losing the ship or cargo. This will allow the player to do more interesting things. My opinion is that the repetitive and boring gameplay (grind) is what kills this game. And many things can be done with good will. For example, fleet carriers cargo docks where it will be possible to unload and loads directly from the fleet carrier to the station. Which will take some time. Doesn't the cottage bother the fact that we have the ability to load 750 tons of cargo in 1 second? This is not realistic at all.
It seems that FD should change the limit of buying/selling prices to make this idea work. We have a 1000% limit (from the average price) now and I think it should be 10.000% to let us trade as we would like to.