Well, you probably know it, but for those who dont: I am a Planetformer. Working for Bretonia and Liberty to terraform Planets, I am the Devil in Gaian eyes, I am the God for Planets (i laughed while writing this).
While IMG and Zoners for example get Cruisers, Battleships and more for being a bunch of Miners we got. . .to say it straight: Nothing. I am not complaining about not having a big, scary Battleship as Planetformer. I am complaining about our Trading, but this will be a long way to describe our Problem.
So well, as anyone can see 3 of our 5 Bases have nothing to Export. It's nearly impossible to Plan a Planetform Role Play Traderoute, which brings supplies to our Bases. Well we have 1 Traderoute, only that one. And it is still full of problems. I'll show you.
We start at Perth, buying our Wildlife. For my Shire it's 1,6 Million. And now we fly all the way through hole Bretonia and Liberty to Hudson, to be exactly Cold Bay underneath Planet Atka. All we can do is hoping we dont run into Gaians, Mollies, Outcasts, Corsairs, Hackers, Rogues, Xenos and Pirate ID'd people. The long trip is cheerful with the ~9 Million i sell the Wildlife for. But, what now? Cold Bay has no real Exports to buy, all i can do is buying Alien Organisms for 7 Million and bring them to Planet Minor in California where i make a Profit for 2 Million. Now we are on Minor and again, we have no Exports. Not even Water and Oxygen are needed anywhere else and we are in the middle of Liberty far away from Bretonia and have no idea. All i can do is flying emtpy to Manhatten (or buy VIPs in Cortez and bring them to Manhatten, but that is way too oorp and too dangerous). On Manhatten i bring the Mining Machinery to Pittsburgh and Boron to Thames in New London and then Robots back to Perth, why we need them is still unclear for me. They are probably needed on Ayr to help there.
There are small things you can bring to Planet Harris, but even that has no real Exports and is Dangerous because of the Kusaris patrouling around it. Even with that Battleship there the NPCs are still dangerous for my Shire, they easily kill my Shields in a few seconds. That really happened to me a few times in Leeds before. But really, it's impossible to plan a new Route for us. I tried it a lot of times and so did people who have a lot of more knowledge in Freelancer than me. But it ended up the same, with making the one and only Traderoute we have.
I know started mining with a new Planetform Ship, but our mining is based on Water and Alien Organisms. Currently I am mining Gold, bringing it to Fort Bush and taking Boron to Thames. Just to get a bit fresh air from the Trading. Yesterday I had a second Planetformer online, and i told him to take Optical Chips from Los Angeles. You cant believe how happy he was to take something else.
Sure I could just fly to some other bases and pick something up and bring it to let's say a BMM Base, but i want to bring supply for our Bases and not some random Rheinland Corporation.
Now I've seen the ALG Topic with all their suggestions and Plans. I tried to get Ideas for Planetform, even made me an Explorer Ship to fly around and see what's worth to be used for us. But only got a few ideas and suggestions, but i dont even know if they can be used. Some of them are maybe possible after a few changes, but after I've read some stuff and heard some stuff that certain people dont want to change anything or dont give a crap about that.
So please I call all the Planetformers, Developers Team and Community, please help us. Not only us, you will also help the Gaians shooting at us.
"Who is it doing this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin'?"
' Wrote:You got my vote, I almost never, ever see Planetformers.
Well it's basically only me flying around earning 20 Million in 1.5 - 2 hours. I to be honest dont care the money I make at least i earn some. I want some changes, i want more destinations. I got like 180 Hours on my Shire. Guess how many times i flew the same Route over and over. I am working that Planetform will hopefully be official at some day, but even when i have enough money it wont happen due to inactivity of the Employees.
"Who is it doing this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin'?"
All the niche corps need a boost. Planetform, ALG, DSE, Cryer, Ageira, Synth Foods.
You think your options are limited? Cryer has two bases and makes only two commodities (Pharmaceuticals and Synth Pot), one of which is terrible for trading, and the other of which is illegal in every place that has laws. Most of our routes involve Zoner bases and commodities that zoners make (normally better than us too) like alien organisms and human organs, so we basically have to fly zoner routes (how ironic, since they're obviously off running corp routes), or smuggling routes. Often both at once.
These niche corps don't have the licence to take just anything, and a lot of the commodities they do get are terrible (lol terraforming gases). Using Cryer as an example again, since I obviously know it best, I've really been pushing the limits a bit to make full trade routes. Pharms, AOs, HOs, synth pot, gaian wildlife. That stuffs all fine. Found out from a bar rumour that drugs are made from polymers and hydrocarbons (yummy!) so they're in too, thanks bar rumour! Sadly hydrocarbons are useless for trading, and i've only found the one good cryer route for polymers. Atka for some reason buys counterfeit software (why would a really rich company be pirating their copies of Excel?) so that's in too. Denver is basically the third Cryer base. It sells Superconductors, which is Ageira tech. But it sells well at the place where i buy Polymers, and down on Cambridge, which is obviously next to Cambridge Research Station, so Superconductors are in too. The one decent pharmaceutical run in the game goes to Shasta, which sells only pineal amulets, which go to the hawaii, which is right by Atka, so we take pineal amulets too. Right. Often my route will run out of steam in Kusari and I'll end up taking Optical Chips somewhere. They have something to do with computers. Cryer uses computers right? I think?
