KlatuSatori
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Posts posted by KlatuSatori
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This topic was indeed discussed before. but it was quite a while back. The topic is well worth a scan through, because it got a nice response from NQ.
In particular, Nyzaltar's post:
On 11/18/2015 at 1:48 PM, NQ-Nyzaltar said:Hi Klatu and Vylqun!The vision you have about exploration is, for the most part, the same we have at Novaquark.@Klatu:-
Explorer specialization won't be just for the sake of exploring. Of course, we plan to make it as insteresting as possible for people who just want to discover new horizons, but we plan to do more than that.
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Indeed, we plan Explorer specialization as a viable way to make a living in the game, exactly how you described it: Explorers will often be the ones to gather resources, but they will have also another kind of income: trading information about resource locations through contracts (which will be a practical use of the RDMS, Rights & Duties Management System).
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Yes, players (especially the first wave) will start the game starved of data. There will be minimal info even about the starting planet, Alioth, at the beginning. We want to generate naturally player demand about map data that way. Explorers will also be - most likely - Cartographers of the planet but also of the surrounding space (first Alioth's solar system, and then the galaxy surrounding it!). The known areas will grow accordingly with player exploration speed.
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The size of the game universe is virtually unlimited. That's the point of having a procedurally generated Universe. We don't want players to be at some point blocked or slowed down due to lack of content to explore. This might be described in a more detailed way in the future, on the DevBlog.
- Explorer specialization will be possible on two axis (like any other specialization): Training skills and crafting (or buying) gear more and more efficient.
All in all, we have the goal to make any specialization fun to play, but also - and we think that's what is lacking in many games - meaningful in a massively multiplayer game world, that each player find useful to group together, either for having complementary skills or to make a big corporation specialized in one activity and selling their services for large-scale ingame projects!@Vylqun:-
Crafting will imply intermediary states between raw resources and a finished products. That's why you will have "alloys" and "parts". The way of learning new "recipes" (we should avoid to use the word "skillbook" here, to avoid confusion with learning new skills) is still under discussion in the team. Crafting will most probably be the topic of a DevBlog post in the future
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If all goes well, yes, Explorers should be as much popular with Scientists/Researchers as with Industrialists/Crafters
Best Regards,Nyzaltar. -
Explorer specialization won't be just for the sake of exploring. Of course, we plan to make it as insteresting as possible for people who just want to discover new horizons, but we plan to do more than that.
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7 hours ago, Lethys said:
once you participated on the test on 30th of september you're under NDA and you CAN'T talk about that to anyone
This in particular.
Also: [Redacted]
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22 hours ago, ClanGDHNeo_O said:
I'm with KlatuSatori. for me, improving perks doing certain actions like build, craft and gather to learn better tiers or/and side perks, sounds very addictive.
as all it sounds a finite system too, but with a nice balanced experience needed could be not too op vs new players.
Stop NWO!
Salut!
I think a distinction needs to be made between tech advancement and skill training. Skill training is character specific and will be time based. It will unlock certain abilities and/or provide small % improvements in a character's performance of those abilities. It will be a lot like the skill training system in Eve. This has been NQ's plan since the early days and hasn't changed as far as I'm aware.
Tech advancement is the discovery of new elements and materials which have the potential to shake up the status quo. For example in the first couple of months, the discovery of an engine that can make it possible for ships to reach space. This is something that everyone will eventually benefit from. New tech will start out being available to a select few, but then more organisations will unconver the secret, some will sell it on for a profit, and eventually it will be become the norm, so that any new player might have access to it in their first week. This kind of tech advancement, I believe is vaguely planned, but the exact mechanisms are not, as far as I know.
Tech advancement is a far more interesting aspect of the game than skill training (i.e. levelling up) if you ask me.
- Neo_O, Captain_Hilts and Seveen
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I'd rather have the skill system gently influence tech advancement rather than directly unlock new elements/blueprints. Tech advancement could be a true system of discovery. Crafters could experiment with different ores/materials/fuels to discover new ones. Explorers might discover mysterious ancient or abandoned constructs that give clues as to what might be possible for players to build. New features could be released without explicit announcement and instead revealed through clues in the environment. Even destruction could have some chance to create and drop scraps of advanced materials that can be examined. Or certain weaponry when used on certain materials could yield strange effects that are repeatable and spark the beginning of a race to find the cause and reap the potential benefits. Tech advancement could be just around the corner for every type of gameplay.
