So I've been thinking lately and I've decided to make a feedback thread on these ideas/questions I've been having...
1) Harder Missions
Currently the missions we have are just normal ships, and the difficulty = the higher ship classes that spawn. However, I was thinking of the possibility of adding missions that spawn ships with armor upgrades/higher dmg weapons, that maybe drop good/better loot on these special missions.
However currently how the difficulty scale is designed, the harder ones give better money/loot however you have to own a battleship just to be able to cash in on this, having at least 500m already in bank.
Doing 1mil missions as max for someone who just started as a snub isn't enough to live on. The loot on those missions are not nearly as good as those on the higher ones. However if the profit was increased via loot on this missions, what's to stop someone from bringing their currently existing battleship and farming the easier snub missions with updated loot?
So my question here is: "Is there a possibility to limit what ships/characters can accept a certain mission?" Maybe making it dependent on being within a certain rank range?
You could add these missions with heavy duty armored bombers and jacked power core, where they have 3 snacs onboard and can fire them all, wrecking any capital ship thus only allowing snubs to be able to come and shoot what spawns.
2) Lootable Patrols
In certain areas patrols can be edited to be more profitable and completely buffed, with armor and damage upgrades. Maybe these can be Cult of Technology patrols, or special Liner patrols that have plenty of VIPs aboard, or Wild patrols with Nomad Power Cells. If their rate of spawn can be controlled, they could be made to rarely spawn, but when they do, be worth to destroy, giving up to 50mil in loot at times.
I'm not sure how this can be done or if it can be, which is why I ask the community. Let me know what you guys think.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
That unfortunately is a bit out of my territory of knowledge but... anyways. I know the loot can be changed fairly easily or so I get the feeling of. As for what it spawns... haven't heard much so I'm in the blind over there. The limitation per game mechanics, not possible as far as I know. And while I like your idea of introducing bombers, they were sort of... cancerous from what I've heard, again. Due to NPC's having infinite powercores and them seemingly permafiring SNAC's wasn't exactly 'appealing' in normal situations.
2)
This, however, is more possible than anything to my recollection. The only problem though being that you can't control their rate of spawning at all. That's correlated with the player count in the server, and from what I've heard, is untouchable. Thankfully you can still edit what spawns where though.
Both of these ideas are, under certain limitations, entirely feasable and have been discussed by some gameplay devs. The main reason these concepts have not been worked on is a backlog of features and ideas that have to be worked on and/or finished first.