Luxury Accomodations disproportionally punishes small ships.

[Hyugat]

Problem Description

Luxury Accommodations is an outfit that allows the player to gain access to an expanded number of passenger missions in human space. While this could help with the early game substantially, it instead acts as a mechanic that needlessly punishes small ships and solo gameplay. Let me explain.

Luxury Accommodations (I'm going to shorten it to "Luxaco" from this point forward for the sake of convenience) is an outfit that costs 250,000 credits, which is not an insignificant amount in the early game, especially for a new player. This would be fine on its own, and a good goal for a new player to work towards, were it not for the 2 required crew that luxaco also adds. The number of hospitality staff doesn't scale with the number of bunks aboard the ship, so you end up needing the same number of staff for an Arrow as you do a Bactrian.

Let's look at the earlygame. A shuttle has 6 bunks and one pilot, giving it a capacity of 5. Adding luxaco adds 2 required crew, effectively reducing its capacity to 3. Playing through passenger missions in the early game, why would I possibly want to nearly halve my passenger capacity? What kind of upgrade is that? These missions simply do not pay well enough to make that a worthwhile tradeoff. In my experience, they do pay a fair bit more, (last I heard, about 33%) but it's not worth the cost for a small ship. You are almost always better off shaving off that bit of extra outfit space for a Small Bunk Room (which is only 2 more space and significantly cheaper), or making the space for a normal Bunk Room. Hell, if you're flying a Flivver, your passenger capacity is effectively reduced to ZERO, making it completely worthless for what is supposedly a luxury ship.

For a small ship, the brig is a superior investment in nearly every way, as it requires no crew, less outfit space, and still unlocks more options for the player. If the brig, the place where you've thrown dangerous murderers and felons, requires no crew, why should luxaco have this requirement?

What's the opportunity cost for large fleets or lategame human ships, on the other hand? Negligible. My experience equipping this in my fleet with a Bactrian flagship was that it was essentially free income. Proportionally, the hospitality staff have little effect on a Bactrian's passenger capacity, and 200 credits a day is peanuts compared to the cost of maintaining a remotely sizeable fleet. It's not nothing, mind you, but the impact is significantly lessened on larger ships and fleets. Fleets especially can benefit from negligible opportunity cost. You don't have to compromise the effectiveness of your flagship at all, since one Luxaco unlocks the missions for every ship in your fleet.

The main issue is that, as I alluded to earlier, you need the same amount of hospitality staff to tend to 2 people (the Arrow's stock passenger capacity) as you do 77 people (the Star Queen's stock passenger capacity). I understand that the way Luxaco works is an abstraction for the sake of gameplay, but when that abstraction also hurts the gameplay, especially gameplay for newer players, that's a problem in my book.

Related Issue Links

I don't know if this is a common topic of discussion on the discord, as I haven't been on there in a long time.

#3359

Desired Solution

Replace the crew requirement with "operating costs", which could be reflavored as needing to keep a constant stock of drinks or other luxury goods. If the missions become too strong, the operating costs could be increased to a larger number than the crew costs originally were. Regardless, this change keeps the upkeep mechanics intact while making it less punishing for small ships.

Alternative Approaches

Add first-class bunks, which can be inherent to some more luxurious ships, or be added as an option separate from the Bunk Rooms. Perhaps it could work in a similar way to scan interference, where it would take a certain number of existing bunks and "upgrade" them to first-class. This requires code changes and deprecating luxaco, but opens up the door for some interesting gameplay and variation in ships.

Remove the crew requirement and adjust the outfit's description.

Rework the luxury system entirely so that ships can have an inherent "luxury" attribute to them. (this is more complicated, but would help ships like the Star Queen, Arrow, and Flivver stand out.)

Additional Context

No response

[eebop]

Maybe a luxury accomodation that converted, say 5, bunks into "luxury bunks" or similar ( and was cheaper) would be much better.

[Hecter94]

One option would be to refactor the Luxury jobs to check for an attribute rather than a specific outfit, using the "flagship attribute: <attribute>" autocondition and have the outfit provide that attribute.
Then, certain small ships, such as the Flivver you mentioned, could be considered "luxury" ships by default, removing their need to install luxury accommodations outfits.

This, of course, wouldn't resolve the issue for all small ships, but off the top of my head, the Arrow, Flivver, and perhaps Blackbird? could likely be considered "luxury" transports without needing the outfit. This would give a reasonable "luxury" upgrade path throughout the early game for players who want to focus on that.

[Hyugat]

@Hecter94
That would be a welcome change, I wasn't aware it was an option without code changes. We might need to adjust the descriptions of the outfit and/or ships in question, to avoid confused players installing the outfit on a ship that already has the attribute, but that shouldn't be too difficult. This would also mean the outfit wouldn't have to be deprecated, and it would give those ships (mostly the Flivver and Arrow) the niche that they've been lacking.

I think the Blackbird could benefit from this, too, as, at least in my experience, it has a hard time competing with the Hogshead for transport duties (although the blackbird is much better in combat). I would probably skip giving it to the Hogshead, which I've always seen as the "budget" transport, and a bit of a rickety ship. I'd also give it to the Star Queen since luxury is the Star Queen's forte.

[Zarkonnen]

Note that the same scaling issue exists with brigs, where one brig is enough to turn your Bactrian into a prison hulk.

My preferred (but maybe overcomplicated) way to fix this is to have multiple types of bunk, so adding Luxacos grants you some number of luxury bunks, and Brigs adds some number of prison bunks. This is further complicated by the fact that random passengers and crew are fine with an upgrade to luxury accommodation, but not with a downgrade to a brig cell!