Currently, the game just rolls the dice a lot. You get a slew of missions spinning off in random directions and Colonia. Aside from isolated systems, this makes getting more than a couple missions to the same station an exercise in futility and board-switching. This makes mission running in larger ships annoying. Smaller ships can operate mostly optimally, but anything with a generous hold or cabins cannot effectively FILL those cargo/passenger slots.
Proposed alternative: Primary and Secondary missions.
Primary Missions: Pay the best. You hit the board with this selected, and get a RNG assortment of missions, like currently. You pick what you want to do, and set a course.
Secondary Missions: At this point, you have X cargo units free, and Y passenger slots available. You flip the switch on the board, and instead of random missions, you get much less lucrative mission to your PLANNED DESTINATION. Bulk transport missions, bulk transport of refugees or whatever, random data missions, etc. These pay nowhere near as well as primary missions, but they fill out your capacity, and they DO pay, and they provide a bit of reputation to boot.
Tertiary Missions: Similar to secondary, except they go NEAR your planned destination, another station in the system, or a nearby system. But they pay a bit more to justify the additional stop.
Reasoning: You're the freelance captain of a spaceship. You hit your contacts for a paying gig, but it hardly fills the hold of your ship. Then you hit the bars, looking for smaller contracts to pad out the rest of your capacity.
NPC bonus: An NPC crew should provide a bonus to mission generation! (They get PAID from it, after all!) They're another warm body, and you would send them out to hit other places too, to drum up work! This provides an ACTUAL USE FOR NPCs in ships that have multicrew, but have no fighter bay!
And it's not unreasonable mission stacking, like Quince. It makes SENSE, and it makes larger ships (with larger costs) actually justify their expenses! A reason to upgrade! WITHOUT board switching!
Proposed alternative: Primary and Secondary missions.
Primary Missions: Pay the best. You hit the board with this selected, and get a RNG assortment of missions, like currently. You pick what you want to do, and set a course.
Secondary Missions: At this point, you have X cargo units free, and Y passenger slots available. You flip the switch on the board, and instead of random missions, you get much less lucrative mission to your PLANNED DESTINATION. Bulk transport missions, bulk transport of refugees or whatever, random data missions, etc. These pay nowhere near as well as primary missions, but they fill out your capacity, and they DO pay, and they provide a bit of reputation to boot.
Tertiary Missions: Similar to secondary, except they go NEAR your planned destination, another station in the system, or a nearby system. But they pay a bit more to justify the additional stop.
Reasoning: You're the freelance captain of a spaceship. You hit your contacts for a paying gig, but it hardly fills the hold of your ship. Then you hit the bars, looking for smaller contracts to pad out the rest of your capacity.
NPC bonus: An NPC crew should provide a bonus to mission generation! (They get PAID from it, after all!) They're another warm body, and you would send them out to hit other places too, to drum up work! This provides an ACTUAL USE FOR NPCs in ships that have multicrew, but have no fighter bay!
And it's not unreasonable mission stacking, like Quince. It makes SENSE, and it makes larger ships (with larger costs) actually justify their expenses! A reason to upgrade! WITHOUT board switching!
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