You want to buff escorting?
Sure. Make an escort.
Want to make it more exciting: go for high value commodities. They already exist (minable commodities).
Normal traders will never hire you, sadly. If you fly alone and make 10 million, you do not want to give 2 million away. And why would I fly 20 minutes for 2 million profit?
Escorting only works with groups, e.g. get a convoy of 6 traders with ore, and every trader pays the escort 2-3 million at the end. The escort makes between 12 and 18 million. That's why there is no problem to find escorts for IMG convoys.
How can you make the escort's life more interesting? By roleplaying in group channel. This takes discipline and good infrastructure (namely Teamspeak to cut the oorp out of group talk) and some experience. But it can be done, as every convoy I lead works like that.
These are recipes that work.
Quote:Now, every thread that has "traders" in it, drifts into "nerf traders!".
Generally, I do not feel that the trade ships need to be changed.
It is hard to pirate at the moment?
Seems so (even though I am pretty sure there hasn't been enough time to properly test piracy a lot. I have been attacked once (!) in the new version).
Looking for the reasons for the high difficulty, however, lets me locate the problems with other factors:
NPCs
interrupted lanes
gate armament
commodity spread
inability of pirate players to locate the new bottlenecks (seriously... how can S13 not be pirate haven already, 24/7?)
The problem doesn't seem to be: too strong transports.
Don't tell me you cannot beat a transport.
If you cannot solo-pirate the standard trading transport in a standard pirate ship, you are doing something wrong.
The standard transport I see is a 5ker with UAU8 maximum. These are easy prey for everything that is a bomber or larger.
However, if you want to solo-pirate a trader who spent 500-800 million on his tradeship AND "wastes" a lot of cargo for the armor AND flies a durable combat transport (wasting more cargo), he deserves to be not that easy to solo-pirate. He makes much less profit than the easy target on every single run. The fully kitted Battletransport can carry around 3,7k of cargo (but live when attacked) instead of 5k (and die if attacked).
This is a simple tradeoff.
Security - vs. - Profit.
But also much more importantly:
"Fun by being not a helpless victim in a confrontation" - vs. - "maximum efficiency grind tool"
"Skill based (relatively) open outcome" - vs. - "100 % pre-determined rock-scissors-paper interaction"
"Fun in participating in the pvp part of the game" - vs. - "frustrating experience of having no chance by default setting"
See, unlike most of you, some (masochist) people love flying transports.
And they also like shooting. So their wish is to fly transports and (!) shoot.
Theye players love the challenge to beat bad pvp odds with strategy and cooperation (e.g. convoys).
And here the battletransport and group play comes in. It caters to the wish of this narrow group.
And why does this group matter? Because they are the traders that will talk to the pirate, that will show you that there are characters on the other side, they will roleplay and make the pirate's experience better than the standard "kill me" powertrader who hates the grindwork and sees you as a factor that leads to loss of profit or time.
About the different approaches:
Quote: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.
I have no problem with this, if the hull is buffed so much that a solo escort will take down the bomber first, reliably. But this will never happen. Snubs are too small and transports too big. With your suggestion, even dodging would be impossible (it pretty much already is on combat transports anyway), so the damage output would raise again, so the hull would have to be buffed into incredible heights.
Disco's problem is: The fat one always dies.
Also: You would open the doors to lolwut cruiser piracy even wider, again. And Cruiser piracy has created some of the most stupid situations and imbalances ever. This kind of piracy resulted in the buffed thrust speeds to give transports some tiny chance to get away because every confrontation was pre-determined 100 % for standard transports.
Quote:What I am proposing is that the base hull hitpoints of all transports is nerfed. [...] 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?
This will never work.
I have been attacked hundreds of times in my transports and not once (!) the escort was able to kill the attacker in time. If the attacker died, it was by a huge transport gank, and the transports did the work themselves (by sheer numbers), but the escort never was able to do it alone.
Just think about it: downing a bomber takes > 10 minutes. Has any transport lived that long in combat? No.
If you - in addition - nerf the transport hull, the escort has even less time to down the attacker. So the job of the escort becomes even more useless. This won't work at all, I fear.
To finally give some solution of how to make escorting attractive:
add only a few (!) high buy-in, high profit routes that move through several difficult systems
play escorts! You have no idea how hard it is to find any!
If you play escorts, approach the factions that fly high-risk, high-profit routes (all others will not hire you)
Improve your infrastructure and communication (be in their Skype channels, have ships in their main activity locations, etc).
Offer something else than just payment, like interesting roleplay.
Offer other forms of gratification to escorts (e.g. like the medals we use in IMG)
Support the scripting of this trade mission script. It will buff trade activity that needs escorts.
In general: if escorting should be more fun, first have the escorting people change things on their end and come up with some solutions about their job.
There are some, e.g. BHG, who are doing it well. They have a channel where you can call them, and ships spread out nicely, etc. So it can work, without ruining the toys that I love to play with.