Enemies attack you during clean sweep

[El Bobbo]

It would be nice if during clean sweep missions the enemies that spawn attacked you, like they do during patrol missions with encounters. The way things are now, the enemies often just ignore you and SPEC away out of radar range, and then you have to hunt all over the system to find them.

I usually try to avoid this by spamming them with insults over com to get them to attack, but sometimes even this doesn't work.

It would also be nice if when you scan a planet during a clean sweep the enemies spawned on the same side of the planet as you, or if they knew not to fly directly into the planet to get to you if they spawn on the other side.

[bgaskey]

Yeah atm there are several issues with clean sweep missions. Its easier just to do bounties currently

[Rabiator]

As an alternative, count fleeing enemies as "sweeped". That is, if they run more than a pre-defined distance away, that part of the mission is fulfilled.

[bgaskey]

As an alternative, count fleeing enemies as "sweeped". That is, if they run more than a pre-defined distance away, that part of the mission is fulfilled.

Or at least if they flee the system.

[Deus Siddis]

The greater problem here is that when they do run, you cannot stop or slow them down enough to attack them, at least with the larger vessels. So if a corvette decides to run and you do not manage to kill it before it gets away from the local gravity well, there's nothing you can do against it unless it decides to stop by another high mass object.

So basically, interceptors, fighters, assaults and bombers can only be used offensively against each other and stations or otherwise used in a purely defensive/escort role.

I do not know if this is the intended balance, but given the game's current focus on these lighter vessels for the players combat uses it seems weird that they cannot at least intercept their larger quarry.

[safemode]

This problem lies with the dueling purpose of the game in terms of gameplay.

You have people who want to trade, and so, transit time becomes an important factor. We have optimized gameplay for these people by making SPEC unlimited in just about any way. Thus it takes a couple minutes to travel from atlantis to the mining base.

Then you have the 3d combat people. These people _NEED_ dogfighting gameplay. The only way they can do this is near planets and bases, as there is nothing to stop them during SPEC travel, since A. they dont need to stop because SPEC is unlimited, and B. we dont provide any other method to take a ship out of spec via some weapon / defensive measure.


I think we should bring back the idea that SPEC is limited, and limit it severely. Bring back the necessity of SPEC cap's. Make charging time take a while. Make the SPEC drive have failures when damaged, as well as limit it's ability to function to capacity. I think the fastest a ship can spec should be a combined factor of SPEC capacitor, ship volume and ship mass. The maximum should be seen on tiny interceptors at the rate we currently can SPEC in VS. Everything else should be limited to slower rates of spec depending on the various factors.

Combined with this limitation of SPEC, should be weapons and synthetic obstacles meant to force ships out of spec, or nullify it's effect within a certain range. These could be used by pirates, bases and such.

To address transit boredom, we need to make long transits much more interesting. To assist in this, autopilot should navigate to "navigation lanes" Navigation lanes are points between A and B where there is no natural obstacles or bases and usually represent the shortest unencumbered path to B from A and vice versa. This would be used by any ships using autopilot, and thus, now transits become much more interesting. You have a very high likelihood of meeting up with other ships, and bad guys are bound to show up.

Trading becomes much more of a risky venture for the privateer. Dogfighting becomes much more easier, since charging spec caps requires a ton of energy, a ship preparing for SPEC can't defend itself for a significant period of time, and if their pursuer has more capacity (or is lighter and has a decent reactor) they will eventully outlast them.

I'd like to see exploration take an hour or so to cross a system. I'd like to see jumping across a couple systems (assuming the gates aren't right next to eachother) take days. I'd like to see the discovery of Sol system via normal gameplay take weeks of accrued gameplay. In that setup, the universe we generate really will seem endless. You will get a sense of massive scale that we simulate when it takes an hour or more to cross a system and days to get from one system to another a couple systems away. The universe is _massive_ and we simulate it on a massive scale. We need to start making players understand just how massive, and keep it extremely entertaining.

[jackS]

Combined with this limitation of SPEC, should be weapons and synthetic obstacles meant to force ships out of spec, or nullify it's effect within a certain range. These could be used by pirates, bases and such.

Engine side, we already have SPEC-inhibitor functionality. Most of the pirate vessels already use this, as do all of the bases. (In systems where the pirates are heavily outnumbered by local forces, the pirates already attempt to position themselves halfway between navigational points of interest -- but space is large, so they're still easy to miss . ) No additional coding would be required to add SPEC-inhibiting mines, except perhaps in convincing the AI to fire them at empty space.

