Heresiarch

I have already read that, and you are right - it is extremely interesting (especially after having read the books)! :-) The problems with trying to replicate that in Dual Universe exactly are that we don't have the AIs which are a necessary cornerstone. And that having an entity that almost never engages in warfare, does not have sharp borders, and only really works because it is a lot more powerful than all neighbouring entities ... is just not very fun in a game. That is not to say that if one faction in Dual Universe where to absolutely dominate, it could not take on similar characteristics to Ian Banks "The Culture". Still, it would not make for very engaging stories (which is the reason that Ian Banks stories are told on the fringes of the culture - there just would not be enough conflict otherwise). So I am trying to lift a few ideas from the books, at least enough to give it a passing similarity, and have stolen the name. But I am in no way saying that I am trying to replicate the society of the books in the game - it would not work, as you rightly say. And as noted initialy - I am just throwing this out to see whether anybody is interested in something like this. Or whether something like it has already been proposed. EDIT: Just thought of another argument to justify taking up the name "The Culture": From this political framework Ian Banks "The Culture" could have straight up arisen. No revolution necessary. So, it's like a proto Culture. ;-)

You are right, the two ways of organizing societies (Ian Banks "The Culture" and what I am proposing in this thread) are quite a bit apart. And I am open for alternative naming ideas. But there are at least some similarities, or I would not have thought of the name: Every ship in the Culture is an autark entity. It can do anything it likes, as long as it respects the basic rules - like letting anybody leave who does not want to stay on it, and otherwise respecting the rights of the beings aboard it. So a ship is kind of similar to a member organisation, in that the overall Culture makes no judgement calls about how it should behave, or how its internal society works. And you can kind of compare the "speaker" role I defined to a ship mind. Only kind of though, we have no all knowledgable AIs here. ;-) The big difference is of course that there is nothing like the ability to make binding laws if 60% vote for that - Ian Banks "The Culture" is much closer to anarchy. But it would definitely be cool if one member organisation is just a ship flying around and exploring, at the same time as it is a member organisation of The Culture, don't you think? :-D

reserved

I am keeping a close eye on any devblog posts detailing asset management and organisation (voting and legates). I think that what the developers intend to implement should easily allow for both direct and indirect democracies to be formed. How competetive these would be (reaction times, for example) of course remains to be seen. But that's a part of the fun for me (darwinism of organisations)! :-) It is well possible that we need a much bigger player base before democracies in any form make sense. The other risk is whether the promised systems will actually be implemented. But I have a very good feeling about how the developers reject a lot of ideas to be able to concentrate on what they promised. They obviously have a clear vision, and appear very competent in engineering the game to match that. In light of all that: I am looking for an organisation that has a more interesting form of government than just rule by fiat or oligarchy. But I'll wait until I see the actual in game systems before making a decision, or deciding to create something myself. I first want to see what is actually possible. :-)

Hi! I primarily intend to enjoy this game by designing ships and treating it as a huge sandbox creating stuff. However, my interest in the game was also fueled by the potential I see in trying out social ideas. Because Dual Universe will give us very, very powerful and flexible tools we can use to mold organisations in any way we desire. I am really frustrated with the way our real life democracies work, yet I am not a fan of authorian regimes or anarchy either. But what else is there? Well, the flexibility Dual Universe organisations will give us, will let us experiment however we want! With the caveat and advantage both that the stakes here are way lower than trying stuff out for real after winning your local revolution. :-) https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2017/03/31/organizations-purpose-management/ https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/03/20/organizations-build-your-corporation-faction-nation-or-empire/ If there is any interest at all from other players, I will take the time to translate my thoughts about this subject into english and post them. But the basic idea is pretty simple, and I will detail it here: In Dual Universe a member of an organisation can be either a player, or another organisation, allowing for a hierarchy of organisations. So imagine an organisation, where only other organisations can be a member (like an alliance of guilds). We'll call this organisation "The Culture" (like in the books from Ian Banks). The basic rules for The Culture are thus: - Every member organisation has voting power proportional to the number of members it has - With 60% majority, laws can be created (restrictions, obligations, ...) - With 40% of the votes, laws can be abolished - Every member organisation is completely free to determine its decisions, and how it votes, in any way it sees fit - direct voting, electing of representatives, dictatorial fiat, oligarchy, whatever! - Every member organisation can give itself any rules it wants, so long as they do not contradict laws of The Culture. - Obviously everybody can leave a member organisation at any time. A member organisation does not have to accept somebody wanting to switch to them from another organisation in The Culture, but this mostly should not be a problem - the new member gives them more voting power after all! - Every big enough member organisation determines a speaker (->role tag). All speakers together form the executive council. This council is purely ceremonial unless laws are voted in, granting them powers. Only organisations with at least 5% of all members of the culture send a speaker to the executive council. Smaller member organisations that together have 5% voting power, can band together to send one speaker. - In contrast to normal alliances, there is no teritorial division between the member organisations. Instead, the members are intermingled. This also makes it easier to switch organisations within The Culture if you are frustrated with the way your organisation is treating or representing you - you do not have to move your home! :-) - people in the Culture are always free to band together and form a new member organisation. There are no conditions or approval process necessary. Okay, that should do it for now. Everything else is details. If you have read the devblog entries I linked, you should see that everything described here should be easily achievable within the framework that Dual Universe will provide us! :-) So: I have not looked through the organisations that have already been proposed. Has anything close to this already been suggested? If not: Would anybody, or any existing organisation be interested in exploring this concept? All that would be needed would be a broad shared goal like "Explore the universe" or "become an economic superpower" or whatever. And then the member organisations could keep their members and work together as described here. This is just a call for interest. If nobody is interested, I'll look for a friendly corp or something, build my ships and be happy with this game. But if there is interest, I could give way more background to the ideas presented here, as needed, and maybe make a dream reality. (I have a whole essay about the problems of democracy, the advantages of having such a meta layer, and how all this could be organised in real life. It's in german atm, though.) So, thoughts, anybody? :-D

