Warlander

There has to be some kind of half assed balance in the game. It comes down to: Attack or defense element Ammo or shield enegy cells Containers or Weapon Crates You shouldnt be able to do it all on a ship without sacrificing something. Weapons or defense elements should weigh the same Ammo for weapons or shield cells for defense should weigh the same Having to choose between containers or weapon crates and filling it with ore or parts or different ammo should all weigh relatively the same. And then building the atmo/space frame around it with as many addons for AGG, Warp, performance parts, etc on top of that. There should be some kind of half ass balance where whatever play style you want you can build a frame around it as a hauler platform, defense platform, assault platform, a mining platform, and you cant do it all at once and you have to leverage attack with defense or performance and having consiquences on what you choose.

Warp should always be a thing. Its not about avoiding PvP as much as being a fast travel option at a premium. One possible solution is that since you are basically creating a wormhole between two points in space and depending on the distance the player intends to travel should be the size of the wormhole on both sides of the jump point to end point. When a player warps this wormhole should remain active until the player initiating the warp reaches the end point. Allowing the PvPer to drift the warping ship if they can enter the wormhole and warp with the other player before the wormhole closes on the other size after the other player finishes the jump the wormhole slowly closes and if the player makes it through then they can continue to PvP the other ship that needs to slow down as they reach their desired destination. Or the second solution would also be a disrution mechanic. The warp drive should have a heavy spool time before activation of at least a minuite with talents to make it 25-50% faster potentially so that you have 30 seconds to disrupt the warp drive. I do not think it should instantly interrupt the warp drive since you cant just have players spend a ton of warp cells and instantly lose potentially 50mil+ in cells arbitrarily if someone tries to disrupt you. Since the warping player is paying a premium to warp the PvP ship can either drift via the wormhole for free or they should also have to spend warp cells or disrution cells in this case to counteract the warp drive cost spent on the warp cells. If anything the amount of disruptor cells you use at bare minimum should negate however many warp cells you think the target is using to counteract the distance the warp drive will then travel. It should not tell the PvPer how many warp cells were spent and it should be a game of bidding how much you think the warping ship is using to negate their warp altogether or if you bet wrong it will just lower how far they can actually travel with warp so that you have a chance to drift them or warp to where you think they are going to end up based on what the ship size is. Smaller ships should be easy to disrupt as it wont cost many warp cells to travel so bidding a minimal amount of disruptor cells should do the trick in preventing warp. Where as bigger ships are more of a gamble on how many disruptor cells you want to bid for bigger core or based on visual size and make up of the ship potentially taking a whole lot more disruptor cells to fully negate the warp or shorten the distance of the jump by how many times you fire your disruptor. Disruption should not be as much as an instant stop as much as another layer of guessing how far the player is going and being forced to PvP at a premium for the chance to extend PvP and not just an arbitrary I-Win button. Another option is wear and tear on elements to do the same thing as your lowered speed limits. I have been a stong proponent of using an element like a door, swithc, pilot seat, and or that elements that constantly run like MUs, Industry units IUs, engines, warp drives, or whatever should either do DD or Dot and element based on use for grade/rarity as the HP=Efficiency in 1-100% hp pool which should lower performance based on use and require maintenence or repair or the over all stats on all elements in a construct degrade over time. So in a sense using a warp drive should be like an endurance race like Lemans or Indy 500 in which it takes pit stops and the performance and handling degrade as the race, warp, or just general flight or element usage should suffer wear and tear or erosion over time to lower the HP on elements and thus lower the top speed of a ship maing it slower, have longer spool times, or work less efficiency overall the more you use it unless you repair the ship. I also think NQ needs to adapt the destructive elements system so that when an element is destroyed it should have a random chance of being permanantly destroyed and at the very least lower the stats by 10% and increasing the chance that it is permanantly destroyed. But allowing players to restore whatever % it degrades via repairing it with the components its made out of as it should require the actual components it is constructed from to get it to the point that you can repair with scrap if you have them on hand or just repair with the cap of how much you can repair without replacing components or having major performance loss and a bigger chance of crashing or getting attacked again and destroing more of the ship permanantly or having further perfomance loss.