I think greatly increasing travel time is something that will need to be examined with considerable caution - when travel times were higher, there was much kvetching on the topic.

[loki1950]

when travel times were higher, there was much kvetching on the topic.

As in a new thread weekly they where bored there is nothing to do in transit except steer as this mostly was before the auto-pilot's implementation remember the fun getting it to max 3 minute between points.

Enjoy the Choice

[safemode]

people complain about travel time because there is _nothing_ going on during it. I would want that not to be the case obviously. But i also think that what we currently do is more than just wrong, it is hurting gameplay by reducing the size of our universe. Why are we wasting all this memory and all this cpu simulating all this universe when we reduce it's size by 100x via spec'ing everyone at 99x the speed of light? Might as well save all that memory and cpu from creating such large systems and make the systems smaller, get rid of spec, and put more ships in.

I dont want that, but it makes _Way_ more sense than having the spec we currently have.

Basically, we have a couple choices here. We can have everyone flying around with no rhyme or order except that they are taking the shortest path between where they are and where they want to be. Even if you had 10,000 ships in a single system, you likely wouldn't encounter any during a transit on avg between any two points. Even with dropping out of spec you would likely sit and recharge and be off without ever being near another ship.

Boring.



We could create a construct called a navigation lane. Navigation lanes could be considered corridors where natural obstructions/hazards dont exist. These are marked via the nav system (not by any physical markers) and the AI for the autopilot would navigate you into the nearest part of the navigation lane prior to going to your destination. Nav lanes would be large, such that your SPEC should not be affected by other travelers, but it would consolidate travers such that they would encounter other travelers along their journey. The navigation lanes aren't the fastest most direct route most of the time, thus some traders will travel off it and go with a direct route, but this is very dangerous, as asteroid fields could hamper them, and pirates frequent these short-cuts.
The nav lane itself could be targeted by pirates and enemies, not to mention they could be traveling within the lane themselves and come across your ship recharging.

Something similar to that would be necessary to consolidate ships so that you'd actually come across others during your travel.

This is nothing like how it would actually be, how it would actually be in real life would be utterly boring, and uneventful, which is why most realistic sci fi for long distance travel put people to sleep for the duration of the travel. We can't do that for the player, so we have to cheat here and figure out something that can be explained away, despite not being the most realistic situation.


I do think something needs to be done though. The Current situation basically nullifies the size of our systems so we are completely wasting memory and cpu by simulating them as such. It completely destroys the feeling that you're in the game. It should not take me 10 minutes to jump 4 systems, never really interact with anyone during that time and not encounter any sort problems natural or otherwise. Every aspect of it adds up to an un-satisfying gameplay experience.

People would be ok with it taking a longer time to get from one planet to the next if it was exciting and not just repetitive nothingness. Space may be repetitive nothingness, but we can't let the game be that way, this is one aspect of space travel where we absolutely can't be realistic.

[Deus Siddis]

I understand where you are going and it makes sense, this is a game, the primary goal should be for it to play well. But I disagree that making it more realistic would make it boring.

In fact I for one find starlanes kind of boring. I find lots of heavily engineered or scripted encounters with pirates boring. And I see from mobygames that highway vehicular combat mad max / roadwarrior spin-off games have not exactly dominated gaming. And I find that these sorts of games have very little in common with space or space travel.

They might make for a more active gameplay experience that is more common and manageable, but I don't think this would make up for their cheap mundaneness in a space environment, where you would expect to have the most freedom of movement.

But I do agree that the game should be made slower and more interesting at the same time. Only in a way that makes this clearly feel like the space game that it is, and not really an unrealistic space game either.


When you launch your ship, you should feel the weight and uncertainty of flying straight into nothing, with only a foggy idea of what is ahead of you and the knowledge that once you are out here, the only one who has a real chance of keeping you alive is yourself. You're basically alone and you will be for a long journey to come, in an environment that is almost as hostile as its sparse inhabitants and as strangely beautiful as it is silent and alien.


Vega Strike is already half way there when it comes to this 'space' theme- the new planet textures and atmospheric halo effect, the space backgrounds, the realistic scale of solar systems, the scale of structures and vehicles, many of the base backgrounds and the overall quietness filled greatly by the many top notch music tracks which keep the feel very consistent while illustrating each different environment you enter.

