We may have talked about making the merchants' trading assignments more interactive during the December runup to Beta.
This involved removing the time limit for each trading run (in those days, they didn't have RFID tags and GPS tracking) but rewarding the player for deliveries made under a certain time.
A baltimore clipper moving a small load of high value cargo in 4 days should make much greater profit than a slow fleut ferrying a huge consignment of mundane bulk cargo that takes a month to arrive.
An extension to this idea is signing a contract with the merchant to ferry say, 5000 tons of food to Cuba over a period of 6 months. The player is then given a subsidy for loading food at the client's port of call, and guaranteed profit on the other end. A bonus may or may not be paid depending on how far the player went to achieve the target, once again, a hefty bonus if the target were achieved on time, and zilch if less than a certain percentage (say, 66%) was actually delivered.
What do you think? We might not have a dedicated or willing coder now, but over the next few months? It might just become reality just as all other Build features had been - they were just daydreams once.
This involved removing the time limit for each trading run (in those days, they didn't have RFID tags and GPS tracking) but rewarding the player for deliveries made under a certain time.
A baltimore clipper moving a small load of high value cargo in 4 days should make much greater profit than a slow fleut ferrying a huge consignment of mundane bulk cargo that takes a month to arrive.
An extension to this idea is signing a contract with the merchant to ferry say, 5000 tons of food to Cuba over a period of 6 months. The player is then given a subsidy for loading food at the client's port of call, and guaranteed profit on the other end. A bonus may or may not be paid depending on how far the player went to achieve the target, once again, a hefty bonus if the target were achieved on time, and zilch if less than a certain percentage (say, 66%) was actually delivered.
What do you think? We might not have a dedicated or willing coder now, but over the next few months? It might just become reality just as all other Build features had been - they were just daydreams once.