REQUEST: ship insurance?

[af_2017]

As an empire/fleet/whatever stuff I can not control in all cases I want to return my property back after loss with correct assignment information at least.

Auto saving is not an option because it is slow and actually interrupts gameplay.
Manual saving is not an option because I might save just before my precious L trader has been destroyed and reloading is useless because no time to save it.
Information "your ship has been destroyed by " is useless because no information is provided to restore the ship. For example I do not care about the loss, but I do care about ship's purpose. And at least following information is required to recover from the loss: ship's assignment and ship's order's. I want to buy the same ship and assign it to same fleet/station. If the ship had manual orders I want the list back to assign to new ship, because setting manual orders usually means that I expect something to be performed by the ship. I might have many of such ships and already could put a lot of manual orders. So if one of such ships has been lost I have no idea which of them and what actions I need to repeat.

Thank you!

[Raptor34]

I agree.
I just have no idea what this has to do with insurance.
Also in the future perhaps also auto replenishment for station assigned ships which doesn't require trained pilots.

A current workaround assuming you don't have overly complex orders is using prefixes which indicates ship role. And also keep the number of ships assigned to a nice easily found number, like I generally use multiples of 10 and any losses are relatively easy to spot.

[Loltak]

The insurance idea might be related to how Elite Dangerous manage the lost of a ship.
I've only played few hours and lost 1 ship but if I remember when you lost your ship you can easily buy the same with its options.

[oddible]

Do you think any underwriter is insuring Navy vessels IRL? Lol. Just buy another one! There are zero costs in this economy, no maintenance, no salaries, just add more and buy more!

[Imperial Good]

Factorio style ghost ships in your property list would be the solution. When a ship is destroyed a ghost remains in that list that retains a copy of all the information to within reason replace the ship. The player can then right click on this ghost an "order from" it to easily get a replacement. There could even be settings in the global order window to allow ordering of automatic replacements when possible. If the player does not want to replace a ship they can right click and choose "forget" to remove it and keep the list tidy.

Now those off-the-shelf traders that are constantly killed by pirates no longer bother you since they are quickly and smoothly replaced! Like wise the odd S ship casualty of a carrier requires no further user attention.

Of course there are 2 limitations with this approach...

• Crew cannot be replaced like for like. This means that ships with default orders that require high levels of skill or that operation depended heavily on high skill cannot be automatically replaced using this approach. This would require another system I suggested in the past, a crew manager that automatically allocates and moves around crew to try and fit constraints and priorities.
• Ship modifications cannot be replaced like for like due to application constraints and randomness. This would require significant changes to how ship modifications work to support, especially if you want/need replacement roll quality similar to what was lost. Specifically ship modifications would need a way to be applied remotely, possibly from an inventory ware pool left somewhere, and there needs to be features that reliably combat the RNG nature of modifications.

[Raptor34]

Factorio style ghost ships in your property list would be the solution. When a ship is destroyed a ghost remains in that list that retains a copy of all the information to within reason replace the ship. The player can then right click on this ghost an "order from" it to easily get a replacement. There could even be settings in the global order window to allow ordering of automatic replacements when possible. Now those off-the-shelf traders that are constantly killed by pirates no longer bother you since they are quickly and smoothly replaced! Like wise the odd S ship casualty of a carrier requires no further user attention.

Of course there are 2 limitations with this approach...

• Crew cannot be replaced like for like. This means that ships with default orders that require high levels of skill or that operation depended heavily on high skill cannot be automatically replaced using this approach. This would require another system I suggested in the past, a crew manager that automatically allocates and moves around crew to try and fit constraints and priorities, to support.
• Ship modifications cannot be replaced like for like due to application constraints and randomness. This would require significant changes to how ship modifications work to support, especially if you want/need replacement roll quality similar to what was lost. Specifically ship modifications would need a way to be applied remotely, possibly from an inventory ware pool left somewhere, and there needs to be features that reliably combat the RNG nature of modifications.

I don't see the limitations as a problem. Customized ships requiring user intervention is fine, most losses are OTS ships anyway.
But I want to add that the death log should also mention that a replacement has been ordered. It should be in the exact same message so it'll be easier to filter out.

[af_2017]

Of course there are 2 limitations with this approach...

To remove the limitations the ghost must store all the values.
And restoring the ghost must bring back the ship, the crew, the modification from nowhere.
I am OK with loosing cargo.

[af_2017]

The insurance idea might be related to how Elite Dangerous manage the lost of a ship.
I've only played few hours and lost 1 ship but if I remember when you lost your ship you can easily buy the same with its options.

It's completely another point. I do not care about credits to buy same ship.
The problem starts when you have like 200 ships and have no idea about ship's assignment.
Ok, buy it back, but placing back to its previous role from the message "your ship has been destroyed" is impossible.

