Recognized Exploration/System Bonuses and Actual Empire Building

    Edymnion

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    Just brainstorming some ideas for things to make exploration and system claiming more important/viable:

    One thing I love about the Civilization games is resource management. The thrill of finding the PERFECT place to found a city in is awesome. It can be the difference in a small science/gold producing city, and a capital filled with Wonders. In Starmade... not so much. Long as you've got some asteroid rings and a couple of planets, you're good. About the only things you might actually go out of your way to look for is a system with your favorite colored star or a sector with a pretty nebula. Beyond that, doesn't really matter what is in a system you claim for your home base, as it won't be overly long before you mine it clean of asteroids and destroy all of it's planets for resources (unless you're like me and keep a pet planet around just for kicks).

    There's already talk of gas giants and using them for renewable resource gathering, and I think that would be a good start. Entire wars would be fought over systems with Rammet baring gas giants. Lets look at those as being similar to the various resource panel enhancements in Civilization. Instead of a panel with Wheat on it, you have a system with a Parseen gas giant. Instead of an iron deposit, you've got a Rammet planet.

    So, what else could we do to encourage exploration and growth? How about if we take the idea from Civ for luxuries and apply them to planets? Right now the only uses for a planet are for a temporary starter base until you can afford a station, and eating them for their resources. Instead, what if each type of planet also produced luxuries of some type, and that you got some form of bonus for controlling the planet? To go back to our roots with Minecraft, what if a terran planet produced say, chocolate? Mining the planet would damage it's luxury production, so you'd have to decide if you wanted the planet intact as a luxury, or eat it for the immediate resource boost.

    What could we do with luxuries? Well, the short sighted answer would be "sell them to shops for money" or "add them to crafting requirements for different blocks", but why not look back to Civ again for a more long game answer? Instead of just building bases and ships for ourselves, what if we actually were setting up empires? Start treating systems the way we treat cities in Civ, as things we control and build in, but have a certain level of autonomous stuff going on behind the scenes. You build a station or a building on a planet, and have it start attracting NPC settlers. If you build them things like sleeping quarters, recreational areas, etc, you make them happy. Happy settlers provide you with some form of income, and attract more settlers, which require more areas be built for them.

    You could build for them to make yourself a huge income base at the expense of all the resources you place into it, or you could ignore them by keeping it small or simply not building whatever might be required for them to move in (like say you had to "feed" your people with hydroponics or agriculture, and each person requires X blocks of food producers, if you don't want any people, you don't build any food areas).

    Could then even start setting up trade routes by giving the NPCs cargo ships and setting up destinations. NPCs could then go about loading luxuries onto a cargo ship, flying it to another system, and trading for luxuries there. Then both systems would have access to those luxuries, and the happiness of both systems increases.

    Heck, depending on the size of your empire/happiness level of your people, they could start spawning in their own structures and ships and going about their own lives in the background, making the universe look more active and alive.

    Maybe go so far as to borrow from Civ again and have "influence" systems. You still claim a system as you do now, but if there are enough happy NPCs living in the system, you start making virtual claims on surrounding systems as well. Influence systems wouldn't have NPCs popping up in them, but would give say reduced mining bonuses. Or maybe the ability to harvest luxuries from those systems by setting up a trade route into them without actually claiming them.

    Hmmm... or perhaps tie happy populations into things like the gas giants. Your NPCs are the ones that actually harvest from the gas giants, not you. The more NPCs you have in a system with a gas giant, the more resources they can extract from it in a given amount of time. Meaning not only will you have to explore to FIND a gas giant, once you do you'll have to set up an outpost there and start building it up to attract workers for it.

    Would make war more interesting as well, as you'd have more to target than simply the other guy's ships. Start taking out his supply lines, his outposts, kill his NPCs, etc to reduce his capabilities. Which of course means he'd have to build defenses for his NPCs...

