Overview: New potential Expansion for X4 series to add more content for all stages of the game introducing Corporations for both player and NPC alike! Providing a variety of new missions, ships, bonuses, allies, enemies, corporate espionage, monopolies, corporate fraud, investments, brokerage, competition, and security.
Introduction –
Welcome friends, modders and Dev’s alike, please give me feedback and your ideas from this potential expansion idea for X4: Foundations. Adding even more depth and ripple effect due to player actions or inaction to the galaxy we live in.
Enter in Corporations! This will add many elements breathing new life into an already complex and amazing game.
Corporations can be created by Players and NPC’s alike which can be purchased, merged, or hostility taken-over using the new systems introduced below. These corporations can be micro-managed or macro’ed depending on how involved the player would like to be, fine tuning for more profits to be had. NPC’s will belong to a corporation for their own race and pirates will be ever-present for opportunities.
Players can risk the stock market, insider-trading or attempt to manipulate the market in their favor as well as partake in shady missions and deals with corporations against their competitors. Knowledge is power and the more you know about your rival corporations, the better you can seek weaknesses in their supply chain or upper management. You have the power to risk it all or play by the rules and out compete your rivals even if they may not play fair.
Highlights: Creating a corporation, corporate HQ and yacht, Board of directors with a variety of benefits, new GUI’s, special legal and illegal missions, events and corporate reputation.
- Chapter 1: Creating a Corporation
- Chapter 2: Corporate benefits
- Chapter 3: Corporate hardships
- Chapter 4: Corporate H.Q.
- Chapter 5: NPC Corporations
- Chapter 6: Legal activities
- Chapter 7: Illicit activities
- Chapter 8: Stock market
- Chapter 9: Corporate Security
- Chapter 10: Pirates
- Chapter 11: Board of Directors
- Chapter 12: Mercenary Corporation
- Chapter 13: Pirate Corporation
- Chapter 14: Unclassified
- END
Key Terms:
- Corp – Corporation
- Rep – Reputation
- Sec – Security
- Merc – Mercenaries
- HQ – Headquarters
- Gov – government
- GUI – graphic user interface (like an in-game menu)
- Short selling – buy reverse stock in hopes that the company loses value which allow you to profit from their loss.
- Species – Referring to the government of the alien race you are working with. The gov is not a corporation but works with them and provides military protection paid for by selling business licenses & reoccurring dues
- Business License – can be purchased at a species HQ if you have the required rep. This allows you to create a corporation within their borders.
- Police – military ships and scouts owned by that species
- Perk/Penalty Threshold - The changing benefits or consequences of having a higher or lower reputation with a corp
Chapter 1: Creating a Corporation
If you would like to start a corporation, you will need to have at least a neutral reputation at the species HQ to buy a business license to start. This license will then allow you to customize your corporate name and logo that will be attached to all your corporate ships and stations and a new corporate menu that will allow you to overview all parts of your corporations. This will include ships, stations, goods, prices, rates of sales, losses, corporate security and information gathered on rivals.
Your corporation will be separate from your normal fleets and stations to keep them “off the books” and you can setup more than one corporation dependent on reputation with the species. You can then choose which goods to specialize in, however not limited to one type. You can allocate funds from your personal accounts to setup a fund for your newly established corp or take out dept which eventually must be pay back the race you borrowed from, with interest. If you don’t, you will lose reputation with that species making them less likely to trade with you thus cutting into profits and eventually lead to military action against your corporate ships and stations. Dependent on your reputation you can then start to purchase assets to buy the infrastructure needed to become a profitable business.
Your Corporation reputation is everything, things you do personally have a small positive or negative effect on your corporation and vice versa from your corp to you. Anything that boosts or tarnishes your corp reputation globally, species wise, other corporations, and star sectors effects likelihood of traders wanting to trade with your corp, trade elsewhere, offer discounts, higher paying missions, or pirate activity against you.
Once you’ve created your corporation you will need to pay dues to renew your business license by the species that issued you the permit, this money is to pay for military ships that patrol and defend their territories as well as offer some assistance if your corporate ships and stations come under attacks from pirates, Xenon, Kha’ak, or Mercenaries.
They will not always get involved if it’s another corporation that holds the same license or mercenaries. Dues are increased when you have little to no corporate-security (military ships that have been added to your corp vs. how many ships/station you own) as they have more protection to provide your growing assets. This will drop the more ships and well-armed your fleet becomes. Once you’ve reached a certain threshold, you can apply to have the protection removed, but you will no longer receive support until you re-apply for the it with a cool-down attached.
