AP Community Project [Released]

[apricotslice]

Out of left feild, but why cant the player choose which sector they get to own ? Even if that is a race owned sector ?

The New home sector the player got was "out in the boonies" and totally useless as far as I was concerned. And I agree with the comment that using the Hub to join the home sector was a total waste of a connection.

A true reward for the player would be if they could own the sector they chose to do their major complex development in, regardless of which race owned it first. (With the exception of key primary race sectors.)

The plot can simply ensure that all races are in debt to the player enough for the secession of a sector to be an adequate payment for services rendered.

That to me IS a reward worth having.

The other thing that comes to mind is that stopping the war impacts all races, therefore all races should contribute reward to the player. One donates a sector, one offers a ship (like the M2+), one offers a station, etc. etc. chosen by the player.

[eldyranx3]

Out of left field, but why cant the player choose which sector they get to own ? Even if that is a race owned sector ?

Dibs on Argon Prime then ...

Basically Egosoft has said we cant alter sector ownership. Hard to say why, but thems the rules. If people are really that uptight about it, how about we give the player three choices. One West or East of Heretics End. One near Legends Home. One some place else.

[apricotslice]

Dibs on Argon Prime then ...

Well, as I said, no primary sectors.

Basically Egosoft has said we cant alter sector ownership. Hard to say why, but thems the rules. If people are really that uptight about it, how about we give the player three choices. One West or East of Heretics End. One near Legends Home. One some place else.

You mean "not allowed" to alter sector ownership. Doing it is very simple and the jobs adjust as soon as its done, withdrawing the race ships.

Sector around Legends Home makes it central in the map, but it doesnt solve the issue of being out of the way from where the player has already built up a sizable empire.

[kidfusion3000]

I've got to say taking a race's already owned sector doesn't make any sense, there's no justification for them giving it up for the same reason you want it.

[apricotslice]

I've got to say taking a race's already owned sector doesn't make any sense, there's no justification for them giving it up for the same reason you want it.

Yes, but I'm saying the new plot makes the race owe the player that level of reward. The race may not be happy about it, but its the player we are concerned with making happy, not the races.

[kidfusion3000]

I think its just too much of a strain on credulity to think a race as personifiably greedy as the teladi or arrogant as the paranid or bloodthirsty as the split would give up a sector without a blood fewd. maybe the Boron would give up a territory. anyone else would rather keep going ahead with the war in my book.

the other downside if you take over an existing sector you're preventing addition of a new sector, which i much prefer.

though in reference to a home sector i would like to see one with more than 1 gate connection to the commonwealth, more trade route possibilities. like akeela's beacon to scale plate green or something.

[Ketraar]

There wont be sector takeovers or otherwise change in ownership to existing sectors, period. Its related to game mechanics rather than logic or plausibility, no point arguing it, its set, move on.

We are also not going to have a ton of options to please everyone, we will make a decision, based on what we think is the best for most, including players. Dillpickle suggested a new sector above Void of Opportunity, which is fairly central, close for both Argon and Terran players and has a Pirate Sector as buffer. It seams to me a good choice and unless someone comes with a better (sustained) idea, its that one we'll run with.

MFG

Ketraar

[X2-Illuminatus]

@apricotslice
The player corp should be integrated to Stock Exchange and maybe even give dividends. The Corp HQ is a symbol of your Corp, sometimes its about immersion and not about buttons. In any case there is no point in having 2 PHQs.

Player Corp integration into the Stock Exchange is no problem. I will provide the necessary scripts in the next few days.

My biggest concern are currently the dividends. While it's surely possible to implement the payment of dividends based on the value of the player corp, it would be rather unusual. Usually a corporation issues shares to get money and pays then dividends to the share holders and not to itself. Nevertheless, I like the idea of paying dividends and would therefore be interested to include it somehow in the Corp plot part.

So what about the following?

