i would like a LOT more commodities in general - legal and illegal - but its not too easy to balance all the routes. especially if you want to add more than only one selling and one purchasing location. its hours of work staring at tabs and numbers - and you have to have the whole sector in your mind - with all the jumpholes and shortcuts so that there won t be a route turning out as superior.
some of the very special goods could easily be be added in single traderoutes - with a single selling location and prolly a single or maybe two or three buying locations.
you have also gotto keep in mind, that the polices have to keep all illegal goods in mind. and that can become a quite hard work. especially when you try to keep a list of like dozens of things in mind - maybe it even changes from realm to realm.
yeah i know it is a big job to make the new trade rout... but yeah more illegal stuff now we only got 4 thinks cardamine,artifats,slaves, counter software...yeah maybe add some more illegal items like 4-6 more items...Bio Toxic nanobots, yeah why not, they are a danger to humans, Nomad Gate Components - maybe sold in nomad system like delta, kappe, lota but traders can dock in lota best buy price lota, Space Spirits (drinks) maybe a cryer made item, Navigation scamblers maybe the lane hackers would pay good for this item, maybe the outcast made some other drug from cardamine where best price is in Rheinland or bretonia, and the corsairs found more nomad stuff where best price is in new tokyo or hamburg
Of all the Freelancer mods I've played, the Discovery commodities list/system is by far the best. This seems to be the only mod that tries to balance new commodities. Most mods simply unleash a massive amount of new commodities with little or no thought to the Freelancer storyline.
This being said, I would still like to see the commodities list diversified a bit - both in the legal and illegal departments. Not necessarily more of the profitable commodities, but just more diversity - to add to RP.
On the matter of smuggling - if you look at any well-established sci-fi universe(Star Wars for example) there are seldom more than a handful of illicit commodities to trade in. In Star Wars you have weapons and spice. In Freelancer you have cardamine, synthetic marijuana, counterfeit software, slaves, artifacts, alien organisms, nomady stuff. That's a fair bit of variety. Not all of it is easy to come by either - but it shouldn't be.
The nice thing about Discovery is the RP aspect. It's easy enough to set up a profitable trade circuit and make a fair bit of coin(minus inevitable pirate and hostile encounters of course), but it gets rather boring and repetitive without any RP behind it - moving faction-related commodites, etc.
Cheers,
Idaho
Freighter Captain
"There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense."
- Han Solo