Its like everything else in DU that NQ thought we would do it all ourselves organically. Orgs were factions to NQ that they wanted us to build ourselves but players if given the choice naturally break into groups and orgs as factions would never really be a thing in that regard. Without binding players to a faction or sim they will not organically occur as the planets have too spread out of ore pools further dividing players to smaller groups. Orgs have a much different agenda than a faction or civ would in what their goals are and the man power they have to accomplish those goals. Back when I started in beta the mining system made it so that we didnt need other people and could get whatever we needed with minimal manpower and still do everything we set out to accomplish in a mining and building game. The PvP aspects or civilization and joining a mega org run like a communist regime did not sound fun and if it was more faction like where we could opperate on our own and still be part of a larger faction to do things we probably would have worked with others but we had no need to. Why would we ever help anyone if everyone is potentially our enemy. Why watch anyones back when they can stab you in it as soon as you reach deep space. Along with the saboteur aspects and long cons we heard about with letting people in and giving them access to what we built they could loot at some point why even put everything we built at risk as it took hours, days, weeks, months, and now years to get where we are. Or helping guild mates with putdowns or getting set up if they eventually just leave or quit the game anyhow. Its not as much of a civ builder as much of a distopian fall of a civilization into a dark age.

NQ never really understood what a solar system was and the biggest problem with this game is that they just made everything a goldylocks all exoplanet solar system when in reality space is unhospitable, dangerous, and full of extrems and the makeup of planets that NQ never did their homework on when generating the solar system. There is no danger or gas giants or environmental survival aspects let alone extreme extremes. On top of it all NQ simply made the 12hr space grid way larger than it had to be with all these goldylocks exoplanets so that they could spread out the ore on different moons and planets when there should have been a limited amount of exoplanets or moons we could mine had there been planets too hot or cold to land on or gas giants. I feel like this solar system is too large and has too much dead space for the size and the exoplanet makeup without danger or even needing air underwater, in general, or in space. Most planets outside Alioth would either have their water boiled out or it would be solid anyways or made of amonia. Or wind, temps, etc that should kill you. Had there been danger elements in game people wouldnt be spread out as far and wide as they are or had to work together a bit more then people do since there are too many exoplanets for the sake of having options to mine. NQ could have made a smaller number of planets or on the flip side changed the scale in this solar system to fit multiple systems with a sun, second sun, extreme planets closest to the sun, goldylocks planets, asteroid belts, gas giants in the kyper belt and ort clouds. and actually had different civs with their Own Alioth homeworld with a punishing mix of envirnmental danger, makeup with a minimal amount of habitable or teraformable planets to mine, and it would have had a better chance of building a civ on each system and fighting together or working together as a civilization. This is an MMO after all. In DU there is a massive amount of dead space, desolate planets, and nothing to explore really. The Multiplayer aspect is yet to be seen as there are too few people spread way too far and wide and made harder since you have to have multiple bases on multiple moons and planets to get what you need. The Online aspect is persistant but having this much dead space, perfomance, and lag with what we have with the Massive and Multiplayer aspects makes it as such that there is no need for other people as you might see one or two people to day since the population density per KM is 1 since like 800 people now play the game and are too far apart for any meaningful civilization to exist outside of Alioth and the bubble of moons. I want to exist in a civ but since NQ pretty much made everyone my enemy and let them eventually wage war on me it makes me want to participate less in the society or civilization aspects of the game vs working together as a large faction of orgs who have a shared goal of building something greater than ourselves even if we dont like each other we still want to keep what we have and have a mutual shared interest in securing resources, watching each others backs, building industries to increase resource aquisition, and built military fleets to protect those in our civilization from harm or to assault other civs who attack us or as a war like society destroy others before they destroy us with sapce conquest. In DU its nothing like that.

Warp should always be an option. Just because you dont like the idea of retreat does not mean it hasnt been a viable option of self preservation since forever. Flight or flight is a natural respons. If this was a dog fighting sim or modern day I would say sure it should be slow boat all the time with no escape. But its a future space sci-fi game. Warp is always a retreat mechanic even for the empire. But it works both ways since you can use it to attack too if you know what lane you are in if you did your homework and meet them where they are going if you jump to the same planet in the same lane.

