Let's consider them

I'm trying to think of ways to make it more interesting and involving for the captains of freight haulers to make money. I've never really worked with Nova's economies before, so this is the first time I've tried adding oops resources-if you have any suggestions I'd be glad to hear them.

As far as missions go, I think having various kinds of passenger transport missions would be interesting, ranging from the 'transport the band' mission in nova to the 'transport the criminal' mission in EVC. Probably smuggling would be a good option as well. I like the idea of doom had in his food carrying plug-I'll need to take a look at it one of these days.

Anyway, all ideas would be appreciated.

It's truly nice to get mentioned. my idea was you basically do cargo missions (shrimp, hot peppers, coffee) and as soon as you have finished those missions you get access to those Junks. in general junks are generally quite profitable.

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It's truly nice to get mentioned.

Hah, I bet. I haven't tried it yet, mind, but I thought it sounded like a very interesting idea.

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my idea was you basically do cargo missions (shrimp, hot peppers, coffee) and as soon as you have finished those missions you get access to those Junks. in general junks are generally quite profitable.

Ah, I see. So, you do one kind of mission, which sets the Traded Here If NCB for that kind of junk?

Pretty much. I could try to recreate something like it for your TC. but I suck at writing descs. You can't actually look at it yet because of addons page slowness. I think you should have lots of side string that make money. specifically i like the smuggling and the transport famous people missions.

Well, one thing I'm trying is making resources that you can only buy if you have a specific holding bay. For example, you can only buy liquid fuel if you have a liquid cargo tank. I'm doing this by having it be an outfit, instead of a commodity or junk. When you buy it, it automatically gives you all of the price variations. Only one of these can be sold or seen at any given planet. When you sell one, you get rid of one of all the types. However, this would all still show up when you get to a planet that allows you to sell anything. It would still work, but be a bit awkward.

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I think you should have lots of side string that make money. Specifically I like the smuggling and the transport famous people missions.

I agree with you. I need to think about ways to implement smuggling, when I get more ideas I'll share them. So far the only thing I've thought of for smuggling is to have resources that are illegal, and you will get harassed by the authorities if you have them onboard.

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Well, one thing I'm trying is making resources that you can only buy if you have a specific holding bay. For example, you can only buy liquid fuel if you have a liquid cargo tank. I'm doing this by having it be an outfit, instead of a commodity or junk. When you buy it, it automatically gives you all of the price variations. Only one of these can be sold or seen at any given planet. When you sell one, you get rid of one of all the types. However, this would all still show up when you get to a planet that allows you to sell anything. It would still work, but be a bit awkward.

That's a nifty idea. I bet you could have it so that buying the tank sets the NCB for a liquid fuel junk, and then selling the tank clears it, so that you could do this in a more immersive fashion. That sounds pretty cool.

(edit) I just tried this, and it works. This is really cool, thanks for the idea 101.

This post has been edited by Shlimazel : 19 November 2008 - 12:35 PM

I think it would be cool to implement a scrap system: you can get scrap from the remains of a starship blowing up. I remember that there was an EVC expansion that had an asteroid mining technique in which asteroids (in the form of ships) released smaller asteroids from a fighter bay that could then be captured in your own bay (asteroid bay, I guess). I don't know how one would go about getting scrap to show up after an explosion, though. Even if a ship is set as an escape ship and put in a bay, the AI (if I'm not mistaken) will launch the "fighters" in battle even if they can't do anything. Is there any way to get them to launch a certain type of ship only as the main ship is blowing up?

I tested having an escape ship bay on an AI just now. Nothing funny happened at first, but then what I think happened is that AI attempted to fight somebody, attempted to use the escape ship bay, and the game crashed because I made a mistake on the outfit. So it does launch them in a fight, apparently.

@shlimazel, on Nov 19 2008, 09:24 AM, said in New ways to make money:

That's a nifty idea. I bet you could have it so that buying the tank sets the NCB for a liquid fuel junk, and then selling the tank clears it, so that you could do this in a more immersive fashion. That sounds pretty cool.

(edit) I just tried this, and it works. This is really cool, thanks for the idea 101.

Thanks. I hadn't gotten around to trying it, actually, but it's great that it works with the actual jünk. That makes it much more intuitive, and eliminates the problem of the planets which can buy everything. Cool.

I wouldn't recommend setting the escape pod as the escape ship, that could cause problems (unless you made a copy of the escape pod that wasn't ID 895). Another problem with this is that when capturing the "scrap" ship it will trigger the "fighter captured" string. I doubt it, but is there a way to get a ship to release a junk type (like an asteroid) when it's destroyed? I figure asteroids release junk resources because they're hard-coded into the game to do that, but if it is resource-based then maybe it would be possible to rig a mission to get it to work. Perhaps even getting a mission to grant the player an outfit instead of a junk type would work.

