So watching the resource requirements and tier placement points spiral insanely out of control attempting to build my own system, and idly leaving my character being Apex Shuttled between completed stations in the hopes of updating it from Construction Sites on Inara, I thought I'd sketch out how I'd impliment an actual system (inspired by No Man's Sky) to widen out the mechanisms through which a solo player could ship their own goods. And, as in the title, it would be NPC fleets.
BASIC OUTLINE:
Currently we can hire NPC fighter pilots. Who even when not aboard your ship, sit in the lounge and eat into your profits and cripple your Elite Combat ranking. Let's put these space moochers to better use. Let's hire them, and make them trading pilots to also ferry goods. On the right hand holo-window (where Carrier Management, Career etc is) there will be a Trading Fleet option now, where we can set up trading contracts they will fly for us.
They will use the ships you currently own and have in storage, and the mission will be calculated from the location of that ship. We will pick a ship we have in storage, apply one of our hired crew to it, and request it fly to a particular station to purchase X amount of cargo. The carry amount will be set by the current equipment of the ship; an NPC flying your trading Cutter with 792t of cargo can bring back 792t etc. The range of the ship they're in sets where they can go etc. Whilst they're on that mission, the ship is locked out for your use; they're physically in it and it's not available to you.
But... when will you pay, and what will they do when they get there? This is where the design ethos FDev want to enforce comes in; if they don't mind you being able to remotely see and order from other markets now, you lock in the price and current availability on mission launch, pay for it then, and send them off. Simpler to implement, less prone to bugs, but changes the way the game feels a bit. But if you want the target system to be as distant-blind as currently, maybe have a bank, like the current Fleet Carrier bank, where you have to deposit cash ahead of time as an operating fund for the fleet, and they take the money out of that bank when the game calculates they're at the target station, at the price as seen at the same time, for however many tonnes of the target cargo is actually there when they "land".
Make it 1.5x (for example) or more the cost of purchasing the tonnage yourself, or give them no profit on selling to the Construction sites as you don't want it to supplant the purpose of player trading. Allow them to also load and unload to your carrier to keep those useful: You could have NPCs load up the carrier, then move the items en-masse to the target system via the carrier, then send the fleet out again to complete deliveries from it, for example.
Whilst they are doing deliveries, they can spawn in the systems they land at as an NPC in other player's games; so people can see CMDR NPC BOB flying to the target station in your Cutter, with the skins etc it has for you.
Delivery times are based on the range of the ship they're in of course, but slower than the players own ship delivery. Again, it should be a supportive, but not supplantive gameplay addition. Something you set them off doing in the background.
But lets make it a bit more complex, flesh out the NPC crew mechanics. Trading missions also have two variables; The first one is that behind the scenes there are some sort of mechanics which calculates how likely you are to have an interdiction attempt spawn on you the player, as well as the overall system security. Use those, or if you want to keep it simpler, just a generic formula to generate a "Dangerous" rating for each trading mission, which is handled by the NPCs current Combat Ranking. The higher ranked they are, the more likely they are to deal with any imagined pirate attacks etc. If they fail to do so, the ship is damaged and needs to be repaired, or even destroyed and takes the full insurance cost. Painful, but again we don't want NPC trading to be that profitable, only a way to provide structure and relief from grind at the expense of credits... and it gives a secondary reason to train them up to Elite level. Allow extra NPCs to "Multi Crew" on missions and further boost the odds with their combined Combat ranks...
Maybe the weapons load and engineering etc on the ship the NPC is borrowing can be used to further bias the mission success chance in its favour; it gives a reason to not just own and keep a wider fleet of ships, but for the player to properly equip them and engineer them out
Secondly, give them also a Trading Elite rank too; at its most basic, it's just a nice way to see how many missions they've flown for you. But maybe it has benefits too, like speeding up how quickly they can fly to the target system, or avoid docking accidents etc, or just reduces how much money they leach from you, either in trading price or over inflated wages, the greedy freeloading bar-stools. Again, multi crewed NPCs get combined better value deals for you.
THINGS THAT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE, BUT PROBABLY TOO MUCH WORK TOO ADD
Let us ride with them as they go trading, just as we ride with Apex Shuttles... this would probably be a tonne of work as you'd not only realistically want the in game pilot model to match the NPC portrait we have in game, and I doubt the tech is there for the pilots; whilst they're not random, (as you get the same NPC and model for each local system flight), there's no profile picture for them; where as the NPCs we have for crew already have an existing one so the pilot model would have to be generated from it. But also you'd need them to be intercepted, and fight on your behalf (or let you man turrets and act like multi-crew) for any of the theoritical events as suggested above, where as currently none of that can happen at all for Apex Shuttle flights. Still possible, I suppose, the pilots already fly your fighters in local combat, but a lot of work to hook it up entirely. And how much fun would it really be to be sat there helplessly watching a Mostly Penniless pilot fly you into the side of the mail slot...
Allow you to flag your NPC pilots for PvP, and have them Wanted & "Trading For Player" when going on these missions; Give them a discount if they are successful, and a financial loss if they get blown up by players on the way... It might be impossible to sync back to the player owner's mission status however whether they've been destroyed etc (especially if they're spawned multiple times in different instances), and it would be extremely hard to balance with any sort of realism regarding in-system time as a specific target, combined with the fact who'd really bother taking the risk?