    Faction alliances would mean more if being allied with someone let you open up trade routes with them. Hmmm... perhaps an active trade route with an allied faction with access to a gas giant would let you share a percentage of their gas giant production. If they're producing a thousand parseen an hour and you're making a thousand macet, say you could automatically send them 10% of your macet in exchange for 10% of their parseen. Or perhaps we could work player shops into it. Separate out the buy/sell sides a bit more and have one side being "this is what I have to sell", and one side with "I want to buy these", and a trade route could have NPC cargo runs between allied factions move those goods around for you. You have thrusters, that guy wants thrusters. You want power capacitors, that guy has them. Ally with him, and your NPCs start automatically trading back and forth for you.

    Get your empire big enough, and get enough trading buddies, and actually mining things yourself by hand could become something you only do when you actually need a lot of something specific in a short period of time.
     
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    I like this :), if my station could populate itself with settlers then I wouldn't have to spawn them in one at a time. Just build all the amenities, like living quarters, eating, recreation and work areas. It'd be nice to have a thriving population spring up around a trade station or mining outpost.

    If you build it, they will come :p.
     

    Edymnion

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    Maybe take an approach from SimCity too. Have the ammenities needed to support a population have an associated cost (like the cost for roads/water/etc in Sim City), but have the NPCs generate more than it costs to support them.

    So that you can't just build a huge ghost city and wait for it to fill up without spending massive amounts of resources supporting it until it does.

    Maybe have it run off of faction points? Like the stuff needed to support 1 NPC is 1 faction point per time period, but each NPC that moves in supplies 2 faction points per period. That way if you have the excess capacity, sure, build up ahead of time. If not, then build slowly and organically as you go.

    Only problem with that is that you still need to balance it so that overall your faction point gain while offline remains negative so that inactive players with large empires can't have abandoned factions hogging server space indefinitely.
     
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    So destroying ot sabotaging an enemy's amenities would be a good way to starve out the competition, maybe even incite a revolt.

    Blow up the swimming pool, karaoke bar, and the local diner and people are gonna be pissed.
     

    Edymnion

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    Yup, make taking out someone's infrastructure a viable tactic beyond "I blew up his mining ship."
     
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    So destroying ot sabotaging an enemy's amenities would be a good way to starve out the competition, maybe even incite a revolt.

    Blow up the swimming pool, karaoke bar, and the local diner and people are gonna be pissed.
    i about died when i read karoke bar lol
     
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    Ithirahad

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    I haven't even read the whole thing and I support this. At this point, I don't even give a damn if I'm going to end up disliking some mechanics; one way or another, we really need something like this, and quickly as far as that can be helped. It seems to me that a lot of people are losing interest in this game, and this kind of system is probably the only way to stop that.
     
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    Edymnion

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    Yeah, right now building is the only thing Starmade has to offer. And don't get me wrong, building is fun and I'm getting quite good at it (if I do say so myself), but once you reach a certain point, there is nothing left for the game to offer. I mean, after you eat a few planets, you don't even mine asteroids anymore. I have tens of millions of everything but Rammet in my stockpiles at this point so that I don't even think about resources anymore. I destroyed a couple of systems in the process too...

    There just comes a point where you've got a kickass ship of every type you need, and you've got a well built up base, and there's nothing left to do.

    Now don't get me wrong, Starmade is an alpha and we're still in the "make the core mechanics of the most important parts work first, worry about what to do with them later" stage, but I don't see any clear intentions on direction for after ship building and combat mechanics are finished.

    I mean, even Minecraft before the story mode had secondary play style mechanics (namely hunger) that slowed you down and made you juggle more than just "do I have enough rock to build my castle with?". Starmade is going to NEED some kind of secondary gameplay element beyond just building and fighting ships, and seeing as how Civ is one of my (and just about everyone else's) favorite "holy crap, it was Friday afternoon when I sat down, a dozen turns later its 4am Monday morning!" games, so it would be a good place to pull from for me.

    To this day, one of my favorite games is still the old Birth of the Federation game. The 4x genre works very well in space, and I'd love to see elements incorporated into Starmade.
     
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    That's the direction I'd like to see this game go, empire building is what would make this game great. Buidling is cool and all, but with nothing to make it worth while other than "look at the cool stuff I built" it gets old kinda quick.
     
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    I think this is a great idea. I like the direction this thread is going. Zaphord is right that while building is fun, and can provide hours of entertainment, it does get old.
     
