New Feature - Shipping Routes

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1

Here is a wild idea:

Let (pro) players create shipping routes that can be recurring (pro only?)
To get shipping routes the company HQ needs a certain upgrade, or route slots are added through out the upgrade path of the HQ.

What does a Shipping route do?
It allows for automated fleet management.
you predefine a route and what happens on said route.
example:
Go to Point A
Unload M, N, O
Load X, Y, Z
refuel
Go to Point B
Unload X, Y, Z
Load M, N, O
repeat

Kinda like that.
The player would need to carefully set these up as there would be no “load what ever is available” the ship crew would stick to the shipping insturctions and only continue if all conditions are met.

Maybe this is to much for PrUn? But i think in moderation it could elevate the gameplay and maybe even drive the demand for ships even more.

Thanks for reading my almost midnight ramble

11 Likes
On player workload scaling, or why I am quitting PrUn
2

I would use this to an extreme degree.

3

Cosign.
I think the permit bottleneck does enough to keep the biggest players from totally running away with the game without requiring babysitting of spaceships to keep things competitive. As it stands, the logistical micromanagement required to play this game, I think, is what drives off old, established players eventually. I like this game a lot and want to keep playing, but I do find myself getting lax with shipping sometimes because it feels like a chore.

The HQ upgrade idea sounds reasonable to me, if this isn’t just implemented for all ships out of the box. Alternatively, it might be interesting for the game to have company infrastructure tied to a class of administrative buildings which require labor to operate. The player would have to weigh the tradeoff of using precious base area and supporting office workers who do not produce any commodity for sale against the convenience of not having to manually order ships around.

4 Likes
4

I really like both your perspective here, and your balance suggestions, a lot. Both sound genuinely fun and like big improvements.

1 Like
5

In a chat discussion the other day it was suggested that automated flights be limited by having a ship upgraded with a certain module. This + your idea of it being tied to HQ in some way, I think could be balanced nicely.

Also, even established players wouldn’t be able to rely on this exclusively, which is a good thing. E.g. I can’t imagine setting auto routes for carrying repair materials. Not everything in a company is perfectly predictable and repetitive. But I very much like how this would automate the repetitive, and still require handling less usual cases.

The only two issues I see with it are:

  1. What to do if something fails? eg. “unload X, Y, Z” failed because there wasn’t enough room, or “load M, N, O” failed due to insufficient “O”.
  2. How to allow some flexibility? Say you’re always shipping M, N, O from B to A, but this once you need to haul some T. Do you have to send another ship just for that purpose, or could the routine flight plan be easily amended just this once to take care of that?
2 Likes
6

My thoughts on the issues you raise are thus:

  1. I think it would be nice to have separate settings, including “wait until unloaded” for the materials to be dropped off on that base, “wait until loaded” for materials to be picked up on that base, and “do not wait” for either case. This works in games such as Transport Tycoon, so I don’t see why it couldn’t be implemented here. It would still require monitoring of ships’ cargo holds and base inventories to make sure they aren’t accumulating cargo and getting backed up.
  2. I think it would be nice to establish the routes separately from a ship and be able to add ships to the route, kind of like the routes in Transport Fever. This way, a ship could be taken off an automatic route for a special cargo and then be re-added. I’m not sure how the best way would be to restart the route if they had been in the middle of a more complicated route, but plenty of transport games allow the player to order a vehicle on a route to skip to a lower part of the schedule.
1 Like
7

First I do like this idea - both the AI module and how you have expanded it. But I wanted to comment on the new/old player dynamic - I think one thing that has been missed by most who are worried that “old players will run away with the game” - is the chaos that is caused in markets when a senior player leaves.

All of a sudden, a big chunk of items they provided disappears, H2O, C, etc - and that damages alot of the newer players who now have to struggle to either find inputs or build new bases. I would argue that this danger would be good to guard against.

With the warp gates - we are providing things that senior players can do - but we need to provide them with some quality of life improvements to encourage them to stay around and help fund the building of the gates and other things.

-Craftsman

3 Likes
8

I would say that, like how basic/free users can only have up to 2 ships in flight at once, that after unlocking Shipment Routes you’d only be able to have 1 or 2 ships performing routes at a time. This can be improved with more HQ upgrades. Of course, routes would also likely require automatable navigational consoles installed in all ships performing routes. Better nav consoles might be able to perform more complex route components, and a nav console, likely a basic one - would be needed in all ships. Basic nav consoles can perform manual flight maneuvers, automatable ones would be able to perform basic automated maneuvers, (move here, drop off cargo, pick up cargo, etc.) Autonomous ones would be able to perform most automated maneuvers and operations, (move here through this route, sell cargo, buy cargo, etc.) AI operated ones would be able to perform all automated maneuvers. (pick up LM shipping ad, go to LM shipping destination, drop off and complete LM shipping ad, etc.)

