A few more ideas

Ok, been little busy lately with second chance and ship creation.

Maybe we could get a few more ideas in for epic.

The possibility to insure your ship against destruction, and not losing everything. So basically this: You take up an insurance of for ex 50% 80% or 100% of the ship value, and if u get blasted to smithereens the insurance company pays u back the percentage of value u insured your craft for. Dunno if this is possible.

A kind of learing curve. you’re part of a certain race, but lets call it faction for the sake of simplicity. Now, you choose to be with faction A or B. if you chose for faction A u automatically get a rookie ship whith which u can start off in the world, and a set of basic skills.

-Engineering
-Gunnery
-Mechanic
-Industry
-Spaceship command

now the nice thing about this is: you have to make money by doing missions, mining or trading. Some ships are crap for mining, they cant install the mining laser, but are good for cargo running. some have a low crossection on radar, fast and agile. Good for interception.

The problem is, that if you want to upgrade your ships with new weapons, systems, etc… or for that matter buy a new ship to fly with,having the money just won’t do it. you need to upgrade your skills needed as well (which just takes time) and start studying to upgrade to the next level. Basically this is a timer function that starts to count down as soon as you activate it. Needless to say: higher levels take more time.

To fly another corporations ship, you need to go to that corporations space, buy the basic flight guide and start studying over again from scratch. This is only necessary if you want to fly different race ships, and you have a collector disease (like me). Some ships, like different types of shuttles for example, are accessible to all corporations.

Now through the market interface you can buy everything at the blink of an eye. The problem is that if the item is not at your location (amazon was probably bankrupt, and downloads were forbidden)you will need to go there in person and grab your goodie, whether it’s a book to acquire a skill, a gun, an upgrade or a new ship.

For example: you want to fly a diff. corporation ship. You have a search function that shows you the location of that flight guide in the whole system u are in. You find a copy of it at your station ? great, you can just drag and drop it from the items list in the station to your item list, and start practising your skill. Mind however (one skill at a time can be learned).
If its not there, it will show up on a kind of reminder list, where u have left it, and thus where to pick it up when u need it (station, constellation, region, starsystem). You can also contact a courier (human player/ ai player) to have it delivered to your place. The courier option is good of course if you have to get across hazardous space to pick up ur goodie and you don’t have the necessary hardware.

The reminder list (or assets list), tells you what you ever bought, so you won’t forget you have bought a nice destroyer in Bujumbura, that cost a fortune, but because of the vastness of space u’ve forgotten the correct spelling of the place and all that money just washed down the drain because of sheer bad memory.

So if you bought a new ship in paris, you can’t just fly your old ship to new york, and use your new ship there. You will either need a courier to fly the ship for you (human players/ai players), or you will need to take a shuttle (which are non combatant) from your old base, fly to your new ships location and sell the shuttle.

Now here’s another thought:
If it is possible to start a corporation (this takes a monthly fee of virtual credits out of your wallet) and you can hire a hangar bay and an office at a space station heres another solution: The CEO has the key to the hangar. So if you have access to a hangar in the station where you bought ur new ship, you don’t need to sell your old one, u can just leave it at the corp. hangar, and then fly back to your HQ and have a chat with the ceo, so he will reimburse you your shuttle with no loss of profit.

The possibility to start a factory, and create everything: from weapons systems, to ship upgrades, to ships.

Another idea. There are human player corporations. Dunno how far we can go with AI into this (probably Grandpatrout has got a huge headache by now).
You can join a corporation, and get a new ship if you don’t want to scavenge asteroids on your own in the beginning. Now heres where it gets interesting:

Situation A: You are in safe space (no pirates or thieves)

Lets say your cargo hold (depending on the ship) has 100 units. You go out to an asteroid field on your own, and start mining. If your hold is full, you need to go back to the station, sell it or refine the goodies and sell them, and go back to your mining operation.

If you do this with a buddy (human or rented AI), it becomes interesting. You start mining and as soon as your cargo hold is full you jettison the contents in space. A container is created which has a far bigger capacity than your ships cargo. You continue to mine and this container gets filled with so much ore that you could buy a whole garage of Ferrari’s instead of doing boring milk runs from Asteroid to station, every time your tiny cargo is full. Your buddy, or yourself, (if you have the necessary skill of course) gets a biiig ship, to pick up the huuuge cargo and divide the profits. Now you can go far with this, even consider the fact you have a whole bunch of Human of AI players mining for you, if you can afford it.

With these minerals you can do 2 things:

either you take them to YOUR factory, and recycle them to create new ships, weapons etc (if you have the necessary expensively acquired blueprints), or you can sell the raw ore. Good if your factory/refining skill is crap and you only get 50% of the value after processing.
Or you refine the ore and sell the refined goods.
Or you get yourself a ship/gun construction license from a mega corporation, buy the blueprints and sell the ships on the (black)market, or start a whole new sister corporation which sells ships in another system.

(sorry, wos on a roll here.)

If you are in an unsafe system, where police can not help you, you must mind the fact that your container can be destroyed, stolen (if you’re mining on your own and need to get back to your mining spot where the container is just waiting to be picked up) or hijacked so you will need to hire wingmen to protect your mining operation or use mining droids to do the job faster than with the laser, and keep your operation as small as possible as not to attract attention. Or you come in with a big ship (necessary skills and money), with loads of guns to protect your industrial ship which doesn’t need the containers, but puts everything in a big cargohold safe from pirates.

If you found a rich ore deposit, you can put a beeper in an asteroid, where u can hyperspace to later with your buddies, and claim the area. (mining rights) so if anyone with another ship comes there with the intent to start digging, the spy sattlite beeper, sends a signal that someone is snooping around your newly discovered area, and its time to send an investigation of interceptors.

The possiblity for human players to put bounty hunting missions on the billboard, and have them accomplished by fellow ai/human players.

Ok so far for the ideas, will be back for more if something comes up.

Greetz

XIII

Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !