Discovery Gaming Community

Escorting is a really fun experience. It adds a lot to your trade runs, such as protection and role play. Sadly, it takes away profit which is the most important part of trading (Don't deny it, you greedy fat cats).
And then we get to our problem as aforementioned; it's all about profit. "I don't care if you've had 99999 successful SRPs, I just want my credits". Ok, that might be a generalization but it's kinda true.
So how do we make the trader still make a profit and possibly pay for an escort?
The thing is, we don't. We can't really. Human nature follows that we'd aim to make as much money as possible. Buff the trade routes so the trader has extra cash to pay? Nah, he'd probably rather keep the higher profit.
And now we reach our conundrum, we can't ensure that the trader won't harm his profit by paying for an escort. So what do we do?
Sounds cheesy? It is.
Basically, borrowing ideas from other people in the community, we could encourage 'high risk high profit' trade routes. These trade routes ain't no candy-land, the trader would be covering spaces of hell that you'd be mad to go into alone. So you'd hire an escort to watch your back out in dangerous space, maybe even more than one if you want the ultimate defense.

"Hurr, I'll just stick on my Cap8 and have a battle-transport. Who needs escorts? )))"
This is probably the ultimate sin as to why we don't have escorts. Why bother hiring escorts when you can have the hull of an unarmored carrier? That poses no threat to a single pirate. A group might pose a larger threat, which may mean more escorts, but lets be honest: single pirates are far more common than groups.
Therefore, lets prevent transports from using capital ship armours.
...
Ok, I know that wouldn't work. It also sounds stupid. But I stick by saying being able to dramatically buff transport armours is what has killed escorting.
Hold this thought for now.

I was playing GalCiv2 (awesome game, but that's for another time). People who are familiar with the game will know about trade routes. I was thinking about GalCiv2 and Disco. In GalCiv2, you can create trade routes with other civilizations (blah blah blah I don't need to go over it in detail)... eventually, a route will be established. Depending on it, that route might be gold dust because money in GalCiv2 is precious (duh). Trade routes can be attacked by hostile ships, which is why escorts would be crucial for your freighters. Freighters used Cargo hulls. These things could store cargo and were super cheap, so you could make cheap ships to make money for you. However, cargo hulls had pitiful hitpoints. I once thought it'd be a good idea to turn a cargo hull ship into a gunboat by dumping 5 odd guns onto it. Never again. This is why escorts were important, because freighters had very low base hitpoints. And although the route might take longer, it would be worth it to avoid those iconian scum from shooting it down.

Ok, this is the tl;dr part.
What I am proposing is that the base hull hitpoints of all transports is nerfed. So I'm suggesting we give some of the bigger transports 50K hulls. That way, with a capital armour upgrade 8, you could get 200K hulls on transports.
"ARRRGHGHGHGHH, BUUUT LYYYYYTH, PIRATES CAN BEAT US UP SOOO EASILY NOWWWWW". Well, that's kind of the point. You'd need escorts to defend your asses. However, I can see this as something that may be problematic, so perhaps we should buff the civilian shields to have higher shield health and maybe faster recovery time?
That kinda ends this post, discuss away.

P.S I thought we were told we'd get repair ships with repair beams? Anyway, repair ships could make the ultimate escort.

EDIT: Shoot, this might need to be put into an appropriate section if necessary. Could this be dumped in Discovery Mod Discussion please if deemed so?

(10-30-2013, 10:11 PM)Haste Wrote: [ -> ]Actually.
I'd rather see transports made more durable. Double their hulls for all I care. Triple them if you really want to.
Why?
Because in return, we drop their impulse speed to.. Let's say, 20. We make them unable to get capital ship thrusters. We make sure their thrusters are located somewhere we can hit pretty easily.

But won't this make them sitting ducks against moderately intelligent pirates?
Yes it will.

The effect? A transport that decides to run will take about six to eight times longer to make it back to port as long as it can't cruise. More than enough time to beat down that large hull.

Another effect? A decent escort fighter will be able to turn that solo bomber pirate into a smoking pile of space debris before the transport dies.

Hurray!

Another thing I just noticed is that it kind of, well, makes sense. The largest transports approach the size of (smaller) battleships. Making their hulls similar to a cruiser isn't too far-fetched.

Of course, the exact numbers here may need tweaking.

Actually.
I'd rather see transports made more durable. Double their hulls for all I care. Triple them if you really want to.
Why?
Because in return, we drop their impulse speed to.. Let's say, 20. We make them unable to get capital ship thrusters. We make sure their thrusters are located somewhere we can hit pretty easily.

But won't this make them sitting ducks against moderately intelligent pirates?
Yes it will.

The effect? A transport that decides to run will take about six to eight times longer to make it back to port as long as it can't cruise. More than enough time to beat down that large hull.

Another effect? A decent escort fighter will be able to turn that solo bomber pirate into a smoking pile of space debris before the transport dies.

Hurray!

Another thing I just noticed is that it kind of, well, makes sense. The largest transports approach the size of (smaller) battleships. Making their hulls similar to a cruiser isn't too far-fetched.

Of course, the exact numbers here may need tweaking.

If you crank up the difficulty, you do not make the game challenging. You just make the oldfaegs bask in their billions of money and the new players unable to acquire it as easily.

Apologies for not reading the whole thing, am too lazy to do so in this case. I'll just address the main problem for me about escorts which you kinda mentioned at the start. Firstly I'd love to have escorts with me while trading, I for one don't mind at all cutting into my profit a bit in order to have em.

The question for me personally, is not what you said at the start, how do we make it worthwhile for traders, who don't wanna cut into their profit. But how do we make it worthwhile for the escorts! As I said I'll happily pay for escorts and would love for some faction escorts on convoys (which I do often have in LR- when smuggling is more about the RP and less profit, but less so for Platinum| where it is more about the money). However there is little incentive to be an escort on such convoys, when instead you could be taking along another transport and making however million credits it is per run.

As for how to solve that issue, beats me. But I'll pay for freelancer and my own factions escorts any day, just not as high a chance that'd I'd want to do the escorting myself...

(10-30-2013, 10:11 PM)Haste Wrote: [ -> ]Actually.
I'd rather see transports made more durable. Double their hulls for all I care. Triple them if you really want to.
Why?
Because in return, we drop their impulse speed to.. Let's say, 20. We make them unable to get capital ship thrusters. We make sure their thrusters are located somewhere we can hit pretty easily.

But won't this make them sitting ducks against moderately intelligent pirates?
Yes it will.

The effect? A transport that decides to run will take about six to eight times longer to make it back to port as long as it can't cruise. More than enough time to beat down that large hull.

Another effect? A decent escort fighter will be able to turn that solo bomber pirate into a smoking pile of space debris before the transport dies.

Hurray!

Another thing I just noticed is that it kind of, well, makes sense. The largest transports approach the size of (smaller) battleships. Making their hulls similar to a cruiser isn't too far-fetched.

Of course, the exact numbers here may need tweaking.

This idea is too good for people to miss, gonna have to quote it in the OP.

Generally, risk versus reward is lacking entirely.
Cargo that nets you top-notch profit needs to be risky. 5,000 a unit at their cheapest point.
Lose 5,000 of those, and you're down 25 million.

In order to make pirates scarier, you make risk greater. Then, escorts actually will be worth spending more than just a few million on. They might even be worth a 50% cut.

Right now, you can usually make maximum profit ferrying something worth 50 credits to a place where it's worth 2500 with little to no risk anywhere. You may lose time and maybe a million credits, but that's it. If you stand to lose twenty-five, and to gain fifty, maybe try and secure that fifty with an escort?

Edit: 'course, there's always the 'silent powertrading at night' issue. Maybe that's where NPCs come in? Or just plain 'turn off' the higher profit commodities at those times, however 'crude' that may seem.

Edit 2: I think I just rewrote part of the OP in my own words with an alteration here and there. I should read threads, rather than titles sometime. Sorry. 8|

Edit THREE, because edits are amazing: Alongside the trading-at-night issue is the 'the universe is too damn big to have pirates everywhere' issue. So make sure there's only like three trade routes that make the ultimate amount of profit, so that pirates can park their ships somewhere at a bottleneck for these routes and make traders' lives miserable.

Anyone tried escorting with Repair Ship or Freighter?

Botfeeding to the extent Repair Ships (and Battleships) allow is indeed a way to make anything survive to a docking point.

That's kind of why most of the developers, as far as I'm aware, want to get rid of bot/bat transfers.

Would it be possible to make Transports cruise/thrust speed or maneuverability proportional to the amount of cargo? I.e. a "full" transport goes slower than an empty one? Maybe that'd be too much work, but just a thought.

I'm honestly okay with either Lyth's or Haste's suggestions, both make sense. In the latter's case, so long as transports keep their cruise speed (to accommodate smugglers who don't use lanes), it would be great.

Although in Haste's case, my main fear is that corporations will start taking to the battlefield with heavily armored cruiser-stand-in transports. I know they won't have the same effect as an actual cruiser, but still.