Contracts menu

[John Tacker]

How about a "Contracts Menu".
It could work like this: (step by step)

1. Clicking on Contracts button, opens a list of Corporations/Companies.
The list shows the following information:
a)company's name
b)sector
c)Harbor in which the products are stored
d)Employees*

*The Employees is just to let the player know how big the Company is (wait and you will see why it is important)

Example:
AGRITECH S.A. Agricultural Products Lisbon 2000 Employees

2. Clicking on one of the companies opens the list of the contracts that the company offers. The contract is just the same as the ones you pick in a harbor (Product name, destination, profit, days limit etc...).
These contracts will give as big profit as big the company is. A huge company will give huge profits.

3. The bad news (for the player) are that he/she won't take this contract that easy. The player must send an offer to the Company.
The offer will be like that:
a) The ship that intends to use for the transport
b) The days that will need to deliver the products (Less days, bigger the bonus that the player will take from the company). Of course if he fails to deliver the products within the period agreed in the contract, he/she will pay a fine (agreed in the contract too)

4. After the player sends the offer he/she will wait some days till he/she gets an answer. That means that it will work like some kind of auction. The player will compete with other Transport companies (A.I.). Who offers less days, better ship (condition, age etc) and better status, will take the contract.
It is obvious that big companies will snob transport companies with low status (that's why the player should consult the number of the employees before choosing a company)

5. There could be 2 types of contracts:
a)Contracts with just one delivery.
b)Contracts with duration of months. Going back to our example:
It is 3 March and you sign with Agritech S.A. to carry it's products (between the same 2 harbors of course) till 15 December. After that day the contract is not valid and you will have to search another contract. Of course if the day 15 December your ship is on the way, the contract ends when the ship arrives to the destination.

I know my English are not excellent, so if you don't understand something feel free to ask.
I would like to know what do you think about.
Sorry for my many suggestions but I like this game
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[corne_mo]

What you actually want to do is split the current freight market into different sections (named companies). It can look cool, but I think it will be very difficult to use, especially when you have a lot of ships. Also the complete interface should be changed. The current interface isn't really handy to use when you have to plan future trips when the ship is still at sea (no reservations on ship names, no good overview directly available from the freight market and such).
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Freight Containers In The Port Of Antwerp

[John Tacker]

It will be an extra option. The freights, as they are now, will continue to exist.
By the Contracts option is increased the spirit of interaction. You send an offer, you wait for an answer etc...
If you say it's difficult it stops here, I don't want to make it hard
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[Sparky]

This is certainly an interesting and enriching feature for the game. Not for nothing this poc is an XXL-version.

But I believe it is also very labour-intensive to integrate ;
and we are already waiting for so many other features to be created or developed, the To-Do-List must be as long as the beard of St. Peter ...

[John Tacker]

[rdklein]

Yes a good suggestion -- hope we can get some manpower to work off our todo list faster ! --
but the change to the new development system will really help a lot as development is increased already !

currently we work on the poc 2008 international version as astragon found a distributor, and this will result in some nice features on pocsim3dii later on also (upgrade for the poc 2008 deluxe people also).

I succeeded in geting the old diplomee work on the shipeditor compiled on the new system, but there are lot of things to be done to be useful (export for example), the basic ideas and works are great already.

I also work on the harbour editor, new 3d generating features also ready work (for pocsim3dii...) and some new 2d shapes will result with some enhancements also. Plan is to put it into general usibilty, so you can easy add new harbours for pocxxl as a first step and later for 3d (currently a step using may is required, but maybe we can change this to blender (freeware) and later to our own exporter).