Faction Point Generators/Replacements - Aka food and fuel

[Edymnion]

Enough people want to see things like food, atmosphere, fuel, etc be things in the game, while Schine has been more on the "thats really hard for tus/he server to do, and/or it doesn't really give much real benefit for the cost".

But what if we abstracted it a bit?

With the Universe 2.0 update being next on the docket, and talk of potentially going Beta shortly thereafter, it seems now is the time to get empire related stuff done. And we still seem to be set on using Faction Points in some manner, so why not combine the two?

Make blocks that generate Faction Points independently of player activity. Basically, have specialized factories that create either faction points directly, create items that can be exchanged for faction points, or create items that AI can use in place of faction points.

Examples:

Fuel - Its come up many times, but its a big layer of micro-managing to put up with on a day to day basis. But, what if instead of needing fuel to move ships, you needed "fuel" to use fleet commands? You could either have actual fuel container blocks in an inventory somewhere that get used up as you command your fleet, or you could burn faction points to issue commands without the blocks.

Territory - Currently claiming more sectors requires a constant drain on faction points to maintain them. What if we could manufacture "food" to offset that faction point cost? That basically you burn FP to maintain a new system until you can set up what amounts to food generators to let that system become self sufficient, at which point it starts burning food per hour/day instead of faction points to maintain your control over the system.

Trade - We kind of already have our "tokens" for this one, its credits. But if we had some other consumable token (I dunno, gold pressed latinum or something), that could then be used to regulate trade. As in you could have trade routes established that require latinum to maintain, or else you have to pay credits (instead of faction points) in overhead. The more trade routes you have established, the more it costs to upkeep them, if they're being actively used or not.

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We currently have logic signals and flora, combine the two. We could have a hydroponics block that produces food tokens when placed next to a bit of flora (so you'd have a berry bush sitting on top of a hydroponics block, it uses a glorified logic signal to know that they're adjacent, and it "turns on" the food token creation), meaning we could build entire farms.

Fuel tokens could be something we could make in traditional factories, or if we got gas giants/nebula we could have specialized harvesters that slowly pull in gas (as just a simple x/hour generator that requires the presence of these features to function) to condense it into fuel.

Latinum could be produced from crushing down all the various rock/stone blocks we always get by the millions but never actually have a reason to use.

Then we could store those tokens in traditional cargo for long term, and have a new type of storage block (some kind of dispenser block) that acts like a chest for only food/fuel tokens. If you have a dispenser in a system, and food tokens in it's cargo space, then the system can start taking tokens out of it. Same with fleets and fuel, only this time the dispenser/cargo combo becomes fuel tanks on board your mothership. For trade, they would become bank vaults.

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And best yet, if all of these tokens require substantial effort to produce, the tokens themselves would naturally become quite valuable. Which means they would themselves become trade goods. Any faction can send out miners to gather asteroid materials and make conventional blocks, and slap down a bunch of enhancers to churn out said conventional blocks. But if fuel took a dedicated station to extract? Or food required a huge amount of surface area to produce (like say each unit produced 1/100th of a token per hour, so you could produce one per 100 hours with one block, or 1 per hour with 100 blocks)? Then we might get into where some factions just don't find the effort worth it, while others who want to focus on support/supply gain a niche.

Could even make planets useful. If the earth-like planets gave a boost to food production, alien worlds gave a boost to fuel, desert boosted trade, etc. Then finding a system with the right planet types becomes an actual part of gameplay.

And since it would all be there only as an alternative to using Faction Points, it becomes entirely optional on if you want to invest in it, or simply have enough players you can afford to ignore it.

 

[madman Captain]

Sounds interesting but I think that would make starmade more a Spacesim/survival than a sandbox game.
Its more a thing I want to see as a addon/mod for the finished basegame than as a part of the coregame.

It not that I not like the idea but I want to deside myself what features I want to use and what not.

 

[Edymnion]

Sounds interesting but I think that would make starmade more a Spacesim/survival than a sandbox game.
Its more a thing I want to see as a addon/mod for the finished basegame than as a part of the coregame.

It not that I not like the idea but I want to deside myself what features I want to use and what not.

Well, my thought was that it would simply be a way to avoid paying faction points for things, making it entirely optional if you wanted to use it or not. But that with enough investment it would pay off, letting you burn FP in other places more freely.

 

[Alphajim]

Well, my thought was that it would simply be a way to avoid paying faction points for things, making it entirely optional if you wanted to use it or not. But that with enough investment it would pay off, letting you burn FP in other places more freely.