Chapter 2: Corporate benefits
The benefits of owning your own corporation are the ability to automate or micromanage your growing corporation into a profit generating empire. Reputation can move up faster than normal personal reputation as you build trust, thus allowing you access to buy ships and equipment for the corp that you could not otherwise obtain with personal rep until much later in the game.
You will be able to build you own corporate HQ and an accompanying corporate yacht to swing favor and back-street deal. Both the HQ and yacht are upgradable and offer specialties that can be interchanged to suit your growing business needs.
You can hire a board of directors to manage certain aspects of the company as well as offer special corp benefits and missions to you.
You can take out corporate loans to build your trading and security fleets bigger and at a higher priority on purchases depend on your rep. (if 10 ships are being made the higher rep you have the higher it jumps up on the queue to make your ships purchased first, you can also pay extra to jump the line which decrease in cost depending on rep)
As your rep increases a small percentage of that reflects to its CEO, thus providing you with species, sector, partner corps and station discounts on wares and services you buy both personally and for the corp. Rep gained or lost for that species also very slightly effect the rep for all corps that hold a business license with that species. Credibility of a large scale business goes a long way, your reputation gains will reflect it.
This also mostly protects you from personal liability of your corp going to war with with a rival or attacking a species gov ran stations to monopolize the market without losing a massive amount of personal reputation.
You can create multiple corporations that work separately from each other and specialize into one or a few products or merge into a mega-corp with no specialization but trades a wide variety of goods and services with no special bonuses.
If your corp fails, you have bail-out programs to try to get you back on your feet whereas with personal assets once it’s gone, it’s gone. (Read more below on bankruptcy)
You'll have access to the stock market where you can utilize your knowledge of the market and any learned inside information to your advantage.
You'll be able to hire and purchase specialty pilots, ships, and equipment to be used as corporate security or sell to the highest buyer.
You're ships and station will carry your corporate crest that adversities your growing corp, this will passively trickle in reputation from various others that will grow as your company commands more ships and stations.
Many corp-related perks can be had, special events, missions, any many other things are only offered to you through your corporation. NPC’s can attempt to woe you in a variety of ways to gain discounts or rep with your established corp and you can decide what perks you’d like to take or decline, just don’t let the police catch you!
Corps that have a business license in good standing will receive support priority in the same system or multiple jumps away when it comes to enemy or aggressive ships.
Create your own Mercenary corporation that for-go's trading and focuses on military applications and missions. Respond to incursions, participate in wars, guns for hire for corporations!
Create your own Pirate corporation! Black-market smuggling, underhanded and shady missions and dealings, evade or out charisma authority, steal, loot, pillage your way to infamous greatness!
Chapter 3: Corporate hardships
As CEO of your corp, your loss of reputation and increased notoriety will trickle into your corporation making the friends or allies of those who you’ve burdened to be less inclined to do business with your corp and charge higher prices to your business as well. The reverse is true as well, you will receive a small rep hit if your corp loses rep too.
As your assets expand, so does the cost of your business license as NPC’s have more entities of yours to protect with their military from Pirates, Xenon, Kha’ak, and pursuing away attacking mercs. Failure to pay your license in time will remove this protection and if too much time goes by; can lead to species reputation loss with your corp. (Which also trickles down into your personal rep as well)
As a new corp with no reputation, buying good will cost more and selling goods will sell for less until you’ve established business relationships with other corps.
Hiring corp managers will cut into profits the more you would like them to do for you, the bigger the more corp profits they require to retain their employment. You can limit the tasks or services you wish them to perform, thus saving you corp profits to keep them employed.
Getting caught doing illegal actions or missions will result in reputation loss and possible loss of assets.
Chapter 4: Corporate H.Q.
Corporate HQ is much like a player HQ (but smaller and more affordable). This HQ will give you new menus only available within it that allows different ways to view, manipulate and manage your corp.
These menus within the Corp HQ you will see overviews and GUI's of your corporation, cash flows, events, the stock market, competitors, rep with other corps, supply chain bottle necks and more. It will also offer special corp only missions offered by species gov. These special missions can offer a variety of rewards like cheaper taxes, discount off renewing business license when its time, increased rep, pro-active military protection instead of reactive all for limited amounts of time as well as ships and equipment for harder missions.
