Smuggling & pirate mission improvements

[Bardagh]

Problem Description

In vanilla, there are mission chains for smugglers which are essentially unattainable during normal play because they're gated behind pirate reputation. Smuggling jobs generated on pirate planets are difficult to use because of the high cost of landing bribes. "Smuggler" is simply not a viable primary vocation.

Related Issue Links

#4628
#5141
#6097 (derelicts could be pirate traps for would-be salvagers)
#6298
#6314

Desired Solution

I suggest the following changes in order to make "smuggler" a viable primary vocation:

• Add an illegal commodity ("contraband") which is more expensive on high security worlds
• Separate the pirate government into planet based & freelance. Organized blockades of traders have to come from somewhere, & imply organization. Could be a pirate planet, an asteroid base, etc. Freelance raids on merchants, on the other hand, could be opportunistic pick-up groups unaffiliated with mission-farmable government rep.
• Further separate the pirate governments by region & assign the pirate planets to regions. SW, SE, Syndicate, & far NE space seem like good candidates. The Core & the Deep are too well protected for pirates to take root within those territories, but pirates could be coming in from next door or based in small scattered bases which the player might not have access to.
• Make it more viable for denizens of pirate planets to leave said planets. Backdoor systems, secret hyperlanes, wormholes; there are a lot of options.
• Make non-gated vanilla missions give small amounts of rep with planet-based pirates & make bribes to land on pirate planets much smaller, or maybe add some rep-granting missions on Trinket with the "clearance" tag to get people started. The "said no to drugs" tag could be relevant here.
• Add at least one smuggling-focused freighter so players don't have to rely on speed alone to evade the authorities. I suggest the Scavenger from Becca's Pirate Expansion, tweaked for game balance. My version has 20 points of scan resistance (equivalent to 80 tons of interference plating) built in, enough to evade scans roughly 95% of the time with the possibility of installing more to improve the odds, albeit with sharply diminishing returns. I can be contacted on Discord for the plugin files I use for my personal game. The original license allows use of mod components with credit if I recall correctly.
• Trinket would be a good place to sell smuggling focused ships. Modified Argosies could also be sold there, giving players a chance to use them without having to capture one. Perhaps a shielded Boxwing variant could be added as well. Maybe a Heavy Shuttle variant with less cargo space & built in interference plating.

Alternative Approaches

Simply adding rep gain to non-gated smuggling missions would go a long way, but might cause issues if the pirate government was not split as raiding fleets would be friendly.

Additional Context

No response

[Zitchas]

Derelicts have a long history in the EV franchise as being "usually just some free fuel & commodities" but also "frequently are actually just pirate traps, and frequent enough that players flying slow combat ships think twice about looting said ships." I'd love to see some of those in game.

These are pretty much all good ideas, many of which have come up on Discord and in other conversations.

While some of these may be complex to add, some (such as the non-gated pirate recruitment missions that give rep and/or clearance to land on pirate worlds) are excellent missions for people interested in learning how to do missions or contribute content.

[Bardagh]

[snip] While some of these may be complex to add, some (such as the non-gated pirate recruitment missions that give rep and/or clearance to land on pirate worlds) are excellent missions for people interested in learning how to do missions or contribute content.

Thank you. I've given this a lot of thought.

[Bardagh]

I can try my hand at tweaking the missions, but I really think we need to split the pirate government to avoid undesirable side effects, and I don't have a solid feel for the right numbers to use or certainty on how it should relate to Republic etc. rep - folks have been talking about implementing a police force with its own government, which would make this much more feasible to integrate without negatively affecting other aspects of the game.