Standardised cargo sizes

[Xit]

Today I was thinking about cargo, the way that it's too easy to buy all the goods at Atlantis - the way we do trading is kind of silly, we buy lots of individual things and worry about having 1/4 cubic meter of wasted space in our hulls, when in the real world, goods are loaded into a container the size of a lorry and then stuck into a freighter.

I think we should have much larger cargo volumes, instead of messing about with 2000 individual PDA systems or whatever, it's just not quite realistic (in the real world, you get better prices for buying in bulk so that the guy selling doesn't have to go and hand pick 7 units to give to you).

This would further emphasise that only larger ships can really transport certain things, the fact that freight cargo comes prepacked from the factory, and the fact that most really small vessels will never be doing little cargo runs (who's going to transport 7 baskets of eggs in a gawain?)

Mainly though this will have great advantages in simplifying economy. Instead of having 0.1 cubic meters of smelling salts, with an arbitrary price, we could have 20 cubic meters of all the different small things, with maybe 3 or 4 categories. Anything smaller or an odd number should only be rare cargos like research items and entire factory installations, and as odd cargoes, these will be the ones that make you think "damn! 53 meters? that's gonna be 17 meters of wasted space..."
Really small things like music shouldn't really stack, they should either be negligible (will fit in the cockpit/wherever) or should only increase by 1 meter per 10,000,000,000etc copies.

This standardisation would help with loading your ship too, as you could directly compare amounts of weight and cost.

This is all just some ideas for discussion anyway, it's not really intended as a feature request but I wasn't sure where to put it...

Edit: changed title to be more appropriate

[javier]

This could be a problem at the game start, when you're with a medium freighter and only a bunch of credits, because the cheaper goods tend to be the bulkier ones.

[Xit]

Exactly, the goods would remain the same price, and as a small trader the Llama would probably be able to hold exactly 10 cargo containers or something. It would just be a lot easier to see that difference, and trading would seem more rewarding when we can suddenly say "aha! I can afford a whole cargo container of solid gold novelty time keeping devices"

[javier]

Right. But we have to care about not making the buying price of a single container larger than your initial credits.

One question: Is this thread intended to talk about a future economic system for the game, leaving the older one to talk about fixing inconsistencies? This is my understanding, but I'll welcome a confirmation from you.

[Xit]

Yeah this is a completely seperate idea which I would really just like to discuss, rather than lump it with the list of fixes for the current implementation.

When the player has little money at the begining of the game I don't think they should really need to be buying gold containers anyway, it was the system in Frontier that more expensive goods like Robots or Luxury Goods could only be traded in real numbers once you had enough money, and so the initial investment was a further hurdle to this kind of trading. As I say, the idea is to make the trading seem more rewarding overall, without having 1000,0000squillion units of cargo at Atlantis.

Also maybe we could still split cargo units up, (say if you're strapped for cash because your ship was destroyed) but the large containers would be the default, and you wouldn't get as good a price per unit...

[javier]

After a second look, what you want isn't equivalent to increase both volume cargo and price by a fixed factor? If one unit of air gases was 100 cubic meters and cost 100x more, you suddenly are managing a container.
This can be directly implemented in master_parts.

[Xit]

Yeah I guess you're right, it's meant to be worthwhile because of the standardisation of sizes, but now that you mention it, it should be pretty easy to hack and experiment with I might do that when I get back later...

[Xit]

Update : Well I hacked the majority of the cargos on master_part_list and it seems to work pretty well, I'd say it makes loading the Llama simpler, there's no real problems with affording stuff at the begining of the game, and it takes into account the fact that if individual items all had different volumes then we couldn't really expect them to all fit together with no wasted space.

Currently there are two container sizes, 10m and 100m, and a few goods like music have retained their tiny volumes. AI cores and PAI wetware I decided were special so they remain unchanged. Consumer goods categories are unchanged because I am lazy.

Anybody want to give it a try? It needs renaming to .csv

[bgaskey]

Nice . This is what this project needs. People to just go and hack things up and see what happens. Except when I make my ship enormously heavy by accident...

Neway, I like the idea of standardizing stuff so you can actually see wtf's going on when you buy stuff, as opposed to my current strategy: bring up natural products and click randomly. This is something that can, and in my opinion should, be implemented in addition to the rebalance of pricing from the off topic thread yesterday

Lets get testing