If we take an extreme exemple, it would be for sure a must-have to be a competitive PvP faction. So it won't be that much optionnal. But this kind of features are nice, if well balanced.

 

[Edymnion]

If we take an extreme exemple, it would be for sure a must-have to be a competitive PvP faction. So it won't be that much optionnal. But this kind of features are nice, if well balanced.

Honestly, on a ship basis, I'd imagine competitive PvP would ignore this entirely, due to the fact it would essentially be dead weight in their ships. Why carry the space and the weight for fuel for fleet commands if you could just burn faction points?

Now they very well could end up with PvP factions with massive farms to offset faction territory costs, in order to apply those saved FP to battles, and honestly I am rather enjoying the idea of hardcore PvP players having to build gardens.

And if the farms were required to be in each system, or to have ships physically transfer food from an invulnerable home base to those systems in order to maintain them, well thats just more legit PvP targets in my book. Entire farming stations/planets, food convoys, etc.

 

[Nosajimiki]

In spirit I like this idea, but it sounds a bit overly complicated which the devs are trying to avoid.

I think it would be better if planets just generated credits for controlling them and to add more places to sink credits such as maintenance costs.

That way the the economic flow would look like this:



In this model, a faction must be active to build up its territory, that control then generates cash which gets syphoned off every day to cover the maintenance cost of their ships and bases. These costs could be a % of the value of all the blocks used to make your stuff plus a flat per entity rate to simulate the "crew cost". The cash left over could be used to purchase manufactured goods and mining could supplement your remaining needs. If you fail to pay maintenance fees, your ships will either start to take damage or disband. (You would lose ships first then bases.)

A few key notes about this system is that balance between wealth and assets would not be a static thing. If you lose half your ships in a major battle, you will have lots of extra cash to pay for replacement ships, if you lose a lot of colonies but still have your fleet, you will have reason to sell off materials to those people who have that surplus cash. This cash dependance would mean far more trade which increases player interaction, and opens new opportunities for professional piracy. It would also soft cap how big people could reasonably build. By letting server admins define maintenance costs in the configs, they could generally control how big people are building without any need for server rules or arbitrary hard caps.

If it takes logging in 10 hours a day to grind the factions points you need to hold enough territory to support a 1 million mass Titan, chances are you will either not try fielding a titan, or you'll need a multiplayer faction to put all its eggs in one basket to hit that benchmark. Either way, you won't see anyone trying to build a whole fleet of 500k battleships anymore.

Also, this means that inactive factions will not just sit around forever waiting for people to return. If you don't play, either your FP or Cash will deplete sooner rather than later.

 

[MacThule]

If we take an extreme exemple, it would be for sure a must-have to be a competitive PvP faction. So it won't be that much optionnal. But this kind of features are nice, if well balanced.

It should be optional as a server setting if such a thing were implemented. No way should it be impossible to switch off.

Personally, I like the version of this idea that abstracts supply all the way out into FP itself so that FP comes to represent a faction's whole logistic and resource flow and reserve. Just wrap fuel, gases, food, water, uniforms, medical supplies, tobacco, toenail clippers, dentists, hookers, payday lenders, liquor stores, and all the other things required to make a fleet function IRL into one resource. Because I think we absolutely need some measure of logistics that is directly indicative of infrastructure, but... I don't want to have to manage how many dentists my fleet has, or how many chow halls, or whether the food served is giving my crew cavities... ugh - the rabbit-hole of fleet logistics can go down pretty far. Like, what happens if I don't have enough tri-latinum isolate to put fillings in all of my crew members who didn't have access to healthy food at one point last week and lost teeth because my dentist spent all our allocated funds on whiskey?? Do the ships they're on get permanent toothache penalties now? Is morale affected? Should I just float them all and hire a new crew? (actually, that scenario sounds hilariously fun, but probably not idea for trying to mobilize a fleet).

I would be happy to see imperial logistics abstracted into a small number of categories like Fuel, Life Support, and Misc Supplies, or whatever. But I think it should all be tied to control of planets, planetary facilities, stations, and systems, regardless of whether it's all wrapped into FP or a number of sub-categories, and I think it should stay abstract, rather than a function of concrete blocks that must be stored, because we already have that.

I really just want the pure macro-economic pressure of a need for logistics and infrastructure as a natural regulator to deployment capability and vulnerable counterpoint to military might - not a bunch of new resources and resource dynamics to micro-manage and engineer around. But that's just me, and I'm not strongly opposed to new resources, but I feel like premising logistics on complex new dynamics is ensuring that they will never find their way into the game because it inflates the coding and debugging overhead way too much.