Once you have your own corp HQ you can hire different types of ‘board of directors’ that will give you even more information and manipulation options for your corp HQ menu GUI’s, missions, and manage certain aspects of your corp for you automatically based on parameters you can set, which you can further modify as they gain experience over time. (See board of directors below)
You will need to expand living spaces to house your new board members, feed them, build a variety of refreshment services (like a spa or wine-house) that does have on going to cost to run, but will boost your directors’ stats and abilities as well as their efficiencies as managers.
You will be able to purchase a corporate space yacht that has its own unique docking port in the corp HQ which allow you to travel in style, access to all special corp menus within it, and offer special missions. You can host corporate parties and invite NPC corps or species gov to take a ride and be wined/dined. This will improve rep and temporary offer you exclusive discounts, protection, or inside information with those corps or species government. Space Yacht can also be upgraded or replaced with newer larger models that can house larger party corp guests and dazzle the occupants offering even more lucrative deals or information. These parties will take a portion of your corp HQ services to fuel it.
The Corp HQ and corp yacht is customizable, expandable and upgradable.
Chapter 5: NPC Corporations
NPC’s will also make their own corporations to exploit the same benefits a player can enjoy. They are dynamic, offer unique corporate cultures, different ways of doing business and do not have unlimited funds. They can go bankrupt, bought out, or hostilely taken over just like a player can. If they overspend it will take away from their trader/miner fleets thus slowing their progress, and vice-versa if another npc corporation loses too many traders they will have to retire their security military ships to get more trading ships or production leaving them vulnerable to attack.
No extra benefits or disadvantages will a NPC have over a player, but they can out compete, buy out, or even hostile takeover other NPC or player corps. This also include purchasing corp security military ships to protect their assets or hire mercenaries for defense or attack specific ships or stations of a corp that competes or has a low reputation with them. (If the merc is captured or paid off, the corp will take a large rep loss with them and a small rep loss with whomever gov business license they have)
NPC Bankruptcy can happen if you are able to out compete them or destroy/sabotage their assets. When they have run out of money and don’t have any cargo to sale, they can either sale off stations and ships if any available or file for bankruptcy (this negatively impacts their rep with the issuer of the business license and other corps they had a positive rep with), issue a loan and go into debt. They can then start buying up assets to begin again and must pay off their debt with interest or if their credit worthiness is already shot, then the species ‘bank’ will not issue any more funds. In this case all their current assets will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. A sector-wide and connected message will go out of the foreclosure and you as well as other corps can bid on those assets to claim ownership. That company will be dissolved their logo is no more. If no bidders bid, all protections will be lost, and pirates will pursue all their assets aggressively (stations will attract larger pirate ships).
Each species will have a few government’ owned non-corporate run stations to keep the prices from being too artificially inflated quickly and gives other species a chance to buy/sell goods needed for their own profits and military. This is to prevent any one species can be fully locked out of goods or their own economy. Outside of this mostly all stations and ships should belong to a corporation.
NPC corps can also specialize in a variety of products including ship building where they could offer new corporate branded military ships and offer specialized branded equipment or enhancements to the ones already there, including L+ ships.
Chapter 6: Legal activities
You can hire mercenaries that comes out of your corporate funds which allow you protect selected or all assets of yours or another corporation from pirates, Xenon, Kha’ak, other unfriendly merc’s. If protecting another corporation this will be a rep gain depending on how much spent and duration. Expensive, but great way to increase rep with a low standing corp! (Hiring mercs lower the cost of dues for your business license as they don’t need to protect your assets as much)
You can hire a finance manager that among other types will give you the ability to sell your corporation and all owned assets of the corp goes with it to the highest bidder. Of course, your staff will take a % of the cut, but the remaining money will go to you and be able to start over or go another route. NPC’s can also do the same if their corp is stagnant or losing money over time, a player can bid on these corps and choose to run it separately or merge into your own. This option is no longer available if the corporation is hemorrhaging money or bankrupt.
Gaining monopoly status by removing all competitors in that species space not only makes it harder for new corps to compete with yours but forces the species gov to purchase your wares at inflamed prices if you so choose, however this will slowly lower rep over time. (you’ll get a monopoly badge next to the ware you have a monopoly on in all menus)
NPC corps that have gain monopoly status will also charge exuberant prices. While difficult to compete with, it’s not impossible to do so through a variety of different methods, legal or not.
Species gov will sometimes offer you special missions for your corp to fulfill for a nice profit and big rep gains with them dependent on difficulty. They can also award get out of jail free cards that will remove the last and biggest rep loss with them.
