Is slow travel a contributing factor to the decline of PvP?

[Employee763]

There are a lot of issues hindering PvP, but travel tedium is what always comes to my mind first.

Vanilla jump & warp values are absurd. The entire point of a tech like jumping is inter-stellar travel, but in Starmade it takes the form of a feeble, intra-stellar limp.

Either the universe is too vast, or travel is too pathetic. Whichever - the result is that ALL Starmade players, even on the busiest multiplayer servers, play mostly in isolation other than chat and the 3-4 people who may be active in their faction. It's lonely, it's slow, and interaction for ANY purpose is f-ing tedious.

I disagree, I've thought the opposite. Galaxy is too small for my taste

The thing is, people will always set up 20-30 minutes away from each other. Even if you increase jump distance it'll always happen.

Uneven resources distribution is how you really encourage conflict.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

War should be considered a "meta-game". It should be a game of strategy. A game where factions try to take systems with key/scarce resources, and intercept enemy trading routes, and create blockades to starve their enemy; and try to prevent their enemy from doing these things; and make (and break) alliances with other factions to achieve all of that.

There are no scarce resources. There are no trading routes. There's no way to create an effective blockade.

There's no reason for war and no real way to "win" a war.

Without war there's no PvP.

 

[NeonSturm]

Ideally, you would have one or many third-factions to hide behind if you recover from war with your recent opponent. (e.g: by having your opponent draw fire on himself if he chases your faction too much).

Each faction should need to build up, raid a resource-generator and leave with the loot before they loose too many assets to holding a contested ground.

There should be things that can only be archived through war and others which are only gained through peace (economy, defending). We humans live inbetween Order and Chaos, too much of one means our death.

 

[Nickizzy]

Maybe there should be resource generators, systems that have massive diposits of certain types of ore. It would be unclaimable, stations could only be so big, and would be close to the core so factions would have to fight over it. There would still be ore everywhere else, but far less than currently, on enough for a large faction. The reasource cores would only be in the starting galaxy, so, as NeonSturm said, factions would build up and assult a reasource core, hold it as long as possible, and leave before they loose their cargo ships.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

Maybe there should be resource generators, systems that have massive diposits of certain types of ore. It would be unclaimable, stations could only be so big, and would be close to the core so factions would have to fight over it. There would still be ore everywhere else, but far less than currently, on enough for a large faction. The reasource cores would only be in the starting galaxy, so, as NeonSturm said, factions would build up and assult a reasource core, hold it as long as possible, and leave before they loose their cargo ships.

I think I want better AI; so that a faction can take control multiple systems and setup automated defenses, automated miners, automated cargo haulers, etc. Otherwise it's virtually impossible to get enough players online to make controlling/using/defending multiple system viable.

Then; I think I want multiple different types of consumables (e.g. food, fuel, etc) where you can live without them but having them gives you a strategic advantage that makes them desirable (and worth fighting for), and where no system has more than one of them (so you want multiple systems to get all of the different types). One of the resources could be currency (gold deposits that can be processed directly into credits/$$?), another could be food (large scale farms on special planets?); and another resource could be AI people (that you use to run AI mining operations, etc), where you have to pay them $$ per week and/or provide them food, or they get grumpy and quit their job and run off with stolen resources.

Mostly; I'd want factions to take a system containing some relatively rare resource, setup an AI mining operation to harvest that resource, then have AI cargo haulers (and AI military escorts to protect them) that automatically take the resources to their main base for processing; so that factions are constantly looking for more resources (gold, AI people, fuel, food, ...) to keep everything running and/or expand.

That would/should/could give plenty of scope for meaningful war.

 

[Ithirahad]

where you have to pay them $$ per week and/or provide them food, or they get grumpy and quit their job and run off with stolen resources.

This does not allow for people going inactive and coming back to the game. Actively using NPCs in ships and whatnot should require pay and food, sure, but if NPCs are standing idle, doing nothing, seeing as this is a game the resource requirements of NPCs should be brought down to somewhere very near (but not) zero.

