Player acting as hired crew

[Helios01]

Hi,

as a variant: No empire. No player owned merchant ships or stations. The only source of income is missions.

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Rainer

I think that possibility has always been there since maybe X2. Not everyone enjoys grinding all that much though

[RAVEN.myst]

as a variant: No empire. No player owned merchant ships or stations. The only source of income is missions.

So... Freelancer, then?

[Lc4Hunter]

I like the idea too and would like to see something like this in the final game.
For the beginning this could be great. But i don´t know if this would be something for lategame, except there will be some kind of "BlackOps" that could be offered by factions to you when you earned enough reputation or if your fight-level is good enough.

But the difficulty here is to have enogh different and interesting missions. I could imagine the 20th "fly to sector X and destry ship Y"-Mission would be boring to most of the players.

It´s ok while you wait that your UniTrader or your factory earns some money, but later it must be really interesting and/or chellanging to the player.

Maybe it could be some kind of sub-plot like Exploring-Missions for an institute that ends in a great discovery or something like this. Maybe you find an old Xenon-Station and, ooops, reactivate it. After doing this you become some missions to destroy the threat and so on.

But coming back to the main-idea: Flying freighters for NPCs and earning some money could be cool for the beginning, too

Please Egosoft, do it

[Crellion]

NPC Boss: Why should I hire YOU to fly my Destroyer?

Me: I can strafe biaaaaatch

===

Jokes aside neat concept.

[RAVEN.myst]

NPC Boss: Why should I hire YOU to fly my Destroyer?

Me: I can strafe biaaaaatch

BWAHAHAHAHAH! Nice

[Fedora01]

NPC Boss: Why should I hire YOU to fly my Destroyer?

Me: I can strafe biaaaaatch

XD

Although my two cents:
This could also be used as one of the starts, initially (by that I mean the first 5 minutes) working as a gunner on some capital ship, patrolling through pirate space, getting attacked+blown up and space walking to some nearby abandoned pirate fighter?
Ex-Military start of some kind, would probably be great as a pirate focused start. (flying in a pirate ship thus recognized as a pirate)

[Falcrack]

The ultimate lategame purpose of this, as I had indicated earlier with the idea, is that as you gain reputation within your organization, you gain more and more authority and ability to make higher level decisions (ie you are told to invade a sector, but all the ships that have been put under your command are under your direct control), with you eventually being able to become the head of the organization (race or corporation).

Initially you may just be a turret gunner, but then you are made a pilot of a ship (following directions of squadron leader), then you become squadron leader of several ships (following direction of fleet commander), then you become a fleet commander (following direction of president who orders large scale directives), then you could eventually become president, who has complete freedom to order everything. This would of course only happen after very long time though.

[dctrjons]

NPC Boss: Why should I hire YOU to fly my Destroyer?

Me: I can strafe biaaaaatch

Lol been too long since X3, took me a few seconds. May they never learn.

I also question the late....well heck the way these games can go, late game can be 95% of the game....so yeah initially sounds useless. But as a limited mechanic to build rep that you can cash in to "move" or influence a faction....interesting. I can kind of think of an example.

May have been Xtended mod...but I made myself an advocate for Boron and Terran dominance, supporting their economies and setting my stations, trade routes accordingly. Problem is part of Boron space was getting wrecked by Kayaks(yeah i know) and pirates but they wouldn't mobilize enough firepower...they had it. I tried to supplement but it was NOT convenient. IF i could have made suggestions for them to watch the area better....dunno it would have been cool. Cool if they did it themselves...yes...but the option to influence...not necessarily direct....directly, sounds appealing. Kind of a gameplay universe immersive reason to suppliment imperfect AI.

Plus...well if you want to roleplay a long game faction infiltration....hehehe.

[wolvern]

So basically you want a version of the game like euro truck simulator where you work using quick missions on random ships until you can earn your own and start getting more trucks and bases to work out of making your own company of truckers and as such get passive income from these truckers instead of from the stations themselves...

Basically the stations you'd be running from would be called trade stations / warehouses... they make no wares, just store them as deliveries that come in for you to take out.

[Fedora01]

So basically you want a version of the game like euro truck simulator where you work using quick missions on random ships until you can earn your own and start getting more trucks and bases to work out of making your own company of truckers and as such get passive income from these truckers instead of from the stations themselves...

Basically the stations you'd be running from would be called trade stations / warehouses... they make no wares, just store them as deliveries that come in for you to take out.

Doesn't that pretty much sum up every X3:AP play through that doesn't involve Stock Exchange shenanigans?

[Killjaeden]

Mount and Blade Warband had some mods that allowed you to be a soldier in another lords army (normally you would lead an army). It was fun to fight as peasant. But sometimes you would simply have to wait for 30-45min at maximum time acceleration, until at least something of interest happened.
What you propose requires very detailed and engaging game mechanics for all the different jobs to be interesting (what SC is trying to do).
When you just push a button to activate autopilot and then click on time acceleration until it's complete then it's extremely boring for the majority of time - in short an extremely gimmicky feature.

Doesn't that pretty much sum up every X3:AP play through that doesn't involve Stock Exchange shenanigans?

What the OP mentions, i would say that X3:Reunion gameplay sums it up prettymuch. -> no overpowered mission payout of TC. Earning your first Trader or even M3 was pretty time consuming (when starting with M4).

If you want to earn your ship you could as well just say that the ship you fly is rented and whatever you earn flying it flows as percentage into the coffers of whoever gave it to you, to pay for the ship + extras. The base concept in a nut shell is that you start in debt instead of in the positive/ as free creature.