Chapter 7: Illicit activities
You can hire mercenaries that comes out of your corporate funds which allow you to target the specific or all the assets of a selected or multiple corporations. If any of the mercs hired are captured by that corps security or the police, you will take a sever rep loss with both.
Run fake ads to discredit a rivals corp or Ad fraud your own company to make it look more ideal to increase rep with target corp or species. Chance of police catching on and you will take a rep hit and be fined.
Gaining total-monopoly status by removing all competitors and the species ‘gov-controlled’ competitors for the same wares forces the gov and any npc needing that ware to purchase at max price available. This will drop rep more significantly overtime and mothball this ware at gov owned stations.
You can Sabotage a corp’s traders by using a scout ship to run mini-missions aboard or around their trading ship not limited to off lining their engines or weapons for a certain duration, communications (they will make bad trades spending too much money buying or selling for a negative profit) or they warp to the wrong sector.
This can also be used on NPC corp stations with a variety of negative effects for them based on what mission the player wants to attempt for example siphoning money or planting false evidence to hurt their reputation with a specific corp or the species they hold a business license with.
Failing the mission drops rep significantly with that corp and a little for the species as well, increasing your notoriety. Completing many missions too quickly will raise suspicion and will still earn you a rep loss with that company even if they can’t prove it to the authorities.
You can take a chance at a rep hit (lowed chance the higher your rep) by paying off a species gov official which will temporally stop them from protecting a certain corp’s assets within their borders and your ships or mercs will not trigger a response from the police or fail missions against that corp for a set amount of time.
You and NPC’s can attempt corporate espionage by fabricating evidence to present to a species gov, this will enact a police response that will shutdown your station or ships until you are able to get there and let them scan your assets for said illegal goods which takes time. During which your ships engines and your station manufacturing is offline. You can use your chief of security in your board of directors to initiate the espionage or he can automatically deal with the police, so you don’t need to be there in person. Increased skill levels with speed up the “paper-work” and scanning times.
Special espionage missions that knock out the production from competing corps or gov owned stations which could allow you to temporarily hold monopoly status.
Chapter 8: Stock market
Stock market is a new UI that can be accessed when you hire a data analyst in your board of directors. This will allow you see how well your own corp is doing compared to your competitors and if you want to join your corp into the public stock market. Your stock can be bought/sold and provide a new stream of revenue as well as buying stock or short-selling stock of any corporation you hold a similar business license with.
Your information officer on your board can also provide insider trading missions that can give you insider information for you to short-sale or buy up stocks to rake in the cash, but this of course carries risk and if caught a rep loss and a large fine which can be reduced to a small fine if you fire your information officer (he will lose his gained skill points as well).
If you stock becomes too diluted, the passive income will decrease. If you lose the majority holdings of your company’s stock (51% or more) and your corp is not profitable this has a chance for an emergency meeting to be called by the NPC’s that own the majority of your stock and potentially change how your managers setting which cannot be changed for a certain amount of time or if your corp hemorrhaging money; you can be voted out losing your corp in the process. They will offer you a golden parachute (severance pay) depending on how long you’ve had the company for. The stockholders can then decide to rebrand the corp and run it or put it up for auction.
Buying more than 51% stock of any company allows you to make major decisions that could ruin the corp, make it more profitable, or complete a hostile take-over to merge it with your own corp. The merger will dilute the stock of your company you merge it with as well as a small rep hit from the species gov as they are not getting funds for two separate business licenses anymore.
You can only can trade stocks while in the corp HQ, trades are limited in a given time dependent on reputation, you cannot trade stocks with the species you don't hold a business license with, etc. This will prevent too much player manipulation that has plagued X3.
Chapter 9: Corporate Security
Corporate security is military ships and defenses purchased by your corp that are used to defend your ships and stations.They specialize at killing pirates, Xenon, Kha’ak, and merc's; but they will not target blue colored police (they will only attack red police which means your corp lost too much rep with the species gov) These units can be improved through time, combat experience, and your Chief of Security.
A new member of the board is your chief of security. Depending on his skill level he can coordinate your defenses, response times, and other small benefits to your security fleet. He also offers missions that can get your hands on free military equipment the power depending on how difficult the mission.
New options for corporate owned military ships become available that allow create fleets, defend certain targets like a trader or station in addition selecting all assets. As the pilots skills increase overtime, so does their response times to attacks and pro-active awareness of incoming threats to neutralized. This can be further improved with your chief of security in charge.
