A couple of obvious improvements for shipping.
A visible flag so that the person accepting the ad knows if it will be auto-provisioned or not, so they don’t have a ship waiting around for 3 days until the shipper logs in again and manually provisions.
An option to auto-deliver so that I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to drop goods off to someone in urgent need.
Mixed shipments. Not only does it cost a fortune in LM fees to ship a number of different items from the same source and destination, single type shipments are a giveaway to competitors of what items you are shipping to where, when they will arrive etc so they can plan to dump their product on the market just before your shipment arrives.
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Flag for “provisioned”: good idea!
I also strongly support “auto drop”, but not only for contracts, but as a possible switch for all good aboard a ship! Example: i fly to CX to get raw material (H, C, ALO, FEO, FLX,…) or consumables because my base ran out. At the moment i have to get online just to unload. So i have to plan flight times according to my sleeping rythm, no use in flying faster? This could also be a “PRO-Feature”!
As for “mixed shipments”: A shipment “container” (i.e. its own inventory) could be helpful. Those could be possible in standard sizes (10, 100, 1000), with need to “construct” such parts (similar to ship parts, maybe a little lower tech). Place an ad for shipping “one container 100 m³/100 t” and everybody can fill them as he/she likes. Containers could also be usefull for own storage: put materials for a new base in a new container so you always see what you already got.
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I haven’t hear the idea about making shipping containers actual items before. That’s a clever way to go about it, and drives some demand for parts out of something like the SKF.
Different sized containers could use different sized “Durable Casing” (DCS, DCM, DCL) and produce an actual good that’s consumed by the PPF earlier on in the game which would help encourage slightly more PG production and also drive additional consumers of the SFK/MFK outputs of the FS, thus making it not a waste of a building to produce.
Maybe instead of having the H2O+PG recipe in the FP, the PPF could create a “1 Litre Plastic Bottle” type object which is then used in the FP recipe.
There’s a fantastic opportunity to incorporate packaging and other logistics things such as pallets, shipping containers, and totes into recipes.
I thought of the PG as a sediment filter, but having a bottle makes sense too, though maybe larger than 1l
Sorry for necroing this thread but I was about to create a new one that was about the same thing i.e. Flag for provisioned goods in a shipping contract.
It’s really anoying to have the route calculated to be profitable with a few contracts and then some of them don’t have goods provisioned and I have to either fail the the other contracts, ask everyone for termination or accept the loss on that shipping route.
Either a flag on every entry or at least some setting to allow me to filter the contracts not to see not provisioned ones as I never want to accept those. Having a contract that says delivery within 3 days but then you have to wait up to 3 days before someone provisions is bad. My ship might not be there in 1 hour let alone 3 days.
Another solution would be to limit the time for provisioning to something like max 1 hour.
Or removing the option not to auto provision → you don’t have resources yet? Then create the contract when you do.
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Yeah, auto provisioning where there’s no goods on contract post date should be disabled or it should have a warning on the LM ad itself notifying players that the contract will be provisioned in x amount of time.