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I can't speak for OP, but it seems this topic was about tech and yet most people are talking mainly about skills - two completely different things. Granted the same structures can be implemented for both, but different mechanisms can be used for their exploitation and discovery.
For example, it probably makes sense to have a deterministic, player driven approach to individual character skills development, ala Eve Online. Technology advancement should be a lot more mysterious though, driven by an unknown combination discoveries, cooperation, random chance, dedicated research and more.
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This discussion is all very much stick in the Eve mindset. Interdiction bubbles are fine but shouldn't be the only option for pulling people out of warp. It's much more interesting and exciting to be able to chase people down in warp and pull them out of it than to simply deploy a bubble. Either with a module or with some kind of limited FTL weaponry, or both.
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The devs on their videos have shown that they use real-life minerals and elements on their design. As for chemistry, it's not known, however, manufactuing of certain types of alloys hould actually, in my opinion, follow a realistic and intuitive model of "carbon + iron == steel" with the differenc in components making different types of steel, some able to absorb more kinetic damage, while others are meant to sustain thermal ones.
But I think they did say that later on down the line they may add an actual chemistry system for...erm, possible reacreational and therapeutic reasons
Oh very cool. I haven't seen that on the DU YouTube channel...
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Yes indeed, there are many possibilities for punishment depending who committed the crime, the severity, even how many times the crime had been committed.
A long term alliance member might get a warning, followed by a fine for a second offence, followed by being kicked from the alliance. A new member might get kicked in the first offence. A friendly might just get banished and downgraded. On the other hand a large scale smuggling operation may lead to war.
At the same time it is a game. Death isn't the end of the world, so the punishment could easily be death plus one of the above.
Perhaps the best way to police your lands is to assign all trusted individuals with a bounty hunter tag. Then if there's a way to apply automatic bounties to anyone who breaks the law, you're set.
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I was typing up a thread for Asteroids but seeing as this was just posted...
How lucrative should asteroids be?
As an example, the average amount of platinum in earth's crust is 5μg (0.000,005g) per kg, whereas a single 100billion kg X-type asteroid has an estimated 900g of platinum per kg...
If this were to translate into the game, no1 would be interested in planetary mining.
Nice idea. It would be cool if DU has it's own periodic table of sorts and a basic system of chemistry that is complex enough to yield interesting and unexpected results.
About asteroid vs planetary mining, you're only looking at a single material on your example. Different materials are rare/common in different places. Platinum might scarce on earth but it could be common as mud on another. A planet is more likely to contain a complete set of resources necessary for life, whereas asteroid living is likely to be much harder - the number of players that an organisation would be able to support will be much lower than on a planet.
In any case, yes, resource distribution needs to be carefully balanced. Resource depletion goes a long way to solving that balance issue.
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There might also be political reasons to ban certain goods/services. Like for example banning possession/sale of all blueprints made by a particular company. Why? Maybe they're somehow affiliated with a rival faction, or maybe their products are just poor and you want your markets to be associated with quality. Or maybe just because you didn''t like the way one of them looked at you one day. If there's a demand for those products despite the ban, cue smuggling/black market opportunities.
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Contracts still need to be validated and be pinned up. Who's gonna be the one that owns the Jobs' Board you gonna go get the contract from? An organsiation. Those people, take a part of the contact for brokering it on their boards. That happens in EVE, but the brokers are NPCs, in the DU scheme, brokers are players. Contracts != circumvention of taxation. They are just a way to sell packaged deals, isntead of one item.
Like, selling a ship, with this and that on it, for 90% of the price of the whole if you were to buy it on the market individually. (which is why in EVE, people who sell ships like that, are people who stole them from someone).
Contracts can be complicated but they don't have to be. They can simply be goods exchanged for currency. If formal advertising of contracts requires a physical location - which makes sense, then tax avoidance becomes a bit more of an effort. You'd need to use word of mouth to form contacts then meet at a designated place and set up the contract and deal it there and then - direct player to player, no middle man or intermediate step. No need for a formal advertising board. This is a black market that takes some effort to deal in. This could be done on a large scale between organisations, too, but it would be all the more difficult to avoid detection by the controlling faction.
