Discussion: ways to encourage players to pvp.

[Lecic]

Pirates are not limited to isanths.
Im sure pirates and other Ai factions are planned to be a challenge, which means they will have bigger ships - not just isanths.
And this means more parts to salvage.

And secondly, i'd say getting resources for big ships SHOULD take ages.

Its not good when players can hit server/pc limits so fast.

Ok, with my proposed HP system, ships have a certain amount of health, and once that health reaches a critical number (10%?) the ship completely stops working. However, you can take a ship out earlier by, say, finding the bridge and killing all the crew and computers.

I'm pretty sure this is the system the devs are going to go with (as opposed to no physical damage to ships until they run out of health), because otherwise, missiles, mines, and explosive/punch through/penetrating tertiaries are pretty useless.

No matter how big the enemies get away from spawn, you'll still need a decent ship compared to them to take them on without needing to spend lots of cash on repairs, and you'll still lose a larger percentage of the blocks than you would currently in a take down.

I agree, large ships should be rare and important, as opposed to the standard faction ship as they are now. I'd rather see big factions have a single capital ship, and small handful of battleships, supported by smaller ships, than how it is now.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

The thing is, from what size on should they be rare? I mean, having a ship that is like... 500 m long.. I'm not sure but I would find it awesome if the "average" ship would have enough size for proper interiors and stuff like that. ^^

 

[Lecic]

The thing is, from what size on should they be rare? I mean, having a ship that is like... 500 m long.. I'm not sure but I would find it awesome if the "average" ship would have enough size for proper interiors and stuff like that. ^^

Yeah, I was thinking that 50-200m ships (large enough to have an ok interior but nothing luxurious) would be a decent average, as opposed to 1800m titans everywhere.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

Yeah, everything above 1000, or at least 1500 should be extremely rare. Below 1000, very rare, below 500, rare, below 200, more common?

 

[BDLS]

Just a passing thought, but maybe with the upcoming faction point system there can be an upkeep system. The idea is that the mass of all your factioned ships is combined and requires X amount of faction points to be able to field. Naturally, as a server option only and not mandatory.

 

[therimmer96]

Random and rare anomalies like wormholes that lead to something valuable like an area of space full of loads of resources would be quite valuable to control. Factions would be forced to fight for control, or trade for passage through to get what ever is on the other side

 

[pod11]

I think collecting materials to build 1 km ship should be work for weeks for entire faction.

Building 200m alone should be possible alone in about a week.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

A whole week? And weeks for the 1km thing? The question what exactly you do in that whole week. I mean, building your first 200m as a faction should perhaps take a bit, but then producing more should go faster. Same with big ships actually, part of the work should be to get a shipyard capable of even building that ship. :D After that only ressources would be an issues, but after the production facilities are done and the first ship build, the ships after that should take less time.
I would love if factions end up having standarized ships, like a few factions already have. So that you can fly through space, then you look out your cockpit and see a bunch of ships thinking: "OH my! Look, 2 corvettes and a Hammertype frigate of Faction XYZ! Good that they are not known for being aggressive." (example)

Gathering ressources needs some kind of automation, too, like AI controlled gatheres in asteriod fields and AI miners on planets, so the faction members can focus on designing ships and fighting with them and organizing trade (etc) while the AI handles putting together ships in a shipyard (after the players build the first prototype) and gathering the ressources for it.

 

[Commodore]

A whole week? And weeks for the 1km thing? The question what exactly you do in that whole week. I mean, building your first 200m as a faction should perhaps take a bit, but then producing more should go faster. Same with big ships actually, part of the work should be to get a shipyard capable of even building that ship. :D After that only ressources would be an issues, but after the production facilities are done and the first ship build, the ships after that should take less time.
I would love if factions end up having standarized ships, like a few factions already have. So that you can fly through space, then you look out your cockpit and see a bunch of ships thinking: "OH my! Look, 2 corvettes and a Hammertype frigate of Faction XYZ! Good that they are not known for being aggressive." (example)

Gathering ressources needs some kind of automation, too, like AI controlled gatheres in asteriod fields and AI miners on planets, so the faction members can focus on designing ships and fighting with them and organizing trade (etc) while the AI handles putting together ships in a shipyard (after the players build the first prototype) and gathering the ressources for it.