I will keep an eye on this. Seems to be a very good approach!

I am not hyped. I am though, extremely curious. ;-) I have no other time commitments on the 30. , so I will definitely try it out, and provide feedback as best I can. I just don't want to be disappointed if it crashes immediately, is unplayably slow, or similar. I expect more of a tech demo than a playable game for this first opening of the servers. But I'll definitely poke around and see what there is to see. My computer should be easily powerful enough for this, anyway. :-)

Sorry for the almost necro. But since I haven't replied here yet, and the thread is not locked, here is my take: 1. KISS - keep it simple, stupid. Do not waste valuable developer ressources on this until it is needed. 2. Avoid horror stories and media backlash before the game is even launched - nobody is arguing for making DACs lootable without any kind of safety net, as far as I can see. Good! 3. Keep your options open - avoid making decisions now that make it unnecessarily hard to change your mind later. 4. Try to keep both sides happy (lootable vs not lootable) - might be impossible, but as long as you keep to points 1 to 3, keeping you early supporters happy is a good thing. :-) Under the assumptions that everybody has at least some kind of (limited) bank space in every safe zone (e.g. locker by your cryo pod?), and that safe zones never cease existing, I'd do it the following way: - There is no limit to the amount of DACs you can put into your Arkship locker - You are unable to leave a safe zone with DACs in your inventory. - You are unable to materialize DACs outside of a safe zone Finished, thats it, nothing else left to implement. :-O Now what does this actually DO!? - Whoever buys DACs with real world money can use them on himself, or trade them on a market (if the market is located inside a safe zone). - You have to put your DACs into the locker (or any other safe container) before leaving the safe zone. Which is normal and prudent behaviour anyway. The game is simply enforcing it to prevent edge cases. - Reselling of DACs you bought is possible. That should avoid any weird price spikes resulting from being unable to resell DACs - There should not be anything for the proponents of lootable DACs to complain about - having DACs you have LESS options compared to normal items instead of more. - There should be no way to spin this as too unfair towards griefed players - your DACs can't be lost because the game prevents you from getting into that situation. - There is a good chance for emergent gameplay because players travel to different safe zones to buy or materialize and sell DACs, because the DACs can't change safe zones. So while you lose emergent game play for DAC traders - hiring escorts and so on - you on the other hand gain gameplay by having more players traveling, making for example passenger liners more likely. Even if win and loss of emergent gameplay only equalize each other, we are coming out ahead! :-D - You keep yourself the option open to allow lootable DACs later on - You only have to remove the check when leaving a safe zone - You are in the best possible position to spin it for the press: "We are only providing an additional option that was not there before." - You have not locked yourself down in any way regarding safety nets - while also having avoided spending developer ressources on that before they were needed. EDIT: Another way to look at this suggestion is that it makes DACs safe zone bound on first trade (because they have to be materialized for that), instead of soul bound (non-tradeable).

Since the new version of the website is now giving us the option to back the game via paypal (https://community.dualthegame.com/pledge), I have now done so. Very much looking forward to the alpha!

