(Reposted from General Discussion).
Commissions in Starsector are very passive - you are a privateer for one of the major powers, and gain a bit of reputation and money every time you destroy an enemy ship. I have been thinking about ways to make them a more active part of the game and making them more exciting.
What occurred to me is that the Missions describe all sorts of exciting and colorful activity on the part of the major powers: strike fleets sent deep behind enemy lines to secure some objective, or smuggle some commodity out of Hegemony space, or sent on a desperate mission to distract an enemy invasion fleet to preserve the homeland. And I think that most of these could be implemented as special missions assigned to you by your superiors: in essence, having you be a secret agent rather than a privateer.
Let's take assassinating an enemy official, for example. The mission could be to kill one of the officials you see in the comm board. How might this be implemented? Well, in order to avoid having to have ground-based combat, let's say security forces planetside are too tough to allow them to be murdered there. But instead officials move from planet to planet in preplanned convoys, guarded by a fleet commensurate to their rankings; the portmaster of Volturn gets a fleet with one or two cruisers, but Philip Andrada gets a full detachment of the Lion's Guard, and pilots the Conquest himself. So to assassinate them, you'd have to figure out when they'd next be leaving land and where they'd go, and then you could ambush them at the jump point, deal with the escorts, and prevent the VIP from escaping. A nice multistage plan that would be fun to play.
Another possibility: intelligence gathering. To borrow an idea from Nexerelin, maybe you can plant spies in enemy worlds. But maybe getting their information is a bit harder: a mission could be to smuggle a top-secret agent into Jangala to steal some plans, and then three months later you'd have to get them off of there in a short window to prevent them from being caught and executed. Maybe a spy is the only way to find out the movements of a paranoid and extremely important target like Philip Andrada: you would have to either implant a spy of your own (one of your officers, maybe?) or bribe a high-ranking official to tell you when he'd be leaving Sindria for Volturn to inspect their lobster or handle a treason case.
One last idea: relief fleets/military distractions. Let's say that you are a stalwart defender of the Hegemony, and that Tri-Tachyon has launched another major offensive. Jangala is under siege by a massive invasion fleet and its defenders will fall unless aid is provided. You could be tasked with sneaking past the invasion fleet (which would be hovering around the world) and delivering heavy armaments and food to Jangala -- but if the fleet caught you, you'd be in for a hell of a fight. Or maybe the assassination of a high-ranking general would put the invasion into disarray. Or you could - through the derring-do of your agent on Eochu Bres - uncover "evidence" of treason in Tri-Tachyon, causing the invasion fleet to be recalled in a hurry. You get the picture -- commissions could be a strong narrative tool, used to add flavor to the different powers and to add narrative excitement to the game.
Of course, some people simply want to be privateers, and in that case they can turn down all the special assignments!