So I theoretically like the consistency of making logistics about concrete block resources that require storage and protection and shipping and engineering to maintain and expand, but I greatly fear that it could be... too much. Both for the devs, and for most players.

For me, logistics would be ideal and streamlined if it consisted of 1-3 abstract elements and was passively generated as a number on the UI simply by owning a planet but increased by supplying a harvester block on that planet with a certain amount of power, storage, etc, and this number was drained by all power usage (since power usage implies not only fuel consumption, but also crew directing operations) with a multiplier (x1.25?, x3?, w/e) for power consumed outside of controlled territory.
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I think it would be better if planets just generated credits for controlling them and to add more places to sink credits such as maintenance costs.

This is another very streamlined solution. Whatever the case, controlling planets, systems, nebulae, etc needs to a direct factor in maintaining and deploying hardware. Whether that should be some version of the OP suggestion, or something lighter and a little dumber is eternally debatable.

 

[Nosajimiki]

...For me, logistics would be ideal and streamlined if it consisted of 1-3 abstract elements and was passively generated as a number on the UI simply by owning a planet but increased by supplying a harvester block on that planet with a certain amount of power, storage, etc...

While I think a planet should be able to be developed, I think a purely block based approach may be wrong. Otherwise people will just turn one world into a giant hive city and surround it with a HomeBase Dyson sphere and just build it up until it produces nearly infinite resources. Perhaps when you colonize a world it will start off at like 25-50% efficiency and slowly go up to 100% the longer you hold it or you can invest resources into it to build it up till it hits 100%.

 

[Edymnion]

Otherwise people will just turn one world into a giant hive city and surround it with a HomeBase Dyson sphere

 

[MacThule]

Long as it can't be invulnerable. O_O

 

[Edymnion]

Long as it can't be invulnerable. O_O

Eh, as long each planet provides a different kind of bonus, they get at most one invulnerable dyson sphere and still have to build more stuff.

Especially not when they could just make the planet itself a homebase and skip the dyson sphere entirely.

 

[MacThule]

Eh, as long each planet provides a different kind of bonus, they get at most one invulnerable dyson sphere and still have to build more stuff.

Especially not when they could just make the planet itself a homebase and skip the dyson sphere entirely.

For me this eliminates the entire function of logistics and puts me squarely in camp with Nosajimiki


I'd very much rather not bother with managing additional systems at all if they will all also be neatly wrapped up in an invulnerable homebase of doom that lags servers with its awesome ability to cause complete and utter stasis within the galaxy outside of cheesy little play-date duels. In my mind, the only potential value logistics has for this game is demanding players pay for the ability to deploy advanced hardware in the hard currency of ever-spreading, vulnerable infrastructure that must be protected, repaired, or kept safe through politics, tribute, etc.

I don't even want to imagine same-old game of sitting on a static fortress hoarding resources eternally for no reason whatsoever... but bigger and more complex yet still completely without purpose or change. Chatting.

I don't see logistic resources as an opportunity to grind more or make engineering harder or create more resources to juggle just for their own sake. Logistics that actually matter will cure a lot of misbehavior, abuse, trolling and bad behavior on servers. Passively. Just by existing. Not if everyone can just circle their supply wagon with an invulnerable base though...

I mean... Building up a huge metro-planet and making it invulnerable is absolutely fine by me... but not if it also produces substantially more resources than any other planet. I think double or triple would have to be the max development potential of any planet beyond first-phase development. No way anyone should be able to wield the equivalent resources of 50 worlds and simultaneously be completely invulnerable to retaliation for their actions.

I think that if owning a completely unimproved planet yielded - e.g. - 10FP per day, then I think that should be pretty much set as the benchmark of support needed to continually supply a smallish mining fleet or tiny combat group (raiders or pirates), or maybe a frigate to be active for several hours a day. Bring the planet to a basic level of development and it can yield 50FP per day. Add more resources and wait for development timers, maybe bring it up to 100-150FP per day - enough to continuously field a large fleet or single titan maybe, but that should really be it. Factions should have to colonize several additional worlds in order to send multiple fleets long distances to camp enemies while simultaneously running amok in 3 or 4 huge battleships or titans. And honestly... keeping the balance low would probably make the game way more fun to actually play than setting the balance super high and easy; when resources are insanely plentiful, losses are meaningless and not engaging. Might as well just play on creative mode forever.

