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More as a topic of conversation than anything else, but if I had my hand on the wheel, this is the direction I'd want to take the game in Universe 2.0 (assuming all kinks and optimizations are worked out):
Minecraft + Civilization = Starmade
Early Game:
First time you load into a server or start a new game you spawn in on a random planet within a few systems of someone else's territory (or within a few systems of 2,2,2 if no one else is there). Idea being that you always are close enough to another player that you can interact, but with enough buffer that they aren't immediately a threat. You spawn in next to a small structure in the shape of a crashed ship. You have crash landed on an unmapped world, and you have to start building up a bit of infrastructure to start building a ship to get off it. This would essentially be a tutorial area where the game introduces you to the basics. You'd need to do some Minecraft style resource gathering, build up things like factories to start producing ship parts, etc. Have some hostile alien creatures on the planet so that part of the tutorial can be "How to build a defensive turret" to keep the mobs at bay.
Now, here's where it gets a little controversial as it involves something Schema doesn't like. The surface of planets would be instanced, so that you could have as big of a world to explore as you wanted, without straining the rest of the server. Would mean things like the anti-grav can be used to make surface vehicles, small ships as transport shuttles, etc. Changing over to the space map would have a nice little animation of your ship arcing up into the sky while space loads. Vice versa, a nice little planetfall animation to help disguise instance loading time for the surface.
While on a planet, there would be, for lack of a better term, "luxury" resources that can be collected, and structures built to harvest those luxury resources automatically. Think farms that can be set up to grow special crops, mining to passively generate special materials, etc.
I'm picturing a centralized "city" with multiple "outposts" being the norm, with the outposts generating resources that then have to be sent back to the main city. Early on you'd be running back and forth to carry stuff by hand, later on you'd be building things like automated hover trains or supply drones to move things around automatically.
Perhaps have there be other intelligent races on the planet (aka, Crew) that you can recruit and give orders to as the brains of the automation system. Food can then be a resource you produce that affects how many Crew you can recruit, and luxuries can form the backbone of a morale system (where happier Crew are more efficient). If the floor for Crew efficiency is pretty low, it means it would be better for a player to do things, but later on crews would get to be nearly as good as players at getting jobs done.
Could even make a block based passive luxury generation for "entertainment" that functions along the lines of the old power reactor boxes. Outline a room in an entertainment array, and unhappy crew could stop working and go there to refill their morale until they're good to work again. We could then decorate those areas as crew quarters with beds, or bars, dance floors, whatever.
Or maybe luxuries determine the maximum amount of morale a crew member can have, and entertainment determines how quickly it fills? Kind of like fuel. The higher their moral, the more "fuel" they carry, the longer they can work at a time. The higher the quality of the entertainment facilities, the less downtime they need before getting back to work.
Mid Game:
Once you have enough resources to build a proper ship, you can start spreading out to other planets in the system, asteroid mining, etc. The ground tutorial would have taught you how to make turrets, how to make systems, and the "automate delivery of resources" from outposts would then translate 1:1 into knowing how to set up delivery routes and schedules for offworld activity.
This is the point where we mostly see gameplay like it is now, with the players mostly being in ships and stations. The planets now start to act more like cities in Civilization, where the resources/luxuries that you've built harvesters for planetside become more akin to passive boosts for growth space side. As in, while planetside in your instance, you've got actual physical movement of blocks. Once you go space side, the game simulates the process and gives you a flat amount of those resources per tick.
You then likely end up building a space station, and set up automated delivery drone routes to shuttle resources from your planets to your station and/or from asteroid belts to your station.
You would, of course, still have to manually design and build your delivery shuttles, your drone miners, etc like you do now (in a shipyard) and have the shipyard kick off production whenever you wanted a new one.
Linking different planets/stations together with trade routes moving luxuries/resources around could then tie into the morale system, making Crew happier, which would then do something like increase how quickly resources can be created/transferred on a planetary scale. The amount of food produced on the planet then helps support Crew totals for manning AI ships.
Late Game:
Abstracted up another level, where now you're working at a galactic scale and you're managing entire systems at a time. Each system would need a "control node" station, from which you could oversee general processes going on in any other system you control. By this I mean you could control the automation AI for an entire system to do things like "Build a warship" (assuming the control node station had a shipyard) or "Send resource shipment from system X to system Y".