Also, you don't understand how monopolies work. Nobody will go and pin up a 10000000000 item sell orde for 600% of its evarege price.
No, they will set up 10000 difffernt sell orders, for 170% to 340%. Why? Because people are idiots and can be tricekd like sheep by the Rule of Comparison.
Not sure what I said in my post that made you assume I didn't understand how monopolies work. I understand well enough how they work. What you describe here is how to keep a monopoly relatively hidden in an anonymous market. Incidentally I hope the DU market is not anonymous, like the one in Eve...
Anyway, what's more interesting and complex is the relationship between the monopoly holding organisation, the territory holding organisation (not necessarily different entities), the punters, and how new competition is held back. These interactions are what define how the monopoly is maintained, and the nature of any black market that may form as a result.
But, if I was to come in and set the price fo the item at 100% of its average price, because I :
1) stole it
or
2) produced it at dirt-cheap cost
or
3) was paid to do so, so I can hit the market's revenue on the monopoly and damage the trade of said economy by exploding a bubble scheme (yes, the aforementioned example I gave on price ranges == a bubble scheme, it happens all the time in EVE).
All these things, require you to smuggle stuff into a market. Which is why RDMS will be like "authorize X person to be able to sell on this market" but not all. Why? Because the market owners - if they are the faction as well - will want to regulate its trade . Case in point, china enabling only a few hollywood movies a year to show in mainland China, as well as oter regulations. Talk about politics...
I agree with the bold bit. But if you're not authorised to sell on a particular market unit then you won't be able to, you'll need to find some other way to sell it (i.e. arrange a time and place to make the trade as I say above). The smuggling part is getting the goods across the border without being detected. If the market unit is owned by the controlling faction your job is much harder. If it's privately held, and they allow you to use it, then that makes things easier, but as I said previously, that would be conferring risk onto the market unit owner.
In any case those are definitely some very interesting interactions, especially the espionage elements...
Also, understand that miners are going to be a Primary Sector (like farmers will, hopefully, be one day in DU). If your faction's miners are congregated to a cartel, that sells ore at EXCESSIVE prices because :
1) they can
2) they are the monopoly
3) your faction's renting of mining sites to them is too heavy and they got to sell ore at higher prices to make profits
, importing ore from a black market may be your ONLY option in making profit in your faction. The alternative would be to move. And good luck with that. Factories, are not easy to relocate.
Black Markets, are NOT about illegal goods, it's about circumventing taxation and regulations.
Black markets are about circumventing the law. That includes trading in illegal goods.
As for the drug-fiend, it's the only solution to the drugs being illegal. It can accelerate your training by giving boosts to your attributes, but it holds a risk of turning you into a drug-fiend the more occasional the use is.
Drug boost lasts 1 day, but you get a debuff of "if you do drugs again within this time, you'll get double the chance of becoming a drug-fined on the next shot", which can stack to oblivion, but makes you into a gun-crazed psychopath inside the game, with a possible "secret" skill training (let's call it acclamation more likely ) of being able to control your drug-fiend mode for limited time periods for the time it lasts.
It's a good reason why people may say "you know, it's gonna boost me, but I ay die and lose all my expensive gear and be labelled a PKr in the process" (as the other people would not be able to tell if you a bot or a person, only thing they'll see is a guy shooting them.
I wouldn't say it's the only solution. And I don't think it's a viable one. You are essentially saying that players won't be able to play for a certain length of time if they take drugs. I'm not sure that would go down well. I would try out less extreme ideas first and see how it plays out.
Let's say a single dose of a drug gives a 25% boost to all (for example) physical stats for 1 hour and then a 5% penalty to all physical stats for 5 hours, and then a cool-off period of 25 hours. You can definitely see how combat oriented players would want to use that. Now, if you take a second dose at some point during those 31 hours, you get a stronger bonus for a longer period of time (but with diminishing returns), but you also get a stronger penalty for a longer period of time, and a longer cool off period.
If your soldiers get hooked on that stuff (which is definitely conceivable!) during peace time, they might become ineffective when it really matters. And they might be diverting too much wealth to the drug manufacturers. You might outlaw the drug.
Another aspect you could look at is production techniques. Let's say that player-characters' dead bodies can be harvested for certain materials/chemicals and used to craft drugs, or any other kind of good. You might want to outlaw its sale and/or production in your territory to prevent cold blooded murder in and around your land.