Alternatively, we could have hyperspace cryostorage we can pack NPCs in, but taking them out should require a few IRL days of recovery period before they can be put on active duty again. (Also they should lose a few skill points every time they do this, or somesuch thing)

 

[TBB]

I'm feeling confident that this whole PvP thing was planned out or at least almost planned out at the moment SM became playable. Why would Schine otherwise have implemented faction points? Faction points do not have any use right now and if the team didn't think of anything. I definitely have some ideas to put them to use.

If faction points would have an use it would probably be something so that players work together as a faction creating politics, and so, friction between factions, just because you can do something with a lot of bling using faction points. If the top tier works together with the low tier actively, they both could become top tier overnight and I've seen that in some simple games before with bigger communities than that of SM (at the time). The only disadvantage of this is something very real in our society and that is fascism. Of course only in an "ideal" system, made possible by faction points creating actual trust in people and even in people you might have never met.

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Honestly, I think the main reason of decline of PvP is the lack of reasons to start a war in the first place.

And what is the #1 reason to attack some country in the real world? Resources. Territory. That's it. The main reason that is present in Starmade and pretty much starts all the issues stated in OP post is abundance of resources.

Let's start it easy first:
Abundance of resources makes "going far away and shutting yourself in" so easy I won't even explain it.
Since it's easy to do that, it makes many people consider starting their own factions instead of joining stronger ones. That leads to a problem which basically makes lots of servers having hundreds of 1 man factions. Absolute majority of such faction are too small or weak yet they can exist peacefully and without problems. Majority of them face ignorance.

What else?
Gigantism. Obtaining resources is way too easy. You can spend few hours of your life mining and make huge silly ships. Access to vast amount of resources pretty much makes it easy to expand these ships in size leading to the gigantism problem.
On the other hand, in battle, it's easy to lose your ship and starting all over will take way too much time. But why? Why is that that you think of your time, not actual economical damage? Because there is no economical damage. Everything is too easy to get.

No one thinks of economical reasons because there is none therefore anyone willing to participate in PvP pretty much loses his/her/their spent time on nothing.

You can expand this list even further but what solutions?

Here's mine.
Make getting resources far harder. That's it. Easy to say, hard to implement.
Instead of doing the same generation everywhere, you should make certain rich/ultra-rich areas on the map and make everything else less good. Planets should be far more rare or contain less amount of resources. Just by making that we can make factions stick to richer areas and actually fight each other for that. This will actually force some players to either join stronger factions or trade for resources which is pretty rare now. Let's admit it - if you were in StarMade world you wouldn't consider making your own factions without certain starting capital, idea or something else. You would join a stronger faction instead of making your own. More people in a faction usually means more activity, both political and actual.
Bigger factions usually means more intrafactional activity. That also means more conflicts between factions and stuff.
Basically it will force players to consider each other's existence.

Also I think we need to tone down asteroid respawning and force factions to expand, not just stick to one territory.

Just by forcing these two things you can already make players have conflicts. Conflicts almost always mean war. And suddenly we see more a more lively universe.

 

[Lecic]

You can spend few hours of your life mining and make huge silly ships.

Just a quick clarification point- what do you consider to be a "huge silly ship" in terms of size?

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Just a quick clarification point- what do you consider to be a "huge silly ship" in terms of size?

Size doesn't really matter in this case. It's basically making a ship which is a total overkill for its task. A death star to destroy a vanilla pirate station or something like that.
We all know that people tend to build bigger ships to defeat some opponent which makes the opponent expand and that closes the loop.

 

[Nickizzy]

Honestly, I think the main reason of decline of PvP is the lack of reasons to start a war in the first place.

And what is the #1 reason to attack some country in the real world? Resources. Territory. That's it. The main reason that is present in Starmade and pretty much starts all the issues stated in OP post is abundance of resources.

Let's start it easy first:
Abundance of resources makes "going far away and shutting yourself in" so easy I won't even explain it.
Since it's easy to do that, it makes many people consider starting their own factions instead of joining stronger ones. That leads to a problem which basically makes lots of servers having hundreds of 1 man factions. Absolute majority of such faction are too small or weak yet they can exist peacefully and without problems. Majority of them face ignorance.