Basic plot idea

Instead of founding an own corporation, the player is asked to take over another one. This corporation was actually headed in the right direction, but then lost more and more money due to several unfortunate events (pirate attacks on convoys, strong competition by other competitors etc.). A last desperate try to restore the corporation to profitability failed miserably, as the CEO was issuing too many shares. So instead of getting enough money for a restart, the corporation lost the majority of its shares. Those are owned by other corporations, companies or even single persons now. It's only a matter of time until the corporation either will be completely bankrupt (due to outstanding debts of lost/failed contracts, and the dividends the corporation has to pay to the holders of its shares) or is overtaken by one of the share holders.
However, based on his long career in this corporation and his attachment to it <plot actor 1> (<pa1>) does everything, what he is able to do to let none of both options become reality. After balancing pros and cons <pa1> decides to ask someone outside of the corporation for help, someone with great business experience, as proved by the many profitable stations he owns, someone like <enter playername here>.

The player is asked to help out as some kind of insolvency administrator. Now, his tasks are to:
1. Improve the reputation of the corporation again.
2. Restore the profitability of that corporation.
3. Get all the shares of the corporation back.

Improving the reputation and the profitability of the corporation will increase the value of the corporation and its shares and therefore also the dividends the corporation has to pay. However, without increasing the value of the corporation the player (on behalf of the corporation) won't be able to get all the shares back.

Plot missions

Now, with the idea of using existing generic missions in mind, most of the first two points (improving reputation and restoring profitability of said corp) could be achieved by generic missions. When the corporate shares reach a certain value, there could be some special missions to a) give the player the feeling that this is a real corp. and b) re-acquire the corporate shares.

Explanations and ideas for missions of type a) and b):

a) Corporate decisions: These should be more or less just decisions by the player. His consultant <pa1> informs the player about a certain decision regarding the corporate assets and the player has to decide, what should be done. Each decision by the player will have an influence on either the value of the corporation or a later decision or mission. Possible ideas for these decisions:

1. Managing factories: There is a certain factory in sector x that belongs to the corp. This factory is not very profitable and we lose money due to it. It's also in the range of another competitor and share holder with similar factories. Now what should be done:
   • i) Buy two freighters, start supplying the factory and try to restore its profitability. (This will cost some money paid from the corporate account. It will increase the corporates value over time, but will annoy the competitor and share holder and make it harder or more expensive to get the shares back.)
     ii) Stop the production of that factory completely. (This will cost no money. We won't lose money anymore and therefore stabilise the corp's value. The station can later be used as a gift to one of the shareholders to convince them to sell / give us our shares back.)
     iii) Sell the factory to the competitor. (This will give us some money, which we can use on another decision. It will also make it easy for us to convince the share holder selling his shares to us.)
2. Protect our convoys: A few of our convoys are flying through the sectors x, y, z each week. Unfortunately this route is frequented by lots of pirates and so our freight is stolen and our freighters are even destroyed sometimes. What should we do:
   • i) Buy a few fighters, hire some pilots and let them patrol the said sectors. (This will cost us quite some money and will tear a big hole in our savings, which might destabilise our corporate shares value. In the long term however this will save us a lot of money and therefore increase our corporate value. Also our reputation will increase as other coporations and traders will profit from those patrols as well.)
     ii) Hire a few well trained marines, which support the freighter crews. (This will cost us quite some money and will tear a big hole in our savings, which might destabilise our corporate shares value. In the long term however this will save us a lot of money and therefore increase our corporate value.)
     iii) Let the convoys fly a different route. (This will cost us no money, but will put some of our contracts at risk, as we won't be able to meet the deadlines. This might destabilise our corporate value.)

The actual results should be supplied to the player via incoming messages after quite some time has passed.

These decisions could also offer a possibility to push the missions the player has to do into a certain direction (trade or fight based).

The interaction within this kind of missions / decisions should be based on incoming messages (informing the player) and conversations (making the decisions) only.


b) Missions to get the corporate shares back: These should be real missions (i.e. the player has to do something). The goal of these missions is to get all the corporate shares back. To achieve this, there can be different ways:

1. Blackmailing: The player has found out that one of the share holders is illegaly producing drugs somewhere. In exchange for not informing the local police about this, the player wants the corp's shares back.
2. Auction (estate, insolvency): A share holder died or is bankrupt, now his property (including the shares) is sold at an auction and the player has to win it.
3. Exchange of shares: The share holder changes the corporate shares against a block of shares (owned by the player) of other companies.
4. Rebuying the shares:
   4.1 Simply rebuing the shares. The player makes an offer, and if it is good enough, the share holder accepts it.
   4.2 Instead of money the share holder is rather interested in a certain amount of a certain ware. If the player brings these wares to the share holder, he will get the shares.
   4.3 The player will have to increase his reputation towards the share holder first, before he can make an offer.

