Sector Brokers (Deployable trade assistants)

[Weylin]

Summary: Brokers would be salaried individuals without a ship that can be dispatched to your current sector to keep tabs there in your absence.

Brokers could be contacted from anywhere in the galaxy for various functions:

• Give a detailed report of supply and demand in their sector, equipment in stock, as well as total volumes available and needed in that sector.
• Purchase goods and equipment there on your behalf, and hold these goods on layover for retrieval by you or a captain.
• Dispatch them to another sector already explored by you, it must have at least 1 station, and there is a taxi and warehouse (re)establishment fee charged by distance traveled.
• Submit a wishlist and budget for automatically buying desired items and equipment when they become available.
• Player can pay for warehouse space to increase the cargo and equipment storage size for that particular broker. (Limits a player from utterly sucking the life out of multiple sectors indefinitely unless they have the ships to move that cargo out)

 

I'm not sure how this would work in multiplayer, what performance impacts it would have, nor what kind of physical presence (if any) brokers would have in their posted sectors. Might cause some problems if an invisible entity keeps swiping goods and equipment, or if they are an entity, a great deal of frustration if someone goes about killing them off or raiding their warehouses.

 

If the automatic buying and storage sounds like too much, these could be simply relegated to providing market information only, and still be a huge convenience for traders that wish to keep tabs on good sectors for procurement and deliveries.

Edited August 7, 2022 by Weylin