Linking entire systems together would be like linking planets together, where the production of entire systems is abstracted (unless a player is actually in that system) and boosted.
And at this level, you have a bigger focus on exploration as you try to hunt down systems and planets with luxuries you don't have so that you can add them to your network.
---
You could then have players who basically "live" at whatever level of abstraction they are most comfortable at. Base builders could stay on planets improving their resource generation. More combat oriented players could stay at the space level piloting warships and commanding fleets. Managerial types could live at the highly abstracted galactic view keeping everything connected and flowing. And while single players could solo all of it, it would be a lot more difficult for them to juggle everything while flying between cities/planets/systems themselves to make it all happen.
We could then also have territory/claimed space be a function of morale or some other measure of "power". At the planetary level, it could be space where hostiles don't spawn in. At a system level, it starts spreading out sector by sector. Only by the time you get to the galactic scale do you start having entire systems that are under your control.
Solo players would be unlikely to get out of the Middle Game section, while factions could much more easily control large regions of space by having each individual player control a system. I think that would allow a better ability to have factions where people who normally play solo can be happy off in their own little corner building their own stuff, while simultaneously providing benefit to the group as a whole.
Could also then have meaningful faction member levels. The higher your rank in the faction, the higher the level of abstraction you can control. Entry level might be limited to planetside automated control only, and would have to manually fly around mining or fighting in space (like we do now), while the higher ups could command shipyards and fleet movements on a sector or system level scale.
---
PvP could then be handled at a personal level (where the player is actually piloting a ship) and a "command" level where the player is basically ordering fleets around and the actual combat flying is done by AI. If you like dogfighting, great, get in a ship and start blasting! If you like it more RTS style, sit in a command center and order your fleets around and watch as the AI resolves combat.
You'll have trade routes populated by physical ships carrying resources/luxuries that will need escorts, or you could be a pirate that attacks said cargo ships to steal resources. Large scale inter-faction war could be done at the RTS scale by sending fleets to attack/defend various sectors/systems, while single hotshot pilot players could outfly the relatively dumber AI's (meaning that you're always better off with a human involved in combat, meaning larger factions being able to field multiple manned ships are going to have a distinct advantage over turtling solo players).
So overall, layers of abstraction where a player can drill down to where they want to spend their time, where any given layer benefits greatly from having an active human present, but are still functional without them.
Minecraft + Civilization = Starmade
Early Game:
First time you load into a server or start a new game you spawn in on a random planet within a few systems of someone else's territory (or within a few systems of 2,2,2 if no one else is there). Idea being that you always are close enough to another player that you can interact, but with enough buffer that they aren't immediately a threat. You spawn in next to a small structure in the shape of a crashed ship. You have crash landed on an unmapped world, and you have to start building up a bit of infrastructure to start building a ship to get off it. This would essentially be a tutorial area where the game introduces you to the basics. You'd need to do some Minecraft style resource gathering, build up things like factories to start producing ship parts, etc. Have some hostile alien creatures on the planet so that part of the tutorial can be "How to build a defensive turret" to keep the mobs at bay.
Now, here's where it gets a little controversial as it involves something Schema doesn't like. The surface of planets would be instanced, so that you could have as big of a world to explore as you wanted, without straining the rest of the server. Would mean things like the anti-grav can be used to make surface vehicles, small ships as transport shuttles, etc. Changing over to the space map would have a nice little animation of your ship arcing up into the sky while space loads. Vice versa, a nice little planetfall animation to help disguise instance loading time for the surface.
While on a planet, there would be, for lack of a better term, "luxury" resources that can be collected, and structures built to harvest those luxury resources automatically. Think farms that can be set up to grow special crops, mining to passively generate special materials, etc.
I'm picturing a centralized "city" with multiple "outposts" being the norm, with the outposts generating resources that then have to be sent back to the main city. Early on you'd be running back and forth to carry stuff by hand, later on you'd be building things like automated hover trains or supply drones to move things around automatically.
Perhaps have there be other intelligent races on the planet (aka, Crew) that you can recruit and give orders to as the brains of the automation system. Food can then be a resource you produce that affects how many Crew you can recruit, and luxuries can form the backbone of a morale system (where happier Crew are more efficient). If the floor for Crew efficiency is pretty low, it means it would be better for a player to do things, but later on crews would get to be nearly as good as players at getting jobs done.
