I was wondering if its possible to make a little change (not sure how little)...but I'm in a game where the corp has 200 ships for some reason... is there a way to setup up an option to export to a corp or personal ship.... So u would hit X then it would ask for corp or personal... then it would separate the list.... Just thinking as i play...

Sounds like someone is angling for a buyout, either preparing against
the enemy trying vs buying out themselves. I can't think why you
would need to have all the ships corp?

When you start buying ships, make 'em personal. That way only
the buyer has a huge ship list. The buyer is usually someone who
won't xport that much, or is able to just send a space to abort the list...


ps don't do buyouts, they never seem to work out...

I do have a solution to buyouts, but haven't had a chance to implement it.

I don't want to make a change to ship list at this time.

Was just thinking about it... I just joined with this corp and i think they like to collect ships by number... i just find it annoying my 10 ships i use are way at the top... ill just use old fashioned paper and write it down... like i said a little suggestion not a needed change.

And whats a buyout ?

it's when you corner the commodities market: Frozen Orange Juice futures, and force Mortimer and Randolph Duke, of Duke and Duke, into the poor house. The Duke's also loose their seats on the Exchange as well.

There is a set limit to how many ships are available. You can
see this on the 'V' screen, among other places. If the limit is
200 and you already own 200 ships, when you try to buy
another at the shipyards it will say something like;
"There are no available ships, try back tomorrow....blah blah"
This is a 'lockout' tactic meant to keep players from getting
back in the game once killed. It is a 'dirty trick' tactic in the
view of many...

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17447


ps The Dukes get back in the money in 'Coming To America!'

That would be easy enough to fix by adjusting the limit by player or corp and not by the total amount in the game.

Well, by corp has issues. If the buyout is done, and then a new corp joins, how do you re-allocate bought ships? By player won't solve the problem either, since there's no reason why said players have to be a member of a corp.

The easiest approach is bump up the number of max ships. Not sure if it's signed or unsigned, or if changing that would impact anything, but 65k max ships would be enough to deter most buyouts... at least in any turns game.

Another trick would be to make ships more expensive as the number of ships in the game goes up. For the first 1000 ships, nobody would notice, so most players would not care. But if the price of the ship doubled or tripled, quadrupled, etc, as the count went up (say every 5000 ships, price doubles)... it would be prohibitively expensive to buyout 65k ships in all but the biggest unlims.

Next, reserve 10% or 20% of the ship count to new players. You can only buy up to 80% or 90% of the ships, then people will always have ships to get back in with. They won't be able to buy a new ship at dock, they can get in.

Another way would be to have a decay % on large numbers of empty ships at extern. Each player would lose 10% of their empty ships past, say, 200. Or corps past 200*player limit. That would allow new players to not only enter, but also buy ships.

YOU'RE A DEAD MAN VALENTINE!!

lol.... Trading Places, an all time favorite..

In any case, I think you might be onto something there. All the ideas have issues except 2. The decaying ship and unlimited ships.

Just like old cars that rot and turn to dust as they get old if they aren't being used, so should the ships. Instead of setting a ship purchase limit where the decay would start, I say all ships should decay if not being used, no matter who has them.

Of course, just as soon as you implement it, someone will write a script that jumps you in and out of every ship you own at logon or logoff to make sure they don't decay, lol. (so forget that idea)...

Sensibly speaking, the only thing I see working is to completely remove the ship limits altogether. Set limits per sector by how many ships can be there, much like you would for planets. By doing that, hoarding ships becomes a non issue and most will no longer do it. Unmanned ships in a sector only cause 1 issue and that issue is resolved by using an attack script. If you do get the occasional freak that can't find anything else to do with his time but buy ships and leave them everywhere, the Sysop can easily come in and bounce him.

Problem with ship limits per sector: we can just keep the sector at the limit to keep people out of the sector. Nobody could invade my bubble. A soft limit would be ineffective, much like the soft planet limit is today. I could use a per-sector limit to keep people locked out of terra and dock, too, unless there's no limit there. And if there is no limit there, then that's just another way to do the buyout.

Instead of having old ships decay, just have a % of ships over X decay. That way, no reason to hop around. There should be some immunity tho, for smaller numbers of ships, otherwise ppl lose ships randomly and at bad times. That's a setting that will just get turned off.

I need to go back to my notes and remember exactly what we came up with, but Sing and I had a long chat about this and I thought we agreed on a workable solution. If I recall, it had to do with a) increasing the shared pool of ships, and b) having a private pool of ships per-player and per-corp once this pool is used. So maybe there are 10K shared ships, then an additional 100 ships per player and 100 ships per corp for a maximum ship count in a 500 user game of 65K. In a more reasonable game with, say, 50 players and 10 Corps, you'd have 16K ships. This is an easier solution to implement with the current architecture than an open-ended ship count and won't allow the ship file to grow too large which, for the current engine, would be inefficient.

The key to this approach is that it would be hard to buy out all the ships in the shared pool, and even if you did accomplish it, all it would do is limit your opponents to 100 ships per player and per corp, which is hardly an advantage worth seeking. As a result, I don't think players would purchase any more ships than they could use.

Yeh, we used a forward limit, and basically pre-allocated a bunch. Could be possible to break that approach, tho.