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Because why not.
From what I've been told, PvE is suppose to work (in the future) along the lines of pirate strength (wave strength technically) increasing the further you get from the center of a galaxy. Which is stupid and almost painfully simple. It would almost replace ore mining with pirate hunting at endgame, as you are almost guaranteed to find larger ships (which you would be prepared for), which would then easily be dispatched and salvaged/looted. Such a system would also probably involve shooting a blank at a pirate station to spawn a wave when you are done. This is our endgame?
I will now commence babbling about a few ideas/concepts that could be added to make it more Dynamic (not complicated, Dynamic).
The first concept is with station spread. The further you go from the Galactic spawn point (2, 2, 2) or center, the more likely Stations are to spawn. This sounds like the idea I was just against? Well there is more to it, to be explained later on. The idea is a lower concentration around spawn, with a higher concentration further out. Which stations will spawn in which systems would be decided based on which faction owns the sector. Stations would slowly generate within their 'allied' systems, up to a maximum, depending on their distance from the galactic center.
I also believe their defense should be buffed to hell and back, and their weapons more focused on sustained DPS, rather than Alpha damage, as that would make them safer to just fly past, but more lethal to those that try and stick around to fight them. High defense to make the fight last longer, and more less alpha so that the fight doesn't end automatically if you are "not strong enough to be in it's presence". When waves are spawned should also be changed, with waves being spawned based on the amount of mass destroyed (I hope that the HP system will apply to stations, so you would have to "overheat" it, rather than snipe a faction block), so we get something that doesn't feel like "HE SHOT ME! HALP".
The second concept would be to split up pirate waves into 3 different types of waves; Patrol, Reinforcement, and Raiding.
The last concept I had, was a wave configuration file. The idea is based off of my days where I played Mugen. Mugen was a sprite based fighting game where anyone could add a fighter to their game, you just needed to add the character to the selection screen after putting their files in a folder (kinda like Starmade, in adding pirates by adding a blueprint and setting them as enemy usable). The game also had a 'campaign' mode, and in order for that to work in a game where you could download any character, they allowed you to set what tier characters would appear at, and what weight would be assigned to them. So if you had 3 characters in tier 2, with weights of 1, 1, and 4; the Character with a weight of 4 would appear 2 out of 3 times.
I would like the ability to customize pirate waves like this. The ability to set a pirate to spawn at wave strengths of 2-10, and then a stronger variant at strengths 5-20, and changing the weight of them at each wave so that the stronger one slowly fades out of use as you approach stronger systems manually. This would allow servers to reliable add an 'rare' spawn among certain waves, like flagships. Things like base wave strengths, max stations and maximum wave strength would also be configurable.
To summarized some (A TL;DR kinda summary)
Pirate (or other factions once we get that ability) Stations should be stronger defensively, with low alpha and high sustained DPS. The more stations in a sector, the more powerful the pirates are there, and the number of stations in a sector would increase over time, to a maximum set by distance from the galactic center and a config value. This would allow players to dynamically change the strength of pirates on the server, creating a more immersive universe with an actual frontier for those that want to PvE, a safe zone for those that just want to mine and build, and PvP hanging around closer to the frontier, where the stronger ships and players would gather.
Stations would be more dangerous to stay around and farm for long periods, and pirates would get weaker as stations are destroyed. Farming pirates would tend involve moving around to different systems, not just poking a single one many times till you reach yourclimax haul goal.
And yes, I like words. Any comments? Suggestions? Alterations? Concerns? Tomatoes to fling?
From what I've been told, PvE is suppose to work (in the future) along the lines of pirate strength (wave strength technically) increasing the further you get from the center of a galaxy. Which is stupid and almost painfully simple. It would almost replace ore mining with pirate hunting at endgame, as you are almost guaranteed to find larger ships (which you would be prepared for), which would then easily be dispatched and salvaged/looted. Such a system would also probably involve shooting a blank at a pirate station to spawn a wave when you are done. This is our endgame?
I will now commence babbling about a few ideas/concepts that could be added to make it more Dynamic (not complicated, Dynamic).
The first concept is with station spread. The further you go from the Galactic spawn point (2, 2, 2) or center, the more likely Stations are to spawn. This sounds like the idea I was just against? Well there is more to it, to be explained later on. The idea is a lower concentration around spawn, with a higher concentration further out. Which stations will spawn in which systems would be decided based on which faction owns the sector. Stations would slowly generate within their 'allied' systems, up to a maximum, depending on their distance from the galactic center.
