TLDR Version: Shipping contracts should allow for multiple items to be shipped as one “shipping container” for transport. I expected the UI interface to be similar to moving items from storage to ships, or to a warehouse.
I’m a new player. One issue I noticed was that shipping contracts are limited to just one item per shipment. That was very disappointing when I encountered that limit. I purchased small amounts of a few items to be able to produce a couple of batches of a few different items at the BMP and PP1. My ship was out doing a delivering so I figured I’d have that small batch of stuff shipped down by contract. I was disappointed to learn I needed one contract to move my 4 COT, and separate contract to move 10 FE, and yet another to move 2 S, and yet another to move 2 SI, and so on…
It seems this would be easy to implement as it should use the same UI elements as used for other inventory items. I think it would be a good QoL improvement, speaking as a new player.
On-going fulfilment contracts, for Corp or other, would be great. Being able to secure raw material supplies for delivery every x days, for y occurrences would be really useful.
I was wondering about a move into Construction and how to deal with raw material.
Tangential, but somewhat different to the ideas being discussed here. But there’s an idea for how to run governments on planets and how they acquire resources for upkeep.
There is a blend of LM\CX run by the government. They put out an RFQ (request for quote) for the items they are looking to acquire. This opens up an orderbook for that particular item with a countdown clock. Users can submit orders listing that item for sale, and once the auction runs out, the govt basically buys everything that’s listed (up to a limit price they have defined).
There can be several mechanisms and configuration functionality added to the governor’s auction control: what the limit price is, whether that limit price is visible publicly, visibility of other companies offers, how many times you can edit an offer per day\total, etc.
Reoccuring/multiple fulfillment contracts. I want to buy 100x H2O x10, a seller can fulfill 1-10 on a sliding scale. Cleans up some LM spam and means new players can participate without needing large amounts.
Contracts to transfer fund to other players
Production contracts. Player X will produce item A, player Y supplies inputs and production fee.
Multi LM contracts. Pay a larger fee to place a contract on multiple LMs. Maybe the buyer is looking for a harder to find item?
Classifieds/Messageboard. These probably don’t fit on the LM but it would be a good way to find players that don’t participate in external forms of community like Discord and in-game chat isn’t asynchronous enough.
Maybe locking of funds (‘3rd party account’)? That the paying party has to pay, but the receiving party can only access those funds when delivering (or another ‘contract block’)
This ‘3rd party account’ could be a service the goverment needs to install and can charges for
Coupling a price to an index (e.g. the FIO boasts a ’ Pioneer Consumable Cost Index’, fuel index could be an idea,…). This could compensate for price shifts on longer term contracts
What’s even better than a price index is a “xxx workforce upkeep package”.
Because it’s a huge pain in the ass to manage 16 or 21 different consumables for just the workforce if you have 3 or 4 different population groups. It would be great if we could just stick all of that stuff into a BMP and make one item. No productivity bonus, no size\tonnage reduction. So it should produce these pretty quickly. It’s just a hell of a lot easier to manage 3 or 4 items rather than 20.
Details are to be determined, but as there’s quite a bit of exploit potential with this feature, it’ll very likely not be available for accounts that never paid.
Thanks for all the input by the way, everyone! There’s even lots of stuff in this thread for many related features beyond this one specifically.
The point here is that the design should be flexible enough to allow contracts with Corporations in addition to Companies. I understand that there would be a lot of additional related enhancements needed to allow this, including:
Corporate control: maybe a corporation equivilent to Planetary governors, where votes are based upon number of shares in the corporation, with only PRO shareholders allows to run for board level positions
Corporate wallets: with maybe a board level treasurer position that controls it
Corporate warehouses: to hold corporate goods
Corporate procurement: someone authorised to setup, manage and sign contracts
Corporate dividends: at present, all corporate funds are automatically distributed to shareholders. Need a mechanism to decide how much and when to pay dividends so that the Corporate wallet retains funds
Corporate shares: allow players to buy/sell shares in a corporation. Allow corporation to control the issue of shares based upon the current value of corporate assets. Allow stock splits etc. Players who setup successful corporations may want to retain a controlling interest, or may want to sell down their shares once they become valuable.
Since the devs will update the contract system, it would be nice to have some new features for public contracts too. For instance loan contracts ask and offer (like 100 000 AIC in 3 days for 120 000 AIC 40 days later). These would be public, not aimed at a specific company. They could be advertised on the local market or somewhere else. Public loan contracts would enable a banker gameplay, which fits well into a space capitalism simulator. Maximal duration for the contract should be increased for that. 20 days is not enough for loans.
Also one could have public custom contracts (ads on the LM or somewhere else). So one conceives a custom contract using the same construction kit as for the private contracts, then posts a public ad, with limitations (rating, blacklist, etc.). Then others can either pick the ad as it is, or send a modified draft to the advertiser.Then it would work as for private contracts. The public custom contract would remain advertised (initial draft) until both sides agree on a common draft.
Partial Contracts where the Contract owner decides valid split size & cost. Long term these should be able to be shared with others or made public with each split drawing down from a pool. Another bonus would be if the Contractee could participate in their own Contract.
Construction Contract where it auto fills the materials from the BBC command for the specified Base and Building. The final step would be optional for the Contractee, containing the command that executes the Build.
Base Construction Contract would be as above for a new base, but I imagine the Contractor would have to be the one to execute the Build.
The ability to automate your fulfiment of a contract once the pre-requisite step on the other side has fulfilled.
Maybe as a tickbox for each stage, this would reserve that amount of material/money for the contract so you don’t accidentaly breach. Could be particularly useful for those that have a large amount of contracts or have a more active inventory so they don’t sell stuff needed to fulfil a contract.
This would also help with short term contracts where you may not be online when the other side completes their side.