[Targ Collective]

Ghost ships is a really good idea but would remove management challenges and make AFK a perpetual motion machine. Games are supposed to reward and encourage player interaction, while staying interesting. I believe there's an achievable middle ground for that - ghost ships that the player needs to replace. There is a major block to this - how would ghosting adapt to changing fleet hierarchies? Ghosting would need to account for changes in wing leader. If that technical limitation could be overcome then you've got an earnable high-reward gameplay loop - authorize replacement ships and the game would do the rest.

[Raptor34]

Ghost ships is a really good idea but would remove management challenges and make AFK a perpetual motion machine. Games are supposed to reward and encourage player interaction, while staying interesting. I believe there's an achievable middle ground for that - ghost ships that the player needs to replace. There is a major block to this - how would ghosting adapt to changing fleet hierarchies? Ghosting would need to account for changes in wing leader. If that technical limitation could be overcome then you've got an earnable high-reward gameplay loop - authorize replacement ships and the game would do the rest.

There is nothing challenging about going down your list of stations and figuring out which one of them is missing a ship. Just tedium. Especially since we're on 5.X and the log still doesn't tell me who lost a ship.
As for changing fleet hierarchies. I would suggest having a separate fleet UI where you build out a fleet, and they'll just auto replenish any roles lost. Also would help with automatically building out a fleet too, you can just save fleet comps and order a whole new fleet. Unless the changing wing leader thing is hard baked in, then just disable auto-replacement if wing leader is lost.

[Targ Collective]

I'm not challenging that? I'm supporting that argument. Overcoming the tedium is what my suggestion here is for - one gameplay loop to create and reassign to create the ghosted structure instead of lots of duplicate ones. If, that is, you have a shipyard to automate it with. I don't think this should work for NPC stations because you could spend massive credits way too fast to be fun, and I think this should be gated by Manager skill, but the logic seems sound. Trouble is I don't know the first thing about code, but this would be better done by the official devteam anyway - if they wish to - because they could do engine-level UI work to support it.

[Imperial Good]

To remove the limitations the ghost must store all the values.
And restoring the ghost must bring back the ship, the crew, the modification from nowhere.
I am OK with loosing cargo.

This then violates game mechanics as you are obtaining hard to obtain stuff without doing the effort (cost). This is not just a ship you order in bulk but rather you have hand transferred the crew or manually installed equipment mods on it.

Ghost ships is a really good idea but would remove management challenges and make AFK a perpetual motion machine. Games are supposed to reward and encourage player interaction, while staying interesting. I believe there's an achievable middle ground for that - ghost ships that the player needs to replace. There is a major block to this - how would ghosting adapt to changing fleet hierarchies? Ghosting would need to account for changes in wing leader. If that technical limitation could be overcome then you've got an earnable high-reward gameplay loop - authorize replacement ships and the game would do the rest.

Ghost ships are a solution to an annoying late game problem. I own literally thousands of trade ships working for stations and lose a few every hour due to pirates. Currently every few hours I have to run through all my stations manually and re-assign stock to them to replace the losses, keeping mental note of how many ships should be allocated to the station. These ships are super cheap and I order them in the 20-40, all max spec, yet I still have to waste my time doing a repetitive task finding out which stations lost ships.

In Factorio I lose some walls, turrets or even entire sections of a base and the robots just replace it all from inventory like magic. Convenient, efficient and exactly what one wants at this stage. It would make S and M ship spam orders of magnitude more viable.

[af_2017]

To remove the limitations the ghost must store all the values.
And restoring the ghost must bring back the ship, the crew, the modification from nowhere.
I am OK with loosing cargo.

This then violates game mechanics as you are obtaining hard to obtain stuff without doing the effort (cost). This is not just a ship you order in bulk but rather you have hand transferred the crew or manually installed equipment mods on it.

That's the point of insurance, right? I pay additional credits to get it back.

Anyway, originally the point of the suggestion is returning ship's "state", which includes ships assignment and orders (especially manual).
I might have a lot of traders not modified/upgraded and without any special crew.
Imagine setting up your empire, giving a lot of manual orders and then one the ships lost without any hint which exactly and what you need to do to bring back new ship in position of the lost ship.

[MaximFS]

Hello,

I am use the auto-replenishment feature for ships in my fleet upon their destruction. However, I've noticed that the newly spawned ships come with a pilot but lack crew members.

Additionally, when placing 6 crew members in a fighter, only 3 are assigned upon ship restoration. If I attempt to assign more, the replenishment process fails.

Could this be a bug?

[euclid]

Please do not "necro" an old thread. Instead just post you problem in a new topic.

Cheers Euclid