It can get pretty threadbare. Gets pretty far removed pretty quickly.
I think it can be solved without pumping in new commodities, though. I mean, admittedly, with the boundary-pushing described above, and a few dips into the edge worlds via jumpholes (eat it, naysayers), Cryer actually has a bunch of servicable routes that will give most circuits a run for their money. But Cryer have it better than Planetform or Synth Foods.
I think the first thing to do to help stuff, would be to fix 'useless' commodities. Fertilizers, terraforming gases, synth paste, hydrocarbons, there's millions. These commodities are terrible. Why? What is the point? Synth paste is supposed to be such a huge deal that it has caused the birth of TWO factions. No other commodity can claim that. But only TWICE in my entire time playing discovery have I actually seen people trading it. Boosting something like Synth Paste in to the realm of good commodities (you know, a route hovering in the 170-180 area and a few more a little below, that lead to bases that make RP sense and lead somewhere else themselves) could only help server roleplay. There's three factions based more or less around synth paste, and the commodity and its industry have a massive impact on Rheinland and Kusari and Bretonia in different ways; Rheinland's fallen to it, Kusari is falling, and if Bretonia can't get Harris sorted out, they'll be next. Everyone has an opinion about it. Planets should be buying it by the billion. If a company, a huge, incredibly powerful company, exists entirely 100% on the basis of making and selling synth paste, shouldn't it, you know, not totally suck? But, it does suck, and no one trades it, and we miss out on a huge area of potential roleplay for essentially no reason at all.
Synth Paste is the poster child for this stuff, but there's no need for any of it to suck. I just do not see the point in bad commodities. Ones that are medium profit but allow you to 'switch routes' or travel in-system or in-house, that's fine in moderation, but ones that are just terrible turd? Why?
Fertilizers and Terraforming gases. Those two, and Synth Paste, are the only three things the LWB are really supposed to pirate. I've spent I don't know how many hours staring at the sides of tradelanes on my LWB, and to date, have seen one transport carrying synth paste, zero carrying fertilizers and zero carrying terraforming gases. Why would the LWB even exist if it couldn't hijack the goods funding and assisting in the ruin of Stuttgart? Hulls the whole faction, so we just get to go shoot Rheinland battleships all day, even though we're supposed to be sympathised with a lot by basically all Rheinlanders.
I'm just talking about the stuff I know, but I'm sure it's rife everywhere. Like you said, Gaians and Planetform have a symbiotic relationship. Planetforms routes sucking stamps all over not just planetform, but the gaians goo.
So yeah, to conclude, while there is a lot of stuff that is not excellent re: economy, the easiest way to help it out would just be to make the commodities which suck and are pointless in to good commodities which you can actually make decent money trading. Secondly would be to sort out commodities that come from multiple places. MOX got two commodities and it works great. How about 3 each for Luxury Food (Stuttgart, Junyo, Cambridge...does anywhere else make it?) and Pharmaceuticals (Atka, Denver, CRS), and any more where that would make sense?
Of course, new commodities and such would be sweet too. I understand that it is much work, and as far as I am aware, Xoria was in charge of all that and he has now left. I'm willing to help out if effort is the only thing stopping this from occurring.
Also I've been up all day, so apologies for the really inconsistent use of capital letters with regards to commodities in this post. Also sorry for how god damn long it is.
I think its stupid that there are so many commodities that don't sell for a profit or even for a loss all over the place. As if most planets don't need that one thing that that one planet where you make your profit needs.
How can you not be able to sell pharmaceuticals to ANY major population centre (referring to Cryer above)? Shouldn't it be that you would make a ridiculous profit on a planet which at the moment is RPing a major pandemic or disaster, and the rest give a decent profit?
Give the corps some love!... and the rest of us traders too.
Heh, yeah. Planets, especially the house capital planets, should be massive consumers of basically everything. As it is, none of my trader characters ever touch them. Apparently the actual centre of the Sirius economy is Ames Research Station. But that would be part of a more major overhaul of the economy.
Basically all the corps Ben said (Planetform, ALG, DSE, Cryer, Ageira, Synth Foods.) are in this situation. Trying to manage Planetform with basically nothing to offer is very difficult, as all you know for the ones I asked, I have been trying to get more people into Planetform but for all the effort involved, it's not worth the time over something with much more to offer. I can understand this and I dont really blame them, I find little time for ingame PFI activities because it just is really.. not that great. The players arnt at fault, the system is.
We should hold on to threads like this one and others that point out exactly what the problems are with trading so that the Devs can easily look at them for reference.
Maybe we can have a 'Trading Balance' subforum for this sort of thing, just to keep it organized?
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