NPC mercenaries?

[Will2brown]

Of course we all know the trading guild and pirates, but what if you were able to hire mercenaries for a price to defend against the dangers of the single player ( and possibly multiplayer) universe? I know that we can hire npc soldiers from advanced shops and that them being able to fly a ship is probably planned but if we were able to have an entirely new faction, the mercenaries, or mercs. We could hire them from a special type of station or shop where we can choose what kind of merc we would want for EG a bodyguard guy or a pilot.

We would hire these mercs in two ways, we pay a set amount of money for a set amount of time or gradually pay over time, the two kinds of currency they would accept would be credits obviously and possibly faction points on a server to make them yet more valuable.

Express your opinions below, sorry for bad grammar 2:00 am here :O

 

[Mr.Steam]

Once we have fleet commands, hiring mercs would be great, as you could add them to your fleet for a single battle, without needing to invest in an entire fleet of ships. If they had their own custom ships, that would be even cooler. Of course they could also be hired to defend an area for a set amount of time or even sent out to harrass another faction.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Pretty sure this will be inevitable. Would be fun if they were given 'Nasty Drill Sargent' voice acting but sadly any kind of VO in this game is unlikely.

'Get back on yer feet maggot! Dying is for sissies and pinko space-commies, and you don't look like a pinko space commie ta me so that kinda narrows it down! Fightin' puts hairs on yer chest!'

...Yeah that was a very convoluted sentence I just typed. It's 11PM here after a hard days work.

 

[DivineEvil]

Agreed. I think it's simple to just have them hired on contract basis for a price based on their skill (accuracy/random firing delay) and a ship (total value), where you can adjust the time for which you want a contract to persist. You could give them simple orders like follow, guard, standby and patrol, and they would get automatically relieved when contract is expired and no combat is in place.

Nevertheless, it would require some method to issue orders to particular mercs with random names, and shop's recipes tooltip left redundant can be used to represent mers available. It would also require another competition to collect a collection of ships for different ship classes with a specific color scheme.