Contract & Waypoint ordered draggable list

[spike]

This is just a "nice to have":

Drag the order of Accepted Contracts list up and down. This list is an ordered, re-orderable list. The game takes the 'first' and 'next' contracts in this order, and plots new waypoints in this order.

"extra credit": add non-Contract waypoints into this list.

The reason for this is that it often takes a bit of offline planning (or on-Zoom Map planning) to figure out the right route to satisfy multiple contracts, and possibly other stop overs. Reordering the Contract list will help to 'save' this mental planning work.

[Kelvin Zero]

So do you take multiple contracts at one time? I have rarely had good luck doing more than two at a time, especially when I could get sent clear across the game map for some quests. How successful are you in completing them all?

[spike]

I need to build a map of the route (in my head mostly) to make sure the contracts are do-able. Two at once is no problem. Three is usually fine. Four is pretty challenging. But you have to be able to Reject contracts that don't fit into a feasible course. This might deplete the supply of Contracts unnecessarily.

One thing that would help in this is if the Contract offer had the Green distance (lowest cost route) as well as the Red distance (fastest route). I realise that's probably expensive to calculate on the fly.

@cory, this raises a "if a tree falls in the woods" question. Are Contracts existing and expiring even if I don't know about them, or do they only come into existence (and start to expire), when I request a Contract offer? Rumours seem to exist, and expire and change, independently of whether I know about them, so there's no game penalty for discovering them early rather than late. Is the same true of Contracts, or not?

[oldalchemist]

If you want to get good return on fuel investment, it seems that taking many contracts is OK. I used to do this a lot in the free version, but with the map being so large in elite, it's harder. The problem is that if you're not equipped to jet around without refueling or are prone to getting waylaid by encounters, multiple contracts become hard to fulfill in time. The rep hit can be rough, especially if you lose rank and have to buy it back up. There goes the profit margin.

Best ROI seems to be single contract long hauls for a faction you're holding a fat rank with.

[slayernz]

I agree with oldalchemist about being waylaid from time to time. Has anyone noticed that encounters in deep space seem to be on the rise? I regularly have 4 or more encounters going through one grid point as I navigate through the map. It's even more prevalent now that your ship auto-resumes the course it was on before the encounter.

Having multiple encounters through your journey just chews up the weeks that would otherwise be used to fulfill multiple missions.

[Cory Trese]

slayernz -- if you are continuing to play the same character, that's just the difficulty slowly increasing on you.

the actual % of encounter chance hasn't changed (literally, not changed) in like 9 weeks.

[ehkamp]

+1 for a sortible Contracts/Waypoints list. If this isn't feasible, I've got another way that would make me just as happy. After I complete a contract, instead of automatically setting a Waypoint to the next Contract on the list, the game to ask me (a pop-up perhaps), "Captain, which Contract do you want to persue next? This one is closest, but this one expires sooner."

I think encounters just SEEM more frequent since auto-resume. Travel is so much faster and map performance has improved (at least on my Droid X), so during an hour of game play I see more encounters than I did when the game ran slower.