Anfros

If scripting is strong enough we might well be able to make our own mining drones, if we are given all the components and information needed.

I think stargates should be in the game. But I also think normal FTL travel should be balanced so that if you are traveling in a small craft going between systems using normal ftl is the method of choice. As to if people who enter the game at a later stage should have an easier time reaching the stars, that's how the devs have explicitly told us it's going to be. I find it interesting that whenever I hear the devs talking about the game I really like what I hear, I imagine an upgraded version of eve that fixes many of the problems that game had while adding solid crafting mechanics. But then people keep making threads about tacking on all manner of unfun survival and rp mechanics, that imo would be really bad for the game if they were implemented.

If we want survival mechanics I'd much rather they went the space engineers route, with oxygen and energy. If you are in a oxygenated and warm environment you don't have to worry but out in space... lets just say things are different.

They could just make up some BS about engines messing with high level shields or something. The timer system in eve is the one mechanic that really makes that game playable at all.

The problem arises when you have someone owning the stargate and only allowing that orgs ships through, which could well mean that there will be situation where an enemy is attacking you and you have no way of striking back. The way I see it if it really shouldn't take more than 1 hour to travel between systems that are within say 20-30 ly apart, if you have proper ftl drives, and even then that would be monstrously boring. Any game mechanic that just makes you press a button and then you are effectively locked out of interacting with the game for any amount of time longer than say a few minutes is a bad mechanic. I don't want a game that says there is nothing more you can do ingame right now, go do something else! IMO the limiting factor in space travel should be fuel and the size of the craft. If a space A is twice the size (size could be in mass or volume or some mix thereof, doesn't really matter) of spaceship B and spaceship A requires say 4-8 times more fuel to achieve the same FTL speed that could mean that if you are just running around in a small single man ship you might easily be able to travel vast distances in a quick manner, but that for large cargo transports or warships stargates might be much more efficient and practical.

One thing we could have is some kind of shield generator, that by some limitation would be impractical or impossible to have on a ship intended for fighting, that once it drops below x hitpoints becomes invulnerable for y amount of time and exits this reinforced mode at a time determined by the defender. We are going to have cross-timezone wars in this game, and for it to be fun at all we mustn't have a situation where people need to be online and defending their stuff 24/7. Allowing the defender to set the time of an engagement might be enough. The fact that everything is just another construct makes this much harder to achieve but strong defense mechanics aren't optional in a game like this. Look at eve online's current Sov-system where the attacker has most of the advantages in that there is no minimum required effort in attacking someone, you cannot defend someone else's sov, and the attacker largely determines when the fighting will take place. This has meant that sov is essentially not worth defending as it is easier to just reconquer it than defend it.

The problem with food is that unless the requirement is low enough to be trivial, which defeats the whole purpose, is that it limits your ability to just log on and sit around talking to people. It may well create situations where not playing the game is the best move one can make in a given situation and I don't think that is healthy for a game. Survival mechanics sound fun on paper but once they are ingame they can be a real detriment to fun.

Since the universe is going to be infinitely large a probe COULD well take several months to travel to a distant location, but I highly doubt going to the next system is going to take more than hours, this is a game after all and people have limited time to play. If the travel time is to long that would simply defeat the whole purpose of the game being single shard since it would effectively limit peoples ability to interact with each other in a timely manner.

What people have to understand is that for this game to work basically all content (except maybe some cosmetic things, though I fail to see how there could be very many cosmetic things in the game given how we have voxel construction) needs to be available to all players which means the devs can't go around selling expansions like this was WoW, which leaves p2p as the only workable model.

The whole point of the sandbox is people being able to set their own goals and find ways of achieving them, if your goal is to become space-rich and market manipulation is part of how you achieve this, that is fine with me. Just as long as anyone is allowed to do all the things that are available to do. I really don't see a problem with different peoples goals putting them on a collision course, if anything that is what makes me interested in the game.