Could even make a block based passive luxury generation for "entertainment" that functions along the lines of the old power reactor boxes. Outline a room in an entertainment array, and unhappy crew could stop working and go there to refill their morale until they're good to work again. We could then decorate those areas as crew quarters with beds, or bars, dance floors, whatever.
Or maybe luxuries determine the maximum amount of morale a crew member can have, and entertainment determines how quickly it fills? Kind of like fuel. The higher their moral, the more "fuel" they carry, the longer they can work at a time. The higher the quality of the entertainment facilities, the less downtime they need before getting back to work.
Mid Game:
Once you have enough resources to build a proper ship, you can start spreading out to other planets in the system, asteroid mining, etc. The ground tutorial would have taught you how to make turrets, how to make systems, and the "automate delivery of resources" from outposts would then translate 1:1 into knowing how to set up delivery routes and schedules for offworld activity.
This is the point where we mostly see gameplay like it is now, with the players mostly being in ships and stations. The planets now start to act more like cities in Civilization, where the resources/luxuries that you've built harvesters for planetside become more akin to passive boosts for growth space side. As in, while planetside in your instance, you've got actual physical movement of blocks. Once you go space side, the game simulates the process and gives you a flat amount of those resources per tick.
You then likely end up building a space station, and set up automated delivery drone routes to shuttle resources from your planets to your station and/or from asteroid belts to your station.
You would, of course, still have to manually design and build your delivery shuttles, your drone miners, etc like you do now (in a shipyard) and have the shipyard kick off production whenever you wanted a new one.
Linking different planets/stations together with trade routes moving luxuries/resources around could then tie into the morale system, making Crew happier, which would then do something like increase how quickly resources can be created/transferred on a planetary scale. The amount of food produced on the planet then helps support Crew totals for manning AI ships.
Late Game:
Abstracted up another level, where now you're working at a galactic scale and you're managing entire systems at a time. Each system would need a "control node" station, from which you could oversee general processes going on in any other system you control. By this I mean you could control the automation AI for an entire system to do things like "Build a warship" (assuming the control node station had a shipyard) or "Send resource shipment from system X to system Y".
Linking entire systems together would be like linking planets together, where the production of entire systems is abstracted (unless a player is actually in that system) and boosted.
And at this level, you have a bigger focus on exploration as you try to hunt down systems and planets with luxuries you don't have so that you can add them to your network.
---
You could then have players who basically "live" at whatever level of abstraction they are most comfortable at. Base builders could stay on planets improving their resource generation. More combat oriented players could stay at the space level piloting warships and commanding fleets. Managerial types could live at the highly abstracted galactic view keeping everything connected and flowing. And while single players could solo all of it, it would be a lot more difficult for them to juggle everything while flying between cities/planets/systems themselves to make it all happen.
We could then also have territory/claimed space be a function of morale or some other measure of "power". At the planetary level, it could be space where hostiles don't spawn in. At a system level, it starts spreading out sector by sector. Only by the time you get to the galactic scale do you start having entire systems that are under your control.
Solo players would be unlikely to get out of the Middle Game section, while factions could much more easily control large regions of space by having each individual player control a system. I think that would allow a better ability to have factions where people who normally play solo can be happy off in their own little corner building their own stuff, while simultaneously providing benefit to the group as a whole.
Could also then have meaningful faction member levels. The higher your rank in the faction, the higher the level of abstraction you can control. Entry level might be limited to planetside automated control only, and would have to manually fly around mining or fighting in space (like we do now), while the higher ups could command shipyards and fleet movements on a sector or system level scale.
---
PvP could then be handled at a personal level (where the player is actually piloting a ship) and a "command" level where the player is basically ordering fleets around and the actual combat flying is done by AI. If you like dogfighting, great, get in a ship and start blasting! If you like it more RTS style, sit in a command center and order your fleets around and watch as the AI resolves combat.
You'll have trade routes populated by physical ships carrying resources/luxuries that will need escorts, or you could be a pirate that attacks said cargo ships to steal resources. Large scale inter-faction war could be done at the RTS scale by sending fleets to attack/defend various sectors/systems, while single hotshot pilot players could outfly the relatively dumber AI's (meaning that you're always better off with a human involved in combat, meaning larger factions being able to field multiple manned ships are going to have a distinct advantage over turtling solo players).
So overall, layers of abstraction where a player can drill down to where they want to spend their time, where any given layer benefits greatly from having an active human present, but are still functional without them.
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