Proposal for earning credits

[Echo Wake]

Earning credits in ED is not suppose to be something easy to do. When I started Elite, it took me about a week to finally move into an Adder, from there another week or two and moved into a viper mk. 4. I ended up staying in a viper mk. 4 for probably the next several months doing the bounty hunting thing. Years later I can say that I finally own several large, medium and small vessels. And no I do not have any where near a billion in the bank.

I know we will be moving to having squadrons pulled in hopefully in Q4 of this year. With this mechanic there will be, or should be, a way to control various things related to a squadron, aka player minor factions, which got me thinking.

Why can we not have a very small player owned fleets? A Players fleet size could not exceed more then perhaps 4 ships. I originally thought 8 would be nice, 2 wings of 4, but that's probably going to far. All ships in the players fleet would consist of ships that player owned, except the ship the player is currently in.

This would tie in game mechanics like ship transfers, as well as being able to hire crews for those ships.

A player can have several options for their fleet:

1. Bounty Hunting
2. Mining
3. Trading
4. Smuggling
5. Pirating
6. Exploring

Also there can be few ways a fleet is set up using the 4 ships.

1. You can have 1 ship for trading with an escort of 3 ships. This would be useful in anarchy systems.
2. You can have 2 wings with 1 trade ship and 1 escort, and the other wing can be 1 mining vessel with 1 escort.
3. You could again have 2 wings with wing 1 having 1 ship exploring, and the second wing doing bounty hunting with 3 ships.

In the above scenarios it is assumed the player in question has at least 5 ships at their disposal, the ship they are in plus 4 other ships they own. You can arrange the fleet however you need to fit your current needs.

This brings me to credits, NPC crew for the fleets and squadrons.

Every NPC crew in a fleet will get paid 20% of the money earned in each activity, while the player would bring in 80% for being the owner of the fleet. And if that player was part of a player minor faction, or squadron, then a 5% faction tax could be added to this to aid in the cost maintaining squadron fleet carriers. The faction tax rate could be adjusted by the owner of the faction to suit the needs of the faction, but can not exceed 15%. Some factions could tax 2% others 10% all depending on the factions needs.

This now bring me to hiring crew. We can already pick up NPC crews for flying our fighters, but we can expand on this to show several types of NPC crew:

1. NPC Pilot for Bounty Hunting - would have small bonus to credits earned and better survival rating. Similar to the NPC pilots we have currently.
2. NPC Pilot for Trading - would have a small bonus to trading as well as being better able to avoid being pirated.
3. NPC Pilot for Exploring - this pilot would give a small bonus to time duration for getting to a specified system.
4. NPC Pilot for Mining - a pilot in this line of work would increase the odds of bring in higher quantities of more rarer items, i.e. Painite
5. NPC Pilot for Pirating - this pilot would have better success at pirating in anarchy systems with a faster crime response time in any system that's not anarchy, but with better rewards.
6. NPC Pilot for Smuggling - this pilot would be able to sell items on the black market and has a reduced chance of being scanned by police ships, but a higher penalty if they get caught.

The Pirating and Smuggling Professions would mark those ships as "hot ships", so, should a player decide to fly one of these after the fact, they themselves would be sitting in a "hot ship".

Should any of the ships be destroyed in their tasks then the player, since it is their ship, will asked if they'd like to re-buy the vessel, like we currently do, and have it returned to port of origin. The NPC crew as with current game mechanics would be killed. Or the player can choose to not re-buy the ship should they choose not to re-buy it.

This is a very loose concept, but I am taking a stab at building on some existing game mechanics and adding some new ones in.

I feel this will help with everyone doing the credit grind and eliminate the need for "cash cow" systems like Quince or Rhea was. This will also help with the re-buy cost for commanders currently fighting Thargoids especially when the Thargoid story line unfolds more.

A fleet can be set to do any task for a maximum of 1 week, or as little as an hour. The Player can cancel the fleets activity at any time, but when the fleet is active... the player will not have access to those vessels.

What do you guys think? I am sure this could be drastically improved... Or be a complete waste of time.

 

[Cageman]

For Solo players, this is what is needed. I do not think this would be good in any other game-mode though.

