Like I said, "Emperor" was too strong a word, "Lord" is more what I meant. You lead forces (your escorts) into battle, command and fight beside them, and can realistically win against another military squadron. You can even decide which faction ends up controlling a backwater system on a warfront.safemode wrote:The "ant to emperor" comment had to do not with your ability to become more influential in your ability to effect the game, but in that no matter how powerful you get, you're still just 1 privateer in the game. You'll never be able to interact with the game in a manner other than that you did when you first started. It lacks the infrastructure to make you into a faction leader, or even a flightgroup leader. It lacks the various things that you would be able to do as someone of such a higher status, like negotiate with the leaders of other factions and such, declare war and give commands to other flightgroups and ships or have bases built etc etc. As an "emperor" your gameplay changes from flying around and trading/shooting to managing others. The game doesn't have the infrastructure for the "managing" aspect that would be indicative of being an "emperor" all we have is ant and bigger ant.
Hopefully in the not too distant future players will be able to deploy/purchase stations or other infrastructure (assets that automatically produce revenue/resources, but need to be protected because of their high initial cost).
Because basically it doesn't make a huge difference if the game allows you to at some point build most things yourself outright, or instead only gives you the option to purchase most of those things- you get to about the same functionallity either way (though I personally much prefer building as a more realistic feature for a far future deep space setting like VS). VS as it stands now, is the kind of game where you can buy basically anything that you can afford.
Well I guess that does sound like a more potent dynamic campaign system than I had imagined. It'll be very interesting to see how it handles important NPCs, what outcomes the player still determines and most of all if each time you play it really is a different experience (a very difficult challenge for campaign systems to overcome).You dont understand what i'm talking about when i say campaigns. I dont speak of a directed plot that the player is basically forced into or requests to be into . The game would have a campaign regardless of what the player does. They can free roam and do whatever they want, the campaign of VS would continue on without them, with the dynamic universe modifying events and times of events throughout the campaign. If the player jumped into plot somewhere along the way, intentionally or accidentally, then they can choose to do missions and such and the campaign would be fine with that. But the player isn't necessary for events to take place. Think of the campaign as mostly gentle nudges given to factions to get them to interact in an intentional way to give the VS universe the feel the time period ought to have. Certain specific events may be scripted to occur under given situations, but for the most part, the AI and dynamic universe are in control. The player can be part of the story or not, but the story occurs and goes on regardless. It starts when the player initiates the game for the first time.
But you don't buy 'friends', you buy ships. Then (their?) AI's fly them, or spaceborn or low level uplifts or whatever- the possible explanations are quite numerous, but the gameplay is really all that matters in this particular instance. Besides, you don't think you run a Thales on your own do you (that is- no sentients or automation to help you)? And yet you still don't have to worry about mutinies when flying anything bigger than a one-man fighter.Friends aren't bought. You earn them by helping others or simply being "famous"/successful. It wouldn't be something related to a fixed number, but helping someone may cause them to bond with you etc etc. They wouldn't be unconditional friends for you to use and abuse though, they're not remote control units.
Well you wouldn't want to put you eggs in one basket under any system. Whether individual corporations or overlapping government divisions, you need to have competition or else things eventually devolve.If you could attach firmly, performance of a company to funding in a socialist system, then it would work fine, just as good if not better than private. But you can't really do that in a socialist system, because of the mentality of a socialist regime, anything that ended up performing poorly would simply get more funding, because to kill it and start over or without it would not be acceptable as people would depend on it already.
If it doesn't directly or indirectly provide competitive advantages during wars as well as self-maintenance and improvement, then as far as factions are concerned, it doesn't matter. Because those are the three things that kill factions- getting conquered, internal instability and getting behind in the race "forward" towards bigger and more complicated.Performance is easy to define, and it has nothing to do with advantages during war.
But performing good doing what? If your economy is really big on paper, but fundamentally it has just soda bottling plants and large office buildings full of software engineers, then unless that faction has powerful friends, it is in fact very weak in spite of its "performance". It needs to be able to produce weapons and battlefleets to fight the aera or other competition, not be very efficient at producing things that offer little physical advantage like sugar water and bloatware operating systems.Performance is simply how much income compares to cost. If the company is pulling more money in than it's spending then it's performance is good.
So what you're saying is that very small goverments can run everything but large governments like we see in VS can only run a few of the things in their vast empires, or else they become extremely inefficient?Some services a government performs are no income or always going to cost more than they receive, like fire companies are today. That cost has to be paid by taxes, and it's taxes that would have to be highly controlled and treated harshly in order to keep such services efficient. That complication is why it's always best to have as few of these types of services as possible, because the government's ability to remain efficient is inversely proportional on an exponential scale to how much it has to do.