Improving Alskants

[the570z]

They are a trade based race, but they lack enough advantages to be worth a damn. They never get peace, and even if you use them to trade up to high xp, you still cannot do anything but trade as you wont be able to buy any guns. So I have a suggestion and it fits right into the theme of alskants.

They can trade with players.

Good alskants can trade goods with other players, they get xp based on the amount of money they make from sale. This would be figured as a percentage. If they buy goods at 100k and sell for 250k then thats profit of 250%. The gain numbers would have to be worked out but they should be comparable to trading a decent route. Double xp if trading with folks you are not allied with.

Red Alskants can trade weapons on top of goods. Red Skants could become the arms dealers of the galaxy. Xp for trading weapons would be based off profit margin as well but 1/10th of good trading xp gain numbers. I want them to have incentives to charge off the wall prices for guns. They should be an expensive last resort, not something that removes the need for peace with races.

[Page]

There are already some changes planned for Alskant next game. Also player to player trading would take quite a chunk of effort for what I see to be little gain, to sell weapons to a hunter you have to put yourself at risk (and you're only likely to have access to Alskant weapons, or generally not very good weapons), for goods then most players would just buy from a port anyway? And to trade to another player they have to be online and in the same sector, so it's just so restrictive that it's infeasible especially with the amount of work required just to make it work.

[the570z]

Well the idea was they would become brokers, they could buy weapons from anybody and then sell to anybody. So they could buy weapons from players of one race and sell to players of another. It would be a sort of trust deal, what I wanted to see was an alskant player or players out in DCs or the like, running guns for the various alliances. The idea would be the skant player has all the weapons when the exchange is started, it would be the people coming to buy weapons off them that would be in danger at first. I kinda like the idea of making the players involved have to trust each other not to try and kill the other. If you already have ideas though then thats cool. Plus if its lots of work, then its not really worth it either!

[Infinity]

Kills the point of race diversity if any person can have any weapon.

[JettJackson]

Kills the point of race diversity if any person can have any weapon.

Good post

[N.ator]

nice idea! i do like the concept.. what about like a trading hub.. almost a black market or something, where you would be able to sell goods for x amount of price, list them and almost like the stock market?

[the570z]

Kills the point of race diversity if any person can have any weapon.

Good post

So your saying we should remove the ability for races to buy any other weapons peace be damned? Any person can have any weapon, just not without getting relations up. If guns cost 5-10 mil each to buy from a skant arms dealer, do you really think everybody will be buying them like hotcakes? Yes some folks will be able to spend 80 million to arm up an FU just the way they want it, but for most folks, the premium of smuggled guns will be far too high except in cases of last resort. If this were to be done, there would have to be STRONG incentives for Alskant players to gouge the hell out of folks for weapons, this wont stop alliances from trying to have a token skant to arm everybody up with, but if done right it will make the game utterly boring and pointless for said player.

[Meh]

It used to be that planets didn't have turrets, and alliances had to buy weapons & equip them on the planet.
This enabled players, with a little time & turns, to arm their ships with all HHGs & Nukes.

This was deemed a bad mechanic way back when, and was removed from the game. What you are proposing is just reimplementing this idea, but making it Alskants instead of planets.

Additionally, you talk about trust, but very few alliances ever go single with a single race. So why would I ever risk buying/selling weapons to non-alliance mates, when I can get an alliance mate to help me get a super weapon setup?

There are already some changes planned for Alskant next game.

^ It'd be nice if you'd elaborate & share the details, or a link? I'd like to know what changes are coming so I can prep for it.

[N.ator]

how about we add the ship that was in shareplay. forgot the name of it. but it was a /13 3 weapons, warbird class rank, and it had all illusion jump and cloak.

[the570z]

@ Meh.

That would only be possible if we removed weapon levels from the game as well. Most top tier alliances do not contain skant players currently, this idea was to get more folks to play skant. If the skant player is responsible for arming the alliance then he either has to be on at all times, or they would need 3-4 alskants. If every team had 3-4 alskants, then the problem of nobody playing alskant would be solved... lol