If I cant mine and reliably transport the goods I work hard to aquire and or produce and im paying a premium to do so im not just going to give it away to someone. If they go with no warp or at best a decent disruptor system Ill just say screw it and build rather than play the game which seems like most people do around here. Without warp im not transporting anything since the risk does not match the reward for me based on how long it takes to aquire ore or build the ships vs how easy it is for someone to blow it up in less than 5 mins. Or forcing people to walk. Like I said, You cant have your cake and eat it too if I buy the cake and you want to smash it in my face and then buy you a new one then force me to walk to the store to get it. No thanks

Lol you have 100% automation and a jame every week or two is cramping your style? You would hate to work in an actual industry. Even when I did printing you were lucky if it didnt jame each minuite, every couple mins, or at best once an hour. Lol. Must be hard being an industrialist vs a miner in the old system sitting around and having to start some machines every 1-2 weeks and banking. At least now you only have to blow charges on your tile to get free ore.

They could have scaled the solar system to match the top speed from the get go but they chose to make the solar system like 10 times larger than it needs to be for whatever reason since it had technical limitations. Thats their design choice not mine we could have had 3-4 solar systems in this game had they made better decisions but they didnt and then added warp to speed it up. I get you dont like warp but its far from free depending on how much you move. All space games typically have a warp drive or sub light speeds and NQ copied that since they went with fossil fuels and capped themselves at 30knph which leave no room for any real sci-fi elements other than teleport pads, AGG, and Warp. The thing is that just removing it kills PvP further if that is your intent. Personally I would just not care to leave planet after that because I am not just going to hand over hundreds of millions in days, weeks, or months and hours of engineering better performance to PvPers when I have to spend money to avoid it and PvPers dont. Thats not even mentioning that there isnt even a law system in game that has any form of consiquences for PvPing people in the first place since there is no crime, no stolen cargo, no loss to markets, or any retrobution once you take my ship to a bubble. You cant have your cake and eat it too if I buy the cake and you want to smash it in my face and then buy you a new one then force me to walk to the store to get it. No thanks.

The way I see it Demeter pretty much finished off PvP except for larget orgs that have mining opperations on different planets with various people on their own. Even with T1 it takes like a month per box of ore and higher tiers are worse looking at the actual ore market in how much ore is entering the game. You used to be able to go wherever you wanted and mine or set up a base as a local launch pad. Now that ore is just under a month per box base and a lot longer for other ores there is nothing really to trasport and those who do are moving small amounts cheap via warp. I am sure there are still people moving large amounts of ore logistically but they budget for warp cells to keep what they earned as the losses post demeter are a whole lot worsse if you lose a ship than before. The main issue with turning off the ability to warp is such that to avoid PvP you have to pay high prices and before demeter it used to cost us bare minimum 50 mil in warp cells to do so. PvPers dont have to pay anything to PvP and I could see the case for a warp disrutpor but unless it involves betting warp cells to stop the ship with some kind of spool time for warping for the chance to disrupt them with using warp cells and paying just as much or more than the other ship is using to disrupt them, Just removing warp will not help the situation. Lowering the speeds on cores when smaller ships naturally go faster and if you need to hunt people down faster there is the option of more engines or adding thrust to your ship to overcome distance before warp or just shadowing someone until you get close enough to fire on them and destroy them is more of an option than just firing when you get into range so your weapons hit. Its certainly a tricky thing but where you see it being unfair paeople pay a lot of money so its not like they get off scott free. Personally I warp to save time as I dont have all day/night to sit there traveling and just want to get there faster. Maybe you like road trips but I dont.

