Why not let players hire out npc contractors from the brewer corp. to assist in bringing material to the construction site? This would cut the grind in half but still maintain the sudo realisim. Or just as well, when a construction site is picked, a system colonization ship arrives shrtly therafter with all the materials needed to complete that project. All the player would have to do is ferry it to the site. This would eliminate the need for so many carrier jumps and make the entire process much more fun, as well as giving newer players and solo players the opportunity to participate.
NPC haulers for system building.
- Thread starter Mark julian
- Start date
Better yet, NPCs should just do the colonising themselves. What the hell do they need us for?
It is enough to simply enter various missions at the stations you have built: "you destroy pirates for N tons of Steel", "extract Osmium and get N tons of Titanium", "protect a cart with cargo in a settlement and get Aluminum", etc. Now, if you want to get a station with an L platform, you will have to do only one activity -> a hundred monotonous trips from A to B, whether you like it or not, it is not right, there must be a choice.
As I wrote elsewhere.
It would be awesome if you could hire apex to haul goods for you.
Works just the same as normal apex, but its goods from a station, it takes time, and they charge a serious fee. You can only have one Apex hauler active at a time.
The more you haul, the more you wait, the longer the distance all means the bigger the fee. And in a lot of cases it may be quicker just to haul the goods, especially using multiple commanders. But if you are a solo commander it would be a godsend.
Doing the grind should have an advantage. And that advantage should be time and overall cost. But if you are not worried about the time, and you can afford the cost, its a much easier way to do it, and, you can do more fun things to pay your apex hauling bill.
It would be awesome if you could hire apex to haul goods for you.
Works just the same as normal apex, but its goods from a station, it takes time, and they charge a serious fee. You can only have one Apex hauler active at a time.
The more you haul, the more you wait, the longer the distance all means the bigger the fee. And in a lot of cases it may be quicker just to haul the goods, especially using multiple commanders. But if you are a solo commander it would be a godsend.
Doing the grind should have an advantage. And that advantage should be time and overall cost. But if you are not worried about the time, and you can afford the cost, its a much easier way to do it, and, you can do more fun things to pay your apex hauling bill.
People repeatedly bring up this argument. Hiring NPCs would not make hauling obsolete, rather it enables alternative ways to enjoy the game while building a colony.
Explorers, combat pilots, exobiologists who want to build a base yet not haul commodities could hire NPCs to reduce the grind by 50%. There would be a timer so the facilities are not instantly built. NPCs would have a higher cost too.
This lets non-haulers participate in colonization and it's a money sink for people with billions of credits.
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Theres a game called X4 that does this, Elite on the other hand actually makes you do stuff, novel i know but it may catch on one day and we will all become less lazy in life.
Happy trucking
O7
Seconded.
Yeah, it's boring and dull.
There's nothing novel about forcing players to only do hauling to construct something. It's basic, barebones game design.
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I wrote something similar, but it was about having your NPC crew member that you can hire for combat to help you haul materials by taking a vessel from your fleet carrier and being more than just a combat pilot. I also support the APEX method o7
I would settle for ability to use fleet carrier cargo hold instead of ship cargo hold for transactions made by player through market interface as long as it is in the same system. In general I like the idea of hiring NPC pilots to do things like navigation for me (set target and make NPC fly to it, just like apex shuttle does it) or even handle freights of construction materials but general aptitude in ED seems to be focused around player doing things by him/her self all the time. The only exception from this seems to be ability to hire fighter pilots which is why I think navigator pilot addition should be fine.
Here's a better idea. NPCs do the colonising and they put out missions for traders to haul the stuff they need, miners to mine the stuff they need, fighters to protect convoys, salvagers to collect lost cargo, rescuers to save lost pilots, ....
Well many players want to be a system architect to manage / build up their own colony. It would be more engaging if the architect could create missions for miners, haulers, fighters (security), salvagers, passenger carriers etc.