Note: This message is here because there are so many spelling issues above. I will fix them later. When that happens, this message will be removed. I may rewrite the whole post when I do this.

1 Like
9

Given the recent devlogs, I’m reactivating this thread.

I personally have very, very little to say about the shipping routes feature, but I do want to pre-empt one thing:

I would be extremely disappointed if we cannot automate moving other player’s shipments via the shipping routes feature.

Right now, one of the biggest issues with cooperative play in the game is that ships are expensive, permanently locked to an account, but transferring SHPT blocks for other players is very time consuming and tedious as it cannot be semi-automated the same way we can for other resources using community plugins like rPrUn, or custom forks of it.

I myself have a fleet of 28 ships but they mostly stay idle because I no longer have the time to operate them manually, but I have the money to buy more ships for the corp, but I can’t because if a player I buy a ship for leaves, I can’t get that ship back and continue the logistical operation.

Whatever future solution to ship trading might exist in the future, I’d really like to, right now, be able to automate the process of loading SHPTs onto ships. Even if it’s not perfect at utilising space (such as just naively taking the first shipment that matches the destination, instead of calculating the best combination), that’d be an acceptable efficiency trade-off for ingame automation to me.

I’d love to be able to just accept 10 contracts from 10 players, mass pickup all of them, and then have ships assigned to the Shipping Routes automatically collect matching SHPTs from the inventory before departing.

I think it would also be really nice if Shipping Routes could also attempt to auto-deliver SHPTs when arriving at their destination, with user customisable fallback logic. (Should the ship try to unload the SHPT to local storage? Should it just continue to the next leg anyway? Should it do nothing and ask the player to decide what to do?)

As one of COSM’s officers, and with the level of insight I have into how so many people play this game, I’ve realised that the primary thing pushing players away from this game is that there’s no realistic way to reduce your time investment in this game once you get large, beyond doing less, if you want to cooperate with other players. Independent players are quite capable of just retooling their empire to mass produce a selection of low maintenance products, but that’s not fun for most people. If you’re cooperating in a production chain, you really don’t have any options, and I think it’s a shame that high level cooperative gameplay is so prohibitively burdensome. Between my job and social upkeep, I barely have the time to maintain 15 mostly low-effort bases, let alone the full 24 my permit count allows.

Having the ability to direct my funds towards operating a massive autonomous fleet for my corp would do wonders for both restoring my motivation, and allowing me to take strain off of my corp members and reduce their burnout.

4 Likes
10

Tbh that mostly sounds like a complaint about a bunch of general game problems that you try to force solve with shipping routes:

=> Corps should be able to own ships and wares and accept conts

=> Auto delivery option somewhat similar to auto provisioning, just triggered when the ship arrives (a button similar to “unload on arrival”?)

Multi permitting exists so you could cut the amounts of bases down to 8 bases with 975 usable area each while still using all permits.

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But I do agree that something like “pick up all shipments / as many shipments as possible in inventory X” (base or WAR) would be nice. Same with unloading.

Useful commands:
load amount / max of MAT x
load everything in INV x except MAT y
wait till SHPI has reached a certain fill level (has a loop that it repeats ever 6h or so which can contain “load” commands)

So a route could look like:

  • load as many shipments from WAR as possible
  • load max of MAT x (to fill the remaining space)
  • wait till full
    • loop: load max of MAT x
  • refuel
  • fly to destination
  • unload all (preferably or only in INV x)
  • load…

flight time:
min and max flight time, max allowed fuel. Priority: max time > max fuel > min time
→ It tries the min time, if that takes too much fuel it uses max fuel, if that takes longer than the max time it takes the max time
But not sure how well that could be implemented as “flight time” is the result which depends on fuel input and planet constellation. A problem here would be that a ship sent on a STL trip with too little fuel can be in the same STL flight segment (planet orbit to planet orbit) for days with no way to cancel it. In system FTL would help with that as it would make the STL segment more predictable as it would be capped at a max distance / time and above that switch to FTL..

2 Likes
11

Honestly, you’re not wrong. But I also think that at this point in time, it would be better to advocate for the implementation of this feature now, and remove it in the future if it makes upcoming corp features redundant. This game, while in development, has to still self-fund, and player burnout means lost profits which means slower growth and potential development.

I do like your suggestions on how route planning could be done ^^