But then there are the things that in conflict to the above come across way to mundane, modern and straight up boring. The total occupation of every landable object by some sort of settlement and mission roster, the lack of ability to explore planets or other natural bodies in anyway, the lack of significant spacial obstacles and environmental hazards, the lack of nonliving and living unexplained phenomena, the lack of visible alien remnants and ruins and most of the player capital being earned by doing whatever routine jobs the game sets for you (as opposed to mining, trading, settling, conquering and stealing assets on your own terms).

When these issues are fixed, the game will be entertaining and immersive whether it takes 1 minute or 1 hour to cross a system because it will tap into the primal explorer, warrior and hunter-gatherer in those who play it and it will do so using all the elements that makes space attract the interests of so many.

[Zolk]

If you make travelling slower, you need to be able to save the game in between, losing no vital information. There are players around who cannot wait a quarter of an hour (or even longer) to save and quit the game.

[Breakable]

In my opinion its not a good thing to alter the speed of the game in its current state, unless you want to create a mod.

Instead the solution should be more simple:
Create means to stop enemies from SPECING,
and to track enemies that SPEC to far away.

For the first it could be missiles, that disable spec drive for some time, or anti-spec field generators, and/or taking some time to initialize the spec due to capacitor recharge.

For second there could be tracking devices that you attatch to enemy, by means of a torpedo, a mine, or just by scanning their "signature".

My 2 c.

[safemode]

in any case, the current SPEC setup we do isn't right. If everyone is Speccing everywhere at 99x the speed of light, then we've reduced our systems size drastically. The game has no sense of scale then and we really waste all of the work done to put things in scale.

It's not about reducing the speed of the game, it's reducing the wrongness of how we cheat with the way spec is done now, to hide our lack of any sort of good solution to the gameplay issue during travel.

The way we currently do SPEC is a band-aid to a problem we have no real solution to as of yet. You should not zip and zap from planet to planet to base in 30 seconds to a couple minutes. It's not realistic in _any_ sort of sense, and it completely trashes the concept of scale. We just have no good alternatives as of yet to fill in the time.

[jorganos]

I like the concept of SPEC as a low-speed alternative to the jump node network. It reflects the kind of stories I want to tell and experience in a space game.


Rather than navigation lanes, I would subdivide systems into occupied spaces and link the major occupied places with in-system jump (or high velocity acceleration) facilities, using some form of external engine cooperating with your SPEC. There might be the need for a second facility to slow you down again (and pirates or other interdictors might bring their own systems to slow you down again).

Possibly facilities controlled by factions, demanding fees. Present only in developed areas of a system.


Privateer 2 had something like this with the multi-stop jump routes connecting the planets.


Pirates have no chance frequenting "off roads" in open space - there is way too much space to cover, and a stern chase will take ages, while interception courses would require the intercepting unit to be close to the travel vector of the target ship.

While it is possible to watch departure alleys from spaceports, the only chance to catch a trader attempting a run through unexplored territory on an indirect route is to follow him and constantly transmit speed and direction (or plant a transponder on the ship doing that). Otherwise, the experienced runner takes a run not quite in the desired direction, after some time changes course to a point in the neighborhood but not on direct course to the target spaceport, from where he will do the final approach.

As a result, it would always be possible to spend a lot of time in SPEC without much happening except navigational hazards.

This should be possible. The player who chooses this style of travel is responsible for his own boredom.


Interaction with other ships will occur at bottlenecks - jump points, near spaceports, stations, claimable resources, or other features drawing attention.


Secured systems might install SPEC interdictor facilities, making it hard to avoid the defined routes. Basically, these would be artificial means to limit top SPEC speed in a certain volume. In a military campaign, these facilites would be targets for elimination. In a smuggler's or pirate game, people would run the rims of these volumes (again creating bottleneck situations).

Plotting a course through bubbles of SPEC-interdicted zones would be challenging, both as a navigational exercise (unless following a set of mapped coordinates) and as an interface to do so.

Still, this would give some sense to Han Solo's statement "made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs", although we're dealing with AU rather than parsecs...

[safemode]

One could also imagine that SPEC travel could be an artform rather than something that can be mastered by machine. Much like slipstreaming in Andromeda type deal. We could make spec function as it does (with some additions and what not) but it brings up a HUD that the player uses to stabilize the warpage of space around the gravity fields of all the other objects in the system, which are moving and dynamic. Thus, to stay in spec requires constant modification of the SPEC engine outputs as you travel across a system and especially as the spec factor increases, so does the difficulty to maintain a stable warpage of space.


