Posts: 3,113
Threads: 96
Joined: May 2012
Staff roles: Balance Dev
The balance of the game itself should encourage piracy over ship destruction, which probably involves:
- Making the cargo traders move around have inherent value (a base price over a couple thousand credits) so cargo piracy is profitable whether the transport cooperates or not. Making it so pirates want to have cargo space also makes them fly ships that are easier to pin down for law enforcement, should they try to deal with the pirate.
- Making destroying a transport significantly harder. This would also make escorting (in the actual escorting sense - people seem to mistake scouting ahead for escorting in Discovery) viable.
- Adding a way to force a transport to drop a portion of its cargo (destroying cargo pods or portions of the ship that visually look like they are cargo storage) that is substantially easier than destroying the entire ship.
Admittedly these are not easy things to do. But I do agree with the sentiment that solving the "Transport griefing" problem with rules is, fundamentally, an inferior option to solving it with gameplay.