 

[Oopsie Daisy]

Reminds me of the bots-as-party-members back in GuildWars1. Probably going the get the same sort of arguments, pro and con, as back then.

 

[krylite]

It would be hard and taxing on the current system. npc piloted fighters already self-destruct when the cmdr leaves the instance. I assume you mean ships of the player's fleet doing activities outside of the player instance. How would this be done? Would these npc piloted ships appear in other player's instances? What about particular modules, and paintjobs which would be more taxing where each player account could have multiple ships running around. The reason it works for the X-games because besides being single player, the persistent universe is actually microscopic compared to ED's where the whole map which consists of a scrabble setup of squares of a 2d map works as a single "instance". And having the player not logged on with npc bot ships working for the player is something unlikely Frontier would ever approve in gameplay.

That said, having an extra escort npc ship in an instance would be a fun idea. With limitations in set as to not overwhelm the game, the cmdr could form a wing with extra npc manned ships. I would also wish for npc crewmembers.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Haven't the countless nerfs made it clear, we're not supposed to be making credits around here? We're supposed to work 20 hours a day, 7 days a week for a quarter-credit and be grateful to get that. Sheesh.

 

[smiths121]

Its still a lot easier to make money than 1.0-1.2 was. I thought it was hard, and I learnt to fly (badly) in alpha and beta.

 

[Tarman]

I don't mind it as a mechanic of itself for other games; the Duty Officer gameplay in STO is probably one of my fave bits. I wouldn't care for it in Elite however, where I want the gameplay to focus on the actions and results of the human pilot as much as possible.

I think a separate game built first on this premise would be a neat offshoot of Elite (Elite: Tycoon, say), with an intentional focus on fleet management and having cockpit gaming as a thing where you could dive in more when you wanted rather than of need, especially in a late-game scenario. It'd let people eventually play the admirals and business entities that some think should apply to rich PF CMDRs, and buy up stations and companies and attempt to grow in competition with other players and/or NPC tycoons. The way I see the existing Elite in-world power setup, PF members are like super wealthy mercenaries at best, and the real power of owning a planet or even a galactic business would be much further above our evolutionary chain no matter how many Cutters are parked up across the galaxy.

I just realized how much that sounds like some other game. .______. Still it'd be neat to make a management-based game out of Elite parts. I just don't want to do that to the main version of Elite.

 

[ZurielSanctus]

Or, make modules less expensive.

 

[RamirezKurita]

I think that rather than implementing an entirely new system, why not just let us put our NPC crew into our spare ships and have them perform as wingmen, just like current PC wingmen? They wouldn't need to do anything outside your instance, simply dropping into your instance a second later if you ever change. To prevent players outrunning their NPCs, it would be quite easy to code in a system that limits the player's jump range to the shortest in their wing.

Combat roles would be obvious, they would by default protect their player but can be ordered like SLFs to attack targets or roam at will to find their own targets. They could also be given additional orders to do things like scan for bounties themselves. Some improvements to AI would also help if it would allow them to understand the shield regen weaponry to help keep the rest of the player wing topped up.

Trader stuff would be simply them picking up appropriate cargo when the wing leaves the station with the player having another station locked into their nav computer. The NPC crew members own trade rank would determine how intelligent they are with picking up the best value cargo, but even penniless NPCs would still earn a few credits profit. They would, of course, contribute as a priority towards any wing missions the player picks up. If they wanted to go more in-depth, then they could even allow some kind of faction tagging system so that the NPC pilots could pick up missions themselves rather than simply bulk trading. Smuggling potentially could be automatic if the player picks up illegal cargo for the destination station, with higher combat rank NPCs understanding how silent running works.

Other stuff, like mining, would be a bit more code intensive as the AI are not particularly good at it yet. It would likely take an entirely new set of orders and AI scripts in order for a player to manage bringing out their own wing of miners.

 

[d8veh]

Yeah, a fleet of NPCs would be great. Fly your fleet into the RES, then go down the pub while they clean up all the bounties. If you come back drunk, leave them until the morning. By that time, you should have over 100 million in bounties.