Sun Mar 09, 2003 3:05 am by Nagorak
To make multiplayer work better, first of all the ships need to be rebalanced as per the ship balance mod announced in the editing forum.
The second problem is the whole economy is totally out of whack. First of all, some sort of dynamic trade system needs to be implemented where things gain and lose value depending on their supply. This is absolutely vital for the game to work.
Some of the more expensive commodities need to be reduced in price. Right now, if you know what you're doing you can buy diamonds for $200 and sell them for $1650 in Tokyo-- a return of $1450 for each cargo space. The problem is the profit is WAY BETTER than running Cardamine, and it's not contraband either. There also needs to be some more contraband stuff to smuggle to make being a smuggler more viable. If somethings were made contraband in some systems it would also make it more of a challenge for a trader.
Some of the really crappy commodities need to be made more profitable. Toxic waste especially... You're running some highly hazardous waste, but getting paid less than water for it. It's just ridiculous that at best you can make a profit of 150 on toxic waste, and then only if you run it halfway across the galaxy. Granted, you bought the waste for 2, so the percent return is good, but you're just limited by cargo capacity for it anyway!
Another thing is, in my opinion, cargo capacity of all ships should be increased 10x (from whatever balanced value is arrived at) BUT commodity prices will all be reduced by 10x also (so basically you carry 10 times as much, but the stuff is worth 10 times less). This is just to make it so the freighters have a more realistic carrying capacity in comparison to the heavy transports. Those ships are 3-4 times larger than a freighter at most, yet they carry something like 500 times as much cargo??? In this case, some stuff like water and toxic waste would not need to be reduced as much as everything else (to make them more balanced).
Player mission payout needs to be doubled so that they're a viable alternative to running cargo. In addition, in order to encourage grouping, the mission payout should be increased by 50% for each additional player you have helping you. In order so it doesn't get abused it should be some sort of diminishing returns. So, for example, the first player you group with increases the mission payout to 1.5x, then the second player increases the payout to 1.75x, the third 1.875x, and the fourth+ to 2x (just for simplicity). Keep in mind, that since player missions are already doubled a 2x payout would really be 4x of what is now, so it might actually be practical to group with 4 people!
Another possibility is that any missions that are trivial for the group do not generate grouping bonuses (if the mission difficulty is 13 and your combined level is more 150% of that then you are out of luck).
Finally, you need to be able to buy capital ships, heavy transports, etc, and you need to be able to capture systems. Maybe you could capture a planet by placing a Battleship in orbit and fighting off the hostile response for a set amount of time. In this case, capital ships would just be NPCs you buy and set to guard a certain location. Depending how deeply into a system you are, you'd have to buy more ships in order to hold the planet. So, for example, you could capture Border Station San Diego with a single battleship, but you might need five or six heavy cruisers to hold Manhattan. Once you capture a planet, all the patrols that are based out of it would be converted over to your faction (whatever it happened to be) and, of course, you could land on the planet since it was your faction. This would make multiplayer a lot more fun, since you could actually fight over systems.
