Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations
Posted: Sun Nov 14, 2010 12:46 pm
Disclaimer: I realise this is all pretty advanced stuff and won't crop up at any point in the near future, but I'd like to make the suggestions anyway in the hopes of sparking some discussion, idea bouncing, etc.
The one thing really bugs me, and probably the easiest thing to 'fix' at the moment, is that when you go into a system and you blow up a station there, or you just damage one enough, another one is instantly generated somewhere else in system and that's fairly irritating. It makes the effort pretty wasted and gives you the sense that you haven't really effected anything, you've just pissed some guys off, which you could have done easily enough and at far less cost, by just blowing the crap out of their ships. Blowing up stations doesn't automatically trigger an in system war, which was what I was trying to do when I discovered this, and that's fine not everything will trigger "omggigantorbattlesplz" but it'd be nice to have your presence a bit more tangible in the universe.
I then think it'd be interesting if the player themselves could own stations, buy them and run them, etc. It'd be a nice way of earning money on the side, and give them more to do and think about rather than confining the game to a long string of system hopping interspaced by cargo missions and dog-fights. As fun as that is, it wears out after a while, even with the randomised universe, which does throw out some very fun little instances every now and then. Of course, if you were to have player-owned stations and such, I'd expect that the stations would only be able to be built by something like a clydesdale, or maybe some other specialised ship type for the rather large amount of materials necessary. Alongside this, you would have to protect that station because it's rather inevitable that somewhere in the game, someone is not going to like you, and that someone will probably attack your station and this will cause a lot of monetary loss if your station has no defences and gets blown up. I won't go into player fleets, that topic has been brought up time and time again, and I'm pretty sure it's easy enough to figure out where things like that fit into the equation.
System malleability. I don't know if this is planned or not at some later stage of development, but we have ai wars at various places in the massive universe and maybe I just haven't noticed it, but they don't really seem to effect much. They're a lot of fun to get involved in or watch from the sidelines. One my most memorable times in Vegastrike was being chased down by a veritable cloud of Dgn,Uln,Luddite,etc pilots. I think by that point I'd given up trying to fight them off because I'd start out with killing a swarm of ten, and then they'd come back with twenty, and I'd kill them, and then they'd be back with forty, etc, and this cloud was like eighty different ships trying kamikaze into me, so I just ran. And I ended up in a Rlaan system, and the Rlaan jumped to my rescue and there was a gigantic, if one sided battle, but anyway I digress. The ai are generally prone to invading each other, but I'm not sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, that anything ever comes of it. What I assume, given that when I blow a station up, it just respawns a second later,and so I'd assume it remains with the original faction it was tied to, whether or not the invading force wins. I don't know how you'd judge the winner or loser of that war, and who then gets the system - if it's just a matter of destroying a certain percentage of the enemy and all their bases and then the invaders construct their own stations in place, etc or something else. It would, however, be nice to see a malleable universe where things really change depending on what's happening around you.
And my final point is actually just a simple question. The factions, as they are set out at the start of the game - are their allegiances set in stone, or randomly generated?
Ok, thanks for reading all that if you did.
The one thing really bugs me, and probably the easiest thing to 'fix' at the moment, is that when you go into a system and you blow up a station there, or you just damage one enough, another one is instantly generated somewhere else in system and that's fairly irritating. It makes the effort pretty wasted and gives you the sense that you haven't really effected anything, you've just pissed some guys off, which you could have done easily enough and at far less cost, by just blowing the crap out of their ships. Blowing up stations doesn't automatically trigger an in system war, which was what I was trying to do when I discovered this, and that's fine not everything will trigger "omggigantorbattlesplz" but it'd be nice to have your presence a bit more tangible in the universe.
I then think it'd be interesting if the player themselves could own stations, buy them and run them, etc. It'd be a nice way of earning money on the side, and give them more to do and think about rather than confining the game to a long string of system hopping interspaced by cargo missions and dog-fights. As fun as that is, it wears out after a while, even with the randomised universe, which does throw out some very fun little instances every now and then. Of course, if you were to have player-owned stations and such, I'd expect that the stations would only be able to be built by something like a clydesdale, or maybe some other specialised ship type for the rather large amount of materials necessary. Alongside this, you would have to protect that station because it's rather inevitable that somewhere in the game, someone is not going to like you, and that someone will probably attack your station and this will cause a lot of monetary loss if your station has no defences and gets blown up. I won't go into player fleets, that topic has been brought up time and time again, and I'm pretty sure it's easy enough to figure out where things like that fit into the equation.
System malleability. I don't know if this is planned or not at some later stage of development, but we have ai wars at various places in the massive universe and maybe I just haven't noticed it, but they don't really seem to effect much. They're a lot of fun to get involved in or watch from the sidelines. One my most memorable times in Vegastrike was being chased down by a veritable cloud of Dgn,Uln,Luddite,etc pilots. I think by that point I'd given up trying to fight them off because I'd start out with killing a swarm of ten, and then they'd come back with twenty, and I'd kill them, and then they'd be back with forty, etc, and this cloud was like eighty different ships trying kamikaze into me, so I just ran. And I ended up in a Rlaan system, and the Rlaan jumped to my rescue and there was a gigantic, if one sided battle, but anyway I digress. The ai are generally prone to invading each other, but I'm not sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, that anything ever comes of it. What I assume, given that when I blow a station up, it just respawns a second later,and so I'd assume it remains with the original faction it was tied to, whether or not the invading force wins. I don't know how you'd judge the winner or loser of that war, and who then gets the system - if it's just a matter of destroying a certain percentage of the enemy and all their bases and then the invaders construct their own stations in place, etc or something else. It would, however, be nice to see a malleable universe where things really change depending on what's happening around you.
And my final point is actually just a simple question. The factions, as they are set out at the start of the game - are their allegiances set in stone, or randomly generated?
Ok, thanks for reading all that if you did.