NPC Faction Update Video

[Dannage]

I'm just sad the space station on the front page looks like one I built on my current server... only much much much sexier...

 

[Ghent96]

Quests, yes. Campaign? Probably not. First, it's hard to put a campaign into multiplayer when you can kill the quest-giver and their entire faction. Also, StarMade is a universe that you should be in control of. If anything, we would have storylines for factions, and nothing much larger than that.

Please don't. We the players can provide our own custom ships, and our own storylines for our own custom factions. Your job as devs of a sandbox voxel building space game is to give us a fully functioning sandbox with all the basics operating fully, and all the mod-able details to let us do all the rest.

We the players will make the campaigns, if you actually take the care & time to fix bugs that are long over due, and put in crew, NPCs, dialogue, AI, and give us server admins proper control over factions, AI, spawns and spawn groups, difficulty settings, scripts... Please stop running after new shineys and distractions. Arguably, slabs and rails have given us NO gameplay core value, and made servers perform much much worse, when what most of us have really been needing for the past year was AI and NPC/faction improvements and bug fixes.

Also... make sure the AI/NPC patch doesn't break /initiate_wave because this is really useful for admins during events, and allow us to set up spawn groups and difficulty levels and spawn cycle times (that actually work) for all negative number ID factions, not just the -1 pirates.
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Good suggestions, I'm not sure what's happening here, will pass this on

Thank you, sincerely. It feels nice when 2 years of communication to a dev team finally pays off.

 

[Criss]

Your job as devs of a sandbox voxel building space game is to give us a fully functioning sandbox with all the basics operating fully, and all the mod-able details to let us do all the rest.

It's great to allow modding, and we plan to do that. It's already present in our community, albeit somewhat limited. But to present a game that relies on modding is asking for failure. We want to provide more than that. We do not expect the player to alter their game just so it is worth playing. The player has payed us for this game. We can't sell it short on what we consider very important parts.

I think the biggest point I want to make is this: if the player is going to presumably be adding in quests for factions they have downloaded, why shouldn't the base-game already have them for the factions that will be included?

Arguably, slabs and rails have given us NO gameplay core value

Well slabs were easy to put into the game. Schema spent very little time on it. It's just a mis-sharpen hull block. Rails are arguably more logical than the turret system we had before. A number of times we have improved performance with them, and it is certainly noticeable since the releases which first included rails.

The exact thing you are asking for in your comment has been the subject of our development for quite some time and the focus of the next few updates.

 

[Shaker]

Criss you guys really need to work on factions, your playerbase is going to die of 1man factions unless you make it worth it to group up.

Personalised/faction rank protection on storage boxes for example to protect your faction from being cleaned out when you recruit that new player.

 

[StormWing0]

Criss you guys really need to work on factions, your playerbase is going to die of 1man factions unless you make it worth it to group up.

Personalised/faction rank protection on storage boxes for example to protect your faction from being cleaned out when you recruit that new player.

There's a ton of ways to expand faction systems and such. Adding a Merge Faction Button would help for those that don't feel like having to leave the faction they are in to enter another. Good for times when you want to merge factions without all the hard work of separating from it and also all the defactioning and factioning of things, etc.

Some kind of Activity Tracker would also help. The Last On and Last Known Coords columns need to actually work for example and their could be a version of this for the overall faction itself. Also why not give us the ability to see other faction's members lists and maybe the individual enemies list could still auto flag players within factions instead of just ones outside them unless manually put in.

Also 1 player factions will always exist and aren't the main issue they are a mere symptom of other things going on.

 

[Ghent96]

Criss you guys really need to work on factions, your playerbase is going to die of 1man factions unless you make it worth it to group up.

Personalised/faction rank protection on storage boxes for example to protect your faction from being cleaned out when you recruit that new player.

