StarMade Devblog - Endgame Document Pt. 3

[JinM]

I think factions don't need to be about grouping for easier production and distributing logicistal problems. A sandbox game allready is about very time consuming building, and thus people will allways group up anyway. And because of fighting and mining and so much duties. Making production more complicated is not needed to make factions more interesting and appealing.

The only reason we have many solo stations/factions atm is because the build settings on the home stations are really bad: You allways have to fear that some jerk unprotects the HB and its docked ships when he has the permission to build on the HB.

 

[Asvarduil]

as I'm assuming this means you could gain an NPC factions trust, become a somewhat high rank and topple them from the inside.

This raises another question.

Will new NPC factions start up periodically? That could potentially be...technically challenging.

Still, being able to quest for factions, then 'disrupt' them, rinse, repeat, could be an unusual, but interesting play style. You're in essence being a U.S. Southerner.

 

[Lecic]

One man factions need to be viable, because not everyone wants to cooperate with others. Edymnion has it right. I don't want to be the only one maintaining a faction while others sit around.

Why do you people continue to equate solo players with factions being maintained by a single person? They are not the same.

I am not opposed to single players. I think the game has a lot of room to grow with solo builders and mercenaries and traders, but that is not the same as factions. Factions control territory and the stations that builders and miners live in, fight in wars and not in battles that mercenaries are hired for, and own the shops and economies that traders deal with in. Being a one man faction should be HARD, inactive factions should die without a very dedicated person maintaining them, and every player should not be carving their own one man empire out of a chunk of space. Part of reducing the amount of worthwhile stuff to control in a galaxy is to encourage fewer tiny factions and increase the number of large empires that can provide an interesting backdrop for those solo players.

 

[GDPR 302420]

Being a one man faction should be HARD almost impossible

FTFY

 

[Shaker]

I think the opposite is the solution to that problem.

all you did was repeat what i said, so not sure how its opposite...\
Across the Aussie servers, factions with 3+ players have lasted longer ingame than the vast majority of solo player factions. was my main point i was trying to get across.

i do agree that unfactioned players grouping up should be nowhere near as "powerful" as if they were factioned together.
Solo player factions should still be viable, but larger factions will always be able to control more space, maybe an upgraded alliance setting to "merge" a bunch of small factions.

 

[GDPR 302420]

all you did was repeat what i said, so not sure how its opposite...\
Across the Aussie servers, factions with 3+ players have lasted longer ingame than the vast majority of solo player factions. was my main point i was trying to get across.

i do agree that unfactioned players grouping up should be nowhere near as "powerful" as if they were factioned together.
Solo player factions should still be viable, but larger factions will always be able to control more space, maybe an upgraded alliance setting to "merge" a bunch of small factions.

You wanted players to be encouraged to group up.

I wanted players to be discouraged to make 1 man factions.


As Lecic said, "solo players" should be a viable choice, however a single player controlling an empire, entire production infastructure, an economy, territory, population and have a diplomatic stake in in galaxy should not be possible.

Playing by yourself as a bounty hunter or pirate should be possible, however running an entire empire by yourself should not be possible in any way shape or form.

 

[Black_Sun]

What if I want to only play in single player? Should I miss a big part of the game because it is almost impossible to maintain my own faction alone?

If not, should I spend most of the time managing my faction instead of actually playing the game because you do not want one man factions in multiplayer?

Is it possible to find another way of making players choose to join a faction instead of creating a new one without disturbing players who only play in singleplayer?

 

[Scypio]

Maybe the faction is too big?

Let's read together the end goal document. It is stated loud and clear that ressources will be scattered around several systems to promote exploration and interactions. So you HAVE TO control several systems to control said ressources.

Fleets are moving unloaded. Fleets will soon™ mine ressources unloaded. I bet everyone see what i'm looking at if unloaded combat isn't a thing. I don't plan on playing pokemon... Errrm i mean Starmade and catch every single mining fleet coming into my system to mine the rare ressources i took time to search and find inside the galaxy. Some people may find it funny at first but it won't when you will have 20 several fleets of a few mining drones coming to your system to steal your ressources. Note that i talk about only ONE system. Let's not talk about the nitghmare of 2, 3 or even 4 systems to look at every single time. That's stupid, we even have a patrol order for fleets and we can't use it properly.

I know unloaded combat will litterally take years to implement correctly and balance but it cannot be skipped. Otherwise unloaded orders shouldn't be a thing, it's the full package or nothing. You can't go halfway like that.

