RTS Survival Ideas

[StormWing0]

I've seen many of these ideas floating around but lets see what else we can come up with.

RTS

Command and Conquer building style on map/fleet menus: No idea why I'm obsessed with this. The general idea here is you could bring up your list of cargo hauling fleets give them an empty station BP with resources to fill it or a filled station BP and send them to spawn the station at the target coordinates. This station would be auto factioned on spawn and set to the named permissions as well. Basically you select the fleet and BP, if needed the station the fleet is pulling resources from and send it to build at destination all from the comfort of wherever you are once you have the infrastructure built up to use the new commands. To use this you'd need an HQ Station and at least 1 Mining Station and at least 1 Factory Station.

Fleet Patrols: This would require fleets remember their last orders at all times even if the server reboots. The general idea here is fleets could be told to patrol between multiple points and defend the area. Also fleets could randomly patrol the system without any point in mind.

Unloaded Fleet Mining and Retrieval: Here fleets would mine or salvage in scouted sectors since what's there is already known by the game.

Scout Fleets: Fleets that scout to see what's there. They also can scan systems.


Survival

Planetary Crew Generation: Simply terms planets generate crew you can use for ships and stations. They also generate other things but crew and their various supplies are what'll help your empire most.

Crew Rooms: On stations and ships these are rooms of various types that allow the crew to be useful, happy, sleep, etc. Can be anything from your control room of your ship to a single terminal with a chair and display. On planets these take the form of small city buildings and rooms depending on your setup, but also help spawn more crew if setup right.

Farming: Yes it can be automated using crew and when on stations and ships it's basically another type of crew room. Doesn't get used to maintain the player but is used to maintain the crew and is one of many things to use to make crew happy and live longer without starving.



Anyone else have ideas?

 

[EricBlank]

Regarding food; it probably shouldn't be mandatory, but a luxury item. Their holographic meatloaf is free. Krabby patties are in high demand. Keep them krabby or they get crabby.
The only crew resources absolutely necessary should be beds; not having enough beds, having to share, makes them unhappy, and credits; don't pay them, they quit. High mortality rates could also make them unhappy, and being too unhappy leads to them quitting. They just hop in a core and fly away into the distance.

I can think of hundreds of ways to make crew management interesting, and automate it to a degree. But it's more likely crew won't even have a morale attribute and all you need is enough space for them to move around... That would be lame, but more likely given what the devs usually do with features.

Scout fleets need to not lag the server out. Maybe a way to generate content without actually loading the sector into memory. If they have to load the sector directly, then each faction needs a limit on the number of scout fleets it can have actively scanning at any given time.

I was thinking as well about the strategic resources available in regions; like, they could be mineral producers that generate an effectively infinite quantity of a single or small number of resources at a set rate. Stuff like special planets' cores, nebulas, black holes, gas giants, stars themselves, supernovae clouds, and abandoned mass fabricators and dimensional doorways from past civilizations.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I've seen many of these ideas floating around but lets see what else we can come up with.

RTS

Command and Conquer building style on map/fleet menus: No idea why I'm obsessed with this. The general idea here is you could bring up your list of cargo hauling fleets give them an empty station BP with resources to fill it or a filled station BP and send them to spawn the station at the target coordinates. This station would be auto factioned on spawn and set to the named permissions as well. Basically you select the fleet and BP, if needed the station the fleet is pulling resources from and send it to build at destination all from the comfort of wherever you are once you have the infrastructure built up to use the new commands. To use this you'd need an HQ Station and at least 1 Mining Station and at least 1 Factory Station.

Fleet Patrols: This would require fleets remember their last orders at all times even if the server reboots. The general idea here is fleets could be told to patrol between multiple points and defend the area. Also fleets could randomly patrol the system without any point in mind.

Unloaded Fleet Mining and Retrieval: Here fleets would mine or salvage in scouted sectors since what's there is already known by the game.

Scout Fleets: Fleets that scout to see what's there. They also can scan systems.


Survival

Planetary Crew Generation: Simply terms planets generate crew you can use for ships and stations. They also generate other things but crew and their various supplies are what'll help your empire most.

Crew Rooms: On stations and ships these are rooms of various types that allow the crew to be useful, happy, sleep, etc. Can be anything from your control room of your ship to a single terminal with a chair and display. On planets these take the form of small city buildings and rooms depending on your setup, but also help spawn more crew if setup right.

Farming: Yes it can be automated using crew and when on stations and ships it's basically another type of crew room. Doesn't get used to maintain the player but is used to maintain the crew and is one of many things to use to make crew happy and live longer without starving.



Anyone else have ideas?

C&C? Awwwwwww Shyt!

My ideas with regard to crew:

- All crew within 50 meters of a first aid block slowly auto-heal.
- Crew cause ships/stations to slowly auto-repair over time when not fighting. The more crew onboard, the faster the repair rate.
- On a planet, the more "crew rooms" you build, the larger the population grows. This will incentivize players to build cities.
- Train crew into space marines and equip them with weapons from the advanced shops. Also, buff that slow-ass rocket launcher.
- NPC factions generate crew as well, to act as hostile soldiers or conquerable civilians during boarding/planetary assault missions.

Regarding "farming": If only...

Spoiler

In any case, farming should stack with housing to accelerate population growth; with planets getting the largest boost, stations getting half the boost and ships getting no boost.


Ideas with regard to C&C:

- Tesla/lightning weapons; functionally similar to the beam weapon but with a visual effect resembling lightning and an acid damage model more closely resembling that of cannons. A similar effect naturally occurs in some nebula and planetary atmospheres.

- Fix planets and the spherical gravity chambers so we can bring out our ground forces.

Spoiler