In or near station crime and theft by civilian population is also the responsibility of your security crew. Increasing security personal numbers will also reduce or nullify these thefts which can be expanded by building more security quarters & security equipment depot housed within your corp HQ. These profits or goods stolen can be sold to pirates or pirate bases in the sector.
The larger presence of Corp-Sec you have, the lower the fees for retaining a business license as the species needs to allocate less police to protects your assets. Your chief of security till rates will increase the larger security he has to maintain dependent on the parameters you’ve set for what benefits he is providing for your security fleet.
Chapter 10: Pirates
Pirates are more attracted to attack a corporation’s assets with more numbers, better skilled pilots and bigger ships if:
• The more profitable the corp is
• Haven’t bought and hired much or any corporate security or defensive mercenaries
• Low rep with that pirate faction
• Poorly equipped stations and trading ships
• Did not renew business license thus no race protection
• Low notoriety
Pirates can ransom your ships, pilots and goods for you to pay. If you don’t, the pilot is dead and the ship floats or the pilot joins the pirate gang, the cargo is stolen or destroyed, or the ship/station will continue to be attacked until destroyed.
Pirates can form gangs with their own logo tag. They sell the wares they’ve stolen or salvaged to the black market and the money allows them to buy more fighter ships, hire more pirates to their gang, until they can afford a fraudulent business license.
Owning a fraudulent business license This will spawn a small pirate base owned by that pirate-gang which appears neutral and won’t be targeted by police. This will increase the income through their black-market sales so the gang can now purchase larger than fighter ships. (The pirate base will build a connected shipyard and other buildings to accommodate the new ships and services)
Pirate ships that appear blue until they attack or hold assets/pilots for ransom. Failure to pay ransom within a certain time means they will either blow up the asset or steal it for black market sales. They will also have pirate-run trade ships that carry illegal goods equipped with cargo-scanning blockers.
They can upgrade the station with those funds for more defenses, stronger ‘security’, and more ports to produce said larger ships. You can then interact and be-friend them, pay them to attack or harass rival corps with no rep loss or you could do a series of police missions to gain enough evidence proving they are pirates, which will get you a reward and rep increase. This will flip the station to red thus triggering police to attack it, in which you can help and receive a larger reward and rep increase based on how much damage dealt past the shields of the pirate assets.
Chapter 11: Board of Directors:
Board of Directors – NPC’s that are more costly to hire dependent on their skill levels. They Can manage/automate certain parts of your corp based on parameters you set, or you can micro-manage your own corp. Each one also proves access to special information, corp improvements, new GUI’s, and missions they can offer you. The more benefits and management you would like them to provide, the more it will cost the corp to keep them employed.
The below is a List of the managers you can hire into your board and what abilities they potentially bring to the table. Once a director is hired, you will be able to view those specific and improved corporate menus in any ship away from the corp HQ. (The corporate yacht will also be able to see the non-improved special menus regardless)
• Chief executive officer – You or the NPC main overseer of the corp.
• Chief information officer – Provides more information about other companies, rivals, pirate/merc activity, adds a little indicator of your rep with other corp entities and special tech upgrades to your fleet. Allows you to see the changes in economic strength of corps and species as well as perks/penalty threshold (read more in Unclassified).
Offers risky insider information or temporally slows/shuts down parts of an operation of rival corps missions.
• Chief marketing officer – Provides options to pay for advertising increasing likelihood of sales even with lower rep, more details about market trends, and can-do negative ad campaigns of rival corps.
Offers missions that temporarily boost sales or run negative ad campaigns against competitors.
• Chief operating officer – Increases efficiencies of your corp from speed of docking/undocking ships, moving trade goods to traders, faster at implementing changes made by CEO, discounts from hiring/maintaining other board members and staff for the corp.
Offers missions for fundraising to afford purchases of any aspect of the corp and discounts from hiring specific skilled staff (skills will increase based on difficulty of mission).
• Chief financial officer – offers more detailed information profit and loss, forecasting, automates payment of staff, and reduces losses from corp espionage. Can also put up your corp for sale.
Offers missions to seek hidden wares in high demand and low supply from further distances away as well as password to open rogue floating cargo crates.
• Chief of Security – Increases weapons and shields strength, coordinates your security fleet tighter, faster response times to threats.
Offers missions to higher merc at a discount or temporarily free to protects your assets, or risky missions to higher mercs to attack a rival corp.
• Chief Engineer – decreases maintenance costs, reduces costs for purchasing ships and equipment for the corp.
Offers missions to temporarily boost ship production and lower their costs or offer free ships and equipment.