Rewards

Once the player has re-aquired all of the corporate shares the player has the chance to overtake the corporation. That way all of the corporate assets will go into player property, the player will have to choose a name for his corporation and it will still be listed at the Stock Exchange Corporation section. The player won't be able to buy/sell any of his corporate shares. The index of the corporate shares however will indicate the value of the player's corporation.

Now that the player belongs to the small circle of corporation owners, he can enter also their playground. Fortunately for him, the player just overtook the corporation, when a bidding process for a newly discovered still unclaimed sector is running. Now he can take part in it to get this sector.

Problems and workarounds:

To circumvent the possibility of the player bringing his own property (ships and stations) into the corp at the beginning at once, which would increase the value of that corporation immediately, I would seperate corporation property from player property.

The corporation has its own account, ships and stations. The rewards of generic missions the player completes for the corporation will not be transferred to him, but to the coporate account. From that account money is taken for the decisions (see mission type a above). Also paid from the account are the debts of the corporation and the dividends that have to be paid to the share holders.
Over a menu the player should be able to overview the current corporate account, the outstanding debts the corporation has to pay, the value of the corporate shares, the dividends that have to be paid and the different share holders and how many shares they own.

[DrBullwinkle]

Absolutely awesome, X2-I!

(Both as an excellent development of the corporate plot content, and as a fantastic demonstration of how to expand a plot from a concept to an outline that can begin to be worked on by the MD scripters).

[DrBullwinkle]

I like the idea of your corp building being combination of warehouse, eq dock, and central trading hub.

I like it too, there is no feasible way to achieve this without messing up the hq.xml (just confirmed it with CBJ)

We can do it by *adding* to hq.xml (without changing vanilla content). Yes, that would be a change to hq.xml, but it would not "mess up" hq.xml regarding the way that it works for vanilla functions. We can use a script to ensure that an existing PHQ will continue to operate correctly without need to rebuild it.

This could be like a limited version of Saetan's popular Enhanced Equipment Docks. Instead of all of the options and flexibility of Saetan's version, we could give the player a single corporate HQ that has whatever docks and storage capacity we desire.

That would make the corporate HQ a much more valuable reward to the player.

Does that help?

[eldyranx3]

Scion's presence will be spotty due to a small case of hurricane. He sends his love and a small assortment of chocolates.

[X2-Illuminatus]

I hope everything is okay with him.

Absolutely awesome, X2-I!

Thanks.

I think I mentioned it in the chat already, but just for the sake of completeness let me say it here again: The sector auction was just a last minute idea to somehow include in the sector reward. Dillpickle already mentioned that doing things twice (there was already a sector acution in X3R) is usually a bit dull. So, feel free to suggest something different, if you have a better idea on how to incorporate the sector reward into the corp plot.

[Killjaeden]

how about... the last shareholder you have to find (much larger company) gets bankrupt too... and you can buy part of that companies assets (which is the sector + x - e.g. tradedock).

[apricotslice]

But there are no non-race owned sectors in the game now. So having one become available that didnt previously exist doesnt make sense. Not unless the first thing you do is create a series of corporate owned sectors, so the player gets used to seeing them.

[eldyranx3]

I would have to argue that that is a grey area. Corporations have been expanding since X3R. To me, it was only a matter of time before they started cleaving off sectors of space using non-race lines.

[apricotslice]

I agree, but it hasnt been done YET.

So giving the player a sector when no other corporation owns them yet, doesnt really work. It will only work if all the major corporations have their own sectors at the start of this.

[Killjaeden]

The true owner of the sector can be made up by story. They are labeled as a race but they can belong to various other beeings with close ties to the race. Splits are clans, yet there is no "Clan xyz" as owner... It can't work differently anyway as the owner of a sector can only be an existing race.

[eldyranx3]

Act I of Shady Business is now complete and posted up on the Storyboard thread for Roguey's Forum. Please keep discussion on any tweaks to that thread.

[eldyranx3]

Act II of Shady Business is now 50% complete with one caveat:

I can't believe I'm actually saying this.

Non-critical portions of the MD code are not executing because the autopilot can safely navigate the asteroid course in Freedom's Reach with near flawless precision using an Arrow with max engines and no rudder tunings.

[EmperorJon]

No!