@VandelayIndustriessaid: "Without warp I can only be at one place at one time. That matters...a lot. And second changing core speeds does add more for defenses. L cores cannot dominate in pursuits. You have shields, and M and S if they want to evade will be able to run away majority of the time. As your shields keep them up. Second, if im in a S core pvp ship, i have limited range. so once again if i match your speed by do so 1.4 su away. i am SOL as i cannot deal damge to you. That is a major defense. The reason haulers never got away before was because my pvp ship was ALWAYS faster, and if I could see you on radar, I could shoot you and dmg you. Changing core speed changes that meta BIG time. This is fact." Just let me ask you why there is no PvP to be had? If people wanted to fight they would be fighting. The fact that nobody wants to fight no matter how long you patrol space is too expensive to build multi hundred million quanta haulers at a premium cost of warp cells since if I could fight with an armored fortress against PvPers I would slow boat but with a full hold its not possible to just add more containers for ammo and stack weapons when you are a sitting duck. Shields arent the greatest defense vs the weapons. Blowing the core without any sort of side power source you can keep them charged with was a bad idea and yeah sure you can stack cores but after you blow all the shields there is still no defense at the end of the day to just hand you my ship and I am just biding time before it goes down. The speeds are already solid and it is a drag race to who hits 30kmph first to hit top speed and that last 10 or so knph is where smaller ships bridge the distance. I cant tell you how many time I come out of the bubble at 30kmph and it does not matter in most cases as the weapons range and tracking is so rediculous that even if they were slower they still get you and even if I managed to get away PvPers have warp too. With Autopilot there are only so many lanes you can travel. Honestly most devs realize people dont want to travel 2-6+ hours on a roadtrip as endless travel is not fun in of itself. Its not all about dodging Pvp as much as it is just cutting down on the crazy flight times. With missions going on there should be a lot of prey out there to pick on slow boating that cant warp.

Ill respond to you in the warp thread as to not keep derailing this thread.

PvP cores are as easy as taking the Static and Dynamic cores and the weapons limits are baked in already. They just need to remove the weapons from normal cores and its a go. Obviously other layers of the solar system arent in the cards but for immediate PvP in the game PvP cores could work.

I actually did reply to your OP. Society is supposed to bring people together and allow the citizens to do more than if there was no society at all. In DU its called a Civ but there is little to nothing to do together that qualifies as a society as much as solo, small groups, and what is left of the bigger orgs that used to play. I do think that there should be a lot more mechanics to do that but a Civilization is a group of orgs and in the larger context of the solar system at large there should be other civilizations that fight against each other or work together. Orgs can do that but its like cities fighting in a state vs states fighting states or countries fighting countries and in this case planets fighting other civs on other planets. @VandelayIndustries I know that you think getting rid of Warp will open up PvP but it will also be short lived as there are not enough defenses in PvP so in theory its just hey go get some friends and youll be fine but without factions or whatever it will just drive more people out of the game then adding PvP. After the PvP dries up what are you going to want to strip from the game next to find the next group of unwilling participants?

It me having a sci-fi game without warp pretty much turns it modern day. Its like one of the few sci-fi elements we have left since VR is now useless, teleporters are useless, and after that whats next AGG? There should be more to do as far as PvP and I get warp stops that from happening especially if you are patroling space looking for someone to fight and every time you target them they bolt and warp. I think that NQ needs to add PvP cores that if you want weapons on a ship you have to use a PvP core. So that you can potentially still fight people you find in space but with PvP Dynamic Cores you could fight people in the bubbles to have more chance at PvP to occur locally. With PvP Static Cores as defense platforms with auto AA scripted defenses you would have something to fight against in addition to looting whatever you kill. Slowing max speeds shouldnt matter unless you want to destroy engineering ships in general since no matter what the smaller ships get up to max speed faster naturally due to less weight and you could use a L core to make a small ship if you wanted it. I think NQ needs to create some kind of disruptor ammo that if you are able to penetrate the shields and aim at their warp drive it should stop them from warping. But the thing is that there is no real defense in the game even with shields since it adds core stress for whatever reason. Do you remember the time the Enterprise got fired on by Klingons and they shot the shield and disabled the whole Enterprise because the core blew? It didnt happen because it was a sepperate power source and once the shield drops its when things start taking damage. There are no real defenses in this game other than offense since there are no automatic turrets or anything run by ai to help defend you other than die which is why warp is still in the game since it took years to just get shields and they kinda suck. There is so much going wrong with PvP in general its not funny. The problem is the talent system or requiring gunner seats outside of the pilot being able to fire their own weapons or being chased as a frieghter and not having any kind of adaquate defenses in general since before this you needed mining, piloting, then container PDs, and finnaly weapons/ammo requiring like 50-60mil exp to make a freighter have reverse defenses. At this point piloting is pretty much a solo experience for most people and not having any real weapons unless thats what you did with piloting, radar weapons, ammo, hp, etc is still a path but it takes too long to get into PvP let alone add tons more containers and everything already bogging down freighters from being defensable fortresses rather than battleships does not exist.

