Do we need greater challenges in this game?

[Volkon]

Well, here's the skinny... been playing with my son for a fwe days now. First time in it was the classic "mine for ore, sell for money" thing, and slow growing. But then it happened... pirates. Most of them followed me, but one stayed on him and he managed to kill it, blowing the chest while at it. The amount of money he got for selling the loot was insane! Instantly, we had no more money issues. Built decent ships with a crapload of shields, now pirates aren't really a threat anymore. Armed stations we can take out the turrets with ease and loot them.



It seems that we can go way too quickly to a life of comfort and relative ease (not taking into account PvP with other players). Should the cash acquisition ability be pared back some, do we need (or are there) greater piratical threats out there? What are your thoughts?

 

[jjaquinta]

I think it\'s hard to balance things like this initially. Over time I expect that a lot of a ship\'s loot will blow up with it.

Be that as it may, I think the \"point\" of a sandbox game is that you set your own goals. At least that\'s how I play Minecraft with my daughter. The key then is to have an environment that sufficiently diverse that people can find for themselves interesting things to do.

Hey, those two planets over there are fairly close. I wonder if I can build a bridge between them...

 

[ABlackFedora]

Keep in mind it\'s still an alpha - only so many things may be implemented.





I\'ll give you a hint on a future update. A pirate king is coming.

 

[Volkon]

I love you.



>cough< I hope that came out in a \"manly but excited for new things\" kind of way.

 

[Axebane]

I think wealth accumulation is way way way too fast in StarMade. I only started playing yesterday and I have over 400,000,000 credits...

I\'m seriously considering starting over already, and modding my game so that things like glass/crystal/cacti/lvl5 ores aren\'t worth such insane amounts. This would make them cheaper to purchase in the shop, but I don\'t have any plans to make a glass cactus ship anyway, heheh.

 

[Raok]

The game is in an alpha testing phase. They purposefully made money and supplies stupidly easy to get so that players can jump right to building large ships and breaking the game :P

 

[Axebane]

Oh, I didn\'t realize that. Makes perfect sense actually. Gotta stress the game to its limits to bring bugs to the surface, and it would be much harder to test everything if it took a long time to afford the parts for complex ships.

Now I feel better knowing that in future development stages the game will be more challenging. I think in the meantime I\'m still going to mod my singleplayer to make it harder to amass tons of wealth. I want to help test the game as much as possible, but I also gotta enjoy myself or else I\'d end up getting bored and quitting before I ever fully tested the game. So.. I\'m off to dig into the XML modding tool!

 

[Stakhanov]

1) Set pirates loot values to 10 times lower. Pirate stations should still have quite a bit of stuff.

2) Set ore prices to only 5 times more expensive per level - L5s should cost 6250 credits. Also , reduce ice rock price to 1 , ice crystal to 100 , and wood / leaves / cactus to 50.

3) Find a few very efficient fighter designs for pirates to use , and disable automatic blueprint usage so that they don\'t fly at you in salvagers or half-finished ships. Remove the Isanth , it\'s too weak and its wreck too valuable.

There\'s no good solution for pirate stations as the turrets can be focused down , and the station itself shelled from long range. For now they\'re a decent speedbump , taking a few minutes to destroy using only the starter blocks and some shields.

 

[Axebane]

Stakhanov, how do I do #3? Only thing I have found so far is disabling \"DEFAULT_BLUEPRINT_ENEMY_USE\" in server.cfg

EDIT: Oh, I think I figured it out. I just copy the blueprint folders I want the pirates to use from StarMade/blueprints to StarMade/blueprints-default ?

 

[Stakhanov]

That part is done in the \"Admin\" tab of the catalog window.

 

[Xerxeth]

If you wanted to spice up the combat a bit, as Stakhanov mentioned, you could always add new types of ships usable by enemies.

 

[joefish500]

Thats what i\'ve done,but I think a bit over kill seeing as they now have massive well armed carriers at their desposal.