The main improvement to this (great) game I would like to see is the addition of ship trading. Currently everyone starts with two 500t ships. This is far more than you need at the beginning, and then later as you grow, it’s not enough. Rather than forcing everyone to become ship builders, you could let players trade ships at the shipyard, similar to how it works in other space trading games.
I think this would also simplify the starting package issues mentioned previously in this thread, since if we can trade for starting ships then you wouldn’t need to create a points based system to allocate them, and the starting packages could remain largely the same.
My proposals for ship trading are as follows:
- Everyone starts with one 100t ship, plus the usual base and materials.
- Except… there is a “trader” starting package, where you start with one 500t ship and no base or materials.
- You can fly a ship to the shipyard, and sell it, or buy new ships. This does mean that low-level ships would have to be cheaper, e.g. the 100t ship costs maybe 50k. A 250t ship could cost 75k - so then to upgrade your starter ship to a 250t ship, you trade in your existing one and pay 25k on top.
- It also means that the trader start package ship has to cost no more than the 100t ship plus all the materials and goods for a base, otherwise everyone will start as a trader and sell their ship as the first step.
- The shipyard would work like the LM, but for ships, with permanent MM bid/ask adverts for the 100t, 250t, and 500t basic ships, but all other types of ships listed by players.
- I expect there needs to be a ship limit per base, to prevent people from buying lots of low level ships, which are likely to be priced “too cheap” relative to their actual gameplay value. A ship limit per base is plausible in-universe, since ships need parking spots.
- For the ship limit, you could just say “max 2 ships per base”, but a more sophisticated method would be to say that in order to land a ship at a base, the base needs to have a landing area for it, which is a building, taking up space, etc. Each base would come with one landing area or parking spot built in, but you can build extra landing areas. This wouldn’t limit the number of ships that people could buy, but it would limit the number they could effectively use for base transportation at a time. It would also mean that there was now a point to having ships in orbit - they are queued up waiting to land. And traders could still operate without a base.
- If you allow ship buying and selling, then it means a viable production path is ship building. In that case, you may want to have some lower tier buildings able to produce BHP, or similar. This is so that aspring ship builders can start on their career right away and don’t have to produce other things at their base before they get to the ship building tiers.
- Some ideas for the above - perhaps SEA could be used for ship repairs below a certain damage level, and the WEL could make BHP, though with a less efficient recipe than the HWP.
In conjunction with the above, I would also suggest that some changes are made to the flight model. If ships weighed less, and cargo weight affected fuel usage more, then you wouldn’t need a weight limit on the ship. e.g. If the starter ship itself weighed 20t, then with 100t of cargo the fuel cost is 5x more than if it were empty. This means that making low-weight journeys could be more cost effective, and FE/FEO wouldn’t be quite as awkward to transport. FEO would still cost a lot of fuel to move, but the number of units are now only limited by volume rather than weight, so you can fit more than 16 units of FEO in the starter ship.
This means that it’s not a 100t starter ship, it’s a 100m3 starter ship instead, and so on, but I expect everyone would adjust to that.
In fact, if there’s no weight limit on ships, then the weight of goods may not even matter - it’s always seemed odd to me that there’s a weight limit for goods stored in the base - isn’t everything just sitting on the ground? Having everything measured by volume alone, except for fuel costs, might simplify things.
Hope some of this is useful. 