It's been a very long time since I did an expedition, but if I were to do expeditions regularly, I would not want my fleet disappearing for the 6ish hours I remember it taking. Of course, for the life of me I cannot remember how long it actually took. Overall, I think this is a great idea, even down to the ruby rewarding. Though I would propose the solution to the possible exploitation by changing it from an automatic reward to a notification to the admins, with the ship with the highest available cargo space be 'left behind' (Ie, in a fleet holding 10 million metal consisting of 1 elite cargo and 1 BS, the BS would be frozen/deleted on expedition) and returned/respawned to the player with the addition of a ruby once the admins have had the chance to review the message. Suggested pseudocode/example :
I send out my fleet on expedition from planet x:yyy:zz (Moon), with 10 Elite Cargoes and an RIP, holding 90,500,000 metal on an expedition. I achieve the ruby find. The system finds that I have enough spare cargo space for an Elite Cargo to be left behind and records date and time. At this point, the system places a message in the admin mailbox reading something like 'Player RogueSpear(//Player Number here) has found a Zorg Ruby on expedition from x:yyy:zz (Moon). This last occurred (//Date + Time).' The EC is then removed from play (Suggest if/else type statement sending a message registering failure to remove EC from play if it fails to remove), and the remainder of the fleet is sent on a return mission to it's origin. Admin then reads the message and authorizes the receipt (Unless that RogueSpear bloke turns out to be a cheating *******) which tells the system to add 1 Zorg Ruby to my account, and place 1 Elite Cargo at x:yyy:zz (Moon) when (((Expedition Fleet Returned) && (RogueSpear == Online)) == True), thus stopping a player from being punished for finding a ruby (Primarily a problem for lower level players with no/low defences that a single ship is ripe pickings, but still).
Thoughts? I'm a bit sleep deprived and haven't really coded much in the last 6 weeks (Should reeeeaaallly start actually showing up in uni...) so I may have some coding flaws or a massive oversight somewhere, but I'm sure Zorg will be able to spot those easily enough and point them out.
Re: A complete revamp of Expeditions
#21
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