Probably the best way to find a balance for logistics would be to set a cap of what would be reasonable for a single world to support (not in a sci-fi show, but in terms of keeping actual gameplay balanced and dynamic rather than sacrifice gameplay to superficially emulate a movie or TV series of some kind), and calculate backwards from there to what an unimproved world should supply. I don't think that anything invulnerable should be able to support more than a single battleship (200-300K mass range) with perhaps a few escorts.

 

[Edymnion]

I'd very much rather not bother with managing additional systems at all if they will all also be neatly wrapped up in an invulnerable homebase of doom that lags servers with its awesome ability to cause complete and utter stasis within the galaxy outside of cheesy little play-date duels. In my mind, the only potential value logistics has for this game is demanding players pay for the ability to deploy advanced hardware in the hard currency of ever-spreading, vulnerable infrastructure that must be protected, repaired, or kept safe through politics, tribute, etc.

I think we're getting rather off topic with the dyson sphere, considering that while it is cool, it is incredibly impractical as you would still only have one homebase, and if you wanted to use it on a planet resource, it would be cheaper and easier to simply make the planet itself your invincible base and build an orbiting docking rig as part of the ground base. The idea of having a giant station surrounding a planet is pretty redundant.

I mean... Building up a huge metro-planet and making it invulnerable is absolutely fine by me... but not if it also produces substantially more resources than any other planet.

Which is why I specifically said to have different planet types provide different bonuses, so that you couldn't make a god-mode resource planet, and would be forced to spread out if you wanted bonuses on everything.

The idea of simply having a planet, any planet, provide a single common resource (like straight up FP) is simply going to make ground bases the defacto homebase. We need to have incentives for multiple bases, where no single one (planet types or nebula or deep space) can do everything.

For me, the answer to people turtling isn't to try and force them out of their bases with penalties, you have to bribe them out. Right now there is no reason to ever have more than one base, other than cheap disposable warpgate station chains, and even those aren't really worth the effort. We also can't make ore types limited, because the entire crafting base to make even normal non-super-awesome ships requires a WIDE assortment. So, my answer to both is to provide something like in the OP. A new resource system that can be made scarce and difficult to obtain because it only helps make the game easier to have it, but does not put you at a brick wall for not having it.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Eh, as long each planet provides a different kind of bonus, they get at most one invulnerable dyson sphere and still have to build more stuff.

Especially not when they could just make the planet itself a homebase and skip the dyson sphere entirely.

Actually... if planets become logistical points, I think allowing them to be HBs or even allowing HBs to be in the same sectors as planets should not be allowed. Otherwise, people will just split up into a bunch of 1-man factions and each take a planet as an HB which would mess up either model by then trading for what they need and as MacThule pointed out, be really hard on servers with everyone constantly loading planets everywhere. As long as you can't HB a world, single faction ownership is more beneficial than single player alliances, and larger caps on planetary output are more reasonable if they are always at risk.
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... For me, the answer to people turtling isn't to try and force them out of their bases with penalties, you have to bribe them out. Right now there is no reason to ever have more than one base, other than cheap disposable warpgate station chains, and even those aren't really worth the effort. We also can't make ore types limited, because the entire crafting base to make even normal non-super-awesome ships requires a WIDE assortment. So, my answer to both is to provide something like in the OP. A new resource system that can be made scarce and difficult to obtain because it only helps make the game easier to have it, but does not put you at a brick wall for not having it.

This is why I suggested cash. Anyone can get it through selling off goods, but maintaining a large flow of it without passive income from territory is impractical. It also already exists in the game so does not need any further layers of complexity.

 

[Edymnion]

people will just split up into a bunch of 1-man factions

I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing.

But then, I'm still of the opinion of "reward for grouping, don't punish for solo". Being in a faction really does limit what you can do as an individual, because while you have a greater access to resources, you're limited in what you can make and do.

After the universe and AI updates, we will really need to focus on adding benefits to being in factions that are above and beyond what can be done alone.

 

[Nosajimiki]

...I think that if owning a completely unimproved planet yielded - e.g. - 10FP per day, then I think that should be pretty much set as the benchmark of support needed to continually supply a smallish mining fleet or tiny combat group (raiders or pirates), or maybe a frigate to be active for several hours a day. Bring the planet to a basic level of development and it can yield 50FP per day. Add more resources and wait for development timers, maybe bring it up to 100-150FP per day - enough to continuously field a large fleet or single titan maybe, but that should really be it. Factions should have to colonize several additional worlds in order to send multiple fleets long distances to camp enemies while simultaneously running amok in 3 or 4 huge battleships or titans. And honestly... keeping the balance low would probably make the game way more fun to actually play than setting the balance super high and easy; when resources are insanely plentiful, losses are meaningless and not engaging. Might as well just play on creative mode forever...