You never said anything about my thoughts on stolen goods, weapons and energy sources.
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IF there are such energy sources (higher output but they damage something), I think some orgs might ban them. But those will most likely not run anywhere near such sites so...yeah that's that but I see your point.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think twerk is up for something like: there's no need to ban certain items in a game when those items don't do anything bad (like drugs that increase some stats and decrease others) so there is no real drive there to ban anything. So the only viable and true lesson here is that a black market most likely only circumvent taxes. A huge outpost might have everything you need but at a 25% increased price (because the market needs to buy fuel for the shield and pay people to run it) so some players make fortunes by importing stuff and selling it at a 15% higher price.
The ability to ban the possession of certain items within your borders is already planned in the game using the RDMS/tagging system. The question is whether there will be a reason for orgs to do it.
Another thought stemming from that - you might ban everyone from possessing/trading weapons bigger than a certain size unless they have a "gun licence" tag. You give the tag out to your soldiers and police/security force plus trusted indivudals.
But those will most likely not run anywhere near such sites so...yeah that's that but I see your point.
Not really sure what you mean by that.
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But no worries, actual people, with actual plans for this, will be helping you out. Cooking books is the most emergent shit you can ever achieve in a video game. FBI agent gameplay for your faction is the only logical extreme after that.
Plus one for undercover FBI agents smoking out corrupt manufacturing orgs.
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You ignored that part I suggested in what you quoted about drugs making you into a drug-fiend.
Also, it's not illegal to smoke in the US. It's not legal though to have tax-free smokes on sale. Where did those unregulated packs of smoke came from? You guessed it, someone smuggeld them in the country, then someone from the mob found a business owner that was interested in NOT PAYING TAXES and asked for the tax-free smokes to be delivered to him for a lower price than the taxed packs of smokes he'll have to sell. Plaster some fake taxation markers on it, and only an FBI agent woudl actually be able to tel lthe difference. Who keeps the books on that? The mob. It's a cycle of tax-free trading what Black Market is. Smugglers are glorified distribution agents, no different than truck drivers - which is what most smugglers are, truck drivers who use the cover of official contracts to deliver ilelgal goods ( some greasing may be required)
This aforementioned example, is what will happen in DU. You don't log in and do smuggling liek it's an NPC quest. You join in the time and day your greased customs officer is on the spot, you pay them a hefty, agreed price, and then you smuggle in your tax-free stuff you got to delvier to someone on the local market, that's not connected with the other markets in the game.
But you guys assume smuggelrs are Han Solos - who incidentally, is a drug-boat operator. Yes, that's what Solo delivered on the Kessel Run. Drugs, and Greedo was sent after him by the Jabba, because Solo probably snorted all the spice on his own. Chewbacca is allergic to spice, just saying.
Actual smugglers don't have to smuggle drugs. There are far more - illegal yet profitable - venues than drug smuggling. Drugs are just in that high of demand, even though, whne you come down to it, cocaine, crystal meth and sugar, are all made with the same, crystal method of dissolution.
I didn't mention the drug-fiend thing because I doubt NQ would consider it. The only way you could do it is if you have toons becoming crazy NPCs when the player is offline.
Assuming that the primary source of a heavily taxed good is from a law-abiding organisation, that kind of tax avoidance wouldn't really be illegal unless there was a either a tax on imports/exports or a ban on importing/exporting goods altogether (none of that foreign stuff allowed). Taxing/banning of imports/exports would probably be pretty hard but to enforce unless you have terrain on your side, or your territory is pretty small relative to the size of your border patrols. And that's just the ground, what about flying out? Smuggling = illegal transportation of goods across borders OR transportation of illegal goods across borders. If it's legal it's not smuggling, it's just running trade routes/trucking. Alternatively, if smuggling is so easy because enforcement is difficult, and everyone does it, you may as well lift the tax/ban.
But if you just want to avoid taxes on everything/anything, that's pretty easy. What's required for tax avoidance to be completely illegal is a ban on direct player-player contracts. Let me try to explain using my assumptions.
- Territory holding organisation sets the taxes for all trading within its borders
- Market units owners set the taxes on their own unit. If they are law-abiding tax payers then they'll set the taxes at greater or equal to the taxes set by the territory owner. They can set up an auto-payment to the territory owner in this way. If they set it lower than this and don't have auto-payment of taxes set up then they'll get shut down if they are discovered.
