Merchant Ships

[PeterCorless]

Create a new class of "merchant ships' which can create trade routes between planets.

For instance, maybe you want to shift food and energy between systems. Should not be a problem. Merchant ships would constantly patrol back-and-forth between the associated worlds, making such trade possible. They should seek shelter in friendly systems near starbases during war like other civilian ships.

Each merchant ship should have a "capacity" so that it might only be able to transport a certain amount of resources back-and-forth. The main issue here is that it would require re-designing the trade system to use such ships, and not allow transfers greater than capacity. This might be good, actually. Right now, you can instantly transport a huge amount of minerals or energy with -- absolutely no commercial fleet whatsover.

While trading with a space empire all the way across the galaxy can balance your budget in a split second while in the middle of an intergalactic war... is that really how space trade should work?

Interstellar trade should also have some modest profit, so that there would be an incentive to building an interstellar merchant marine. In theory, specializing planets would have an even greater ROI. You'd also face the classic "guns or butter" with your ship capacity -- do you simply build warships, or do you build a massive merchant empire?

Anyway, I'd like to put the idea of trade ships forward for discussion, and see what people thought of the idea.

 

[ShichiNoBushi]

Regarding trading resources between your own planets, at this point food is the only resource that is specific to any one planet rather than one stockpiled for the whole empire like energy and minerals. Merchant/trade ships could help with building new colonies or supplementing ones unable to produce enough for themselves, but within your empire, they won't have much use. But I do agree with using them to trade minerals, energy, and strategic resources to other empires rather than lumping a large amount after clicking a few buttons. The amount you can trade at once and in any long while is limited to how large your "fleet" of trade ships is, and then they actually need to fly a path either within the other empire's territory or rendezvousing with the other empire's ships which could have its own difficulties or complications needing to cross other empires' spaces or getting intercepted by hostile ships possibly requiring a naval escort along the way and as far as any other empires permit them.

A similar feature I would have wanted was for planets to have their own stockpiles of resources requiring amounts transferred between them as needed and for construction ships to require replenishing their own cargo of minerals so they may build orbital stations. But that sort of feature would be too much micro-management and likely spurned by the community.

 

[klockrenlol]

These trade ships would probably need their own type of FTL system. I wouldn't want to trade with anyone if it allowed them to build gates within my borders.

 

[sparta105]

These trade ships would probably need their own type of FTL system. I wouldn't want to trade with anyone if it allowed them to build gates within my borders.

Borders are getting revised in the Asimov patch so I would say we should wait for that before jumping to conclusions.

 

[Purussaurus]

Another option is that merchant ships are automatically built by the civilian population and automatically trade between the planets of the empire (the "living systems"). The player could decide how much of their point of command he would engage in this trade fleet (if necessary).

 

[AvengerDr]

I hope Paradox considers implementing their own version of Distant World's private sector. Although with the current implementation, it's very easy to build all kinds of stations very quickly. There would be hardly anything left for the private sector. So perhaps they would either change the cost of stations or allow private companies to build outposts in planets/asteroid that do not have resources.