Directors will gain skill over time if they are being put to work. Higher skills points offer better management skills and abilities as well as more lucrative and risky missions as well as unlock more management settings and better AI. The individual board members employed also allows you to access their special corp menus in any ship your traveling in.
Chapter 12: Mercenary Guild Corporation
The Merc guild will focus on military applications, contracts, jobs and missions while foregoing trade. Respond to incursions, participate in wars, guns for hire for corporations and species. A place to recruit higher ranked pilots and special skills, build a merc base, create special military ships and equipment for usage or trade. Distinguish your way to the top!
New reputation type: Distinguish.
Distinguish is a new reputation that is gained from committing favorable acts or missions; opposite of Notoriety. This scales equally as its counterpart from 0 to 1000.
The opposite of notoriety, completing those works will lose your Distinguish reputation if you hold the same business license with the same species. (You don't want a merc & a "pirate license" for the same species or they will conflict with each other)
The higher your level of Distinguish, the more variety of difficulty of missions requests you’ll have access too. These specialty missions are meant more a well-organized team with a dynamic or variety of ships capable of handling whatever the details of the mission may be. Completing missions increases your Distinguish, whereas failing them or aborting the mission negatively impacts it.
After completing a certain chain of missions in Tides of Avarice or reaching a high enough Distinguish rank, you will be contacted by a Mercenary that wishes to join you and start a guild. When you decide to agree, she will start a small mission chain and then help you get the ball rolling. She will suggest creating a small Mercenary base of operations, call you Guild Leader and she will become your guilds first Private. You will then create your own Insignia that will automatically be sprayed on any ships/stations under your control.
This will unlock the ability to buy or build a small starter merc base in any unclaimed territory. Once it has been claimed/built you can then start to build small facilities within it which provide different infrastructure to carry out the various contracts and supply the needs of your guild.
Facilities:
- Forums Office - Missions, contracts, and jobs from other corps or species will be picked up and posted too
- Intelligence Office - A facility that provides information on actives wars, incursions, pirate activity, and special Merc missions
- Shipyard S/M - The place to buy and sell Merc or captured pirate ships or to build your own Merc-grade S/M ships out of scrap. Also doubles as an equipment dock.
- Shipyard L/XL - The place to buy and sell Merc or captured pirate ships or to build your own Merc-grade L/XL ships out of scrap. Also doubles as an equipment dock.
- Mess Hall - A place to feed your crew. Low or no food will negatively impact the performance of your crew reduced benefits
Once you gained enough money, Distinguish, and base facilities; you can talk speak to your original officer to establish a business license and be able to build a medium sized base which is fully customizable, upgradable, and expandable, in that species territories. Same requirements for upgrading to a Large and XL Merc base.
Merc Guild Ranks:
- Enlistee - The lowest rank and the most affordable to start your hiring pool from.
- Private
- Corporal
- Sergeant
- Lieutenant
- Captain
- Major -
- Colonel - Provides bonus to a fleet group unlocking all formations, increases engine tuning and weapon accuracy for all fighter ships assigned to his/her squad. Can only work on small to medium fighters.
- General - Provides bonus to a fleet group unlocking all formations, increases engine tuning and weapon accuracy for all ships assigned to his/her fleet. Can only work on medium or larger ships.
Your officers can be sent to work at any facility and they will provide bonuses and efficiency dependent on rank + time on that job. Moving said officer to a different job will lose those gained specialization bonuses and has to start from the beginning again.
Extras:
- Does not have the ability to trade wares outside of food, military ships, and equipment.
- Pirate bases will attempt to attack, steal, capture crew or sabotage your merc ships and station
- Failed contracts on the target corporation can result in lowered reputation and when it becomes too low can be subject to counterattack from their security
Chapter 13: Pirate Corporation
Black-market smuggling, underhanded and shady missions and dealings, evade or out charisma authority, steal, loot, pillage your way to infamous greatness!
Notoriety is now changed from 0 to 1000 and more directly tied to your nefarious deeds. This will allow minor dealings to be accounted for while makes very hard mission a more profound impact on this classification of reputation. The opposite of Distinguish reputation, completing those works will lose your notoriety reputation if you hold the same business license with the same species. (You don't want a merc & a "pirate license" for the same species or they will conflict with each other)
After completing a certain chain of missions in Tides of Avarice or reaching a high enough notoriety rank, you will be contacted by a pirate smuggler that wishes to join you and start a gang. When you decide to agree, he will start a small mission chain and help you get the ball rolling by suggesting creating a den of operations and call you Captain and he will become your Quartermaster. You will then create your own pirate flag that will automatically be sprayed on any ships under your control.
