Fleets and player start location

A few things we should discuss.

For the "Traffic" release (name for next fall until we pick a better one), we should pick the major nations to balance. My suggestion is that we pick Emerald Alliance to be "default". They will be the middle of the road vanilla ships. Not the greatest, not the worst. Then we should do the Leung Empire. They provide ships to many factions and the player could be started there. Third, we should do the Dead Reaches. These cobbled together ships can be used by the poorest factions and most of the pirate types though out the cluster. We can always stretch these three to cover all the factions (if we run short of time).

The other main point is where should the player begin the game. When this was a mercenary simulation, The Dead Reaches was a good place. Lots of conflict. But now that the player is a poor trader I think the best start location is the Leung Empire. It has four well patrolled systems with fairly low corruption and a lack of pirates. it would make a good place to start out. When the player has purchased some better weapons he can branch out for higher trade profits.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Sounds good to me. Leung should be the place to start, Emerald should be tougher but with a bigger pirating payoff? I start in Leung, make a little money and get used to how things work, then I want to go Emerald for bigger profits but bigger risks.

Grandpa: Is there any method for dynamically assigning weapons loadouts to NPC ships? This way we could use a table (or array) of typical weapon loadouts per faction.
Two factions should be quite easy for me to churn out, I was thinking perhaps we could randomly generate ships for variety, to mildly surprise the player.

If this were possible, can we get the weapons from those ships during salvage? I still have questions on how cargo and salvage will work.

- Qlippoth

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We could also start the player in the Caliphate of Yezhid. It is close to the safety and trade of the Sultanate, but is still in the 'boons'. Starting in the Caliphate, perhaps in Nureddi, will make the players exploration and discovery of the Middle State more gradual. Al Wadi would also be a nice quiet, isolated starting place for a start in the Sultanate itself.

Thinking about this somemore ...
If the player is to be "poor" down on his luck type situation then being positioned to start in a trade poor area would seem likely. Now this doesn't mean the area has to be riddled with pirates etc, just not much of an economic powerhouse.

Originally posted by Joco

Thinking about this somemore ...
If the player is to be "poor" down on his luck type situation then being positioned to start in a trade poor area would seem likely. Now this doesn't mean the area has to be riddled with pirates etc, just not much of an economic powerhouse.

Poor but safe? That sounds like the Leung to me. But I'm not too familiar with the factions yet. I guess I'll go reread my docs...

- Qlippoth

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