- Player to player one-off contracts can happen anywhere and at any time as opposed to market units which are anchored to a specific location. So tax avoidance here is easy. No smuggling is required to avoid taxation.
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No goods will be illegal. You people need to get some grain of real world.
No organisation will declare drugs illegal, unless using drugs may have unforeseen consequences, i.e. turning your character into a bot that the server operates for a few minutes thus emulating drug-fiend behavior. What a drug-fiend is? The junkie that attacks people. Your character goes into drug-fiend mode, that increases with use, depending on the severity of the drug.
Too grim? Probably. But it's a good reason to ban drugs as an org, as you don't want lawlessness and random PK in your planets.. Teritory units only prevent editing, they do not make your toon immune to damge. If your own people use drugs to get X boost on training skillset, and they end up as drug-fiends, that's a pretty good reason to ban drugs.
Otherwise they won't be banned - at all.
It's not a stretch to see that an energy source that causes the nearby mines to dry up might be banned. Same with banning the sale of stolen goods.
Drugs is not so straight forward, but can still be done. If a drug causes your people to be ineffective at critical moments, or has an impact on your economy, it's conceivable that they could be banned.
It terrifies me that most of you people can't really understand how and why black markets exist.
Are you saying that prohibition is not one of, if not the main reason that black markets exist?
So, let's just keep Black Markets as the illegal trade they are, i.e. blockade running, does not have to be about drugs, it can be about smuggling items for a lower price in a place where monopoly and high prices dominate.
Absolutely agree with that, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find ways for prohibition to be a thing too.
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Doubtless, allowing everything will be the default position of most territory-holding organisations. Prohibition of drugs or other items will only happen if the negative consequences are great enough they somehow have a direct effect on the running of the organisation or the security of the territory. On the other hand, prohibition of stolen goods is something that many organisations may be forced into. Surely you wouldn't allow the possession and/or sale of goods stolen from your own people, but what about that of your allies and neighbours?
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I love this topic. If the right pieces are in place then all kinds of emergent, player-led prohibition/smuggling/black market trading can be made possible.
For black markets to exist you need either prohibition, high taxes, or the ability to outlaw particular people/organisations from trading in your territory or on your market units. Plus some way for illegal trading to occur in secret (direct player to player contracts is the most obvious possibility). Prohibition doesn't necessarily have to be of a particular product or class of products - it can be for stolen goods or goods owned by a particular player/organisation.
There are a couple of ways to make prohibition exist. One way is for certain items/products/crraftables to have dual or divisive effects. In other words, they need to be (strongly) appealing to some people and (strongly) repellant to others. In this way you'll have something that some people want to use, while others want to abolish its use. Another, perhaps less obvious kind of way is to have highly profitable, taxable items replaceable by something far less profitable or abundant. This is much more complex to implement though. It needs subtlety to ensure it is driven primarily by politics and player interactions.
Smuggling can exist either as a result of prohibition, or of scarcity and stockpiling. Smuggling can go two ways - getting something into an area, or out of an area (or both).
Prohibiting the possession and sale of stolen goods is probably the most obvious way that smuggling will come into play, because all of the elements are already in the game, more or less. Organisations controlling territory can prohibit the possession of stolen goods by anyone who doesn't have the, say "Security Force" tag. If it's sophisticated enough, which I believe it is, it could even be okay to possess stolen goods originally owned by a particular set of people, i.e. a white list - it's okay to steal from these guys... or a black list - it's okay to steal, but not from these guys. Smugglers may be trying to get goods into an area where selling stolen goods is prohibited in order to sell it on the Black Market (as described above - as Twerk says, Black Markets that have a permanent physical location aren't likely to last long...), or more likely, out of an area where it is prohibited and into an area where it isn't, so that it can be sold normally on a market unit that allows it. Incidentally market units could also be given this kind of control, and if they're breaking the rules of the territory on which they reside then they are liable to be shut down/repossessed/destroyed by the controlling faction (it's a black market!). After that all that's needed is some way of scanning or searching players, vehicles, and market units to see if they are in possession of prohibited goods. And the nature of that system will determine the nature of the smuggler/customs relationship.
