As a new player I am probably restating an issue that has already been brought up many times however the cargo management hurts my brain. The most glaring issue is the fact that a standard unit of cargo is a ton and this is used for determining cargo capacity. The problem here is that a ton is a unit of mass not a unit of volume its fine to simplify the cargo system to use standard units but those units need to make sense for example a standard unit of cargo should not be a ton but rather a measure of volume such as m^3. Mass is not really a factor in determining cargo capacity of a space craft operating in deep space. Obviously a over mass ship will have crappy acceleration consume a lot of fuel and have a reduced frame shift range but the max tonnage doesn't determine how much cargo can physically fit in the cargo bay or how much cargo it can move between space stations. Max tonnage is only useful in determining wether a space craft can operate within a gravity well. as for a ton being a standard quantity of cargo when you add variations of gravity into the equation a ton of cargo on planet A could be a half ton on planet B or 3 Tons on planet C making this attribute unsuitable as a cargo capacity unit. Optimally the cargo should have both a mass and a volume because not only does this allow for better balancing of cargo capacity it also allows for ships transporting low mass cargo to not suffer speed and jump penalties for a full cargo hold while also making sure lower quantities of heavier cargo will effect speed and fuel usage appropriately as well.
Refactor inventory to display cargo capacity as a unit of volume instead of mass
- Thread starter Corian Teranos
- Start date
Presumably the mounting brackets in the cargo bay are only rated for 1t pods. If it's a tonne of clothing it might well fill up quite a bit of the pod internally. If it's a tonne of osmium, then it's a small block in the middle plus a lot of packing foam to stop it falling out of the side of the pod when you do a sharp turn. If it's a tonne of Lavian Brandy, then it's a single bottle of Lavian Brandy plus a tonne of packing foam to keep it safe.
It’s entirely possible that the capacity IS based on tonnage ... ie the ship can only move/jump with up to a certain tonnage on board, regardless of how much space that takes up.
Of course, that doesn’t really make sense with the ability to add extra capacity by installing more cargo racks ... but maybe that’s the kinda theory they were going for?
Of course, that doesn’t really make sense with the ability to add extra capacity by installing more cargo racks ... but maybe that’s the kinda theory they were going for?
tonne
BTW - I used to hate doing the weight and balance calculations for aircraft and that was just military where it was mission-fits that gave most changes. The corresponding nightmare that must accompany cargo craft appear daunting to me. Therefore it seems a reasonable assumption (mental excuse) to say that each container of cargo has a mass of 1 tonne - no matter what you put into it, the gross mass (net mass) of the container would be 1 tonne. That way your ship w&b (or mass and moment for spacecraft) would be easier to compute. Presumably that is why in commercial shipping you have VGM (verified gross mass) - saves the ship capsizing after loading (
).
BTW - I used to hate doing the weight and balance calculations for aircraft and that was just military where it was mission-fits that gave most changes. The corresponding nightmare that must accompany cargo craft appear daunting to me. Therefore it seems a reasonable assumption (mental excuse) to say that each container of cargo has a mass of 1 tonne - no matter what you put into it, the gross mass (net mass) of the container would be 1 tonne. That way your ship w&b (or mass and moment for spacecraft) would be easier to compute. Presumably that is why in commercial shipping you have VGM (verified gross mass) - saves the ship capsizing after loading (
).
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I have wanted to have a mass and weight for cargo. For instance 1 unit of gold could way 4 tons, and a unit of tea could weigh 0.5 of a ton.
This way it would mean that gold would be more valuable for a reason in that it is more difficult to transport. Also the heavier you are the worse your handling is and the worse your FSD range is. It could be better to trade in lighter goods as well as heavier goods. It would give us reasons to trade in food for instance intead of just mainly metels or minerals.
At the moment I find trading to be a completely un-balanced mess.
This way it would mean that gold would be more valuable for a reason in that it is more difficult to transport. Also the heavier you are the worse your handling is and the worse your FSD range is. It could be better to trade in lighter goods as well as heavier goods. It would give us reasons to trade in food for instance intead of just mainly metels or minerals.
At the moment I find trading to be a completely un-balanced mess.
If in such games the whole gameplay is reduced to the state of a brick, then people too quickly reach the goal and the end of the content and they get bored, hence the various gankers and those who say "I'm leaving and the elite." Natural and logical difficulties will not spoil the game, but will only give players new goals, therefore I support the essence of the proposal.
Elite-style trading is basically impossible to balance, I think.
They've done some interesting things in 3.0 and 3.3 to make more goods capable of being the optimal one for a specific route, and making that calculation change daily with the BGS state updates, but in practice it's mostly irrelevant (not least because things like EDDB can substitute for actual thought in almost all cases).
