Return of loading passengers into vehicles, and rewards to allow "freelancer gameplay

[Ivan]

Not an urgent matter, but imo, it would be cool if these would return at some point:

In the old city system you could load citizens and crew with vehicles like a space transport and SUV etc (possibly beause you could contact the city/buildings in trade channel without needing a spaceship)
From Wayback Machine, 2014 SoH game manual (Communication):
"Load Passengers
Offers empty stateroom berths or vehicle seats to passengers looking for transport. Loads Passengers while aboard a spacecraft. You must be an officer of the ship. Loads Passengers into a vehicle that has empty seats. Transmit on the Trade channel to initiate contact with a city."

- This allowed for Citizen players (non-goverment members) to make money by ferrying passengers to the moon with a spacetransport or even between two cities on your starter planet, with a helicopter/sailboat.
- Additionaly doing construction labour would net you some cash (I think maybe because of the reward system?). The emperor could also set rewards for exploration, founding cities and other things.
-The missions I already mentioned in another thread.


Why u ask, when we can take millions from the bank?

Well, when playing as a citizen character, instead of emperor, this allowed you to basically have this Freelancer/Elite experience, where u start small and then work towards a larger (private) ship, in the Hazeron universe. I started one such character today and noticed you can't really do alot anymore. Yes you can take a loan of 50k, but that allows you to only buy 2 ships currently available in the Workshop.( I could ofc design new ones). The only mission you get is "ship needs captain, take control of this huge ship without having any credentials whatsoever for free", which feels like cheating.


Also I noticed that my citizen character could buy things from a Retail Shop at a habitable planet, but not from a Retail Shop at the moon. (not sure if bug?)

Alot of this neat little details that existed before seem to not have been transferred to the new system. Yes ofc emperors don't need those, but it's sandbox and giving yourself a challenge without infinite money is fun (without using a free empire ship). You could basically create the world with your emperor(s), set up trade routes, passenger ferries, partols, ... . Then play around as a citizen/stateless trader, taxi, miner, bounty hunter, pirate & do missions in that universe you created.


Dunno if I'm the only one, but I think it would be nice to have this back in the long term.

[Celarious]

Pretty sure rewards were removed because they were never actually used for their intended purpose, Haxus mentioned they were just abused so emperors could give themselves infinite free money http://www.hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.p...s#pid10305

There's also the problem that money isn't actually useful at all anymore, there's no research to spend it on, once you buy your EV suit and gun then that's it, and I'm pretty sure yuri gagarin gives you an EV suit if you do rocket training so

In addition, there's also no "progression towards a larger ship", all you need to do is find a basic shuttle in your starting city, fly to a random habitable, colonize it, boom, now you're an emperor again doing emperor things again, unless you specifically restrict yourself to existing cities only, but then there's nothing to do once you get a big ship, colonization (and thus becoming an emperor again) is really the only gameplay, there's nobody and nothing to fight...
Also only sticking to existing cities relies on you intentionally setting up infrastructure to support "company ships" like private security contractors and however crew are recruited

And everything else that exists for citizen players technically only still does as leftovers from the MMO, when you could start the game by joining random players' empires

Maybe if the NPC empires allow us to join under them then this style of play could become more prevalent, but currently the systems in place for it are purely for self-RP and don't really work in a singleplayer environment, unless you really really really really like solo RP I guess

It would be cool if MP returns but that may not happen anytime soon given Haxus chose to prioritize NPC empires first

[GaelicVigil]

I think it would be interesting if there were unique, noncraftable items in the game. You'd have to either find them through RNG by searching planetary ruins or buy them from your own citizens. I'd imagine these would be like alien artifacts.
That would give an incentive to create a true currency system where you could do jobs for your empire as a citizen or even do commodity trading with AI empires for cash to earn these type of end-game rewards.

