More Passive Civilians

[Master_chief_150]

When flying around the world of starmade, five things pop up on our radars,

• Asteroids/Planets
• Pirates/Enemies/Trading Guild
• Shops
• Abandoned Stations
• Our Own Ships

In the vastness of space, these encounters can be few and far between, leaving us to a universe of empty void. Let's breathe some life into our galaxy, into our universe, such as the introduction of civilians, other than the trading guild. I'm suggesting the implementation of passive, civilian ships, where they are there to give us a sense of belonging, a sense that we're not alone in this universe.

Suggestions for civilian ships are:

• Travel through the void of space
• Possibly allow trade with the player
• Represent different possible species (So implementing species might also be a good idea) (Maybe even stations around planets or in space that ships hover around)
• Prey for Pirates (and the player)
• Attraction for the Trading Guild (looking for a trade)

This is a suggestion that I hope gets revised. I know the trading guild does similar to what is mentioned here, but in my experiences, encountering a trading guild is really rare, and you can spend hours in space with nothing in sight.

 

[jayman38]

Secondary suggestion 1:
When the civilians exit the player's area, they should be removed from the game completely, even if chunks were taken out of their ships/stations/whatever, to avoid filling up the database with unnecessary data, slowing the game down and making it less stable.

It would be kind-of neat to see certain ships with the same battle damage wandering around, but it's not worth the extra database load. Just implement more different ships for civilians to use, to enjoy more unique encounters.

Secondary suggestion 2:
It's kind-of unrealistic to expect to see civilians wandering around such a dangerous universe on their own with no protection, so I think civilian ships should always be paired with some kind of combat drone, even a small one.

As a matter of lore, it would be customary for a civilian craft to release their drone toward any significant threat and run to the nearest shop or other safe zone for protection and hope their insurance doesn't go up too much.

Secondary suggestion 3:
There should be "civilian factions" among the dynamic factions, and they should use the smallest, least combat-capable RP-style ships available.

Possible ship selection algorithm: sort ships by weapon groups and sizes from least to most, and select the top 20 or so ships, which should be the weakest ships on the list. These will generally be pure-miners, pure-RP, and pure-utility craft. The list may ultimately be "poisoned" with build-mode-helper cuboids and rail-docked structures like doors, so the selection list should pick only blueprints with thrust ratios of at least 0.2. Civilian factions don't need a unified "look", so they don't need to group ships from the same "fleet submission" in the ship-selection list. In fact, the more variety, the better, when it comes to civilians.