Blacklist refinement possible?

[Scoob]

Hey all,

While investigating - or trying to - a bug, it got me thinking about Blacklists in specific scenarios. Picture this:

I have a "Frontier" station that borders enemy space. It's an Equipment Dock type station, and is making good money resupplying Allied ships in the area. As this sector is a hot zone, I also have scavengers (Tugs, Compactors) collecting any wrecks. From time to time, I need to STOP any scrapping activity (blacklist) to prevent my Tugs and Compactors getting destroyed when there's an ACTIVE incursion. However, when I blacklist the sector, any deliveries to my Equipment Dock are also blocked.

What I want is to be able to maintain Station deliveries - the station isn't near the gate, so is fairly safe - BUT prevent Scavenging activities in the area. Ideally, in this instance, I'd be able to set a "No Scavenging" blacklist that ONLY affected Tugs and Compactors. Current Blacklists of course impact Sector Travel and/or Sector Jobs - the later encompassing ALL jobs, Trade and Scavenging alike.

Is further refinement in this area something you'd find useful? Perhaps when we make an "Activities" blacklist, we can actually pick the specific activities we want blocked. So, Trading (perhaps Buy / Sell / both distinction), Mining, Scavenging, Exploring (when multiple Explore orders have been given) etc.

[vvvvvvvv]

What I want is to be able to maintain Station deliveries - the station isn't near the gate, so is fairly safe - BUT prevent Scavenging activities in the area. Ideally, in this instance, I'd be able to set a "No Scavenging" blacklist that ONLY affected Tugs and Compactors. Current Blacklists of course impact Sector Travel and/or Sector Jobs - the later encompassing ALL jobs, Trade and Scavenging alike.

You should be able to setup separate blacklists for scavengers and update it when there's another xenon invasion. "Individual instructions" tab allows you to override blacklist set by commander, so technically your traders and miners assigned to a station don't have to follow station trade rules, although this is counterintuitive.

[Scoob]

You should be able to setup separate blacklists for scavengers and update it when there's another xenon invasion. "Individual instructions" tab allows you to override blacklist set by commander, so technically your traders and miners assigned to a station don't have to follow station trade rules, although this is counterintuitive.

Yeah, I can do that and indeed I do. However, it'd be nice to just enable something at a sector level quickly, that just impacts a certain subsection of jobs.

Currently, I can just ban the station the Tugs work for from that sector, that works - so just enabling the rule at an individual station level - but that's not quite ideal.

Two of my current rules is a global "Don't travel here" and "Don't work here", I add Sectors as needed. It's easy to manage. When I have a station in a sector, unless it's a Defence Platform, it's usually far from the gate so relatively safe. Traders can visit without issue. Tugs and Compactors however are just going to head directly to where the wrecks are. Miners too are potentially exposed. So, to be able to just ban those jobs sector-wide would be very powerful and quick to implement. No visiting multiple stations and ships and manually enabling a specific rule.

Ideally, I'd like to see dynamic Blacklists, tied in to the Alert system. I.e. Enemy Capital ship spotted in Sector, automatically Blacklist that sector for tugs. Once all enemies are dead / flown off, Tugs will automatically start visiting that sector again. I'm currently finding myself doing a LOT of micro management, which is why I'd like Blacklists to be a bit more specific in what they ban. Linking them to alerts would be very useful indeed of course, but that's a bit more of the leap methinks.

[Jar B]

Is further refinement in this area something you'd find useful? Perhaps when we make an "Activities" blacklist, we can actually pick the specific activities we want blocked. So, Trading (perhaps Buy / Sell / both distinction), Mining, Scavenging, Exploring (when multiple Explore orders have been given) etc.

Yes. Just yesterday I found myself wishing for such a mechanic. I've started a new play-through and decided to go for Pegasi on "update trade offers" duty (repeat order) instead of spamming all sectors with advanced satellites. Being ZYA my tradies attract agro from hostile Argon fighters, even in HOP space. Instead of overriding the individual response on attack for every pilot individually I would rather prefer some sort of class mechanic.

