US: cluster redesign

I wanted to start a thread discussing the changes for the new jump routes.

One thing I would like to see happen is that pirates and customs will be present on all standard trade routes. If you want to smuggle, you need to take unstable routes.

Same with pirate avoidence, You can pay off the pirate, or risk your cargo ship jumping. But you have to choose.

Thus far I am just maintaining the tolls you had set up. But I had planned to double check whether all the 'borders' and lpoints along the major trade routes had tolls on them. Of course, unstable routes would be unguarded, except perhaps in special circumstances.

Also, I need to know exactly the consequences for each type of jump stability before I can plan them into the routes via their 'cost' factor. i.e. it won't help if I make a whole bunch of unstable shortcuts, if the unstable jumps are really not much more difficult than a standard jump. I need to know how much pain will be inflicted for taking these alternate routes.

The cost and damage has been left open to change.

The only limit on the design right now is that there are 5 levels of diffculty. The lowest level is the standard trade routes and will not damage anyone.

Damage is delt by degrees of difficulty above the ships capsule drive. The values can be anything you need them to be. Right now they are setup that if a player takes a standard drive into a level 5 (Deadly) jump, the player will almost always be destroyed.

We can put in other effects. For instance, rather than damage, we could toss the player back out the same lpoint a certain percentage of the time.

That is fine then. I can develop the hidden routes without fear of messing things up as long as we can tweak the damage or cost seperately.

Also, I like the idea of tossing the player out of the starting lpoint a certain percentage of the time. Combine that with being dumped out in deepspace (but still much closer to the starting lpoint than the destination lpoint) and you have a fairly tangible 'cost' to a jump.

Grandpa, how balanced are the current customs and pirates that you have currently set up at L-points? You mentioned that you would like to see more of these customs tolls. I am just wondering what kind of impact adding a lot more of them will have on the economy. Is your intent, as I seem to recall, to make travelling the normal routes totally untenable for independent traders?

Not untenable. Just unavoidable without using smuggler routes. Customs should not leave any standard routes into a nation unguarded. Pirates should depend on shipping levels and nearby pirate stations.