What else?
Gigantism. Obtaining resources is way too easy. You can spend few hours of your life mining and make huge silly ships. Access to vast amount of resources pretty much makes it easy to expand these ships in size leading to the gigantism problem.
On the other hand, in battle, it's easy to lose your ship and starting all over will take way too much time. But why? Why is that that you think of your time, not actual economical damage? Because there is no economical damage. Everything is too easy to get.

No one thinks of economical reasons because there is none therefore anyone willing to participate in PvP pretty much loses his/her/their spent time on nothing.

You can expand this list even further but what solutions?

Here's mine.
Make getting resources far harder. That's it. Easy to say, hard to implement.
Instead of doing the same generation everywhere, you should make certain rich/ultra-rich areas on the map and make everything else less good. Planets should be far more rare or contain less amount of resources. Just by making that we can make factions stick to richer areas and actually fight each other for that. This will actually force some players to either join stronger factions or trade for resources which is pretty rare now. Let's admit it - if you were in StarMade world you wouldn't consider making your own factions without certain starting capital, idea or something else. You would join a stronger faction instead of making your own. More people in a faction usually means more activity, both political and actual.
Bigger factions usually means more intrafactional activity. That also means more conflicts between factions and stuff.
Basically it will force players to consider each other's existence.

Also I think we need to tone down asteroid respawning and force factions to expand, not just stick to one territory.

Just by forcing these two things you can already make players have conflicts. Conflicts almost always mean war. And suddenly we see more a more lively universe.

The problem with that would be that reasources would be so rare that people couldn't risk losing ships. I'd also add something that would add incentive to fight for reasources.

Spoiler: Combat rewards

The basic idea is from a game called from the depths, and in the game, when you fight an enemy and destroy part of their ship, a certain amount of that reasource would come back to you in it's base components.

How I think this would work in starmade is that all weapon computers could be linked with a storage. When fighting, if you destroyed a block you would get a (configural) amount of the base cost to make it. Ex: Basic gary hull costs 2 composite and 2 mesh, if you get 50% of what you destroy, you would get 1 mesh and 1 composite for each gray hull you destroy. It would probably calculate every 1/2 seconds how many of each block each system destroyed, then each block would have a value in capsules and mesh and composite. The ending values would be placed in the system's storage. If the storage was full or was nonexistent, the blocks would simply be destroyed and nothing gained from the fight.

It would add a reason to raid and fight other people, because you could be a pirate and steal or be a faction and raid other groups(and take the high density resource zone for a time) instead of slowly mining your way up.
Storages would probably still dump their contents into space, but you would get the bases for the storage.

Little idea, I think I've brought it up a few times before with no response anyway. Hence the spoiler.

 

[NeonSturm]

Spoiler: Side-topic Response to Nickizzy's "Combat Rewards"

The problem with that would be that reasources would be so rare that people couldn't risk losing ships. I'd also add something that would add incentive to fight for reasources.

Spoiler: Combat rewards

The basic idea is from a game called from the depths, and in the game, when you fight an enemy and destroy part of their ship, a certain amount of that reasource would come back to you in it's base components.

How I think this would work in starmade is that all weapon computers could be linked with a storage. When fighting, if you destroyed a block you would get a (configural) amount of the base cost to make it. Ex: Basic gary hull costs 2 composite and 2 mesh, if you get 50% of what you destroy, you would get 1 mesh and 1 composite for each gray hull you destroy. It would probably calculate every 1/2 seconds how many of each block each system destroyed, then each block would have a value in capsules and mesh and composite. The ending values would be placed in the system's storage. If the storage was full or was nonexistent, the blocks would simply be destroyed and nothing gained from the fight.

It would add a reason to raid and fight other people, because you could be a pirate and steal or be a faction and raid other groups(and take the high density resource zone for a time) instead of slowly mining your way up.
Storages would probably still dump their contents into space, but you would get the bases for the storage.

Little idea, I think I've brought it up a few times before with no response anyway. Hence the spoiler.

SpringRTS has this too: "spoils of war", "wracks" and researched many flaws.

