Actually, the main problem I tend to see is simply a lack of escorts (other than BHG when we specifically ask them, usually), other than our own in-faction ones that is. What encourages people to fly escort instead of a transport out of faction members? Well for CR| you've got everyone with combat ships but not all with traders, but it's the opposite for IMG| - so we have medals and renown on offer, mostly. Actually paying well, as a small percentage per person in a large convoy, gives great rates as you personally know.
The high numbers of traders compared to unlawfuls is also a problem, since almost all of them can get away without being pirated regardless of being carrier-strength or paper ships. Hopefully there will be a couple of changes/reversions to make pirating a bit more viable, but it still needs people to put some extra effort in. You make it too easy to pirate (by making transports really weak) and the balance is shifted too much again - Spazzy's warning has some merit.
As for the actual escorting, what is always more useful is actually a scout (terms can be mixed up sometimes). Avoiding the pirates is a better strategy than smashing through them (unless you also give medals for transport kills ), although if you are forced to go through somewhere or stay in a certain place like a mining field, then a group of combat ships is better to fend off attackers instead.
I henceforth summon Jack for further discussion of the topic, he's put most of the effort into our system anyway.
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.
(10-31-2013, 03:24 AM)Coin Wrote: 10 escorts = 1 scout. avoiding the battle is the best way of winning it. I already fly the high-risk routes, cos that makes things interesting.
But ever since Wing Commander 1 "Vaccine for Fargo" Mission, we know that defending a transport under fire (with a chance to rescue it) is so much tenser and more fun than directing it around the enemy. (It can be so tense, that I still remember the 3 Jalti bombers attacking the Drayman transports vividly and that was likely... 22 years ago).
So collecting ideas of how to make that happen is actually a good thing.
Fix piracy so the lanes will be crawled by various pirates all the way long - then escorting will be interesting.
However the trend was that pirates must perish from this mod, or at least everything is done for this to happen. In times it was not easy to pass few systems w\o running into some shady folks or at least w\o seeing them on scanner but now I was trading\smuggling sometimes and didn't runned into much pirates. Actually for 4 month or so I was pirated only 1 time flat. Thanks to neverending lawful side buffs. First NPCs, stationed objects, transports armors, guns, cargoes, recently pobs, mining buffs, etc. For all I care pirating in that environment is just waste of time.
P.S. Oh wow, I rad the posts above and currently trying to stop laughing. Almost all proposals are again running into "well, buff trading more" ideas. It's incredibly stupid already. I can make few runs on some random mid-profit route with 4.5k transport and suit up a fighter with full equip. Trading is retard profitable already and you keep asking for buffs? Sorry but that reminds of the Sair leaders who keep asking for buffs too while their stuff is already VERY good. In my opinion, and mind that I didn't played for pirate in a veeery long while, the trading must be cut at least for 3 times in profits and mining at least for 4-5 times. Piracy must return, and I mean normal piracy by random pirates sitting an every corner. That way I'd play trader with enjoyment again.
1.Sirius is too big;
- we have zilion trade routes becouse of that
- no bottle neck sistems on high profit routs
Solution:make Sirius smaller whit bottle neck sistems on high profit routes.
2.Economy is unbalance:
- credits are to easy to gain it we compare it whit small ships prices
- we can now buy cheap commodity and sell it whit same profit like some expencive commoditys (on same distance)
- we have zilion of commoditys now
- we have new commoditys now for POB needs whit no acctual sell points if they are pirated why? I know POB are currently not on line. But when they will be what then?
Solution:make all commoditys more expencive on buying points.
Comoditys that are more expensive on trader route starting locatin should make more profit.
We don't need so many commoditys as we have now.
We don't need those new POB commoditys the old sistem was fine.
3.Pirating is hard becouse pirat ships are unbalanced:
- pirat ships are to slow to catch traders
- pirat ships have less fire power than trader ships
- pirat ships are no good for cargo pirating
Currently the best ships for solo pirating are freighters. Imagine they can acctualy solo catch trader IoI.
Bombers are good if the transport is big...if transport is smaller QQ
Solution:make pirat ships faster than trader ships.
Make pirat ships able to destroy treders cargo faster.
I don't acctualy wish that pirat can kill trader...I wish that trader can loooose the cargo
4.Transports are to OP now
- transports have great weapons
- transports are to fast
- great hull if they are bigger
- now the transports are better then GBs and GBs were best for pirating before update.
Solution: Less weapons on big transports.
Less speed for all transports.
Cargo hold that can be destroyed (not the whole ship like now)
Transports should be fast only in trade lines.
Lets sey they should be like trains - more cargo less speed ( every cargo pod(500 space hold). If transport add one cargo pod ,-10 for all speeds )
5.Escorts are not needed now:
- read point 1
- read point 2
- read point 3
- read point 4
- trader can use company escort
Solution: solutions 1-4
traders need profit buff to pay escorts
allow trader companys to use only transports( no house escorts=need for escort companys )
make mining less profitable IoI I know or
make mining companys only to harvest ore and trader companys to transport it or
what about if we don't have mining at all? Less miners = more traders
(10-31-2013, 09:51 AM)Tibbles Wrote: A faction representing a private corporation offering escort service with an understandable tag would help too ^.^
We have an emergency channel for help requests and escort requests, any faction leader that wants an escort can ask to be added there. We use Bottlenoses in the Taus for IMG for example.
Sorry, i didn't see that post, thought it was long forgoten like everything else. You can join BHG and do escorts only, it's not a problem, maybe add another wing with a secondary tag. It's an idea worth considering.