Some other ideas for particular kinds of goods that may end up being prohibited by players:
Weapons - there may be some types of weapons which have a damaging effect on the environment - maybe they destroy one or more kinds of a particular type of ore within a certain radius of its use, or maybe they debuff the stats of the user, and everyone nearby for a given length of time, similar to the trauma idea https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/10334-trauma-mechanics-and-emergent-gameplay-consequences/.
Drugs - they heavily increase some stats for a limited period of time but decrease others for a longer period of time. They can have a cooldown timer, again similar to the trauma idea, where if you use them again within that period then the negative effects last longer.
Energy/fuel sources - some types of energy/fuel could have a negative effect on the environment/nearby users as with weapons above.
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Very nice idea. Personally I'd make the penalty a little more punishing - say [ 5 * (times of death) / 100 ]. That makes running back to continue fighting a battle after dying a couple of times a much more difficult decision to make. Plus it makes drugs a much more tempting prospect if you do hit 25% debuff to all stats. Anything that makes player-led prohibition and smuggling a possibility deserves a look.
Or you could have different penalty equations for different types of stats.
But that's all just numbers/tweaking, I think the core idea is great.
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If the game gets big and there ends up being 20 plus gate jumps even if other game content is good that can kill my mood daily until I quit.
It doesn't feel immersive or massive jumping gate to gate to gate endlessly. It's just tedious repetition and poor design intended to lengthen travel time.
If it's eve like I may as well go get my Lincoln logs and Legos out instead of crying while I watch and don't play.
Surly there's better ways, it seems like they're searching for them.
I think the game would have to get very big indeed for that to be a problem. But if it does, would you personally have a reason to go from one end of inhabited space to the other on a daily basis? Remember this won't be empty systems like in Eve Online, there will be hundreds or thousands of players in living in each system, probably no less than a few dozen in frontier systems. An empty system wouldn't have a stargate.
Only space truckers will have a reason to chain gate jumps every single day.
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You guys are weird :V
That's a fair assessment.
- wesbruce and Cornflakes
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[Citation needed]
Flight time and whom i take with me arent much of an obstacle when i can just log off with that character and play with another for the duration of the flight :shrug:
That's not necessarily the case. NQ have said that it will be dangerous and risky to undertake such a journey, which implies it will require attention and care to ensure your ship isn't destroyed. If a 20 man ship needs a minimum skeleton crew of at least 2 people actively manning the ship at all times that doesn't leave much time for anything else is most people average 4 hours a day. And if a ship needs to be halted completely when no one is logged in, that will greatly extend the travel time for smaller ships. Even if a significant portion of time can be spent AFK travelling through interstellar space (which would be very disappointing), the hardware is still absent from any useful location while in transit, which is a cost.
It definitely is "suddenly, fleet" for the destination.
because they dont have any information about the big blob of ships incoming before it is in interplanetar-ish range.So when they are already in the system.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that complete control of a solar system by a single faction is not likely to happen for a very long time if at all. Seeing an enemy fleet at the edge of your peaceful solar system is a lot more warning time than coming from a neighbouring planet, or an army drive/march over from a couple of hundred kilometres away.
If you look at the context im saying there that spool-up and spool-down times make it impossible to just switch off gates.
Not that NQ said they wouldnt be able to being just switched offIt's not about switching them on and off, it's about giving permission for them to be used.
You definitely need some other form of interdiction for interstellar space:
Example:Say you can detect a ship up to ten minutes away in FTL from your position and maybe two minutes of that range are interdictable.
from your own statements lets assume that a system is roughly 1 hour in radius, 2 hours in diameter.
thats about 1/12 of a systems diameter scannable from a single ship, which seems about right for me for large sensors and in-system play.
to guard a systems borders at the 1-hour-radius mark you'd have to keep an eye on 45000 square minutes of surface area.
a ten minute detection radius would have a cross section of about 314 square minutes (the volume of the detection sphere doesnt matter because the intruder has to fly through your cross section to be detected).
so you'd need 144 ships, which is
bit higher or lower because you cant fill a surface with discs but you can let your ships patrol which closes the gaps.
so lets assume that the 144 is a valid number. which is the ratio of system radius to scan radius times two squared
so you need (rsec/rscan)²*4 ships to cover a given system from intruders from outside it.
which gets highly highly uneconomical very fast
for 1h+10min warning time you need 13² ships or 196
for 1h+20min you need 14² = 256 ships
and so on.