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    I reeeeeeeeeeealyyy like this idea.
    Imagine having different types of settlers be able to spawn different small-sized blueprints. When someone would attack your city, settlers who are rich enough to have weaponized ships would rize to deffend their homeland. Those would be small ships and they would only stay in atmosphere to deffend the city. But it would be so awesome to be trying to attract certain type of settler in to your city because they can spawn certain blueprint. Then if someone built a dirty city with poor residents you would see low budget gheto ships spawn to deffend it. But if someone managed to attract the wealthiest type of residents then it would spawn some luxury jachts or ships with higher class technology. Ship's armaments and style would reflect kind of settler that makes it spawn.



    To increase chances of this geting implemented, let me just list all of the PROBLEMS that this game has which would get fixed by this:


    1. Invulnerable homebases remove any kind of base/planetary siege battles. They are indestructable and they give no reward for being attacked.
    FIX: Cityes on the planets would NOT be invurnerable, but since they always spawn their own deffense + any deffense that you build on to them, fear/posibility of losing your city would be reduced. Player could still have his invurnerable base somewhere in space to reduce the loss of losing your city if you do lose it, but not in same sector as that planet.
    Since cityes spawn their own deffending ships, someone attacking your city means free resources for everyone. They dont even have to damage anything, they just use large pull beams to steal deffending ships and take them apart for resources. Each settler/group of settlers would have cooldown of when they can be included in ship spawn to remove posibility of abusing this and to decrease incentive to turtle in your city instead of preventing attacks proactively.​

    2. Players want large scale battles with large ships and many small ships/fighters. But there simply is NOT enough players to fit all those small ships and if there was not all of them would want to play in a tiny fighter.
    FIX: Cityes would spawn those small ships. Large ships would be the ones players brought to the battle.​

    3. Game feels empty.
    FIX: I'm prety sure this would solve this problem 5 times better than Fauna update by itself will. Because it will not only matter to the player that people live in their city, but also what kind of people live in there. Knowing your people creates emotional bonds, especialy when you recognize that settler's type of ship deffending your city.​

    4. It takes days/weeks to collect resources to build ships. Because of that nobody is willing to risk losing them in battle and everybody just camp in their invurnerable homebases.
    FIX: By building up your city and setting up trade routes to get resources you would NOT just be increasing your resource supplies. You would be increasing your resource INCOME. Making the gained resources more expendable because after losing them you still have that same income instead of being back at zero.​


    Also this would fit in AMAZINGLY with current game mechanics.
    -Total population of each type of settler in all cityes of a faction could affect how desireable each city for each type of settler is to live in (to simulate migration). Cityes could also trade with each other by regualar trade routes to supply the resources which their residents want regulary. Both of those functionalities could be extended to allied factions aswell.
    -Type of settlers and their population in a city could also affect spawning of current AI factions in sectors close to that city. Having large poor gheto city would increase pirate spawning. Having a lot of merchant type settlers would increase shop restock rates.
    -Imagine having to build a SHIP with living quarters for each settler and then doing runs betwen cityes with it to get a quck jump in your citys growth. Like driving migration waves inside it. Game detects that you built X living quarters inside it, you come to some other city, you take up to X people who want to migrate and drive them to your city. This could also be done with upcoming cargo system to boost your citys economy. Imagine building a mothership which holds whole population and colonizes unkown planet with it.
    -Don't even get me started on planed quest system and how each settler type could have quests which they sometimes give to the player, bigger population=more quests. Sometimes you could even get a quest as a requirement for continuing city growth.
    -Settler types don't just have to be their wealth levels, they can also be different races, including multiple alien ones. You can make each settler type have different % prefferences for things like: Planet type, Planet size, Distance from star, Type of star, current settler types in city/allied cityes and their population(some types could attract/repel other types), position in galaxy... But the main thing regulating what moves in to your city would still be how you build the city itself, aka. how well fit settler type's requirements are. Imagine growing an alien city and defending it alongside their alienlike ships.
     

