"Homebase" Invulnerability - For Ships ?

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    Greetings fellas,

    with great pleasure I am following the development of all the new mechanics and additions to the game. The one thing I find quite sad though the game doesnt allow me to do yet ( in multiplayer ) is playing without a homebase or planet.

    The thought of just flying through space and working, crafting and living on your ship alone would probably please quite some people other than myself. In reality though, everything that is not docked once you log off will inevitably be griefed, destroyed, pushed into a star or stolen as soon as another player finds it.

    I suggest a new block being added to the game that, once activated, will deploy invulnerability and cloak to your ship/entity at the cost of mobility and a lenghty deploy-and undeploy process that temporarily disable your shields and/or even weakens your hull. Think of it as a device that puts your ship in a parallel universe for the time being.

    Now, this device will not be fueled by energy but a specific type of material found in asteroids/planets/whereever that will ONLY have the sole purpose of fueling said device, no other crafting use at all.

    How it affects gameplay:

    If you are planning to play without any homebase or planet you can do so but in turn you will have to make sure you have enough of those special resources to sustain the device during your log off time. To give an example with some arbitrary numbers, assuming the device burns through 10 units/h and you know you will be logged off for about 12h, you want to have at least 120 units in your fuel tank before you activate the system and log off. As soon as the device runs out of fuel it will automatically deploy the ship into normal space again, leaving it vulnerable to everyone.

    The reason why the said material that will serve as fuel will have no other crafting uses is to prevent acquiring it by accident or as a byproduct, meaning you have to specifically invest time into locating and finding these if you want to have log off invulnerability for your ship. Since living on your ship makes you highly flexible and mobile though, this wont pose an obstacle.

    Of course the activation and deactivation sequence needs to be tied to severe penalties that completely render this system useless as a "combatlog" or escape tool. Activating the system should instantly consume an amount of fuel as an initiation fee, followed by the fuel consumption over time. Upon activation, the hull could lose 50% of its armor rating and all energy and shields could be instantly drained with their regeneration disabled. The ship would need to be motionless as well and stay in this state for 30/60/whatever seconds without taking damage. Only when the countdown is completed with no interference, the deployment would be successful, movement would be disabled completely, invulnerability and cloak would kick in and the device would start feeding on its fueltank. The whole sequence would be played again if the device is being deactivated again, although without a "deactivation fee" of course.

    Picking the right difficulty to obtain this fuel would be real trick here. Make it too common and easy to find, everyone could do this for an armada of ships. Make it too scarce and hard to find, you would need to play more hours to farm these things than it actually grants you protection time.

    Thanks for reading
     

    NeonSturm

    StormMaker
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    • Wired for Logic
    • Thinking Positive
    • Legacy Citizen 5
    And you login to notice a minefield 1 sector apart in all 6 directions, which are tied with wire-less logic in a way to automatically join the attack on you when you come into firing range of one of these :D
    (Push pulses to propel idle ships into combat range, all hail the logic and the jump inhibitors).

    I'd like Home-bases to protect a whole System (except border-sectors) from any enemy installations (invulnerables).
    Invulnerable-ships should do either the same or have a jump free upon manual deactivation.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen 5
    I don't agree with you on this at all... but I would love to see things such as Radar Jammers and Cloaks stay enabled after leaving a ships core. Of course, as the owner of the ship, you should be able to find it again, and at least see your cloaked ship using the hologram effect used by shipyard designs.