2019-04-16 TEU Shipments, Hand Craft, Bank Cash Flow, Ship Title

[Haxus]

TEU Shipments
Broker shipments were intended to be something players could carry. This was never completed.

Players can now pick up and deliver TEU shipments.

• To request TEU shipments, a button was added to the dialog for requesting things for sale.
  
• To unload TEU shipments, a button was added to the dialog for offering things for sale.
  

This mechanic may evolve based on actual game experience. At present, there is no cost to pick up a TEU shipment. The delivery fee is based on delivering the package at the estimated delivery time. The delivery fee increases if you are early and it decreases if you are late.

Hand Craft
New style manufacture buildings do not add handcraft options if you stand on their site

Fixed addition of building-specific processes to the hand craft list. Added some visual indicators to point them out.

Fixed use of patents when hand crafting. Patents at the building and in your gear are searched to satisfy patent requirements of hand craft processes.

Military HQ on Sensors
Hm. Well, i noticed that military HQs are not visible on sensors both enemy and friendly

Fixed.

Company Hail Response
Company ships do not respond to hail.

Fixed various replies from company ships that were not working.

Production DNA
I have some leather production with using animal DNA but result leather clothing doesnt match it

Fixed a bug that lost DNA during the manufacturing process.

Headless Body
It turns off your whole body. Add a setting to turn off just your head.

There is now a setting to turn off the head of your body. This is sometimes helpful when head geometry intrudes into your vision, such as horns or jaws. This only affects your appearance in your own scene. Other players always see your head.

Bank Cash Flow
Report should show bank cash flow.

City report now provides a more detailed report of income and expenses of your city.

Spacecraft Title
You should be able to sell a ship title like any other commodity

Use the Spacecraft Policy page to create copies of a company ship's title of ownership onto a blank piece of paper or blank disk. Any person in possession of a title can use it to claim ownership of the property on the title. When ownership is claimed using a title, all other existing titles become null and void, with a note showing who claimed the property and when. The spacecraft on the title hails the new owner with its location, even if it is in stasis or in a hangar.

Weapon Bay Selector
Also perhaps related, because each weapon bay is now associated to a specific Firestation, you cannot switch between weapon bays at the commander chair

Fixed clipping error on the panel that caused it to only show the first digit of the current weapon system, which is usually 1.

[Neils Iyssada]

TEU Shipments
Broker shipments were intended to be something players could carry. This was never completed.

Players can now pick up and deliver TEU shipments.

• To request TEU shipments, a button was added to the dialog for requesting things for sale.
  
• To unload TEU shipments, a button was added to the dialog for offering things for sale.
  

This mechanic may evolve based on actual game experience. At present, there is no cost to pick up a TEU shipment. The delivery fee is based on delivering the package at the estimated delivery time. The delivery fee increases if you are early and it decreases if you are late.

Tried this, the delivery fee was really awkward :
- When I picked it up it said 1.3M fee.
- It was reduced to 70k while I was still on the next sector (no waiting time, I plotted the course right after having picked it up).
- Final fee of ~40k (less than 5% of the initial fee) while I arrived really early (like 10:45 pm instead of 10:55 pm for a 1 sector distance).


What I can imagine to make it better :
- Add a "guarantee fee" paid by the ship when it accepts the shipment, in the case the cargo is lost or stolen. It's refunded to the ship if the shipment is delivered.
- Make shipments speed take WARP level patent of the empire into account.
- Base the shipment fee on the standard shipment delivery time, and make all increase / decrease on the fee revolve around it (exactly on time = no fee).
- Scale the fee with the estimated delivery time. If you travel more you gain more.
- Scale the fee with the spacecraft's WARP level ? It's to avoid fee abuse, but can generate more abuse (warp 2 pick up, transfer to a warp 9 and gain a lot more).
- Make physical cargo ships. IDK how to handle them without making broker shipments tedious for beginers (having to afford building/paying them vs having to not pay them but easily abusable). If it's viable then add an option to use a different ship design by default, or even having to select in a list of "cargo" ship designs when planning a shipment (selected by the empire). Should we be able to board into them ? It could be useful for player pirates, but again easily abusable if it's cheap to get them.

[Vectorus]

As far as actual cargo ships appearing in the game go, they should spawn along trade routes when encountered, like pirates, rather than existing in the game the whole time. I reckon there should be some default designs but it should be allowed to design your own or purchase from the exchange with all the features of a normal ship. To have it otherwise would feel very weird now that literally everything else about your empire is going to be customizable and capable of being unified to a single aesthetic.

If your design has the same volume as the default-tier ships it's free, but to use more powerful custom trade designs you have to purchase the vessel for that route from the broker screen. Maybe there are also some higher-tier built-in designs you can purchase the same way. If the ship is destroyed or robbed en route, you lose your upgraded ship for that route - it reverts to using basic designs until you purchase it again.

Autogenerated trade ships should not accept any berth requests from players or any orders; they could, however, be capturable - but take severe damage when changing empire flag. This would prevent people from using the broker to instabuild ships for themselves to use at a cronodollar cost. The exploit value of en-route encounters is rather low, since they only occur along a straight line from source to target - especially if the encounter is not guaranteed but a probability, as for pirates. 


Also, it will presumably still be possible for trade shipments (and thus ships) to be auto-plundered, without generating a physical encounter, by pirate presence in the sector.

[Neils Iyssada]

I like this !