In this way, skilled pilots would be able to spec faster than unskilled pilots. And longer durations of spec will be extremely taxing and difficult on the pilot.

The interface for this hud could be any number of things. I think I prefer an extremely fast updating hud consisting of a 2d cross section of gravimetric waves radiating out from every significant body in the system. This would be done by overlaying solid circles that get lighter the weaker the grav from that body... thus overlays become lighter or darker than normal depending on the direction of the various grav fields. This cloudy looking hud then gets exaggerated the more you increase your intended spec. The object then as this field rapidly changes as you move across the system is to modify the power outputs of the SPEC engine to balance the forces in order to keep your warp field stable. Such modification could be thought of as either being joystick (analog driven would be ideal ) but for us non-joystick users, we might have to deal with the mouse. The faster the spec, the more drastic the differences in fields become, the faster they change, and thus for a pilot to be able to spec really fast means they have some serious piloting skills, or can see the future.


In this way, we dont need to introduce artificial ship interaction or tons of out of place or unbelievable obstacles. Space will not lose it's scale even if you travel it fast in this manner, because even if you're going at the same speed we're doing now, even 60 second travel times will feel like forever at that speed


EDIT:
another idea is to visualize the SPEC field as a sphere around the ship in the HUD and then have the faces designated by levels underneath it. These levels are ideal when they all read 0, as in 0 net force. The graphic then ripples and distorts as we travel through the system, based on the relative gravity enacted by significant bodies. Now the user adjusts his speed and has 6 keys to designate the 6 faces of the sphere and has to press the key corresponding to the face being distorted. The % that the sphere remains above a given thresh-hold (this threshhold increases towards 100% the higher the set SPEC factor is set by the user), dictates the ship being in spec or dropping out due to a field collapse. Say for SPEC half as fast as the game currently goes at, requires a SPEC field efficiency of 85%. This means that the user has to adjust the 6 faces (which are changing at a good rate) and try to keep the sphere a sphere to within 85% or the field collapses (the sphere will begin to resonate and ripples increase in severity exponentially the longer it stays below 85% until finally they touch the ship and spec is lost). This becomes extremely hard the higher you set your spec factor, or the more complex a system is.


Basically, the task requires extremely fast coordination the higher your spec factor (complexity of system), and strategy.

I think it should make for spec travel to be much more interesting, without feeling artificial and repetitive.

[Deus Siddis]

That could be a good general solution, but the execution might be too gimmicky. Piloting should be about piloting, not an abstract wave manipulation game of sorts.

So what I would suggest is that to avoid this sort of spec obstacles that maybe originate from the gravity wells of objects and the spec wakes of other ships, you have to stear your ship around or else they will knock you back to normal speed, cut out your spec drive for a duration or even damage your ship. And then the pirates and others of that type will come out to feast on you, their biggest source of prey being vessels who hit a spec drive speed bump and are temporarily stranded.

[safemode]

the thing is, when in spec, you're not speeding through space. So the idea of dodging things doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Much less sense then manipulating a bubble via a little reflex type gimmick game.

It's not as fun as slipstreaming either, where you are speeding through hyperspace and picking conduits to hitch onto.


I think this is a good idea for a solution, but the execution needs to be hammered out and polished. Whatever ends up being done will keep the pilot engaged, make their skill directly related to their ship's performance while in spec, and it puts real limits on spec without introducing a lot of artificial nonsense.


Edit:
spec compresses space so that you dont have to move fast to get to point B from point A. This does not get translated into real space, it can't, because in real space, that would mean you'd be traveling faster than light. That's why i hate the idea of saying you're "compressing space" because it gives people the idea that space is crumpling for that ship in front of them and they're being stretched across it as far as other people see are concerned and then when they stop compressing space (turn off spec) their rears catch up to them and viola, they're at their destination. Can't happen that way, in any method of imagination. SPEC compresses space, but you can't travel over compressed space, otherwise you would be compressed as well. The only way to not be affected by your own SPEC is if you isolate yourself from it's effect, and then tunnel through compressed space. This, however, isolates you from normal space-time, thus you could say that you're traveling in a "subspace" while in SPEC. Completely cut off from the rest of space-time. Should sound familiar, and that's not a coincidence. Now, just about the only thing really different about SPEC compared to Warp drive is that we make gravity waves pass through normal space-time (which is plausible, seeing as how gravity ought to be more powerful but isn't and we dont know why), and this hinders SPEC travel.