The newest kickstarter update says that they will offer a way to support the game via paypal, and get the same rewards as during the kickstarter (except early bird deals). Great!

My problem is simply that there is no word from the developers (that I have read anywhere) about this. A simple "We are looking into it, and hope to be able to do this and that" would be perfectly fine. So, does anybody have any link to an answer from the developers? I am just getting tired of not knowing anything, and I really don't think asking them to answer that question is asking too much... If you are basically shouting "Thats a totally cool project! How can I give you my money?" - and all you get back is silence. Well, at some pont you start thinking that maybe they don't want or need your money after all.

Well, I have been patient. I had also asked the paypal question in the AMA, just to make sure the developers heard the question. I just read through the second part of the AMA answers, and still don't see any word about paypal. So, does anybody have any news? If there is only silence from the developers regarding the question (and I did my damndest to make the question heard), then I guess I'll just forget about the game for now, and hopefully hear about it anew once hits steam. *sigh*

I suppose game mechanics wise that might work out fine. I just don't think it would add much fun to the game. And it would totally break both immersion and the spirit of the game: We are supposed to build up a new society by our own imagination, the way we see fit. The developers are giving us all the tools for that, e.g. minecraft like capabilities to make the architecture we want, and generic "Organisations" which we can sculpt from anything from democracy to dictatorship, and into other stuff we don't even have names for yet. Why the hell should there be a game mechanic which enforces a patent office? Which physical law keeps me from rediscovering something another guy or gal figured out before me!? I am sorry, but very strongly opposed.

Thats the problem I see with any "just figure it out in game" schemes - thanks to information on the internet, the best solutions will be known very quickly, and from that point onwards, very little experimentation will happen. You definitely would not be able to make money ingame for the recipe, if just knowing the information is enough.

Well, having research only in the sense that the developers add in new items, is of course a possibility. I already outlined the advantages I see in having research in the game, but in the end, this is just the idea box forum, right? ;-) As for the changing recipes: It depends on the crafting system. If you immediately go from ressources to finished product, it is no problem: Say a laser weapon takes 100 iron ore and 20 unobtanium to make. You can then have the rule that every damage time your tech increases the damage of the weapon, you increase the iron ore requirement by 1%. So after the 1. increase the recipe would cost 101 iron ore, after the 2. increase 102.01 (rounded down to 102). The fun thing is, the player does not need to know these rules, so they can be way more complex. All he sees is the new builing plan for the improved laser weapon, which lists the ressources it needs. Now what if a a laser weapon recipe instead needs an emitter, a weapon base, a ball bearing, a tracking computer and 2 cans of oil to be build? In that case I would not make the laser weapon recipe itself improvable by research at all. Instead you could tech up the recipe for the emitter (increasing firing speed, damage, and energy draw), and the tracking computer (improving tracking speed and electronic warfare resistance). Almost, but not quite. If somebody just texted you the symbols of the tech in the game chat - that just won't be enough information to do anything with (well not quite, it might still be usefull in reverse engineering, see below). If you got your hands on a building plan (either by buying or by stealing it), then you have everything you need to build the item yourself - these are the detailed instructions after all! But what if you only captured an item? That is reverse engineering, which I did not explain in my first post, because that is an addon to the basic concept (additional work to implement, and not needed for the framework to function). The way I imagine reverse engineering might work, is that you have a scanner you use to analyse your item as well as possible. Depending on your own skill, the quality of your scanner and maybe the amount of time you spend, you would get a data package of a certain quality out of that (the data package is an item). So you don't even have to aquire the item - A spy with enough time alone with the item could smuggle that analysed data out! You would put that data package into a reverse engineering machine (ain't I grand at naming things? ), together with a building plan for a different variant of the same item (so still a laser, but with +10% firing speed instead of +10% damage). Now the engineering machine goes to work (endlessly), and if you are lucky, at some point it will spit out the building plan for the item your data package came from. (Optional: Even if it has not managed to give you the building plan, after some time it will start to figure out the symbols of the tech used to make the item whose data you are analysing (Not all at once, one symbol at a time), allowing you to look for a closer technological match to feed the machine.) What does the difficulty for the reverse engineering machine depend on? -The amount of commonality between the tech you are analysing and the comparison item you gave it, as determined by how long the tech DNA strings stay identical before diverging (this should be the deciding factor - if the analysed tech is only a minor variation of tech you already know, it will be way easier to figure out compared to if development forked of a long time ago). -The tech level of the item it is analysing, the higher the harder -The tech of the reverse engineering machine