This will unlock the ability to build or claim a small starter pirate base in tatters in any unclaimed territory. (there should be a few abandon pirate bases in unclaimed territory's) Once it has been claimed/built you can then start to upgrade the facilities to allow for a variety and difficulty of missions based on what facility(s) you decided on. This can include building: a small prison to hold pilots/civilians captured for ransom, torture chamber to extract valuable information to be exploited, a trade port for smuggling operations, a market to have your own black market enterprise, etc.
Once you gained enough money, notoriety, and base facilities; you can talk to a shady looking guy that hangs around your pirate base who “Knows a guy’ to get you an illegitimate business license.
With the illegitimate business license, you can now buy a plot of land within the species borders to start a medium sized pirate base building project under the guise of a legitimate business that is fully customizable, upgradable, and expandable.
As your pirate-base notoriety grows, this will give you the ability hire specialized pirates that offer you lucrative shady business opportunities that can also manage certain aspects of operations and provide bonuses to them.
Specialty-Pirates: Pirates classes you can hire with skill levels that enhances the efficiency and income for their skill set.
- Quartermaster - Oversees the day to day operations, his skill level improves overall efficiency and skills of the other classes.
- Boatswains - Works at the Prison to make sure prisoners don't escape and help fetch larger ransoms.
- Gunners - works on the pirate base or larger pirate ships to increase the defensive and offensive capabilities.
- Cooper - Works at the Black Market increasing its efficiency and reduces theft.
- Sailing Master - Works at the Trade Port increasing its efficiency and security.
- Powder Monkey - Works at the Chem lab increasing its efficiency and unlocking new illegal wares.
- Sailmaker - works at the Tech lab increasing its efficiency and unlocking new tech.
- Cook - Your crew needs to eat, the cook will make sure they are fed and continue to work. Unfed pirates can lead to them leaving or mutiny, where as well fed pirates are more efficient and loyal.
- Swabbies - works for any building as laborers which is required for the building to operate and provides a small boost to their efficiency dependent on how many you have working there.
- Carpenter - allows you to build/upgrade to a medium sized pirate-base and build medium sized specialty buildings. At higher skill levels can unlock the ability to build larger pirate base and specialty buildings
- Cabin Boy - captured people can be converted to cabin boys and used to work at the scrap yard increasing its scrap conversion rates and volume.
Specialty pirate-buildings:
- Prison - A hold for pilots, rich civilians, government officials, etc; that had been captured.
- Black-market - The main hub to buy and sell all stolen or illegal goods and wares throughout the galaxy and what has been produced from your chem lab.
- Trade port S/M - The place to buy and sell stolen ships or to build your own pirate-grade S/M ships out of scrap. Also doubles as an equipment dock.
- Trade port L/XL - The place to buy and sell stolen ships or to build your own pirate-grade L/XL ships out of scrap. Also doubles as an equipment dock.
- Cargo Hold - More storage for illegal wares, black-market goods, and equipment storage.
- Tech Lab - Unlocks the ability to craft new black market tech ie grappling emp hook to capture and hold pilots for ransom, cargo-scanning blockers, new pirate-grade ships, etc.
- Chem Lab - research new illegal wares that can be produces and sold from your pirate base to trading stations, other pirate bases, and certain docking platforms. This can also be consumed as a secondary resource for stations to enhance the performance efficiency for whatever that station is producing.
- Scrap-Yard - Tow in the scrap from destroyed ships to use for tech lab components, re-purpose to build a new ship from in the trade port, or can be sold on the black market.
When your notoriety is high enough, you can start the major construction project to either upgrade your pirate base to Large size that’s offers all rooms in their larger sizes.
(As ships can go up to XL sizes, perhaps their could be another tier up from large to XL Pirate base as well)
Once you've reached a large+ pirate-base, you will be able to make a L/XL shipyard to produce your own large pirate ships including your own personal dreadnought warship able to rival any species most powerful Battleships.
Extras:
- You will only be allowed to buy and sell illegal wares or food, within your pirate base
- Other pirate bases will attempt to steal from you or attack your ships
- Corp security military ships and mercenaries will be an ever present challenge and getting on the bad side of wealthier corps could award you well financed merc ships to attack and re-claim your assets.
- You will not be able to accept normal corp missions unless they are illicit in nature against other corps.
- You can choose to limit or remove protection from the issuing species as their police units could spot your shady dealing thus incurring reputation loss and/or a police response.