Nice maths
Actually 256 one man scout ships being able to give a 20 minute warning of incursion to the edge of a solar system from any direction sounds very reasonable. There are many reasons why - first you wouldn't even necessarily need 100% coverage, and certainly not at all times, because you should have an idea of whether an enemy is launching an attack (remember it takes weeks to travel through interstellar space, you should have some intelligence), attacks are much more likely to come roughly in the direction of other stars (granted, not necessarily, but most likely), and you should have outposts set up around the solar system which should be able to take up some of the slack.However those aren't the main reasons that 256 is a very reasonable, relatively low number of people for the kind of scouting you're asking for. How many players do you think need to be allied in order for an entire planet to be under a single banner? Looking at the size of the planets, I doubt it would take less than several hundred players at a conservative estimate. For an entire solar system to be united - planets, moons, asteroids, stargates, space stations, comets, (kuiper belts and dwarf planets?) - under a single entity or group of allied entities you surely have to be looking at several thousand players at the very least. Remember, if there is even a single moon or stargate that is controlled by a hostile organisation, travelling for weeks from another solar system to attack becomes largely irrelevant.
Compare also, the number of players it takes for full coverage of a solar system with the number of players it takes to cover a single 1km hexagon on a planet. If the perimeter is 6km, sensor range is 1km, and tanks can travel at 10m/s (22mph, pretty slow), you're looking at around 35-40 players patrolling 5km out from the edge of their territory in order to give a 10 minute warning to incursion to the edge of their territory. That's only a single order of magnitude in difference from being able to guard an entire solar system.
Obviously it's not as straightforward as any of this (what you're saying or what I'm saying) as there are many game mechanics neither of us know about, but I think it is worth keeping these things in perspective... plus it is fun to theorycraft like this
The point is, holding an entire solar system should be hard, and travelling for a month with your fleet to launch a single attack is far far far away from being anywhere near OP.when writing this i had an idea about how to statisfy both of us:
what if active FTL drives would produce a "streak" forwards and backwards along its current orientation, a streak you can detect "long" ahead of the actual ship (hours to days) when it passes through your sensor range?
it would keep the free movement and give defenders time to react to incoming fleets from outside their systems without making sensor ranges in general gamebreakingly long.
and for travelers into unsettled space it doesnt matter because theres no limitation on movement.
for traders it would introduce a game of deception and a bit of luck to avoid being ambushed in unsafe areas, as fling just straight ahead could lead you to an ambush of someone who already came across their streak, but changing course could lead to you being detected in the first place when you wave around that beacon.
maybe with a bit of an opening angle that aiming-a-bit-past-your-target is unfeasible.
It's a good idea. I'd be okay with it if it were implemented, perhaps with tweaks, like it takes a specialised kind of sensor that takes a lot of energy to power, and hence a specialised kind of ship to detect them. But for the reasons I've given above, I don't think it's really necessary. At the very least NQ may as well wait until entire solar systems are united before considering anything like it. If it turns out that month-long travel between solar systems for military reasons becomes a thing and is OP, then this might be a good thing for them to consider implementing.
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"you cant possibly enjoy this camping trip without the six hour car travel to our camping location!"
The road trip is often more enjoyable than the destination. To each their own.
and i dont say that jumpdrives are bad, i say that freeform drives without any limitations on arrival point are bad.
when you can fly around without any limitations (and you explicitly said it doesnt need limitations....) every semblance of strategy goes out the window.
No limitations? Everything I've said is about limitations. Strategy goes out the window when movement is removed from the equation... i.e. when you can travel vast distances quickly and without consequence.
When you want to get from point A to point B there are a lot of decisions to make. How long will it take? What/who will I take with me? What/who will I leave behind? Do I need to keep the journey secret? How? What happens if we're discovered? Home base is attacked while the main force is in the middle of nowhere? What route do we take? What obstacles (environmental and man made) might we encounter. These are things that matter when travel times and routes are an issue. Mobility is one of the most critical military issues.
with the difference that having to get something thats interceptable to the target before you can jump in your whole fleet changes the whole game.
its not "suddenly, fleet" its a possible entryway for the fleet you can plug without having to engage the attacking combat fleet with a more-than-equal defense fleet.
shifting some of the advantage back to the defender, leading to more stability for the non-fighting population.
