A "respond to distress calls" order would be an interesting alternative to making the ship patrol.
Don't know if it would be easy to make it also respond to distress from other systems, but maybe a hidden empire defense fleet would make more sense for that.
One way of doing it would be to have the ships be mothballed in military hangers, when a distress signal is received the ships from the hangar will calculate the distance to the distress call and just teleport over there when the calculated travel time passes. Similar to pirate encounters, but belonging to the empire and be predefined.
I'll just make a separate idea thread for this, don't want to derail this thread too much.
See: http://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=117
Don't know if it would be easy to make it also respond to distress from other systems, but maybe a hidden empire defense fleet would make more sense for that.
One way of doing it would be to have the ships be mothballed in military hangers, when a distress signal is received the ships from the hangar will calculate the distance to the distress call and just teleport over there when the calculated travel time passes. Similar to pirate encounters, but belonging to the empire and be predefined.
I'll just make a separate idea thread for this, don't want to derail this thread too much.
See: http://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=117