What if freighters were not the only ships to use the trade centers? What if there were all sorts of civilian traffic that ran from system to system. Yes I realize that too much would needlessly over load the processing speed of a lot of computers but space travel is hard and expensive anyway so there doesn’t have to be A LOT of traffic. I think it would be awesome to see massive cruise liners going from planet to planet. After all people need to be transported to, not just trade goods. When a planet is first colonized it would grow at a very slow rate until a trade center is built and more people can be transported in by these massive people movers. The regular growth rate would still need to be high enough to allow for planets to not have these trade centers. And the population on them wouldn’t come from nowhere. They would come from the planets that are already maxed out.
But more then just the population aspect would be the fact that Pirates and Enemies would now have substantial non military targets to prey upon. If one or several of these cruise liners were destroyed it would ruin the moral of your empire (or at least their starting planet?). Thus making them prime targets for your enemies to pick off in a "dirty" fight. You could assign parts of your fleet to guard or escort these ships or possibly whole shipping lanes in general. Thus a small fleet of frigates would constantly be patrolling your trade lanes looking out for stray pirate or enemy ships.
This idea came to me when posting in the IDEA: Pirates thread. There I said that pirates would disguise them selves as civilian traffic such as cruise liners or high priced private "yachts." Thus making it easier for them to slip into the middle of your empire and attack your undefended areas. But say, what if you had ships patrolling the trade lanes. Then you would catch these pirates and they would be forced to find a trade lane you weren’t patrolling. Or maybe even be smart enough to time their trip to slip through a poorly patrolled area.
In all I would love to see more civi traffic, making it important to guard this traffic or pay the consequence of not doing so. I think it would add a nice element to the game. What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Other types of civi ships you’d like to see… Maybe tweak the concept a little in a way I didn’t think about?
