Station Trading, Industry and Management System (stims!)

[Loki_5]

Inspired by this thread in gameplay: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,3731.0.html

 

As a method to improve the station to station economy maybe a future feature could be to allow for assigning npc ships to stations (groups of stations or ships) with a dedicated set of economic orders (Buy / Sell, transport/transfer, defend, mine). So rather than relying on faction npc ships the buy sell behaviour (on multiplayer servers) would be largely player driven?

 

So the automatic station supply behaviour look a bit like probably work something like:

if home station product-home station product transfer order value = >0 sell

if home station ingredient+home station product transfer order value = <1 buy

else patrol

 

Checking for goods know to be in transit would prevent bottlenecking and over/undersupply

Sell would then check each station type in range (depends on fitted mods) either by distance, needs or profit and select an appropriate sale destination.

Buy would work in a similar manner

 

This becomes more complex if a HQ is managing multiple ships and stations as it would be better if it tried to assign appropriately positioned and fitted ships for given tasks. But this is largely a matter of sorting based on stats and location.

 

Although if every station had a default small freighter that automatically tries to sell the goods and restock the station that could help as well? So the linked posts fruit farms own freighter would have been buying the water from the player owned station and/or the players freighters would be supplying to it automatically?

 

Could have some sort of headquarters module for stations to 'coordinate' this behaviour - with tiers of it being used to differentiate range that the controlled ships will work at (iron local, then +2 for each tier after this, + mods)? So players (and factions) might choose to have a headquarters master station that co-ordinates a large chunk of space with many stations across it? Could also be used to prioritise ship orders so that a transfer order given from 'head office' can't be overridden by the little local mine to urgently bring them whiskey or something? Grouping of ship assignments might help. Additionally each tier of HQ might allow more complex behaviours, iron the core set  (patrol, buy, sell, mine) whilst higher tiers might allow for automatic ship building, crew transfer, attack and station building? Probably the ability to issue bulletin board mission would be good?

 

Crew would probably be a variable that could stop this turning into a digital grey goo of infinitely replicating ships (and a maximum number of ships/stations that a HQ can handle).

 

HQ blocks could also be used to manage how station resources are distributed (for example assigned space in the cargo bay some for ingredients and some for product) or the automated transfer of crew from place to place (probably have only the very high teir HQs able to auto hire with crew transfer being a function performed by ships)? So if a player hires the entire crew of a station away HQ can dispatch a new crew to the station automatically?