IMO, this should be up to each server's admins to solve the problem of how to incentivize factions. For example, the admins on mushroomfleet have implemented a ship size limit unless you belong to one of the major "Barony" factions. Mining bonus, safety and protection from pirates, bigger ships, and extra "tribute" income are among other bonuses. We've seen a marked decrease in 1-man factions by implementing this new system over the past few months, and will probably continue it into the next season of Mushroom Fleet - Starmade.

 

[Ithirahad]

IMO, this should be up to each server's admins to solve the problem of how to incentivize factions.

Sooo... to you it should be... up to the players... to make it worth it... to properly use a default, central feature of the game. Seems legit.

 

[Ghent96]

(nonsense troll attempt)

Yep, 3 years, proud of it, and we're still going, and pushing the limits of the game like always. If you feel like you need to make something of that, then do it outside of this thread. Don't derail or troll.

Sooo... to you it should be... up to the players... to make it worth it... to properly use a default, central feature of the game. Seems legit.

Yes. Disagree? Please spell it out in more detail.
Devs of a _sandbox_ game should be tasked to make an engine. We players are more than capable of filling out the rest with our creations, our stories, our system, our blocks and textures and factions and rules and lore and incentives... as long as the core game engine is bug free and empowers us to do these things properly. If players truly want to game in a 1-man faction, then they should be allowed. If players want to band together in a 20 or even 40+ man faction (I ran one, once, so yes it does happen) then they earn the commensurate bonuses of doing such, according to each separate server's admin staff, according to their ideas. There should be a nice variety of experience available between the various servers, to suit various players' styles.

Similarly, Would you ban all starmade servers that don't meet a certain # of players? No, of course we shouldn't. Should large servers be rewarded somehow for their success? Sure, why not. Good topic for another thread.

Back closer to the topic: there is some good functionality and gameplay in the current AI / NPC faction system that should be maintained. It creates an element of risk and inherent danger in the entirety of _the_ (hint) galaxy by having random spawn pirates every X# seconds from the -1 pirate faction. This could be maintained even with the new NPC faction system. Perhaps the -1 faction and even -2 factions left alone, but other IDs enabled for server admins to configure as more autonomous "factions" mentioned in the O.P. video. Allow admins to turn on and off the basic -1 and -2 factions: the pirates and trade guild. (Trade guild also obviously has an important function if a server decides to use the default credits and shops, but I want to focus on the pirates) A new line in the server config:

MOB_random_pirate_faction x

where x is the faction ID number for the game engine to use for what was the original -1 pirates, and 0 (zero) turns the feature off for admins who so choose.

Not the only idea, I'm sure, but just an example of how to solve it.

 

[Shaker]

IMO, this should be up to each server's admins to solve the problem of how to incentivize factions.

No it should not be, admins are there to keep the server going, and keep players within the servers rules.
The game should make you want to be in a group without an admin forcing you into a "balony" faction, im sure it works on your server and my guess is you require more admins than most servers to keep that ruleset going.

 

[DarianRitten]

So how exactly do I set the rules for NPC factions? I want to be able to completely remove pirates from my worlds?

 

[MrGrey1]

So how exactly do I set the rules for NPC factions? I want to be able to completely remove pirates from my worlds?

In the catalogue, go to the Admin tab and click 'Remove all Enemy Usable Permissions. '
Also clear the 'Manage AI Spawn Groups.'

You can turn off the NPC factions by setting
NPC_FACTION_SPAWN_LIMIT = -1 //null
in server.cfg. You may need a fresh world if they've already spawned.

 

[DrTarDIS]

In the catalogue, go to the Admin tab and click 'Remove all Enemy Usable Permissions. '
Also clear the 'Manage AI Spawn Groups.'

You can turn off the NPC factions by setting
NPC_FACTION_SPAWN_LIMIT = -1 //null
in server.cfg. You may need a fresh world if they've already spawned.

isn't "-1" for infinite/unbounded factions? I'd wager "0" is the value for disabling them. Could be wrong though. Starmade do be quirky, and it's been a while since I did a new world without deleting the factions blueprints folders.