please?

I love the new convoys and all, but I think it would be nice to see some of those lone atlas traders again (and other lone vessels - UIT Mauds, taurs, wraiths...) to give the game some more atmosphere, and the newbs something to chew on.

Of course, they should be armed this time... but I think the voys don't offer the difficulty ramp they should. (face it, moths are hard to catch, and even moreso when you have a dozen light figthters with energy and impecable aim to hammer on you) Sure, the reward is there for people who are up to the challenge, but occasional appearances of smaller, lone ships for newbs to prey on (for lesser reward) would be welcome. It would also get rid of those long lapses of inactivity between convoys to have some lighter traffic.

I don't think the Atlas NPC trader is actually gone. We'll probably see their return under certain conditions as outlined below:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/12050

Momerath42 said:

"The number of traders is derived from the amount of cargo space required for a particular pre-computed cargo. There are several routes that only require one trader. The number of escorts is determined by the danger of the route. At the moment, danger can only go up, so there will always be at least one escort (unless it's been killed). Anyway, you will run across a lone trader once in a while as it is. Soon(tm), when the economy is tied in, I think it will be not-uncommon for a station to require a small amount of something at a time when it doesn't need anything else. Where it can get it via a safe enough route, there will often be single transports around."

It might be useful to make sure that trade missions suitable for an Atlas be more plentiful near nation capitols.

for the record, i agree with cunjo.

the lone atlas' are the pedestrians of the universe, they make it about 50% more real.

Well I can appreciate the danger factor, but shouldn't there be some willing to take the risk (or unable to minimize it due to lack of funds for escorts, etc...)

the reason i say this, is that near nation capitols where these lone traders would appear under that plan, you can't shoot them without condemning yourself.

As a noob, an immense amountof ht efun I had in this game came from popping tani atlas' in serco space. While the defendability of the convoys now would make it an appreciable challenge for me, noobs wouldn't stand a chance, and would miss out on the lone, unprotected traders.

As Proximo so eloquently put it, they are the pedestrians of the universe - the regular, individual and independant commerce and transportation which should flow freely through any free universe.

If we are to improve the game by making travel and activities a risk for human players, the NPCs should also face the risk. And were they real individuals within a universe like Vendetta's, they would.

Helios has small convoys!

i saw many time alone moth

but what of the lone atlas? or the lone wraith/maud?

I don't understand why the original atlas system was removed anyway, weren't the new transports suppost to supplement the already existing system, not replace it??

The two systems were probably redundant.

I think that if/when the new convoy system starts working properly, eventually it will "settle down" and huge convoys will be things of the past. Lone atlas traders will reappear once stations establish an equilbrium of supply & demand.

I think that convoys will simply have to be generated more often to get the Atlases back. That ought to reduce the total cu for any given trip.

I think it also depends on what goods are in demand. While a station may want 1,000 cu of ferric ore, they aren't necessarily going to want 1,000 cus of luxgoods, so I'm sure we'll eventually see the odd atlas carrying 30 cu of luxgoods from Dau to Nyrius, for example.

The new convoy system does supplant the old one. Only because the old Atlas convoy method was a very simplistic "ships go from A to B", where the new system allows for a lot more flexibility and interesting gameplay possibilities.

That said, the suggestion is well received. We've planned on tweaking the convoys to increase the number of "small" groups (a single ship, or a single trader with an escort), but further deliverator development and debugging have temporarily forstalled that. So, hopefully we'll get a chance to improve this in the next week or two. It's really not a big deal, we just have to re-tune the average size of a trade request. If we add more small trade requests that can be filled by single-ship convoys, you'll start to see more of them. The system just.. handles it automatically.

At what point will convoy requests be controled by supply and demand, as opposed to you manually setting demand?

When we actually have variable supply and demand. Yes, there is "demand" in the economy now, but it's not the deliverator-controlled true dynamic economy that we're planning on implementing. It's easier to just wait until we make that than it is to implement it once now and then redo it again later.

Even then, though, there'll be some amount of manual numbers tweaking on our part, breaking up the demand into multiple smaller requests, so that the posted Trade Missions (which both NPCs and users will be able to answer) will cover a spread accessible to single users, small groups and large groups. If users don't take the missions, this will still result in a decent spread of convoy sizes, with single/small probably being the most common.