 

[serge1944]

For who says that it should not be possible to have a one man faction.I say you are wrong,why?Because single player,in single player you do not have the abilitie of having other players with you,you have the abilti to have npc/ai with you that simulates other players,even thats better cause with npc in your faction you have overhaul control on them.The thing is that most of you are forgetting that npc act like replacement to players,once npc will be emplemented and smat enough,factions will expand damastcly,of course several men faction aswell,but think of it like an rts game you are the one controling your empire alone,who you are controling are not players but still,once you have a player who joins you,you have the advantage of a more control and tasks,most of you only think of starmade future multyplayer only populated with players and not npc.

 

[kulbolen]

Discourage one man factions rather than encourage grouping.

do both. the mechanics that push me to spite the game and try to do well alone usually stem from beating the odds when the game says i cant. if theres a big benefit to not bothering, i wont bother.

If you say you like PvP but run to the next galaxy over so that no one ever comes close to you, nobody bats an eye.

i actually agree with you here, i find it really weird. i personally laugh when people run galaxies away to hide, but then do things like try to recruit or interact, or get frustrated when someone actually chases them. i know this is prob the opposite of what you mean, but i do bat an eye.

Gonna leave a link to a clip of a conversation between Schine and Veilith on twitch during his stream.

whos this guy lolol

One man factions need to be viable, because not everyone wants to cooperate with others. Edymnion has it right.

as a 1 man faction i agree. they should be "viable." and this should all be config setting able, for those who play sp or or want a like 0 downside easymode environment. but i think it should be much more difficult to "accomplish" things in game solo.

its hard to judge the future game based on the current balance, because i assume the devs know perfectly well its unbalanced as crap now and the final product will be very different... but if we were to judge right now, the biggest issue is, its INSANELY easy for a lone player to collect enough resources to quickly (within an hour or two on a brand new server) build stuff that exceeds the games ability to load or smoothly play right. so in 2 hours a lone player can "max out." sure a group could do it a bit faster, or collect a lot more TOTAL, but the total accomplishment doesnt really matter, just the usable accomplishment. i assume they already know this and itll change in the future.

 

[Ithirahad]

Fleets are moving unloaded. Fleets will soon™ mine ressources unloaded. I bet everyone see what i'm looking at if unloaded combat isn't a thing. I don't plan on playing pokemon... Errrm i mean Starmade and catch every single mining fleet coming into my system to mine the rare ressources i took time to search and find inside the galaxy. Some people may find it funny at first but it won't when you will have 20 several fleets of a few mining drones coming to your system to steal your ressources. Note that i talk about only ONE system. Let's not talk about the nitghmare of 2, 3 or even 4 systems to look at every single time. That's stupid, we even have a patrol order for fleets and we can't use it properly.

I believe that I heard that at some point, fleets will not be able to follow orders to go and do stuff inside someone else's territory unless the fleet is loaded.

Nevertheless, the announcement that there won't be unloaded fleet combat (just because people would cheese the system!?!) is very disappointing. If people tried to exploit the stat counting the game uses to make dedicated unloaded combat ships, it would be fairly trivial to set a trap for their ships, load the sector, and then tear them apart, and continue doing that until they stop using those ships. I'll hold out on final judgement until we hear more about the alternative territory contest mechanic, though.

 

[kulbolen]

im not sure if anyone heers referenced x3 yet, but it uses a stat weighting system for unloaded fleet combat, and its very possible to minmax for out of sector combat using a pretty wildly different composition than in sector... and that game doesnt allow you to purpos build ships. itd get pretty hilarious in starmade, but if the devs were slick they could come up with ways to prevent it. i think it has more to do with game optimizations and issues running everything at once since its scale is huge. but idk.

 

[Neon_42]

Why do you people continue to equate solo players with factions being maintained by a single person? They are not the same.

I am not opposed to single players. I think the game has a lot of room to grow with solo builders and mercenaries and traders, but that is not the same as factions. Factions control territory and the stations that builders and miners live in, fight in wars and not in battles that mercenaries are hired for, and own the shops and economies that traders deal with in. Being a one man faction should be HARD, inactive factions should die without a very dedicated person maintaining them, and every player should not be carving their own one man empire out of a chunk of space. Part of reducing the amount of worthwhile stuff to control in a galaxy is to encourage fewer tiny factions and increase the number of large empires that can provide an interesting backdrop for those solo players.