I might look into this some more.

Edit: OK, there obviously is an "on capture" field in the ship resource. I'm not sure if this will work when capturing a ship into one's fighter bay, however.

Edit 2: I suppose we could check if "Never used by AI ships" (in the weapon field) causes the AI to not release their fighters except if the fighter is an escape ship and the ship is both destroyed and set to release escape pods. I doubt this will work, but if it does, that'd be cool.

I have thought of one way other than this that might work: the player could get a weapon that is a fighter bay and releases a fighter that looks like a weapon blast. This fighter has an equal top speed to the exit speed from the ship and no maneuvering capability. In turn, this fighter is armed with a fighter bay weapon that destroys the parent ship when fired (I'm not sure this part is possible with the current version of MC, but I'm not sure that it's impossible either). I suppose arming it with both a destroys-parent ship weapon and a fighter bay weapon might work. In any case, the shot (carried ship) destroys itself if it passes over the enemy ship, and the "scrap" ship is released. Again, though, I am not sure that there is a way to get a ship to only launch a fighter when it is within a certain range of an enemy, which is what would be necessary.

Edit 3: if this doesn't work, one could always replace one of the asteroid types with "space debris".

This post has been edited by Crusader Alpha : 20 November 2008 - 09:24 AM

@0101181920, on Nov 19 2008, 10:17 PM, said in New ways to make money:

Thanks. I hadn't gotten around to trying it, actually, but it's great that it works with the actual jünk. That makes it much more intuitive, and eliminates the problem of the planets which can buy everything. Cool.

What happens if you load up on liquid fuel and then sell the tank? Would the fuel stay in your cargo hold but you wouldn't be able to sell it any more?

My, that's some complicated wizardry, Crusader. That's way beyond my meager level of nova hacking.

You know, it'd be child's play to add a fighter bay function to the Asteroid Scoop, and enable it to scoop up Scrap "fighters". This way we wouldn't need to have seperate mechanisms for the asteroids and the scrap.

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What happens if you load up on liquid fuel and then sell the tank? Would the fuel stay in your cargo hold but you wouldn't be able to sell it any more?

Having just tested this after reading your question, yes that is what happens.

Make the outfit unsellable, in that case.

@crusader-alpha, on Nov 19 2008, 12:44 PM, said in New ways to make money:

Even if a ship is set as an escape ship and put in a bay, the AI (if I'm not mistaken) will launch the "fighters" in battle even if they can't do anything. Is there any way to get them to launch a certain type of ship only as the main ship is blowing up?

WeaponType: <RID of Fighter Bay>
WeaponCount: 0
Ammo: 1

Ehhhxcellent....

This post has been edited by Crusader Alpha : 23 November 2008 - 02:59 AM

Quaanol to the rescue! I'm going to have to implement this mechanic now, too much cool here to go to waste.

One problem I can see with this is hailing the scrap. We don't exactly want to have lengthy discussions with free floating debris, do we? Is there a way to prevent the player from being able to communicate with a ship?

This post has been edited by Shlimazel : 23 November 2008 - 11:49 AM

Isn't there a flag which is 'ships don't respond too hails'

Yeah, you can just set the scrap to be unable to respond to the player's hail. I need to check some things, though. I'm pretty sure you can't capture an un-disabled ship.

That's in the govt resource, not the ship resource.

I tried Qaanol's method twice, and it didn't work. The target ship didn't drop the scrap.

Here's more specifically what I did;

I made an outfit with both the 'scrap scoop' weapon and the mining scoop.

The scrap scoop weapon is a conventional fighter bay, but it doesn't show the ammo amount.

There is also a 'scrap' ammunition resource.

I set the 'scrap scoop' weapon to <scrap scoop>, 0, 3.

When destroyed, the target ship blew up real nice but didn't drop anything, in any form.

This post has been edited by Shlimazel : 23 November 2008 - 12:40 PM

I got it to work just fine, but it only drops the scrap ship sometimes. That's actually good, because it seems realistic to me that it might be destroyed in the explosion sometimes and scrap might survive sometimes. Some things are that 1. I can't get the ship to drop more than one piece of scrap and 2. I can't get the scrap to be "derelict". I haven't yet tried giving the scrap ship a weapon that when fired does slightly more than 66% damage to itself (instant flak type weapon with small blast radius that damages parent ship) but that might work. A third problem is that to arm the AI with scrap like this (if I'm not mistaken) the game gives the player one of the scrap metal outfit when the ship is bought. The only way that I can think of around this is to make a separate version of every ship in the game for the AI, but I'm not really keen on that idea.

I'll keep experimenting.