Yeah NQ cant keep losing people like this who are the people they wanted to build the game for NQ. We can do a lot but it would seem the exodus has started. Hopefully NQ comes to the table before its too late.

Sorry to hear that OP. NQ can turn this around any time they like. Most of the time they do shady things like "Recruit a Friend" pyramid schemes for skins when they should have just sold the skins and gave store credit for recruiting people. There is lots they can do right now to save this game. It really wouldnt take much to do so. NQ is very bad at communicating and if they would just acknowledge that things arent going well and talk to us rather than asking for feedback and doing nothing with it. There are lots of things going wrong that could be fixed IF NQ actually wanted to. What they have made and development as it goes on is not going to work and evidence shows its less fun as time goes on.

Still it makes sense. Plus we supposedly saved all this performance with the geo reset and removing mining so it should be enough to just create an instance of the solar system at half scale or other higher speed instances half the scale of that if we indeed saved so much performance. It does not require anything on the planets as you just need to render empy space.

Its a small price to pay for starting them and not needing to touch them once a week. At least you dont have to micro manage it with charges and things like mining units. It also makes sure you have all the talents to run it vs having people with pushes start it for you or makes it harder to skirt the industry talents.

I had not seen their comment on it but it does make a lot of sense. It could be possible to spawn or have some kind of warp instance that is a smaller version of the solar system that is like 30kmph but still allows people to chase and hunt other players if you warp out. They could also effectively create additional instance of even smaller versions of space for faster versions of warp than that so at least it counters avoiding PvP by warping if they make an instance with the planets closer together in space with a smaller version of the solar system.

There could be lots of different governments or societies players could vote on like piracy, military, trade federations etc. But still if it is a 6 hour road trip slow boating and Warp was changed to just double normal speed once you hit 30kmph and it just cut down half the time of travel you still would have a 3 hour road trip instead of a 10 second teleport. If the attacking ships warp when you do then they can still chase you down. Even if NQ at some point came out with Warp 2 it would still take you and hour and a half to do the same thing. Warp3 45, and so on costing a lot more for the speed than now at a premium. Players should always have the ability to chase you down depending on the makeup, parts, and weight or size of cores depending on who is chasing you.

Yeah I dont get why you can be part of multiple orgs and at the same time create your own shell org. I agree that hard choices should be made and each planet has a small yet strategic ore pool which makes trading or fighting necessary to make what that planet can make its primary export.

with Warping it would have been better if it was like regular space travel just upping the speed limit to 60kmph instead of a teleport so its not instant by any means but I think if it was tuned to get anywhere in the solar system in an hour it would be a decent tool that should act as fuel like space gas.

What NQ calls Civilization I consider a single society. We all supposedly belong to the same society but are fighting each other. There is no building a society if we are fighting each other and there is no incentive to work together as a society. Or that it is supposed to be a PvP game and yet taxes of NQ as a government dont do anything to pay for things or to be a military power in the solar system instead of a Quanta Sink. I guess orgs = countries in a planetry sense but in the grand scheme of things each planet is pretty much the countries that would exist in a solar system format and the orgs being the stats within that context. Civilization as a concept only works if you take a sort of sim city approach to a planet with zoning, mining/industy/market/logistics portion of the current game loop and applying it to a military based system that lets players join a planetary or civilization's army and that those governments as planets would be doing the same thing and fighting over space. Where it does not matter if Civs rise and fall like they have throughout history and new civs form, get crushed, or hit their zenith and fall. Its really the missing half of this game to unite players under a faction to want/need to work together or they all get destroyed together once you leave Alioth.