No, did you even read what I wrote? There has to be room for all players to fill each role they want to play as. This means that single players have to be able to play as an imperialist. They need to control territory. There is a balance that can be struck. I agree that single players shouldn't be able to carve out a large section of the galaxy, but they should be able to play the way they want. Even if it means a faction with only NPC members. You cannot say that only people with friends can play the game this way. What about single player? If I'm playing in my own galaxy I need to be able to form a faction without others, and the rules for this need to be the same in multiplayer so that we can practice, for when we join a server.

 

[GDPR 302420]

To Lecic RedAlert_007 or other users that think on a similar way:

Being a 1 man faction IS HARD the fast and bad explanation is because you are alone.

Lets suposse you can have your own 1 man empire of more than 15 systems, with the current game mechanics and sufering and atack from 2 or more players.

You really thing that player can manage to defend propperly his "empire" from that atack?

Most probably that "1 man empire" is going to lose all those systems except the homebase´s one. [At present it is more than balanced the one man faction vs factions of two or more players].

Big Empires do not even attempt to control 15 systems, let alone 1 man factions.

Resources are too common to justify permanent expansion outside your home system, any faction that has a clue generally doesn't do it.

Your whole argument is pretty much moot for that reason.

 

[kiddan]

Here's a though; What if you could recruit NPCs as factions members? You wouldn't earn factions points unless they are continually busy through work that affects another "player role" supporting the faction. A single player could manage their own faction much easier, but has to earn the money for startup costs (first few paychecks, crew quarters, ships, etc) through working for another player or NPC faction.

 

[apelsinsaft]

Utter nonsense. 5-10 people is "too big," for an EMPIRE, no less? The simple fact of the matter is that you cannot keep enough sectors loaded to defend your territory from unloaded fleets cruising through, no matter how big or small your faction is.

I meant maybe your faction is trying to defend too many sectors for how many people it has available. Right now Starmade is too feature barren to be able to say definitely that faction X is powerful enough to be entitled to Y volume of space, other than the arbitrary number systems we have in place in the form of faction points. There aren't even any non-placeholder NPC inhabitants.

I know unloaded combat will litterally take years to implement correctly and balance but it cannot be skipped. Otherwise unloaded orders shouldn't be a thing, it's the full package or nothing. You can't go halfway like that.

In my opinion, the best option is to have every ship pack a couple of values for the DPS, tracking speed, durability, mobility and XYZ profile, and then mash the values of all ships into a function (together with some significant randomness) that spits out a winning team with amount of ships remaining.

The reason i think its the best option is because
1. No/little cost for the server to run algorithm
2. Randomness is incentive for players to actively partake in fight to minimize the risk of losing a fleet to RNG, meaning a proactive faction has the upper leg on a delegatory faction, meaning more fun
3. Randomness makes any differences between loaded fights and unloaded fights less noticeable, meaning it's less likely you'll see ship builders minmax for unloaded combat

Again, emphasis on the randomness, because balancing this shit to 100% is figuratively literally impossible.

 

[ObiShawnKenobi]

Wow, this got quite noisy.

Honestly it's easier to say "We're still working on stuff" instead of making up this endgoal crap. It's making more unnecessary arguments.

 

[Valiant70]

On the topic of one-man factions: The difference between single player and multiplayer is that in single player, the server only runs when you're online. In multiplayer, stuff continues to happen while you're offline, so you may need other people to help keep an eye on things. In single player, you're on 24/7 as far as your game universe is concerned.

Make sense? If factions require frequent attention, but are not impossible for a single person to manage, single player can still work even if it's very hard to manage a faction alone in multiplayer.
[doublepost=1502574092,1502573938][/doublepost]

Wow, this got quite noisy.

Honestly it's easier to say "We're still working on stuff" instead of making up this endgoal crap. It's making more unnecessary arguments.

Nonsense. No one had any idea what the finished product might look like before. Now we do, so we can provide more accurate feedback. Unfortunately the Dock is kind of a mess so we get a lot of arguments. Nonetheless, there is some good information getting thrown around here.

 

[ObiShawnKenobi]

Nonsense. No one had any idea what the finished product might look like before. Now we do, so we can provide more accurate feedback. Unfortunately the Dock is kind of a mess so we get a lot of arguments. Nonetheless, there is some good information getting thrown around here.

Isn't the game too far away for endgame to be considered a thought?

 

[EricBlank]

in game development, as in writing or creating something yourself, you should always have an endgame you're working towards, to define just what the heck you're doing and so you know it when you get there. So in that way, no, its best to lay that out first and foremost, everything in between is meant to accomplish that goal.