Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations

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Boaal
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Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations

Post by Boaal »

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.
Last edited by Boaal on Sat Nov 20, 2010 12:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Deus Siddis
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Re: Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations

Post by Deus Siddis »

Are you sure a destroyed station is instantly or quickly replaced somewhere else? I never noticed that before myself.

And unless something radical changed with VS' dynamic universe in the last release, you can turn the tides of a war by destroying enough of a faction's materiel. I remember my brother essentially destroyed the Aeran Ascendancy by constantly sabotaging their frontlines with the Andolian Protectorate, back in v.0.4.3.

To answer you question regarding factions, their allegiances don't change, though this would be a nice feature that could very well be added in the future.

Same with station ownership, I've brought up in the past as well, along with planetary colonies (which are essentially the same thing). All of this plot and dynamic universe becomes a lot more interesting when the player has a stake in it. Valuable and immobile assets like stations are just such a stake. Owning them could make you very powerful and wealthy, but if the Aera move in and wipe the system, you could lose all of that. So now you have personal reasons not to let that happen.
Boaal
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Re: Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations

Post by Boaal »

Yeah, there is definite insta-replace, at least in the svn version.

Edit: Ok, it's not insta replace when something else blows a station up apparently.... I'm gonna test this further to see if it's just player related. It also could just be the fact that I'm running a pretty old SVN so maybe things have changed. I'm a little wary of updating again, though because I'm not sure if it'll run on a mac with the updated svn changes. I should probably try anyway, really.

More update edit: Yeah, I was right. When the AI blows up a station it takes a while for the station to reappear. When the player damages a station the system goes into mad-build mode - I was attacking the Klkk medical in Enyo, I got the first one to red and then got swamped. I came back and there was another medical. I hit that one next, got it to orange and then got pounded on by a tesla. I returned again to find not only had they built yet another medical, there was also an extra fighter base. In fifteen minutes of raiding, I had Enyo filled with Aera-Klkk battles, four or five medicals and three fighter bases.

It'd be nice to see the option for random generated faction relationships on universe creation, and then have it change as the universe is played in. Perhaps a story mode where you play as Ducalion and there are set factions, and then a non-story mode where everythign just gets randomly generated and you can choose your own pilot and flight group name.

Edit: You were right the system take over thing is already added, I just didn't realise until last night when I started playing again and decided to help the Aera expand. Now I'm back in Cephid 17, where I started, only it's run by the Ascendancy now :)
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Re: Ideas and questions: players, systems, universe, stations

Post by Shark »

Might be nice to have two sets of models for each station: an in-construction version and a completed version. The first one would be spawned when a new station is being built, and after some time it would be replaced with the final version.

Though, stations really shouldn't be being rebuilt every few minutes (or weeks for that matter) regardless, so I am not sure it would even be worth the effort.
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