The problem of "SpringRTS / Balanced Annihilation" is that your and the enemy wrecks combined is 100% payback for war.
Ofcourse you need energy, time and build power to convert all that metal back to units, but it's either:

1. The stronger player gets even more, the weaker gets nothing. The stronger comes back even stronger.
   
2. The weaker tries to win a losing fight and completely ruins his own eco. The stronger can meanwhile spend 20% on his own eco and then suddenly spam super-units to rush into the enemy base and steamroll everything on their way.

Unless you pay back the losing player (respawning his ship at his base for 50% cost), you see the same problems in StarMade between beginner factions and trolls which could get their hands on some assets or a group of trolls / unfriendly players.

 

[BDLS]

My main gripe is how tedious bringing in a ship is.

Mining isn't bad, just manually making every single block type for your shipyard inventory sucks. If the shipyard linked to a factory complex automatically processed the parts from your ores and meshes etc it would be pretty sweet. Overseeing making 10 red deco comps or 2 yellow light rods for example is a bit of a hassle.

 

[Reilly Reese]

My main gripe is how tedious bringing in a ship is.

Mining isn't bad, just manually making every single block type for your shipyard inventory sucks. If the shipyard linked to a factory complex automatically processed the parts from your ores and meshes etc it would be pretty sweet. Overseeing making 10 red deco comps or 2 yellow light rods for example is a bit of a hassle.

Agreed.

 

[Nickizzy]

Spoiler: Side-topic question

Spoiler: Side-topic Response to Nickizzy's "Combat Rewards"

SpringRTS has this too: "spoils of war", "wracks" and researched many flaws.

The problem of "SpringRTS / Balanced Annihilation" is that your and the enemy wrecks combined is 100% payback for war.
Ofcourse you need energy, time and build power to convert all that metal back to units, but it's either:

1. The stronger player gets even more, the weaker gets nothing. The stronger comes back even stronger.
   
2. The weaker tries to win a losing fight and completely ruins his own eco. The stronger can meanwhile spend 20% on his own eco and then suddenly spam super-units to rush into the enemy base and steamroll everything on their way.

Unless you pay back the losing player (respawning his ship at his base for 50% cost), you see the same problems in StarMade between beginner factions and trolls which could get their hands on some assets or a group of trolls / unfriendly players.

Any Idea how to balance that? Keep in mind that you'd only get about a tenth of the bases, and you could always send your spoils into cargo ships that jump away when the the enemy starts to win.
My idea is that this would have to go with some multiship/fleet corporations, where you can suffer a loss, the enemy grows stronger, then you push a big raid to a main base and get a great victory(or defeat). Small rouges could raid small transports too, of the likes of the trading guild.

 

[NeonSturm]

My main gripe is how tedious bringing in a ship is.

Mining isn't bad, just manually making every single block type for your shipyard inventory sucks. If the shipyard linked to a factory complex automatically processed the parts from your ores and meshes etc it would be pretty sweet. Overseeing making 10 red deco comps or 2 yellow light rods for example is a bit of a hassle.

I already would be happy if the shipyard could use a factory to slice blocks or reprogram computers using different components, etc.
Making categories more important and items less.

Spoiler: [USER=671400]Nickizzy[/USER]

Any Idea how to balance that? Keep in mind that you'd only get about a tenth of the bases, and you could always send your spoils into cargo ships that jump away when the the enemy starts to win.

That ruins the purpose.
The only balance possibility I can think of atm, is to reward the loser too.
10% spoils of war, 80% payback, 10% lost or similar.

 

[Nickizzy]

It would make rebuilding ships a lot easier. You could practically, with effort, simply place ores in a storage(or send drones out to mine!\0/fleet comand!), and spit out ships on the other end.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

At the very least it would be nice if we could set NPCs to handle the factory specifics.

 

[Ithirahad]

send drones out to mine!\0/fleet comand!

That feature might not be part of fleet command for quite a long time. Just sayin'.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

It's been said that the AI system they're working on can have fleets operate whilst unloaded in the game, so I wouldn't be too surprised if that's one of the functions they can perform. I guess we'll just have to wait and see though.