I think we need to address the difference between pve and pvp. I would propose that in a game like this there are very few acts that are just pve or just pvp and that instead there is a continuum. On form of pvp could be denying access to an area to other players, therefore limiting their available actions. Two people cannot occupy the same place, and therefore there people must have the ability to force another player out of an area. All players will have to do both pve and pvp activities, to some degree, players may tend to one part of the spectrum but in the end they are inseparable. Anything that can be be build should be destroyable, the real question is how we balance these two aspects of the game. In my opinion defending should be easier than attacking and there should be some safety so that you do not have to play all the time, very few people have the time to even play every day. That said it would probably not be good design if defenses not controlled by players was capable of holding of even moderately sized groups for any longer stretches of time.

This is under the assumption that food will be required in the game, which afaik we have no confirmation of and large portions of the community seems to be against.

ground vehicles would be a must if planets have gravity, which I certainly hope they will. Flying vehicles have a limit to how heavy they can be before the fuel needed to lift them becomes to expensive to be practical. I hope any assault on a fortified planetside base will require the use of ground vehicles.

Instant construction would be a bad thing in m opinion, I would much rather see something like space engineers welding system. Imagine a well stockpiled defender just instantly building turrets and fighters to defend their previously undefended base, or a wealthy attacker doing the same against a weaker defender. Building times means people have to be prepared before things go south. Also a welding like mechanic would probably mean we'd have to build foundries to build larger ships, adding to the overall complexity of the game, while also providing weak spots. If you can take out the enemy's foundries they can no longer produce capital ships and so you have made the war much easier for your side.

I could see agriculture being a nice thing, but not food. But perhaps we could grow materials and fuel. Though I suspect in the future people will have better ways of powering/heating their stuff than charcoal.

While I am a huge fan of open pvp, that doesn't mean I want what the OP is describing. The way I see it, the game must guarantee that when you go to sleep your stuff will still be there the next day and that destroying something typically takes more effort than building it. The game basically needs to be balanced in favor of the defender.

If the plex system works like it does in eve, the price will be entirely dependent on how many of them people buy out of game to sell, how many people want to buy in game and market speculation. going by what we currently know about the market system though I guess prices and availability will be very regional. Since you generally don't want to be moving them around for risk of them getting destroyed I would not be surprised if they are almost exclusively available around the arkships.

I'm against any mechanic that would make just standing around chatting with friends have bad consequences. If there is a food mechanic it should only affect players who are doing something.

Banning multiboxing is basically impossible and as far as I'm concerned of very little importance. What is more important imho is banning the use of botting and input broadcasting meaning you would actually have to play each account individually, that way it is fair for everyone. Though if scripting will be as strong as they have made it out to be you might be able to accomplish many of the things people would normally use bots for ingame, I still think using software to give game inputs should be banned though.

The way I see it the main problem with arkification is that while it is, to an extent, a good thing for single players, it would be totally abusable for large organizations. Being able to make your industrial backbone invulnurable would make raiding completely useless and remove one of the main ways a small organization might be able to damage a large one. This would mean you would have to actually defeat your enemy in battle to win a war and remove many alternate ways of winning a conflict. And as for people who say arkification would only affect players and not structures that defeats the whole purpose of them, your character will most probably not be your most valuable asset in this game, your base and resources will be. The only way I could see arkification being non-abuseable is if you were not allowed to build anything except a very limited amount of structures, basically what is needed for trade, and tiles that have been built on are not eligible for arkification. Basically every if you are allowed to build a sandcastle somebody else must be allowed to tear it down, otherwise you get a kind of asymmetrical relationship between construction and destruction which is not viable in the long term. This is not to say I think you should not be able to defend your stuff, the defender, especially someone defending a small area, should have significant advantages over any attacker. To start with I think the arkships should defend their planets, or at least a very large part of them, from orbital attack, on other planets players should have to construct these kind of defenses themselves. Secondly shields should be cheap and require serious effort to break through. I would also suggest the game make use of the "Shield generator outside the shield" trope. Basically there would be shields that are impenetrable unless you first destroy the shield generator outside it. I also think there should be some kind of reinforce mechanic like in eve online allowing the defender to set the time of the final engagement and allow things to be evacuated from a base under siege, unless the enemy can blockade it of course. Sorry for the wall of text, hope my ramblings were somewhat coherent.

I think this would be very good for the economy, since atmospheric entry/exit would require specialized vehicles. This means there would be demand for more diverse types of vehicles.