Freighter Ship and Escort Ship AI Setting

    Edymnion

    Carebear Extraordinaire!
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    How about this for an AI ship setting?

    Automated freighters.

    You build a ship, give it storage containers, and a Bobby AI set to Freighter. If it detects that it's linked storage containers are empty, it attempts to dock at the nearest friendly faction docking port. If it detects items in storage, it checks to make sure no players are on board and then sets course to the nearest shop. Once it arrives at the shop, it sells anything in it's storage containers. Storage now empty, it sets course back to your base to dock and await being refilled.

    Or if we ever get the ability to link storage between bases and docked ships, we could set the storage on the freighter to auto-pull from base storage and fill the freighter. Could give it settings similar to the auto-pull but instead of "on tick" have it be a total, and it would launch whenever it had pulled that amount. So if you were making explosive modules to sell, you could set your freighter to pull 1,000 modules and then depart to sell them.

    Could even then add another AI setting of Escort, which would act like a normal drone AI except that it always stays within 1km of the nearest friendly freighter. That way you could build fighters to escort your freighter ships.

    We basically already have this in the game with the Trading Guild. Resupply ships guarded by fighters that travel around to the shops to restock them. Only difference here would be that we get to build the freighters and fighters, and they make shop runs for us instead of the trading guild.
     

    jayman38

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    This is another great use case for programmable AI. (When more than 20% full depart for a shop, arrive, dock, sell all blocks of type X, Y, Z, buy all blocks of type A, B, and C, depart, fly to base, unload blocks A, B, and C, load blocks X, Y, Z, goto step 1)