A few things we should discuss.
For the “Traffic” release (name for next fall until we pick a better one), we should pick the major nations to balance. My suggestion is that we pick Emerald Alliance to be “default”. They will be the middle of the road vanilla ships. Not the greatest, not the worst. Then we should do the Leung Empire. They provide ships to many factions and the player could be started there. Third, we should do the Dead Reaches. These cobbled together ships can be used by the poorest factions and most of the pirate types though out the cluster. We can always stretch these three to cover all the factions (if we run short of time).
The other main point is where should the player begin the game. When this was a mercenary simulation, The Dead Reaches was a good place. Lots of conflict. But now that the player is a poor trader I think the best start location is the Leung Empire. It has four well patrolled systems with fairly low corruption and a lack of pirates. it would make a good place to start out. When the player has purchased some better weapons he can branch out for higher trade profits.
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