NQ was right in the sense that this is a Civilization Building game in their concept. Imagine Earth as Alioth and that when pioneers from earth colonize Mars that at some point they will instantly or at some point become their own break away Civilization as a sepperate planetary government with their own rules and agenda, taxes, etc and require people to pledge citizenship to Mars as your primary home as countries do now with country of origin with citizenship. Any of the Planets in DU should also become their own break away civilizations from Alioth's basic starter Civilization. I think that if you are a player you should be able to own personal tiles on any planet, but if you have an organization you should have to bind yourself to a planet with HQ tiles or more specifically players should have a Corperate Headquarters Tile that permanantly binds them to a planet that they cannot change unless they dig up all their tiles on a planet and move their Corperate Headquarters. Right now the biggest problem with DU is that Orgs as factions is not enough to get anyone else in this single Civilization to participate in anything that a faction would let them band together and work together as a much larger group to accomplish something larger than themselves. As it is now there is too much put on the individual players or Orgs to support themselves or to enguage in any meaningful combat. If you had to bind yourself to a planetary faction it does a number of things. Other planets need what your planet has and strategically makes it so that you cant get all the ore you need to make things. So even if everyone goes to Jango or the most profitable planet as a break away civilization they still need resources from other planets and since they are bound to Jango or whatever planet they can only put tiles down on that planet other than personal non org tiles down. Going to the other planet would be full FFA vs the other civs and it would be filled with defenses on tiles if PvP cores were made to where Jango as a Civ faction could only do so much damage to the planet without waging war via Assault Territory Units or to find frontier areas to mine via Dynamic Core miners since they cant own land on the planet that isnt PvP FFA that can be destroyed at any time by the citizens of the planet they land on. If the taxes collected on each planet were used to buy ore/parts to buy them from players as missions to build planetary fleets and just let anyone who wants to pilot a ship fly one or fight together as a Planet Civ Faction it makes it much more inclusive if anyone can use the ships the tax collected buys and maintains and then adds more content by building ships to have constant PvP going on but also opt in that has major impacts on gameplay and running together as an army of a planet makes it easier to cover your miners mining on other planets via ships or FFA Territories since you dont belong to that Civ easier with military support, overwatch, escorts, etc if the system is designed as a military machine through missions vs doing nothing to simulate PvP since you have to pay taxes but you get something fun out of all the money collected in the end to actually participate in PvP that does not put hundreds of millions in losses directly onto the players since it is the taxes paying for it like an actual government would with funding a military. Players as they leave Alioth would be able to Put down a Corperate Headqurters tiles once they progress from Alitoh and up until then could be traders as Alitoh would be the primary Civ of the game everyone is born into with the most new players and people working together and spreading out into the solar system until they put down their Corperate Headquarters. Headquarters tiles could still be put down on Alioth until they leave Alioth and people Should always be able to go to alioth unless you PvP Alioth Citizens as the flag for PvP against other Civ or Civs you attack each week since you should be able to attack anyone in deep space but doing so should make you an enemy to their citizens.

Yeah I saw this as well. He nitpicks a lot on things that dont necessarily matter too much since he talks about gravity and NQ tried that and all the constructs that fell and blew up without never requiring AGG on static cores to maintain anti gravity on static cores was why. They wanted to do it but it wasnt feasable. The real issue in this game is the sense of community. We dont need AI as much as including people into a bigger factional setting as its not one civilization of disorganized orgs as much as it needs to be Planet VS Planet of multiple factions that call one planet or another home and working together as a unified faction instead of sepperate orgs to give people more of a sense of community to allow people to work together instead of simple Org vs Org setup they have now. I know making planets into factions sounds limiting but if NQ allowed more people to work together or to rally to do more since you are locked into a planet faction with all your tiles and assets you can fight other planets and add Dynamic mining ships back into the game to need protection of an army vs disorganized spread out orgs or solo players that dont need to work together and everyone is an enemy that makes trusting people harder since nobody has your back and you can do everything on your own or in a small group with talent speccing. If missions or taxes were used as a means to build armadas for planets and then just have anyone who wants to fight pick up a ship and fight can its a more inclusive system if the mission system takes or and parts and actually builds BPs in a dry dock Core element that is massive players could be a lot more included and since the taxes they pay are being used to build and maintain a planetary fleet or defenses there is no real loss if you lose since the taxes pay for all the ships instead of putting it all on players.