Switeck's Shipping OXP

Overview

Traders make up the biggest group of ship types in the game... it's time they start getting a little more organized!

• There are multiple trader types, some with specialty behavior!

NPC ships will appear in more roles, but are typically quite rare in those new roles.

Includes very minor rebalancing of ships.

• Pirate ships are now slightly more likely to have extra equipment such as ECM and Escape Pods.
• Any ship that carries more than 1 missile now has a 4-10 second delay between firing each missile to prevent making it easy to ECM once and kill most/all their missiles.
• Adders, Boas, and Boa 2's can now be pirates! (However Boa and Boa 2 pirates are very rare.)

NO NEW SHIPS ARE ADDED!

Savegames

3 starting savegames are added -- basically Medium, Hard, and Harder settings for Oolite.

One is a Cobra Mark-I, the MEDIUM difficulty.

The other is an Adder, the HARD difficulty!

Both only have 100 Credits to spare.

The third one is Adder Broke Start, the HARDER difficulty: no money, no witchfuel, no heat shielding (that's normally standard on Adders), no cargo, and no missile.

AI Changes

NPC ships will...hopefully...behave a tiny bit more intelligently than they do in regular Oolite.

Still don't be surprised if a single enemy pirate doesn't put up much of a fight. It didn't before...and even if it's slightly more likely to have an ECM now, that doesn't make it a good shot with it.

The standard traders that appear around the witchpoint beacon will now have a bit more diversity of behavior -- some heading to the nearest station, others scooping cargo, some actively attacking pirates, and some even hyperspacing back out again.

Some traders may scoop cargo canisters and escape pods along the space lanes.

• Thargoids are now more aggressive!
• Thargons may now follow Thargoids around if not in combat.

Economy Changes

• Minerals will no longer be as plentiful at main stations, at least at high tech industrial worlds...which consumes them.
• Alien Items (Thargons) will always be about 40-60 credits in value, since you can't buy them anywhere and destroying them would give you at least 50 credits and 1 kill towards Elite status anyway.

• Rock Hermits have MUCH lower prices on average for Radioactives, Minerals, Gold, Platinum, Gem-Stones. (basically unchanged!)
• Rock Hermits have slightly lower prices on average for Computers, Alloys, Furs, Alien Items. (I increased most of those to close to main station prices)

• Rock Hermits have slightly HIGHER prices on average for Food, Liquor/Wines, Machinery, and Firearms (to defend against docking pirates). Selling these items to the Rock Hermit may only make a tiny bit more money than the main station.

• Since Rock Hermits only have Radioactives, Alloys, Minerals, Gold, Platinum, Gem-Stones for sale...There is some profit from reselling them at the main station, but not really any more than the original Rock Hermits already gave because I intentionally kept quantities for sale low.

Download Link

• Switeck's Shipping discussion pages and latest version.
• Switeck's Shipping OXP v0.5 on Mediafire.

Probably broken

Cim's junking the commodities.plist, changes to AI and to economics may well have broken this OXP - and brought a number of Switeck's changes into the Vanilla game. This OXP was written in 2010-2.