For it to work properly I think you'd need the travel time between trading ports to be quite a bit longer than the market cycle - so, sure, system A has a great price when you depart, but will it still have a great price when you get there in three days time, or will system B be better, and can you predict how the markets will move?
...but if they wanted to focus on that, they'd have called the game Elite: Entrepreneur rather than Elite: Dangerous, and probably have made it a fleet management sim rather than a first-person spaceflight game.
I don't think it's impossible, it would just require a combination of faster ticks (1 per day is a good start, but ideally we should see them every hour or even every 15 minutes) as well as bringing in other potential variables such as making piracy a real concern (ie, making pirate attacks scale in ferocity and frequency according to the value of cargo held as well as local market and security conditions) and maintenance costs (to make cheaper and more cost efficient freighters more suitable for certain runs). Even with perfect market information, it would be possible to make it having a significant amount of decision making potential by tying together a sufficient number of different factors and facets that a player should consider in order to make the largest possible income.
On the topic of making trading a more important thing, trading has always been one of the core things of the Elite franchise. It was the thing that set it apart from conventional adventure and space combat games. While it's true that some spiritual successors (such as the X-series) have focused heavily on the economic side, considering Elite's massive development investment compared to its peers (ED allegedly has 5x the number of developers active on it than Egosoft's entire employee base) I'd say that Elite's trading is currently one of its weakest points in dire need of a big overhaul.
I don't think a fun and balanced space trading game is impossible ... I just don't think it would much resemble Elite Dangerous, and I think it probably is impossible to get to it by starting from Elite Dangerous.
BGS ticks every fifteen minutes would be a nightmare for every other use of it if that meant that things actually changed faster - but if it just smoothed out the transitions, it wouldn't really help for shaking up the trading markets on the scale needed. And you don't want the price to be too volatile, or the response to arriving and finding you're not going to make a profit will just be to wait a few minutes to see if it improves. This is all much easier if you can use time acceleration or time-skips in hyperspace to make the markets volatile over the duration of an inter-system trip, but usually stable while waiting in dock. Of course, that doesn't work in multiplayer.
Piracy ... yes, potentially that could be used to both slow down reaching port (and therefore not require quite as fast market cycles) and to introduce further balancing factors... but making pirate ships a reasonable threat (of destruction or more usually partial theft) would require a major change in odds in favour of the (NPC) aggressors, especially in terms of making interdictions very hard to evade and low-wakes impractical under fire, which would probably also require a complete clawback of most of engineering - especially drives and shields. Similarly, making maintenance costs high enough to make them seriously cut into trade profits if you pick the wrong ship for the job (and therefore the consequences of just ignoring them serious enough that you don't!) would be very hard to balance against exploration where the collection-reward cycle is weeks or months rather than minutes and you can't just pay up every hour to service your ship.
It's also, of course, mostly irrelevant unless skilled trading is more profitable than any unskilled activity. There's quite a lot of complexity and depth in the current trade system in terms of restock rates, state effects, local specialisations, etc. and hardly anyone cares because you can either just get EDDB to tell you a trade route that's over 90% of optimal, or you can go mining instead.
To an extent. It's very difficult to stop it coming down to the simple "which has the greatest profit per unit", though, unless you can somehow guarantee that even an experienced player will lose some cargo to piracy on most trips.
Making the most profitable cargoes perishable, and therefore not something you can hang around waiting for the price to improve or trying multiple stations on, might be one way to do it. But they'd need to decay really quickly - half lives of at most 20 minutes on their value - which would be pretty implausible for most goods (Why, exactly, are we cooking the soufflés in a different system to the one the restaurant is in again? Oh, right, protected designation of origin rules.)
BGS ticks every 15 minutes would probably be relatively minor, unless something major happens in the meantime such as a megaship dropping off some cargo or some other BGS shenanigans. Granted, the currently minimalist BGS can't simulate these things beyond highly abstract state changes, but one can dream that they'll eventually rework the BGS to be far more bottom-up and include far more general happenings (such as megaship schedules, NPC plots and schemes, regional price disturbances etc that would reward in-depth knowledge of the local events and news for traders). Currently, the game lacks sufficient depth in the BGS to properly allow for market research beyond the basic commodity demands and system states. The ultimate goals for regular, quite major changes in price would be to both reward the clever forward-thinking trader as well as reduce the effectiveness of 3rd party trade assistants as they are much more likely to be using outdated information.