[Ivan]

Pretty sure rewards were removed because they were never actually used for their intended purpose, Haxus mentioned they were just abused so emperors could give themselves infinite free money http://www.hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.p...s#pid10305

There's also the problem that money isn't actually useful at all anymore, there's no research to spend it on, once you buy your EV suit and gun then that's it, and I'm pretty sure yuri gagarin gives you an EV suit if you do rocket training so

In addition, there's also no "progression towards a larger ship", all you need to do is find a basic shuttle in your starting city, fly to a random habitable, colonize it, boom, now you're an emperor again doing emperor things again, unless you specifically restrict yourself to existing cities only, but then there's nothing to do once you get a big ship, colonization (and thus becoming an emperor again) is really the only gameplay, there's nobody and nothing to fight...
Also only sticking to existing cities relies on you intentionally setting up infrastructure to support "company ships" like private security contractors and however crew are recruited

And everything else that exists for citizen players technically only still does as leftovers from the MMO, when you could start the game by joining random players' empires

Maybe if the NPC empires allow us to join under them then this style of play could become more prevalent, but currently the systems in place for it are purely for self-RP and don't really work in a singleplayer environment, unless you really really really really like solo RP I guess

It would be cool if MP returns but that may not happen anytime soon given Haxus chose to prioritize NPC empires first

The main reason for starting this thread was that it bothered me I could no longer load citizens int a SUV or space transport. But then it got me thinking of other things also.

I could be wrong, but iirc you couldn't enter or take control of ships unless you were in the chain of command of a city before. Maybe that was only for officered ships.
Either way it could be made impossible for citizen players to acquire empire ships, the same way a US citizen can not go and take command for a US navy aircraft carrier for starting his ow shipping company.

Money has no use? Well yeah I'm exactly trying to give it a use. Otherwise you might abolish money aswell. Just take everything for free. I'm suggesting to add options that were removed, which I personally liked. Sure the rewards could be abused to get infinite money (corruption), but then why remove them to just be able to get infinite money? Could have just left it in. Basically before we had the ability to have government corruption in addtion to having the "decent government" gameplay option (giving goverment members reasonable rewards for their efforts) and the ability to give citizens rewards. Now we just have absolute government corruption without a "decent" option and no ability to give citizens rewards.

So the reasoning seemingly was: because corrupt politicians (players) exist, we don't need checks and balances anymore, we should just embrace corruption and citizens don't need to make money for public service, but will get free aircraft carriers instead. Free aircraft carriers for everyone! 

But if that is the preference of the majority, then so be it.

Free aircraft carriers for everyone sounds cool actually. Hmm, maybe I'd vote for that guy too. Ffs I'm a communist or at least anti-monetarist and am trying to get capitalism and monetarism in the game, SMH. Capitalism is an addictive mmo triggering lots of dopamine releases, it seems. That's probably why we keep it around. Whole world seems addicted to it.

I had written an entire off topic section rambing about fixed prices RL economics, artificial scarcity and fractional reserve banking, flawed/circular logic used as justification, and suggesting an alternative, but maybe such things don't belong here. Also I wasted 2 hours writing it. Either way it made me conclude the current hazeron system is actually realistic when you are able to collect infinite resources.

Without money as a restricting factor, once we have several planets worth of resources an economy of abundance like Hazeron could be possible. (not per planet ofcourse). We have only mined a fraction of the Earth's minerals anyway. The problem is perhaps rather technology and water, fertile land and pollution/destroying biodiversity, but doing so outside our homeplanet on perhaps orbital farms would be fine.



Idea: Because the number of planets is virtually infinite anyway , maybe each planet could have a (very large) maximum number of each mineral (depending on mineral percentages).

Potential (difficult to implement) solution: Maybe goverments could have restricted budgets. Maybe some expenses should be added. Maybe printing infinite money could inflate prices to the point it is not useful (but without a delay, unlike IRL, for easier implementation), unless the money supply grows in accordance to the population and production growth. Ofcourse that would be a huge change to the way the Hazeron economy works and is likely not going to happenin the short term.

People play entire games where their only goal is to buy a bigger ship, to make more money to buy an even bigger ship. Some games like X4 allow you to have a fleet and eventually build some kind of empire. I just thought it would be neat to have that option in Hazeron. Ok others disagree, so not happening. Fine. I guess I can pretend by giving rewards to the citizen with my emperor character, but that kind feels less immersive than before.  Go communism! Free aircraft carriers!


About joining the AI empires as a citizen, I completely agree, was even thinking about that after posting it last night. You could work your way up until you reach a certain rank and then either stay loyal or leave and found your own empire (like M&B Warband) or perhaps even overthrow the emperor and take his place.


I've left in the the striken parts because I consider 2 possible realities: one where capitalism exists and one where it doesn't.

Ok I'll stay away from the forums for a while. :D

[GaelicVigil]

How about earning money in game to be able to use the old Design Studio? ;D