I also believe their defense should be buffed to hell and back, and their weapons more focused on sustained DPS, rather than Alpha damage, as that would make them safer to just fly past, but more lethal to those that try and stick around to fight them. High defense to make the fight last longer, and more less alpha so that the fight doesn't end automatically if you are "not strong enough to be in it's presence". When waves are spawned should also be changed, with waves being spawned based on the amount of mass destroyed (I hope that the HP system will apply to stations, so you would have to "overheat" it, rather than snipe a faction block), so we get something that doesn't feel like "HE SHOT ME! HALP".
The second concept would be to split up pirate waves into 3 different types of waves; Patrol, Reinforcement, and Raiding.
- Patrol is the normal pirate spawning. Ships spawning within sectors which players may encounter randomly. The wave strength of said wave is a constant (though a little lower in the spawn system). However, wave strength would increase for every station of that faction in the system, meaning that at the galactic center, there would be fewer stations and thus weaker waves. But at the frontier, there would be stronger pirates due to the more abundant pirate stations. This creates a Dynamic universe, in the sense that new players to a server would have to stay within the safer sectors that the larger factions and veterans of the servers have cleared, where as the veterans would be at the 'frontier' of space, locked in battle with pirates. Depending on how often pirate stations respawn (I would recommend a low chance occurring at Faction point updates), you would eventually reach a stage where you could not explore any further without pirates filling up your tracks. It could lead to seperated areas in space connected by warp gate, with pirates swarming the area in between.
- Reinforcement. The waves that spawn when a pirate station is under attack. As I said in my 'fairly angry rant' thread, I believe pirate stations are the True endgame, as such the reinforcements spawned by a station should reflect it's strength. Wave strength here should be tied to station count as with patrols (but to a lesser extent, say +1 wave strength for every 2 stations), but with a higher base wave strength.
- Raiding waves. Waves spawned specifically to hunt down a certain player. Part of this idea came from the planned bounty system, where I would expect you would gain credits upon destroying a marked target. Except in this idea, you gain "marked" points for EVERY ship you destroy, player or pirate, manned or just undocked. The amount of points you gain is equal to the mass of the destroyed ship, and is hidden from the player. As the points increase, the strength of the wave that come to kill you also increase, with certain thresholds. The max threshold (The amount of points you need to attract the strongest set wave) could be set via a server config, and would decrease by ~20% of it's current value upon death. The idea here is that more experienced players with bigger ships would want a bigger challenge, so rather than allow them to grind at the other reaches, why not spawn a wave just for them every so often? Ideally, this spawned wave could potentially be more powerful than waves found in pirate sectors with many stations.
Say the pirate base wave strength was 5, and you found a system with 10 pirate stations. The Wave strength of the patrols would be 15, where as the reinforcements for a station under attack would be 12 (with a base of 7), this allows players to slowly regain control from a pirate infested sector if they are not strong enough to fight them upright with hit and run tactics. Kinda like sabotaging infrastructure.
The more pirates you kill however, the stronger the raiding wave will get, as you become noted as a threat that needs to be dealt with.
The more pirates you kill however, the stronger the raiding wave will get, as you become noted as a threat that needs to be dealt with.
I would like the ability to customize pirate waves like this. The ability to set a pirate to spawn at wave strengths of 2-10, and then a stronger variant at strengths 5-20, and changing the weight of them at each wave so that the stronger one slowly fades out of use as you approach stronger systems manually. This would allow servers to reliable add an 'rare' spawn among certain waves, like flagships. Things like base wave strengths, max stations and maximum wave strength would also be configurable.
To summarized some (A TL;DR kinda summary)
Pirate (or other factions once we get that ability) Stations should be stronger defensively, with low alpha and high sustained DPS. The more stations in a sector, the more powerful the pirates are there, and the number of stations in a sector would increase over time, to a maximum set by distance from the galactic center and a config value. This would allow players to dynamically change the strength of pirates on the server, creating a more immersive universe with an actual frontier for those that want to PvE, a safe zone for those that just want to mine and build, and PvP hanging around closer to the frontier, where the stronger ships and players would gather.
Stations would be more dangerous to stay around and farm for long periods, and pirates would get weaker as stations are destroyed. Farming pirates would tend involve moving around to different systems, not just poking a single one many times till you reach your
And yes, I like words. Any comments? Suggestions? Alterations? Concerns? Tomatoes to fling?
