Planetform, left behind.

[Unseelie]

I agree, about 1000%. yes, I broke math. I've over 400 hours logged this year on various tradeships, and I think about this a lot.

Beyond factions to which there's no point in trying to be a profitable trader (and wasn't that one of the points of the new borked system, to give every faction a point?) there are commodites, in spades, which are entirely useless. Pointless, and stupid. They're coded into about 450 bases, and they are almost never, ever, get used? That's 450 lines of code which were completely pointless, for each commodity. Lot of wasted effort. Of course, more effort has to go into coding them correctly, so this may well be a placeholder. Is it? I've no idea.

My current extragameular project is to work out a human cargo net using scientists, crew, vacationers, turists, VIPs, Prisoners and Passengers, giving each one of them at least a few profitable routes which lead to other profitable -people- routes, in such a manner as that a person can arrange to only fly people, and make good money doing so. This will incorporate the Crew and Scientist commodities, which are called 'rp commodities' I consider them useless and pointless wastes of effort, and its rather sad. (also, we need ships that carry people that aren't either prison ships or luxury ships..most passengers are not prisoners or first class)

Other placeholder pointless commodities abount
Synth Paste can be fixed just by boosting the profits of say, hauling Synth from Stutt to the rest of the world. Easy fix. Put it up into the realm of 140 cr/sec, and it will even be used. Put it into the realm of 160 or higher, and people will see it in abundance.

Water, Oxy, etc? Sell them low on planets, high for short runs to the stations around them. Short, simple insystem routes, mostly, maybe a two or three system jaunt. 120-140 cr sec, as the current trade policy seems to be against encouraging shorter routes.

Luxury Food (and this one really ticks me off, for some reason) Couple ways to do it, we could 1: Sell it on Junyo, Cambridge, and stutt, and send the Cambridge lux food to Curacau for a profit, the Stutt Lux food to Hamburg, the Junyo Lux food to Kusari, and all of them to the middle, Liberty, all routes for around 160-190(its bloody luxury food, peeps, high demand, yes?). OR we could 2: Split it in to three sorts, Gormet Fish: Junyo. Beef: Cambridge, Exotic Produce: Stuttgart, and then send each commodity to any number of bases (I'd reccomend the Metropoli worlds: New London, Honshu, New Tokyo, Hamburg, and Manhattan, perhaps Malta, and somewhere in Gallia. )

Toxic Waste...no higher than 300 credit profit per unit, anywhere. Sure, you can buy it for 1 credit, and make 3000%(that, btw, is not broken math) profit, but you're not making much profit at all there, either. There's like, 4 bases that buy Toxic waste for 'real' prices, and if they got some level of a boost, you might see people trading it as more than an RP lark. And it might be a good export from those terraforming bases which don't produce anything..cleaning up their messses as they go.

Synth paste has definately been adressed to death...

Pharmaceuticals, sadly, can't be split up, as their infocards make them out to be panaceas...but ideas abound for other medical whatsits. Autodocs, genetic databanks, biomod things, cybernetic replacements. (I really like the idea of a higher teir product for neural computers, where those little green packets get added into big clusters of plantlike computing things) Tapeteach, etc.


Here's another thought. There's blockades, along Hamburg-Texas, and along Leeds-Tau 31. Drop in some Guard fleets near both gates, and you can let the mod itself help inforce the blockade which is supposedly impacting the value of trade routes through those regions.

***If anyone can create a program that can do some level of math, and come up with some of the values needed to balance commodities automaticly, there would be a huge increase in the intracacy of the system. As is, each commodity takes hours of very tedious work to balance, after the idea's been perfected, most of this work is just discovering what can and cannot be done, recording numers from the FLC dump file, etc.

---