Thus far none of these work for me on their own:

• Assign to fleet commander and set subordinates to mimic. Fails because each subordinate should operate in its own sector.
• Assign to HQ as trader with "repeat order" trick. Declutters map lists but fails on attack behaviour. I don't want proper HQ traders to behave like my "trade offer" Pegasi (Boa trader: drop laser tower, Barbarossa trader: ignore, Pegasi: run Forest run).

I suppose I could try to combine the two approaches but I currently lack a sufficiently beefy commander that could survive most agro while still able to perform the duty. Maybe a Falx? Hm

[Raptor34]

Yeah, I'll like to see more categories which we can apply our blacklists and trade rules to separately.
For me my issue is that wanting to setup a feeder trade station, i.e. one where it absorbs resources from everyone and only feed one specific faction, is unnecessarily difficult.
What I want is to be able to setup one trade rule for buying and one for selling. Even better if I can separate them out by resources, intermediates and products. Basically as much control as possible.

I can already do all these btw, it's just takes an unnecessary amount of clicks to do it. So this is QoL instead of new functions.

Oh, and while we're at it, one new function too. Currently if I want to only repair a faction's ships and not sell them ships, I need a separate EQ dock. Not necessarily bad as it gives them a purpose, but if I can separately designate the trade rules, that would be nice to have. Or even if it forces you to add maint bays so they have a separate trade rule list, that would be nice too.
Going further, being able to manually set trade rules for each individual fab/maint bay would also be nice. Currently for those of us who want to control a faction, a separate shipyard and wharf are absolutely necessary, because you cannot restrict sale of ships by categories. Speaking of which, why not let us restrict sales by military or civilian? I don't want to build a million destroyers for HOP, but that also means I'll be nerfing their economy because I cannot just not sell them destroyers, I also cannot sell them traders or miners.

[Jar B]

Currently for those of us who want to control a faction, a separate shipyard and wharf are absolutely necessary, because you cannot restrict sale of ships by categories. Speaking of which, why not let us restrict sales by military or civilian? I don't want to build a million destroyers for HOP, but that also means I'll be nerfing their economy because I cannot just not sell them destroyers, I also cannot sell them traders or miners.

Absolutely. Yes! Faction support is either all or nothing. And if "all" it is then one L build module won't cut it. By a long shot. More like... upwards of 10.

[Scoob]

I've asked for Repair / Sell ships distinctions in the past, as it was really annoying to have to build a separate Equipment Dock to support allies, and a Wharf / Shipyard for myself. I want to do it in ONE station. I'd also hoped that I'd be able to configure such things by Fabrication / Maintenance Bay. I.e. allies can buy ships from me, but at least one S/M Fabrication Bay is all mine.

There are often ways around doing what I want to do, but greater refinements of Blacklists would help immensely in many areas of the game. I was primarily talking about Sector rules based on the role of the ship, as that's the issue I was having at the time. Greater control over individual wares would be great to.

I tend to create warehouse "chains" so Stations are in-range. In my current game I have my own sector with all production there (raw resources imported from another Warehouse) which feeds my primary Ship production and an Equipment Dock that's pulling in a LOT of credits from Allies popping in for repairs. It was profitable when buying from the regular market, now it's totally supplied by me, it's hugely profitable.

With this in mind, I set up other Equipment Docks open to allies elsewhere, and they too bring in lots of credits. As my own production has ramped up, I want to supply these directly, but some are out of range of even Five Star Managers. So, these other Equipment Docks have both Buy and Sell orders to move the wares around. It generally works ok, but I do see situations where one ship will Buy from Equipment Dock A, delivering to Equipment Dock B, while another ship is Buying from B to sell to A. Some additional trade rule refinement would help here. Repeat orders are the current obvious work-around, but that's a pain. Currently I just hope things generally balance out over time, so each station has enough to function. I of course set "Sell all but" to ensure there are reserves. However, sometimes the stations furthest away in the chain, will sell back to earlier stations, whereas the trades should largely be one way. The "end" station - aka the one furthest away from the source station - of course ONLY buys, but if there's more than one intermediate station, you get there weird "ware swapping" issue.

I'm going a bit nuts on economy this time...