The problem arises serverside, remember that everything that happens on the players computers needs to be calculated on the server, many of the busier servers have high end CPUs, and still struggle with lag spikes due to not being able to keep up. Having AI flying around when players are not nearby is going to make it much worse. (server only loads areas where players are)

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

The game isn't fully optimized yet.
Hm, perhaps instead of actual AI ships it would more be like.. like, you send 3 AI gathers in a sector, then their effience is calculated based on the asteriods, their salvage beams, their speed and their storage. So the game calculates that they would be able to gather around 3 of ressource A, 5 of B and 1 of C every 10 minutes or so, which is added to the faction's global storage...?
Like, the AI gatherers would gather when you are there, but their work is more some kind of decoration, as in, they fly to asteriods and shot salvage beams at them and then go back to a drop-off point, but they don't actually pick up anything or such because what they actually manage to gather is moreso a ressource stream of some sorts? That sounds sort of RTSish, I know. And on planets it would be some kind of mining building perhaps? The same could go for asteriouds, too, instead of gatherer drones.
-> This way the AI ships would not load, at least not their ships and their AI, but they would still work in form of small calculations that run in the background.

And the shipyards? Well, that's kinda simple. Those would just be huge, docking area like structures (player-designed, but the 'drydock'-area must be big enough for the ordered ship) which you tell to build blueprint X, which costs materials that are made by automated factories from ressources.
It would tell you "Ship done in 1 hour" and that's it. It would just be a timer in the background and if you go away for an hour and then come back the ship would just be sitting there in the drydock, waiting to be parked somewhere, while if you choose to watch the yard you would see how a ghost image of the blueprint is sloooowly filled with actual blocks.

 

[Commodore]

Those are nice ideas, it would be interesting to see them implemented.

 

[Lecic]

A whole week? And weeks for the 1km thing? The question what exactly you do in that whole week. I mean, building your first 200m as a faction should perhaps take a bit, but then producing more should go faster. Same with big ships actually, part of the work should be to get a shipyard capable of even building that ship. :D After that only ressources would be an issues, but after the production facilities are done and the first ship build, the ships after that should take less time.
I would love if factions end up having standarized ships, like a few factions already have. So that you can fly through space, then you look out your cockpit and see a bunch of ships thinking: "OH my! Look, 2 corvettes and a Hammertype frigate of Faction XYZ! Good that they are not known for being aggressive." (example)

Gathering ressources needs some kind of automation, too, like AI controlled gatheres in asteriod fields and AI miners on planets, so the faction members can focus on designing ships and fighting with them and organizing trade (etc) while the AI handles putting together ships in a shipyard (after the players build the first prototype) and gathering the ressources for it.

I'm not sure I see why it would speed up after you built your first one, unless your first one happens to be a heavy asteroid miner. I mean, it'd still take the same amount of time to gather all the materials.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

No, I mean like, the first ship to build would take longer since you first have to build the things that gather ressources for you and also the fitting yard. But after you got the basics for a "mass" production set you can start to build more ships in quicker succession, as long as the ressources keep flowing.
Of course, right now with how things work every ship takes an equal amount of time to build.

 

[pod11]

No, I mean like, the first ship to build would take longer since you first have to build the things that gather ressources for you and also the fitting yard. But after you got the basics for a "mass" production set you can start to build more ships in quicker succession, as long as the ressources keep flowing.
Of course, right now with how things work every ship takes an equal amount of time to build.

If you can mass produce, have ai gather resourced for you or in any way get materials for 200m ship in 1 hour, noone is going to give a fuck about cubes, noone will fight for them, and noone will even bother undocking their 200m ships becouse they wont have anything to fight for.

Whole point of making collecting materials take long is to make those materials of any value.
The faster you get them, the less valuable they are, and at some point noone cares about materials or even finished cubes enough to fight or trade for it.
And you are so stubborn to have everything FAST.
You dont have a game without any challenge.
You want building sandbox, which wil be avaible, but we are talking about survival mode here.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

Well, I wrote "mass". I didn't mean churn out 3 ships per second or anything like that. Or even per hour. Or per day.
And small ships shouldn't take too long to build, that would be boring. You also forget that if you build a drydock for a 200m ship, your 500m shipt still cannot be build. You first need a bigger dock, which would cost more ressources and time. And of course the production time of the bigger ship would be longer as well.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

I still agree with 'non-purchasable loot that is a rare find on planets', as this will then encourage players to explore as well as compete over resource-rich planets.

And with the new crafting system coming, rare items that are useful for crafting will be sought after by players! So a brutal pvp resource war commences...

 

[Jerry_Brinefield]

We really need resources. In strategy games like civilization, the main source of colonization and conquering is the contestment of natural resources among players. Having Large asteroids which you could set up a mining rig to mine fuel for ships would be a great way to do something like this. Having oil fields with oil rigs and stuff like that would be a great way to introduce farming that would also cause competition and pvp. Additionally, the introduction of some sort of high cost medical resource such as bacta or kolto could also prove interesting. As many other users said, a system based on trading and economics of natural goods is the only way to foster competition and the desire to gain resources through conquering.