Trade while in flight
Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2013 1:33 am
As I was transiting back to Atlantis, I was idly poking the springy hula girl on my Llama's dash and thought "you know, I should be doing something productive. Nobody's shooting at me, the SPEC stopped smoking after I kicked it a couple times... What I really would like to do is arrange my next purchases at the trade center. Nah, but then while I was squinting at the relative costs of thorium I'd slam into the backside of a long hauler. But... wait! The on-board manual can already be convienently pulled up transparently over the HUD, so I can figure out which doo-dad I should push to eject while *still* avoiding a blistering beam of hate from those danged pirates! Wouldn't it be *awesome* if I could use a similar interface to get my business in order during those long, dull, asymptotically-accelerated trips? My com could contact the destination trade center the moment I punched Auto Pilot, recover the most recent price list, and give me the option to place sell and buy orders. Sure, some of the goods may be gone by the time I do arrive, or perhaps the price has changed slightly, but I'm sure I could arrange something with the trading floor to allow a quick yes/no confirmation after I land of any changes before the deal is sealed!"
I got so excited about this that my little spiral notebook slipped off the console. As I stared down at it, with the stubby little golf pencil tucked into the coiled spine, it got me thinking more... "Why do I have to jot down the price of *everything* one-by-one? In this day and age of superluminal flight, surely a modern space pilot could have his computer upgraded, at very minimal cost, to automatically recover the prices, quantities and weights of *all* available goods? Perhaps even organize comparative data in a conviently filterable and tabular form that highlights profitable trades between nearby destinations, or what's currently in the hold!"
Sorry if this is in the wrong place; it looks like the best subforum for gameplay suggestions. Anyway, the transit times are really a killer. I read other posts where it was listed as a design decision to keep things realistic (at least within the growing canon). I can respect that, but I think an (optional) in-flight pre-arrival trade window on the HUD would surely be the sort of thing that an advanced space-faring trading society (with FTL communications) would incorporate. And I'm certain they would have fully automated quote recovery. The game looks very nicely done, but there's far too much twiddling-thumbs-time. I cleaned the kitchen while moving between stars. I *hate* waiting for the last 500 kilometers of planetary approach. Clicking through the goods hierarchy was just painful. A sortable, automatically-generated table, with:
[ "Product", "Price", "Quantity", "Mass", "Profit relative to Hold", "% Profit relative to Hold", "Profit relative to OtherPlace1", "% Profit relative to OtherPlace1", "Distance to OtherPlace1", "Profit relative to OtherPlace2" ... ]
... is the sort of thing that you'd expect any trader to have access to. Always a pair of columns for the hold, and the triple-columns for maybe three user-selected destinations. Strategy then comes in "Do I really want to haul 500 tonnes of building stone through 4 wormholes for a 350% profit, or should I just take some brandy to the in-system mining colony for a 12% yield?" Being able to do all this while in quiet transit would remove a lot of the (realistic) boredom and replace it with good old fashioned (and realistic) cut-throat business opportunities.
Anyway, thanks for making what could be a really cool game!
I got so excited about this that my little spiral notebook slipped off the console. As I stared down at it, with the stubby little golf pencil tucked into the coiled spine, it got me thinking more... "Why do I have to jot down the price of *everything* one-by-one? In this day and age of superluminal flight, surely a modern space pilot could have his computer upgraded, at very minimal cost, to automatically recover the prices, quantities and weights of *all* available goods? Perhaps even organize comparative data in a conviently filterable and tabular form that highlights profitable trades between nearby destinations, or what's currently in the hold!"
Sorry if this is in the wrong place; it looks like the best subforum for gameplay suggestions. Anyway, the transit times are really a killer. I read other posts where it was listed as a design decision to keep things realistic (at least within the growing canon). I can respect that, but I think an (optional) in-flight pre-arrival trade window on the HUD would surely be the sort of thing that an advanced space-faring trading society (with FTL communications) would incorporate. And I'm certain they would have fully automated quote recovery. The game looks very nicely done, but there's far too much twiddling-thumbs-time. I cleaned the kitchen while moving between stars. I *hate* waiting for the last 500 kilometers of planetary approach. Clicking through the goods hierarchy was just painful. A sortable, automatically-generated table, with:
[ "Product", "Price", "Quantity", "Mass", "Profit relative to Hold", "% Profit relative to Hold", "Profit relative to OtherPlace1", "% Profit relative to OtherPlace1", "Distance to OtherPlace1", "Profit relative to OtherPlace2" ... ]
... is the sort of thing that you'd expect any trader to have access to. Always a pair of columns for the hold, and the triple-columns for maybe three user-selected destinations. Strategy then comes in "Do I really want to haul 500 tonnes of building stone through 4 wormholes for a 350% profit, or should I just take some brandy to the in-system mining colony for a 12% yield?" Being able to do all this while in quiet transit would remove a lot of the (realistic) boredom and replace it with good old fashioned (and realistic) cut-throat business opportunities.
Anyway, thanks for making what could be a really cool game!
but as I said in my answer it is fairly low in priority.And as a project we need to be that as well.