I think an even better approach to this might be that each planet has an FP cost to maintain that does not go up much as you improve a world but capturing and improving planets costs a large 1-time FP cost. So, to take a planet, you would have to do enough damage over time to temporarily disable (blockade) it, then pay either FP equal to the planet's cost to destroy the colony that is there, or 1.5x it's value to conquer it, or just leave it after it's been disabled knowing that you deprived your enemy of that planet's daily income.

This means conquering or destroying an entire faction's territory would require both a strong military force and a lot of FP to be able to achieve. It also means that large empires have to weaken themselves to conquer or destroy others so they can not just steamroll a server over night while everyone is offline.

Thirdly, it means that a smaller empire can still deliver a meaningful blow to an enemy through gorilla strikes by blockading the production of an empire's weaker planets.

Example:

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I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing.

But then, I'm still of the opinion of "reward for grouping, don't punish for solo". Being in a faction really does limit what you can do as an individual, because while you have a greater access to resources, you're limited in what you can make and do.

After the universe and AI updates, we will really need to focus on adding benefits to being in factions that are above and beyond what can be done alone.

I agree with this as well, but if you make invincible HB logistics worlds, then you strongly reward solo play/punish faction play which is a push in the wrong direction. Under the above system, a single player who plays 8hrs a day is theoretically just as strong as 4 players who play 2hrs a day, so solo play is still viable, but strength in numbers is strongly encouraged to be able to build up to those ALMOST indestructible level 5 worlds.

Also, solo casuale players can still get the cash they need from trade and mining to maintain a few small assets without even needing to maintain colonies; so, it is not a 100% must have aspect of the game.

 

[Edymnion]

I agree with this as well, but if you make invincible HB logistics worlds, then you strongly reward solo play/punish faction play which is a push in the wrong direction.

I disagree, I think it would do the opposite.

If the bonus producing planets were more scarce than they are now, just finding one would be an accomplishment. If a faction claims it, then there could potentially simply not BE another planet like that for multiple systems in any direction. Which means the single players either have to push WAY out there to find their own, or they would have to faction up to get access to the bonus that planet produced.

 

[MacThule]

I think an even better approach to this might be that each planet has an FP cost to maintain that does not go up much as you improve a world but capturing and improving planets costs a large 1-time FP cost. So, to take a planet, you would have to do enough damage over time to temporarily disable (blockade) it, then pay either FP equal to the planet's cost to destroy the colony that is there, or 1.5x it's value to conquer it, or just leave it after it's been disabled knowing that you deprived your enemy of that planet's daily income.

This means conquering or destroying an entire faction's territory would require both a strong military force and a lot of FP to be able to achieve. It also means that large empires have to weaken themselves to conquer or destroy others so they can not just steamroll a server over night while everyone is offline.

Thirdly, it means that a smaller empire can still deliver a meaningful blow to an enemy through gorilla strikes by blockading the production of an empire's weaker planets.

Example:
View attachment 49440
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I agree with this as well, but if you make invincible HB logistics worlds, then you strongly reward solo play/punish faction play which is a push in the wrong direction. Under the above system, a single player who plays 8hrs a day is theoretically just as strong as 4 players who play 2hrs a day, so solo play is still viable, but strength in numbers is strongly encouraged to be able to build up to those ALMOST indestructible level 5 worlds.

Also, solo casuale players can still get the cash they need from trade and mining to maintain a few small assets without even needing to maintain colonies; so, it is not a 100% must have aspect of the game.

I like your general approach to planet hardening and scaled output. I think it would benefit from a bit more nuance (i.e. break it into 10 or 20 or 50 levels instead of just 5) but is a good approach or guidepost to approaching planet revenues. It would also possibly benefit from a take-over timer (for war purposes), and an upgrade timer that increase every level so it take a week for a planet to go from L4 for L5, and represents not only resources, but faction efforts to protect and cultivate that planet over time.

 

[Nosajimiki]

I disagree, I think it would do the opposite.

