- Joined
- Mar 18, 2015
- Messages
- 2,709
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Two big weaknesses of Starmade right now as I see them are resource gathering and turtling in a single base.
For resource generation, the only methods of obtaining more are highly destructive. If you want to build big, the only thing you can really do is eat planets and mine out systems. Big building leaves systems empty and dead. That is a problem for me.
The other is that once you have your main station, usually your faction home, you have zero reason to ever build another one. Nobody makes a home away from home because it spreads your limited resources too thin. Having a billion of a certain capsule does you no good if it's stored in a station across the universe. You can't get to it without dropping everything you're doing, so the best method is to always bring all your mining to a central storage location.
So, what about using both of those weaknesses to counteract each other? Much like how having multiple cities in Civilization allows you to connect them together for trade bonuses, if we could have some kind of "one or two per system" station that can passively generate a single kind of resource, it would encourage players to expand and have many different bases to maintain.
We could then link in the shipyards and the trade guild caravan system. If a shipyard building things could decide what mats it needed, scan inventories of your bases, and then dispatch cargo drones to pick those mats up and return them, not only does having distributed storehouses become less of an issue, it encourages players to design cargo ships and escort fighters to defend their important trading corridors.
Could even promote more inter-player interaction. Having enough systems to have passive generation of everything would require a lot of systems, so if two players next to each other worked together to pick their passives, they could then trade those resources with each other.
And if they don't play ball, then we have a good reason to have old fashioned invasions to take control of those resources by force.
For resource generation, the only methods of obtaining more are highly destructive. If you want to build big, the only thing you can really do is eat planets and mine out systems. Big building leaves systems empty and dead. That is a problem for me.
The other is that once you have your main station, usually your faction home, you have zero reason to ever build another one. Nobody makes a home away from home because it spreads your limited resources too thin. Having a billion of a certain capsule does you no good if it's stored in a station across the universe. You can't get to it without dropping everything you're doing, so the best method is to always bring all your mining to a central storage location.
So, what about using both of those weaknesses to counteract each other? Much like how having multiple cities in Civilization allows you to connect them together for trade bonuses, if we could have some kind of "one or two per system" station that can passively generate a single kind of resource, it would encourage players to expand and have many different bases to maintain.
We could then link in the shipyards and the trade guild caravan system. If a shipyard building things could decide what mats it needed, scan inventories of your bases, and then dispatch cargo drones to pick those mats up and return them, not only does having distributed storehouses become less of an issue, it encourages players to design cargo ships and escort fighters to defend their important trading corridors.
Could even promote more inter-player interaction. Having enough systems to have passive generation of everything would require a lot of systems, so if two players next to each other worked together to pick their passives, they could then trade those resources with each other.
And if they don't play ball, then we have a good reason to have old fashioned invasions to take control of those resources by force.
