Hi Guys

Long time lurker, first time poster. Now that Josh has returned and things are looking up I'd like to share an idea I had awhile ago.

So I love the idea of procedural generated ships and the incremental research and upgrades too them. But I've been wonder how the AI can use this to complete their own goals. So my suggestion is that all ships' stats in the game are tracked over time. kills, deaths, money generated and specific states related to specific goals the AI tries to do(like mining) while using/piloting. The AI can then use this information to decide on a new ship(or fleet for their underlings) to buy to complete its specific goal. More successful ships will naturally become more expensive through supply and demand, while less successful ships will lower in price.

The AI then can(if it wants to) always try to stay cutting edge if it can afford it, while its also a viable option to buy a lesser expensive ship that's maybe a jack of all trades, or just worse but more affordable. This naturally also gives the player a good indication of the current fads and ratings of ships for his own interest. This would also not stop the player or even the AI from discovering a ship that is amazing but hasn't been given a chance yet by any entities.

This idea also has other implications like exploiting the system by targeting certain models, destroying them and making them look worse on the overall rankings.

What do you guys think?

Welcome to the forums! This sounds like a reasonable proposal. I do think that a ship's success will largely depend on the pilot. A fighter pilot isn't going to do well at selling items on the market with a freighter. So, suggesting types of ships for particular roles will be more worth while than simply saying ship A is better than ship B. With this in mind, I'm unsure if stats really need to be tracked for every ship the player encounters. I would personally limit stat tracking to "executive NPCs" and leave the worker NPCs out of the loop.

Besides that, everything else you brought up looks good to me.

wish granted, likely is already that way