If the bonus producing planets were more scarce than they are now, just finding one would be an accomplishment. If a faction claims it, then there could potentially simply not BE another planet like that for multiple systems in any direction. Which means the single players either have to push WAY out there to find their own, or they would have to faction up to get access to the bonus that planet produced.

You are right. This idea needs to be revised so that colonizing and building up new planets up is more expensive than conquest and obliteration. Perhaps, conquest costs 50-75% of building up a planet from scratch, and obliteration costs 25-50% of the total cost. That way, planets don't need to be scarce to promote competition. If two factions are near each other, they could just expand away from each other all peaceful like because there would be more than enough planets to do so, but if it's cheaper/faster to conquer your neighbor, then war is incentivized. It means that as time progresses, those handful of mid-level planets will naturally be far more important conflict points than the 20 nearby uncolonized worlds.

Also, if you play on a PvP server, you would not need to be unbeatable to maintain territory, you just need to convince your neighbors that peace is more valuable than war; so, you could be a 1-man faction that specializes in gorilla tactics in which case, you can force peace just by doing more damage than your enemies profit from it (guys like Vaygr would eventually be worn down by their constant conflict and risk leaving their HP exposed from over expansion). Or, you could go political and get the allies you need to stay safe. Or, you could hire other players to protect you. Heck, just being a nice and helpful guy with no real political attachments can make the difference between a curb stomping and being a valued member of the galactic community.

1-player factions will still be viable, but they would no longer be exempt from the pressures of inner-faction politics because they would need to expose something of theirs to expand. People being able to get away with zero vulnerable assets is a big source of trolling and toxicity. If a player does not want any risk, then the game is still a perfectly viable sandbox in single player, or they can choose to just stay small and rely on trade instead.

I like your general approach to planet hardening and scaled output. I think it would benefit from a bit more nuance (i.e. break it into 10 or 20 or 50 levels instead of just 5) but is a good approach or guidepost to approaching planet revenues. It would also possibly benefit from a take-over timer (for war purposes), and an upgrade timer that increase every level so it take a week for a planet to go from L4 for L5, and represents not only resources, but faction efforts to protect and cultivate that planet over time.

Both good ideas. That table was just an example, but I agree: 10-50 levels would make it feel more like a natural progression.

The only issue I have with timers though is that it would make depopulation OP. So, if someone has a few mid-high level planets they spent months building up, another player could just come along and wipe them out overnight, and you'd have no way to replace them in a timely manner. If it's just based on FP, it's less realistic, but if you have 100k FP saved up, and you get wiped, you can still fall back and rebuild elsewhere without being totally screwed. If there are timers, then I think planets should be able to be built up in a matter of days and not weeks/months as long as you have the FP to make it happen.

As for the take over timer. Planet stats on those high level planets could be the viable option people have been looking for to make unmanned static defences viable. A world with 10 bil HP and 60 mil regen and a 500k FP pricetag to bombard armed with who knows what sort of defenses would be enough to repeal all but the most powerful and well coordinated of attacks. Instead of a take-over timer, this system could be adjusted so that developed planets take a long time to take over just because of how hard they are to siege. Sitting around over a planet for 30 min waiting to see if anyone shows up (which you know they won't because you're not dumb enough to attack when any of their players are online) is boring, but spending 30 min kiting planetary defenses, hoping you don't end up sandwiched between a wall of missiles and those reinforcements you may not have noticed login because you are busy beating on the planet means PvE conquest could be just as active, and adrenaline packed of an experience as PvP.

 

[Edymnion]

1-player factions will still be viable, but they would no longer be exempt from the pressures of inner-faction politics because they would need to expose something of theirs to expand. People being able to get away with zero vulnerable assets is a big source of trolling and toxicity. If you don't want any risk, then the game is still a perfectly viable sandbox in single player.

True, but there are problems going the other way as well.

Unlike most multiplayer games, you and your stuff do not cease to exist when you log out, meaning your stuff is sitting defenseless (from a human powered perspective) most of the time. Large factions can be assumed to have players on all the time, but the problem (especially on PvP servers) is that a large faction can wipe out a smaller one to the point they are incapable of recovering.

And when we get right down to it, this is still a video game people play for fun. Individual players on a server should never have the power to effectively ban someone from a server they don't own. The homebase invulnerability is there specifically to prevent that. That no matter how big and bad the other guy is, they can NEVER push you off the server against your will. They can harass you until you leave, but they can never wipe you out to 0 credits and 0 mats in the middle of deep space with no way to go anywhere.

That is an INCREDIBLY important protection that cannot be undermined, IMO.