Piracy would indeed require making NPCs far more threatening, both in terms of their interdiction capabilities and their general realspace effectiveness. Obviously, this would scale depending on local security and the value of the cargo you are hauling. A player trading a low value good such as grain or aluminium would only encounter relatively weak pirates that can easily be avoided or defeated by a normal freighter (assuming it has the smallest mountable shield and weaponry), while a ship dealing in the more valuable goods like gold, Imperial Slaves or getting medicine into an outbreak system would want to be a proper hybrid ship (largest possible shield generator, possibly a fighter hangar and a decent power distributor and thrusters). This could possibly be weighted further based on the value of the cargo per tonne, so two ships with equal cargo value would see pirates attempt to take down the one with the more credit-dense commodities as they don't want to be bogged down trying to collect near-worthless flak. Engineering wouldn't necessarily have to be affected as long as the NPC pirate response were to be balanced accordingly as engineering would just let you get away with a bit more cargo than an unengineered ship; the issue would come down to how many Kraits, FDLs, Anacondas, Eagles, Asps and Cobras would have to be sent against an engineered freighter to have a reasonable change of bringing it down (even if it requires chain interdictions, a juicy target with 5 million credits of Imperial Slaves would trigger an organised response from most of the pirates in the system and possibly neighbouring ones.
This would also rein in Void Opals somewhat, as even a single VO would attract pirates like blood in water. A 500 tonne cargo bay of them would result in the player's location basically being a 1-side CZ as they get drowned in endless waves of 30+ pirates at a time, which could possibly turn into something resembling a regular CZ if the system security is high enough to bring in sufficient authority ships.
Piracy shouldn't just be a random interdiction every now and then, it should be a serious factor to consider for even an engineered ship. Piracy should turn the trading game into one of careful planning, judging the security of the systems and the combat capabilities of your ship vs the value of your cargo. Sure, gold might give more credits per tonne than silver, but does 500 tonnes of gold bring more profit than 700 tonnes of silver?
Maintenance is a bit trickier as you have mentioned, particularly due to the need for explorers to spend prolonged periods out of reach of conventional resupply and repair methods. Then again, I have been quite vocal about reworking exploration so it is less space tourism and more stellar survival...
This actually sounds interesting. I did wonder about this too at the beginning. Mass and density.
That way, the ship would have 128 units of cargo space. I could load it up with 128 units of VOs.
Assuming per unit would be 1 cubic meter, 1 CBM of lead would come in at 11.34 tons (average density 11.34 g/cm3)
1 CBM of Osmium would be 22.5t, and 1 CBM of Void Opals would be 2.09t, based on the average density of normal Opals.... aka SiO2·nH2O.
But if commodity prices were to be reflected in tonnage, then it would actually make a very interesting trade/mining mechanics.
You can go out and fill your hold w 128 units of VOs, and they would bring in 267.5t worth of profits.
At 1.6m Cr max, you can earn 428m per full load.
But if you fill your hold with 128 units of Osmium. You would have 2880 tons.
At a max sell of 36K Cr per pop, you would bring in about 103m Cr.
Still less than VOs, but is better than the 4.6m you would get now since everything is measured in tons.
At least lower value, but higher density metals would be a little more lucrative now, and have more of a reason to exist other than being fillers next to VOs and LTDs.
As an afterthought, the cargo rack would probably have to be refactored a bit.
Eg: A class 2 Rack might mean a 2 x 2 x 2 cubic meter space, for a total of 8 units.
Cl 3 = 3 x 3 x 3 = 27 units
all the way up to CL8 where it has 8 x 8 x 8 = 512 units of space.
One thing interesting I can see is that, you won't be able to load up your ship with 512 units of Osmium as you wouldn't be able to jump far, or even at all.
And if you landed that thing on a planet, you would effectively be grounded till you ejected some of that stuff out.
Just leave the current jump range and ship max weight mechanics as is. We can then see how players will get creative with their ship outfitting.
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... so people think the cargo "model" is unrealistic but have no qualms about our Remlok suits being able to hold thousands of bits of raw materials and manufactured components.
It is a game - get a grip.
It is a game - get a grip.
... so people think the cargo "model" is unrealistic but have no qualms about our Remlok suits being able to hold thousands of bits of raw materials and manufactured components.
It is a game - get a grip.
Isn't the ship holding the materials?
Last I recalled, we didn't have space legs yet.
No, they move with the pilot and are teleported with him / her on ship destruction.
Actually so does cargo. And if you try to change ship while holding more cargo than your new one can hold, you can't do so.
So in short, stuff gets transferred around in the port.
Little NPC porters and slave labor will move your cargo and mats from ship to ship whenever your change it.
As for ship destruction. Shhhh….. we'll let that one slide by.
... There is also the SRV - you go into the SRV and your materials go with you - your SRV blows up your materials still get teleported with you.
No - the stuff isn't "held in the ship" no matter how much you want to reason it into being so.
I reckon the materials are really in the ship. And you're just using the internet to look at your ship inventory.
And any materials you scoop up gets teleported to the ship. (Because it's the 34th century, and they learned how to beam me up Scotty in the 23rd century)
But shhhh…… we'll also let that one slide by...…