They dont need us. They never did. This is simply a way to cut the massive grind in half. Games are supposed to be fun remember? Not a second job.
The size of the fee would be the problem, I think. Credit-earning rates vary so much between activities that it can't be sensibly balanced.
If you go all out for credit earning, you can probably get 200M/hour (there are certainly a bunch of stations with lots of missions that pay 50M each and don't take 15 minutes each to complete). So if you can normally make five round trips an hour, with a T-9 carrying 750t, that means to make it a reasonable choice Apex need to be charging something like 50000 credits per tonne hauled (or about a billion credits to complete a basic outpost for you)
Of course, the vast majority of in-game activities don't earn anywhere near 200M/hour. So that just makes it ridiculously expensive and means that you can't usefully do "other stuff" in general and have it be at all a useful substitute for hauling the cargo yourself. You're still either hauling or doing this extremely specific gold-rush activity.
But if Apex charge a smaller fee - say 5000 credits per tonne - that makes the fastest way to build a station (by a factor of ten) to use one of the outlier earning methods and then pay them.
Non-credit alternatives could work, though, because it's a lot easier to balance those to trade time-for-time. e.g.
- trade in a Building Schematic for 100t of requirements. Maybe could even be more than that, but there are a lot of spare Schematics about right now.
- increase the quantities given as commodity rewards for missions by about 10x, give the option for them to be delivered to one of your construction sites instead
- reduce the targets (slightly!) if building on/around a planet you've mapped
- have specific "construction convoy" signal sources with a pirate attack scenario. The more freighters which survive the attack, the more you get to your construction.
But the credit earning rates for activities are so incredibly unbalanced that it can't then be used to provide alternatives.
Rather than just automating the work away completely and dealing with the awkward questions around simulating them (would these haulers take their stuff in open? Appear in solo instances? What if one gets shot down by pirates?) I'd prefer to see a more subtle representation of this sort of thing.
Use the commodity markets, local economies, and delivery missions.
Someone sells a bunch of commodities at a market that are in demand elsewhere in the system? Especially if you sell more goods than there's local demand for at the markets? On the economic tick, those goods get snapped up by the local market and taken to chip away at the construction requirements.
The presence of construction sites should generate source&return and delivery missions at local stations that directly contribute to progress.
A station local to the system that produces particular commodities should slowly, over time, eat away the requirements for those commodities (at the cost of those goods being at lower supply on the markets while construction is ongoing)
And so on. And so forth. If you want NPC activity to help you build your stuff, there's a whole economic simulator in the game that could be tapped into.
Use the commodity markets, local economies, and delivery missions.
Someone sells a bunch of commodities at a market that are in demand elsewhere in the system? Especially if you sell more goods than there's local demand for at the markets? On the economic tick, those goods get snapped up by the local market and taken to chip away at the construction requirements.
The presence of construction sites should generate source&return and delivery missions at local stations that directly contribute to progress.
A station local to the system that produces particular commodities should slowly, over time, eat away the requirements for those commodities (at the cost of those goods being at lower supply on the markets while construction is ongoing)
And so on. And so forth. If you want NPC activity to help you build your stuff, there's a whole economic simulator in the game that could be tapped into.
I wouldn't mind being given the option of having convoy escort missions. If the whole convoy makes it to the construction site then the entire cargo of X tons is credited to your material requirements. Lose half the convoy and that's only 50% delivered.
And since this is on top of your architectural duties, you get paid - with bonuses for good performance.
And since this is on top of your architectural duties, you get paid - with bonuses for good performance.
Managing these logistics is the core gameplay of many city/colony building games (including the X series games).
The twist I would add here, which results in the most interesting problems and outcomes is is - you send NPCs from your already colonized systems to trade in other populated or colonized systems with the goods you produce there. This means you need to build up an economy to support further colonization and if you don't want to build up a particular industry chain then you can just haul it yourself (or barter with other players to have their NPCs deliver it).