But this is all really for another thread on the "correctness" of the visual and physical effects of SPEC travel. Some things were done not out of correctness but simply for gameplay, and that's where we're at now with it.

[Deus Siddis]

the thing is, when in spec, you're not speeding through space. So the idea of dodging things doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

You're speeding relative to the gravity wells from which these obstacles form in both your suggestion and my adaption of it. If Spec completely separated you from the normal universe you are trying to get around in, then you would not be affected by the gravity well of something when you approached it in normal space.

And forget about making sense, none of this is in anyway based on reality or sense. That ship has sailed.

So I think what should be done is to build a fiction around gameplay that is solid and sensical. That's why I suggest navigating through a maze of spec obstacles, when traveling in spec. Because we already know that anyone who is attracted to this sort of game is going to enjoy that sort of maneuvering / navigating sort of thing. But a 2d star-treky magic-field mini game they might not.

Plus it sounds like it might be too simple to not get boring after the first 20 minutes of travel gameplay. And even in 0.5, you still spend alot of time traveling. Alot.


If you want a minigame that is unrelated to piloting, maybe a repair mini game would be good, for when your ship is damaged or if your spec or jump drive becomes "unaligned" or "destabilized" or whatever. A put it back together sort of puzzle game or something. Just at least not while you are trying to fly the ship though.


Speaking of break-downs, your idea of the spec drive breaking down at random times might be a good solution as well, if it meant a high risk of hostiles catching up and attacking you, or even being attracted by your temporary inability to escape. Perhaps any vessel with an unhealthy 'spec field' would show up on the sensors as such. That way fights and skin-of-your-teeth flights would become alot more common in deep space flight, which would make that leg of travel alot more interesting. So I wouldn't let go of this idea either.

[AzureSky]

Rather than rewriting SPEC, wouldn't it just be easier to be able to specify an override value to the current faction relations? So if you are currently in good relations with pirates, but select a patrol mission related to pirates, those units spawned for the mission have their attitude adjusted down. If you then kill them, all pirates are more negative to you, but if you evade them, the attitudes stay the same after the mission is over.

Something like this is needed for the Privateer storyline anyway; You start out neutral with the militia, but then take on missions running contraband. It fakes it by setting the relations to negative, instead of only lowering it for those missions. Then they attack you for the rest of the game.

[HoodedWraith]

I agree with parts of what safemode is saying here, because honestly, I get tired of seeing three or four ships every couple of hours. On the other hand, while I like the time it takes to get from point A to point B, if that increased too much my attention span would wander horribly, which I believe is partially what was happening with other players; hence the complaints.

The nav lane bit I agree completely on. Ships need an established set of routes in system to make it so that the player can see all of those happy vessels flying about 'close up' as opposed to several AU away on the scanner. Outside of a nav lane, gravatic/spatial/etc interference could be used as an explanation as to why you can't SPEC so quickly in direct leaps, thus allowing interceptors and faster ships to overtake cargo vessels and cap ships much more easily. Then the SPEC lanes could basically end up being regions of space that the SPEC drive can push itself to the limit on, creating a minute or two low speed 'onramp' to the SPEC lane, and then a rapid transit to the 'offramp' and your destination. Also, assigning this to AI ships as well would definitely make the commerce raiding aspect quite a bit more tricky and fun, especially with the implementation of an anti SPEC drone/mine/unit that you could recover after a successful heist.

However, Deus Siddis:

I've found that fights are uncomfortably common when flying cargo runs, they have a tendency to occur at launch, halfway through, and at landing; even when I'm completely empty and broke. With the current level of AI being able to find you no matter what, and of course pop out of SPEC before you do in some cases (being harassed by a full squadron of Goddards is not fun in a Llama), and also the slightly irritating fact of life that the factions tend to have an almost random landing to landing drop in affection (the Merchant's Guild and Confeds lose love for me when I just run food to their stations almost as badly as they would if I was ship hunting)... it would just make things even more infuriating for the small shuttle pilot like myself. My primary save is stuck on Atlantis because of encounters, and I have yet to shoot back at anything other than one specific faction (the name escapes me at the moment)... and yet the Confeds are all attacking me as if I'd nuked a couple of space stations.