Chapter 14: Unclassified
With so much emphasis being put on reputation, increasing your rep with a species or corporation will slightly lower your rep with the species or corp they are at war with or enemies of. This creates a delicate balance, but still possible to have a good reputation with everyone, it requires skills, knowledge, timing, and patience to achieve it rather than a more linear approach. That being said, personal reputation, (a new reputation GUI could be implemented here that gives more information), will be more difficult to obtain higher ranks to balance the trickle of rep flow of your corp(s) and give more of a challenge to obtain the rep needed to unlock personal ships, discounts, and perks OR change the personal rep to match corp rep of -1000 to 1000. (I feel its to easy to get your rep up and while not trying to make it a 'grind', I want it to feel more like a major accomplishment) [It's kinda weird imo to get to 20 rep in a few hours of game play so you can now access ships you definitely cant afford in a normal play through]
A new GUI for reputation should be created that allows you to see not only a log if these changes but a variety of graphs to understand the flow of money and reputation better.
The corporation reputation system should be changed from a range of -1000 to 1000. This will allows more transparency from reputation gains and losses from micro-transactions. Each species and corp will have different numbers you would need to get too to invoke a discount or price increase or trigger positive or negative actions against your corp(s). This number is dependent on economic strength, the higher that strength they easier they are to anger and harder it is to please or impress. As their economic strength is influenced by player and NPC behavior, so does the threshold change to reflect their increasing or decreasing economic strength. (Once you've hired a Information officer it will unlock this information) This will be called the perks/penalty threshold.
You would start at 0 corp reputation with the species and other corps. When you've selected a specialization, you would slowly lose reputation with any corp that is utilizing the same specialization as a form of passive competition in the same business. This also goes for any type of trade if your traders are only going to one or a few corps businesses to trade boosting their business and not their own that is buying or selling the same ware they need or producing at a similar station (but different corp. These transactions will be minuscule but can grow if the same trade exclusions continue. (Those corps would continue to produce and would lower prices with increased supply to out compete, however you can setup corp trade behaviors to exclude certain corps. This is meant as re-reactionary rep loss for not taking part in the free market)
For example, if Argon was at war with Split and you were doing heavy trading with your corp in Argon space, you would start to lose reputation with Split based off the total income gained while their warring. You could either off-line your corp during war times to save face at a slight reputation loss for whom you’re trading with (they could be relying on your good to fuel the war effort), or you could setup equal trading with both species space to offset the reputation gain and loss. As for corps, doing business with a rival corporation competing with them and not with them will lead to reputation loss with that corp, especially if it’s a competing corp of the same species in the same sector.
A new range of corporate trading AI could be setup that tells your traders to pay higher prices to a certain degree to reduce reputation loss with a certain or range of companies/species.
Any ship or station you’ve scanned or in proximity will show you their corp logo and your corps rep with theirs.
A log of reputation gained/lost between your corp(s), and others can be added or becomes available when you hire chief information officer.
Owning a sector will allow you to deny/accept building from which every factions you'd like, and impose a tax based on how much real estate they are taking up.
END:
I would love a game where they’re multiple corporations undercutting and out-competing each other or duking it out both legitimately and illegally! Creating your own company and try to climb your way to the top. I have been a huge fan of the X series since X2 and its only gotten better and better, I think this would add much more thrill and challenge to the game!
Not every aspect of the above needs to be included in this expansion, I have basic coding experience and I understand the scripts and UI needed might be a daunting task for anyone other than a paid professional team, hence why I listed it as paid expansion. However, if the interest isn’t there then even if a few of these ideas was implemented as a mod I would be more than happy to play it. Additionally, It might be better to make corporations an unlock after completing the main story missions in or out of game or an option you can choose at start so you can choose to play vanilla without corporations for newer players.
Alternatively, there could be a point in the game or a mission you start and complete that unlocks corporations and then the AI will start to corp up dependent on their wealth or other factors. This would allow players and AI to start and compete organically as they both have the same starting point. That would allow new players to get a feel for the universe before ramping up to the next challenge keeping the learning curve more steady.
If you made it to the end of walls of text congratulations! I’m grateful to have captured your attention till the end and I appreciate your patience, it was a lot to unpack!
I know I’m missing a few things (sometimes even I ride the short-yellow Tuatara) Please help me find & fill in the blanks!
Thank you all very much!
. 
![[ external image ]](http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r174/Smart_bomb564/Khaak-12.jpg){kind=link}