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.
' Wrote: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.
Although 'pharmaceuticals' could remain, you could take out some of the production points and replace them. The Cryer infocard says they produce an array of 'normal' and restricted-class drugs. You could have pharms coming from Denver and some sort of say, 'prescription drug' coming from Cambridge.
As for the other Cryer-y ideas, wholeheartedly approve. Cryer's second most RP commodity is god damn Synth Pot.
' Wrote: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.
not so fussed about the crews, Scientists i'd like to see more profit to be made at research stations, but very yes on a rethink of human cargo routes(excuding slaves)
EVERY highly profitable route involving transporting humans to and from luxury destinations is a there and back route, to make any kind of sirius wide tour, or even a 3 leg trade route you need to go a couple steps down from the best selling price.
Everything is still a there-and-back route basically.
As for crew and scientists, they'd actually be something produced on planets. Right now, basically everything is station-station, when in reality planet-planet would account for the vast proportion of trade.
As for Synth Paste splitting, it has flavours. There's bar rumours about like Seaweed flavour or something being all the rage in Kusari.
' Wrote: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.
I don't see that as a fix. It might result in one good route, and even if there are variations on it, all of them will include that same fundamental leg. A fix, in my opinion, needs to be one that introduces more possibilities.
For example, taking unprocessed materials (such as that plant they grow) to Synth factories elsewhere. These factories could produce mostly the same pastes, which traders could then ship onwards to retail centers in high-population areas.
I am no expert on Synth Foods lore -- more often than not I make assumptions that are utterly false -- but if I remember correctly, the lore says that Stuttgart is the primary producer of Synth Paste. For that reason (as I mentioned in my earlier post), shipping away the raw materials might not seem appropriate. However, I don't think it would be a stretch to assume (or posit) that flavoring agents are produced elsewhere. This could provide more possibilities in the form of either shipping flavoring agents to Stuttgart or shipping the other raw materials (or perhaps a base paste) to flavoring factories.
Breaking up the production process like this seems to me to be the best way to improve corporation trading.
' Wrote: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.
Legs like that could be useful patches to otherwise holey routes.
' Wrote: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. )
I like this idea.
' Wrote: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.
I think this is a good idea too. If there are only a few bases that buy Toxic Waste, it would likely be relatively simple to balance the prices of Toxic Waste on a great many other bases based on how far away they are. It's not a problem if Toxic Waste costs a whole lot on some bases in order to make it feasible for trading.
' Wrote:Synth paste has definately been adressed to death...
It 's certainly relatively dead and nothing much has happened to revive it; addressing it more might not make it revive a whole lot faster but not addressing it definitely won't.
' Wrote: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).
' Wrote:The Cryer infocard says they produce an array of 'normal' and restricted-class drugs. You could have pharms coming from Denver and some sort of say, 'prescription drug' coming from Cambridge.
I highly doubt there are a mere handful of specific drugs that Cryer produces. The most common ones are likely very efficient and broad pharmaceuticals (Pharmaceuticals, yea?). They might cover, for example, essentially all bacterial and most viral infections; the kind of drug easily accessible to most citizens of Sirius for their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly health problems that drugs can solve.
Specialized drugs are very likely to exist as well, otherwise there would be little reason for Cryer to do any research except to improve their miracle-pill which, frankly, would be very boring. There might be everything from experimental (and probably quite secret) anti-Nomad-vaccines to physical-augmentation-pills to stimulants and sedatives. There are likely drugs that do mostly the same thing as other high-tech medical equipment, but there are advantages and disadvangates to both that might merit having them both.
And on that note there are a myriad possible medical equipments that could be made into any number of commodities.
' Wrote:Although 'pharmaceuticals' could remain, you could take out some of the production points and replace them.
This is the crux of this solution, breaking apart the production lines and making them accessible to traders.
' Wrote:Everything is still a there-and-back route basically.
With enough commodities, there will often be the possibility of endlessly spiraling and variable routes. Imagine that!
' Wrote:***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.
If I had any idea how to fetch information from the Freelancer files, I would likely be able to.
On Evynd's point about the Synth...
Stuttgart, as I understand it, is the main producer.
I'd set up branching routes, perhaps two, from Stuttgart. These routes lead to every base which buys synth in large quantities, so, Planets in Rhienland, Liberty, and a few in Kusari. Not all of these planets have something to bring back, but they might well create loops with other things. And if a few planets sell, say, Fertilizers (which should be buffed on the buy price on Stutt and all bases with biodomes, prolly Camb too), they've a return trip, right there, for a short back and forth.
A tree, then, drawn across sirius, from Stutt, of the synth routes. Sure, the early bits are going to be the same, because, oh, synth is in the main, produced on Stuttgart. Add more flavors, I'd still suggest using the same tree, but making different points on the tree more proffitable for different flavors.
Agricultural equipment, perhaps, could be produced on Leeds and Berlin, and shipped to Cambridge and Stuttgart, respectively, if we're looking for inputs.
Of course i was thinking about new things for Planetform.
Such as the Planetoid in Cambridge, it's used for Terraforming Experiments. There should be a base where you can sell things like Gases or something else. For buying ne Cargo you could fly to the Planet Cambridge then.
Commodoties like Terraforming Machines, Plants (which can be used in an End Stadium for the Planet, dont just let it stay an Ice Planet) or Bacteria. They can be used for Planetform and should be helpful for Cryer aswell.
I think Planets which are and will be terraformed should have a reason why they should be hospitable, maybe scientists found some Resources there. Otherwise they would just ignore the Planet.
"Who is it doing this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin'?"
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