Failure will not be tolerated

[martyparty]

I'm not sure if this counts as a bug or not, but you know how sometimes you're doing contracts and you land at the planet, but you want to do a few things that doesn't make any game time pass, such as checking rumours, ship upgrades, and new ships, and you can get the "contract expired" message, but if you then go and do the contract before departing, the contract is still completed, and you gain reputation.

However, when your military rank is high with the faction that gave you the contract, the game gives you a "failure will not be tolerated" after the original contract expired message, and takes a level of rank away, which is quite expensive to buy back.

An easy way to fix this would be to not force the ship to take off into orbit after you complete a contract, so the player can do that first BEFORE being tempted to check the rumours and whatnot. You can still require the player to take off and land again to "reload" any subsequent contracts for the same planet - though it would be nicer if that wasn't required either, and the player had the choice of whether or not to go back into orbit to do surveillance in the case that the next contract was a bounty.

[slayernz]

The original game design required you to go into orbit to actually undertake a contract. The logic being that exchange of packages/passengers is much safer to do in the relatively safe environment of space. Less likelihood of being ambushed when you are in orbit compared to in a dark alley. The end result of you finding yourself in orbit after contract completion is just a net result of the exchange.

Of course, the other Urban/Wild contract types (kill/capture) also require you to actually do your job in space.

So unfortunately for all captains out there ... if you are on a job, don't stop in the local spice halls along the way. Try and explain to your military contacts why you were a little late in completing the contract. "Yeah I delivered the package okay - but it was a little late because I was just checking out the latest gossip in the Spice Hall and lost track of time."
That's usually followed up by "Please put down that blaster ... or at the very least, please point it at my First Cat - it was his fault - he wanted Catnip!"

[martyparty]

Well I'm nearly always on a job and have to check the rumours SOME time.

Normally I'm not that tardy, but I'd just upgraded my Honor of Thulun to a Spear Cutter and was checking for ship upgrades along the way and also consolidating all the tiny little caches of loot into one larger one, so yeah, the chores put me behind schedule.

[slayernz]

Heh heh ... the Honor of Thulun is a wickedly good ship for its price and availability. I would have been inclined to finish the mission in the HoT before taking the Spear Cutter out of Dry Dock.

[Cory Trese]

This is just the reality of the Star Traders RPG engine on Android. It would take well more than a month of work to fix, and trust me, I have tried to make it happen before. It simply isn't as easy as changing a rule it would require a re-write of the entire Urban Zone system.

See: ST2