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Re: Subcontracting

#31
Jacobi1981 wrote: hmm, i wonder if/how that will work. wont our fleet basically sit idle or follow main ship if they arent posted to a project?
They will most likely sit around without a job.

im pretty sure that you wont have to assign everything to projects to control them.

Projects are just a mean of controlling things.


Lum:
Subcontracting does not exist as a proper feature right now.

Why should the rest not be possible?
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Re: Subcontracting

#33
Lum wrote:Because I don't know if "exclusive mission assingments" or "you, the small fry, come here to talk about business" exists or will exist in the game :lol: The tactic lose the point if such a contract is made public. The subcontracts must of course, but not the shady, secret one.
Well, then one of the fail conditions would be "make it public" if its a private contract.
With the failure consequences being severe
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Re: Subcontracting

#35
I didn't see this information in a search, so necroing this thread to start a discussion about types of work.

I'd like to lay out a possible system of jobs NPCs could be hired to do. I'll leave the obvious ones to one line or so; I'm more interested in logistical work, support, trading, and other jobs where it can sometimes be difficult to manage cash flow and risk. So let's start looking at the value chain of a hypothetical ship manufacturer, and call it Shippo Corp.

Mining - Pretty obvious. You don't need to hire miners, just set market orders, but hiring a miner or two on contract could be helpful to secure a stable supply to a refinery. You tend to have to pay more for stability than you otherwise would on market, since the miners could be doing more profitable spot-market work instead.

Raw material procurement - Basically, putting a manager in charge of optimizing inputs to the ore refinery. The manager is dedicated to the job of optimizing two variables: cost and throughput. If cost suffers, then the margin per unit made suffers; if throughput suffers, then nothing's being made so there can't be any profit!

How does Shippo Corp hire a procurement manager? They could open a contract specific to their own faction (or a public one) that rewards increasing the optimization function above. Generally, real-world procurement workers are paid on salary, and maybe get a bonus if their department does well. In LT, I don't even know if salary is an option, but I think you could set a contract for repeating payment + bonuses as long as service continues. The bonus, however, would need to be highly variable and dependent on inputs versus outputs to the refinery. Shippo could measure how much metal is coming out of the refinery and how much better or worse their procurement manager is doing than the average market spot price. Or, they could set the contract to pay the procurement manager the average market price over a given period for the materials with no salary; the procurement manager is responsible for meeting the terms of the contract, and any margin he earns on his supply is his to keep.

Manufacturing - Whether you're running an ore processor or a shipyard, the principles of manufacturing jobs are much the same. The basic job is, take inputs and convert to outputs. Bonuses come when you can either reduce inputs per output, reduce cost per output, or increase total output. Manufacturing contracts should be set up to incentivize that behavior. If we assume there's an "average" amount of materials it takes to make a ship, the contract can be drawn up in terms of "I'll give you x materials, you give me a ship, and you keep whatever you don't need. Or go out and buy whatever you do need." I think the incentives for that one are fairly simple to set up.

Marketing - Finding the best combination of high margin + cash flow. This function can be outsourced by simply selling the ship at the market and letting someone else try to flip it for higher value, but that's basically just taking the easy cash flow and leaving money on the table. So if Shippo Corp wants the extra margin, they may initiate a marketing contract that sells all their ships straight to a marketer's inventory at a slightly higher price than market and let him handle it... or they may establish a contract that has the marketer put, say, 10% of the market value down on the ship, then pay the other 90% when the ship is sold, and whatever price he gets above market, he keeps 50%. There are several ways to incentivize margin-seeking behavior, it's just a question of how much risk Shippo is willing to take that their marketer isn't just going to take the ship and run!

Trading and hedging - Trading can enhance profits from marketing or procurement, or both. However, you tend to have to entrust traders with large sums of money and keep them restricted to a particular type of commodity to trade. The way trading works in the real world, you're paid a basic salary that's pretty moderate, but you have the ability to make 10 or 20% of whatever you earn beyond a certain target. So let's say we set up an ore trader with $100MM of capital and let him try to time the market to buy ore as cheaply as possible, and sell any excess that the procurement team has made. His contract will stipulate that he has to return $110MM of capital within x amount of time or he loses the contract, and if he doesn't return ANYTHING, he gets hunted until he's dead. However, if he turns that $100MM of capital into more than $110MM, he gets to keep 10% of the additional profits above and beyond, which can be very lucrative in a good market. The trader doesn't have to be hooked into the supply chain at all - he just needs to pay a fair market value for the excess ore he's selling, and be paid a fair/slightly under-market value for the ore he buys that he intends to send to the refinery. Trading tends to be kept in a separate, siloed wing of most companies since it's not strictly necessary for the company to run - or as a separate speculative business unto itself. Trading shops are started up by investors with a whole lot of money who want to turn that money into more money in a very fast but volatile way.

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What I'd like to see out of LT, then, is a way to perform any of these functions on contract for a corp or faction, once you've earned their trust enough. I'm happy to discuss more detail about the way the contracts should be set up, and other jobs that might be useful to have.
Spacecredentials: looks at stars sometimes, cheated at X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, killed a titan once.

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