And that's it for a quick sketch of how I imagine it could work.
BASIC OUTLINE:
Currently we can hire NPC fighter pilots. Who even when not aboard your ship, sit in the lounge and eat into your profits and cripple your Elite Combat ranking. Let's put these space moochers to better use. Let's hire them, and make them trading pilots to also ferry goods. On the right hand holo-window (where Carrier Management, Career etc is) there will be a Trading Fleet option now, where we can set up trading contracts they will fly for us.
They will use the ships you currently own and have in storage, and the mission will be calculated from the location of that ship. We will pick a ship we have in storage, apply one of our hired crew to it, and request it fly to a particular station to purchase X amount of cargo. The carry amount will be set by the current equipment of the ship; an NPC flying your trading Cutter with 792t of cargo can bring back 792t etc. The range of the ship they're in sets where they can go etc. Whilst they're on that mission, the ship is locked out for your use; they're physically in it and it's not available to you.
But... when will you pay, and what will they do when they get there? This is where the design ethos FDev want to enforce comes in; if they don't mind you being able to remotely see and order from other markets now, you lock in the price and current availability on mission launch, pay for it then, and send them off. Simpler to implement, less prone to bugs, but changes the way the game feels a bit. But if you want the target system to be as distant-blind as currently, maybe have a bank, like the current Fleet Carrier bank, where you have to deposit cash ahead of time as an operating fund for the fleet, and they take the money out of that bank when the game calculates they're at the target station, at the price as seen at the same time, for however many tonnes of the target cargo is actually there when they "land".
Make it 1.5x (for example) or more the cost of purchasing the tonnage yourself, or give them no profit on selling to the Construction sites as you don't want it to supplant the purpose of player trading. Allow them to also load and unload to your carrier to keep those useful: You could have NPCs load up the carrier, then move the items en-masse to the target system via the carrier, then send the fleet out again to complete deliveries from it, for example.
Whilst they are doing deliveries, they can spawn in the systems they land at as an NPC in other player's games; so people can see CMDR NPC BOB flying to the target station in your Cutter, with the skins etc it has for you.
Delivery times are based on the range of the ship they're in of course, but slower than the players own ship delivery. Again, it should be a supportive, but not supplantive gameplay addition. Something you set them off doing in the background.
But lets make it a bit more complex, flesh out the NPC crew mechanics. Trading missions also have two variables; The first one is that behind the scenes there are some sort of mechanics which calculates how likely you are to have an interdiction attempt spawn on you the player, as well as the overall system security. Use those, or if you want to keep it simpler, just a generic formula to generate a "Dangerous" rating for each trading mission, which is handled by the NPCs current Combat Ranking. The higher ranked they are, the more likely they are to deal with any imagined pirate attacks etc. If they fail to do so, the ship is damaged and needs to be repaired, or even destroyed and takes the full insurance cost. Painful, but again we don't want NPC trading to be that profitable, only a way to provide structure and relief from grind at the expense of credits... and it gives a secondary reason to train them up to Elite level. Allow extra NPCs to "Multi Crew" on missions and further boost the odds with their combined Combat ranks...
Maybe the weapons load and engineering etc on the ship the NPC is borrowing can be used to further bias the mission success chance in its favour; it gives a reason to not just own and keep a wider fleet of ships, but for the player to properly equip them and engineer them out
Secondly, give them also a Trading Elite rank too; at its most basic, it's just a nice way to see how many missions they've flown for you. But maybe it has benefits too, like speeding up how quickly they can fly to the target system, or avoid docking accidents etc, or just reduces how much money they leach from you, either in trading price or over inflated wages, the greedy freeloading bar-stools. Again, multi crewed NPCs get combined better value deals for you.
THINGS THAT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE, BUT PROBABLY TOO MUCH WORK TOO ADD
Let us ride with them as they go trading, just as we ride with Apex Shuttles... this would probably be a tonne of work as you'd not only realistically want the in game pilot model to match the NPC portrait we have in game, and I doubt the tech is there for the pilots; whilst they're not random, (as you get the same NPC and model for each local system flight), there's no profile picture for them; where as the NPCs we have for crew already have an existing one so the pilot model would have to be generated from it. But also you'd need them to be intercepted, and fight on your behalf (or let you man turrets and act like multi-crew) for any of the theoritical events as suggested above, where as currently none of that can happen at all for Apex Shuttle flights. Still possible, I suppose, the pilots already fly your fighters in local combat, but a lot of work to hook it up entirely. And how much fun would it really be to be sat there helplessly watching a Mostly Penniless pilot fly you into the side of the mail slot...
Allow you to flag your NPC pilots for PvP, and have them Wanted & "Trading For Player" when going on these missions; Give them a discount if they are successful, and a financial loss if they get blown up by players on the way... It might be impossible to sync back to the player owner's mission status however whether they've been destroyed etc (especially if they're spawned multiple times in different instances), and it would be extremely hard to balance with any sort of realism regarding in-system time as a specific target, combined with the fact who'd really bother taking the risk?
And that's it for a quick sketch of how I imagine it could work.