Thor Wotansen

"OH GOD NO!! HE TAFFIED MY ENGINES! ABANDON SHIP!!"

Why not just have the units of currency be m^3 of iron, or other metals/materials that are common and essential construction materials. Then you get to choose to pay the iron price or the gold price . So say I sell a ship and charge 1000Fe for it, I would also accept 800Al or 100Au or 300U whatever, you get the idea. Let the scarcity of materials be the value of them. This also makes construct's values be properly calculated.

Bach to the Future? But yeah, with Lua scripting I think it should be possible to pull things like Pandora music into the game if that is a supported thing, so I could play classic rock out of speaker elements on my ship so that the crew can groove to the beat while we roflstomp some poor bastard.

Another option to the "alien race" thing is to perhaps put another arkship on the other side of the map as it were (eg really far away) so that when the expansion finally hits you realize "holy shit I thought we were the only one". The devs could do this without telling us and the reveal would be the best thing ever. Imagine being that guy who is 3 months travel from the closest stargate and you find some player on a planet building a base who says the arkship is in the next system.

If indeed food becomes a thing in the game it should be a simple resource, not an elaborate "you are hungry, sit down and manually eat this stuff". Instead it should be a thing you bring, but you can reduce the need for it by bringing a cryo tube or some other suspended animation system for when you log off. Logging on to find yourself dead because you forgot to bring a few extra units of food would suck really bad. In fact I think the survival should be more like Space Engineers, the food thing is too crazy for the distances of travel the devs are talking.

I really like the TV idea for realz. I will be more than willing to co-host a Top Gear -esq spaceship show. We'd need a tame Space fighter pilot though.... Some say he has never heard of music, and his knees bend both ways, but we know him as the Stigg! other silly ideas: How far can you launch yourself with medieval siege weapons contest

I'm of the belief that form will follow function, at least initially, then when I get good with the design elements I will establish some common themes and go from there. I'm planning on creating "families" of ships with various sizes and levels of complexity, with a different family for each role, whatever the roles turn out to be. I really hope I get to design some very large and complex ships.

Heimdallr's Keep Bifrost Asgard

I hope to start a big spaceship company and supply dealerships across the verse. Once it gets going I will probably spend most of my time in the design simulator making better and bigger ships. I will need a Lua guru though, I don't code. I'm hoping to have a large selection of different hull designs with an equally large selection of options and extras for each model. Hopefully the blueprint system will not be an obstacle to selling completed hardware, but rather be a protection against "copyright fraud".

My main draw to this game is the possibility of crafting my own unique designs and seeing them (hopefully) become popular and ubiquitous. I am also compelled by the sheer potential this game has to be something so much more than so many games that are out there right now, including EVE. I think the one skill training at a time thing is a mistake because it limits character growth and forces newer players to compromise between surviving in the game and training the necessary skills they need for what they want to do, which may or may not be obvious when they start. Skill progression is a logical thing and I understand why the devs want to have it but it could be so much more organic. I don't want to see this game become like EVE where you have to play for 3 months to learn what you have to train to be an effective player, then go create a new character and do it right.

It seems we agree on a good few things. I think that specialization is a necessity in a game of this magnitude, unless you want to do many things poorly. What I am against however, is the kind of specialization that requires mindless repetitive actions or an arbitrary timer. Skill should be determined by one's peers and the market, rather than by a game statistic. In other words, The ability to build a sexy looking and fully functional ship should not require me to build ugly, crappy ships, nor should it require me to train a selection of time based "skills" that give me percentage bonuses and unlock voxel editing tools that others can't access. Specialization should be a result of a discovery of a person's actual skills as they relate to the game, rather than a dedication to a particular "skill tree" that excludes other aspects of the game by nature of the skill system.

I sincerely hope that the devs do not go for a EVE style time based skill system. I think a skill system of some sort might be a good thing but if you truly want a sandbox construction game to shine you can't have the finer points of construction be blocked for newer players by the fact that they have not spent enough time waiting for a bar to fill or repeating some menial task for the sole purpose of unlocking that smoothing tool or being able to pick up a sniper rifle. Instead let the skills have more to do with time or efficiency at upgrading weapons/modules or refining and crafting components for construction. For things like weapons specialization there is always a learning curve to simply knowing how to do the action, be it the intricacies of long range marksmanship or knowing how much to lead a moving target in a space battle. I think the greater limitation should be economic progression and skill based on actually doing a thing rather than having the required XP. How likely are you to buy an expensive ship for an extended conflict when you know you can't afford to replace it and you have never been in a big battle before? The players who spend time making ship designs will get better at it naturally, and the same goes for the players who have big battles and know the capabilities of their equipment. EVE is often mentioned for it's virtues and its drawbacks. The complexities of EVE pvp are a wonderful thing, with all the many kinds of ships and the innumerable ways to make an effective combat setup , however the tedious waiting for skills to finish training so I can use that mining tool, even though I can afford it and know where to use it is ridiculous and is a defining factor in why EVE is not new player friendly. Effectiveness of a particular tool or weapon should be based on it's level of design and complexity and be inversely proportional to the scarcity of its constituent materials. It should not be based on an arbitrary number determined by how many times I've punched a rock or by how long ago I told the game to "train that".

How I understand the construction process right now is that the basic structure of any vessel or building is going to be voxel based, and the functionality and some of the aesthetics will be defined by the various elements one adds, like engines, cockpits, and pretty lights. The voxel building gives the builder types incredible creative license and allows us to design awesomely complex structures, but I'm a bit worried that the elements will be the thing that limits some designs. If, however, elements could be modified and adjusted, we could see some truly unique things. For instance, the cockpit we see in the trailer; it's a very specific size and shape, and that can limit, to some degree, the look of a ship. If I could go into the building area and tweak the size and shape and perhaps the number of seats in to cockpit before using it on my craft I would be very happy. This also might open up a market for custom elements like cockpits and engines that have been optimized to look or preform a certain way. As for tuning, things like engines are IRL pretty complex things that require a hell of a lot of engineering and tweaking to get running right. If there were some relatively simple tuning system that allowed you to maybe replace parts with better ones or overclock certain bits to make one aspect like efficiency better at the expense of thrust or vice versa, it would allow for a greater range of creative options. Similar systems for every active element would make aftermarket tuning or even engine design a career path in the finished game.

If indeed the building process is going to be so exacting and the physics of things like center of mass and center of thrust have bearing on the handling of vessels we are going to need a "virtual workshop" or something akin to the VAB or SPH in Kerbal Space Program, where the game allows you to see such attributes of your design. This makes the whole blueprinting process easier as blueprints would have to be created in the design space and not just from physical objects wherever.