    Ithirahad

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    Well, thing is, I'd rather let us define blueprints for ships our cities use, they should just have to be within certain guidelines of size to spawn normally. Otherwise, yes. (If I have, let's say, all Romulan ships, and my cities are all spawning purple blob ships or big industrial scaffold-covered grey armor ships, that just looks wrong.)
     

    Edymnion

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    What if NPC citizens could access your shipyard?

    We already have a hidden pirate flag that lets pirates spawn ships from blueprints, we could simply add a not-so-hidden NPC flag to say "this blueprint is suitable for NPCs to spawn". Then just keep designs for those ships in the shipyard computer.
     
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    Come on, this can't use up more than 10,000 lines of code in various places

    List of random game engine related ideas and fixes:
    • Block to spawn city (city core)?
    • Define "house", guidelines for spawning of house
    • Or, you design houses (come up with algorithm to define what a house is) and settlers come in with classes based on size of house
    • 3rd idea works with cities in space
    • Trade routes have automatic shipments? Port to port? Link rail dock to rail dock?
    • Random people in space become settlers based on how attractive a "house" is or the size of community.
    • Neutral "freelance" people in space. Akin to pirate spawn.
    • Automatic mining block?
    • NPC's build small shipyards.
    • Types of cities (More likely to build military based houses and turrets, economic, neutral/civilian)

    NPCs build idea branch:
    • Players have a city block they place in center of city on planet, block can only be destroyed by killing all affiliated NPC's
    • Control status for players of city can be owner (multiple), friendly (can use anything but city block functions), neutral(not shot down), enemy (yeah, dead)
    • 1 NPC per house (change later)
    • NPC's get a slow steady income of all types of blocks present on body of city (1 block per 20 seconds per say), blocks are placed in the city block, as well as money depending on house floor size (communal $)...
    • Players can enter house blueprints that meet following requirements:
      • Must have flat bottom
      • Must define floor somehow (floor size determines how desirable a house is (no one likes a 1 square ft house) for class.
      • Must have a door (may be difficult to define door algorithm)
      • Floor can be defined as all uncovered, non-wedged, upwards facing, physical blocks
    • Players can enter shipyard blueprints that meet following requirements:
      • Conforms to normal blueprint requirements
    • NPC's will place houses on flat surface large enough to house the bottom shape of the house (bottom layer becomes shape)
      • There can not be any overlapping blocks
    • NPC's will place shipyards on flat surface large enough to house the bottom shape of the shipyard (bottom layer becomes shape)
      • There can not be any overlapping blocks
    • NPC's will place turrets on flat surface large enough to house the bottom shape of the turret base (bottom layer of base becomes shape)
      • There can not be any overlapping blocks
      • Turret base should have power supply for weapons
    • House floor size determines tech level and productivity of NPC residing
    • Once, say 10 for example (can be changed), NPC's are present; a random function picks between building a shop, shipyard, or defensive turret
    • The structure is build using supplies from city block, can't be build if required resources are not present
    • Structures can be used by players depending to affiliation to city...
    • Players can buy from shops for $...
    • Shops increase the basic gain of money and blocks...??? (Maybe?)
    • A city with more money attracts wealthier citizens (cities grow over time)
    • Shipyards:
    • Takes longer to build than player
    • Ships only launched upon attack
    Problems with idea:
    1. Cities grow but never stop unless destroyed
    2. City can't be repaired (good thing for above?)
    3. Original low class buildings don't degrade and disappear


    Should Shields be Included in NPC Cities?

    Trade Routes:
    • Allows for addition income of blocks from other bodies the trade partner is on
    • Cost up front establishment fee of $
    • Choose from drop down list of all cities in city block, other city has to accept request (even if owned by another player)
    • Income is based off of other city's income. More advanced city partner, more for you.

    Of course I agree with almost everything already said, just elaborating here...

    This idea is awesome! Bring in the Schine...

    PS: You're welcome for the annotations...
     
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    Ithirahad

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    TAG EVERYONE!
    Tagging Bench has been known to work if enough people do it, he said it himself at one point (Let's not start exploiting this though; I think this is one of the few topics that actually is worth the summoning ritual)

    But sure, for good measure, let's try summoning keptick and Comr4de and all the rest. :P