There is no "jumping". Your fleet has to travel the whole way. Much riskier than throwing out a probe!
There's no "suddenly, fleet". It has to travel the whole way.
other pretty simple additions could be spool up and spool down times for any variation of jumpgate/drive tech.
the stargate probes are lighting up for a while until they are ready to be used (preferrably with some time of standstill)
I agree there should be a spool up time, a spool down time, and a scalable fuel requirement for every stargate jump. Jump drive (for individual ships) should definitely not exist (and thankfully NQ have said that it won't).
As I was thinking about it I came to the same conclusion that stargate probes have to have a long standing time once they reach their destination before anything can jump to them in order to limit their use as mobile jump gates. Something on the order of 6-24 hours.
and jumpgates couldnt just be switched off when someone you dont like comes in sight, but have to be slowly wound down during which the wormhole/whatever connection stays active.
I'm pretty sure you're making this up. Stargates will all be player built and therefore player owned. The RDMS system will allow the owner to decide who can use it and under what circumstances. Stargates would have to be a strange exception for this not to be the case and I haven't read that anywhere. If I find a direct quote on this I'll post it.
and what "interceptable" FTL? you said yourself that that is not needed
No, I said that there don't need to be any different rules/elements for intercepting ships in interstellar space. They are traveling so slowly anyway - at the same speed as ships traveling between planets within a single solar system - so the same rules should apply.
Regarding interception of ships traveling at FTL, I much prefer Elite Dangerous' interdiction method to Eve's.
I was just reading the ask us anything event and Nyzaltar has actually said that nothing will stop players from making interstellar journeys on their normal FTL drives, just that it will be long and difficult and risky, so probes will probably be the preferred method. This is exactly what I'm talking about except I'd prefer if they balanced the two methods by making probes much slower.
EDIT (quote from Nyzaltar)
Can we get devblog about how Stargates are going to be built? Will players be able to fly for months to their stargate destination instead of sending probes?
We will make a devblog when we have finalized all the details. The preferred method will probably be to use SG probes, but you could very well travel to the destination directly with your ship or your colony. However, it's likely going to be very hard to get there and survive. Think about energy, fuel, and all these elements that will be difficult to acquire on the way. But it could be a hell of a journey, yes!
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aaaand that doesnt work with instant jumping/ stargates .... how?build a jump capable ship, follow the wake of jump probes and build gates in the systems which are interesting for other people as well or where some leave the ship to stay in the system.I'm talking about a real voyage through space that takes time. Instant jumping/stargates is just teleporting, where's the journey?It sounds like you're now advocating for jump drives on ships... that seems to go against everything you've said until now.stargates have much less ways of breaking the whole strategic game than go-anywhere-from-anywhere FTL drives.with stargates you have limited ways to get somewhere, instead of being able to walk around any kind of defenses but the ones at the installation you are attacking.why should i stop somewhere but my intended target?gives the attacker huuuuuuge advantages in terms of target choice and (strategic) focus fire ability.with basically no way for the defender to be there in time unless they are in range before the strike, which would be a bad intel situation for the attacker and not planning on the defender side.without the "strike anywhere" capability of freeform FTL drives the universe loses its "war anywhere anytime" characteristic which gives /stability/ to the world which is protected by the ones who fight for the players who arent involved in fighting (yet).giving players the peace they need for actually building cool stuff instead of having something thats worse than EVE nullsec everywhere.
I'm not talking about instant jump drives, I'm talking about the same FTL that is used for interplanetary travel where it takes weeks or even months to go from one system to another. On the occasions where it's actually used to launch an attack it would be a massive and risky undertaking, and it would still be relatively easy for the system owners to see it coming once the enemy fleet enters the solar system. We're still talking about an hour to get from the edge of a system to its centre, depending on its size. If the defenders also have some small outposts on the outskirts of the system they can give themselves even more time. And I'm also talking about interceptible FTL, so enemy ships can be intercepted before they reach their targets.
But let's consider stargates in this scenario. You're talking about an alliance that has colonised/claimed an entire solar system, right? Assuming this happens at some point (presumably years after launch), that alliance will have control over all stargates in the system. An enemy wouldn't be able to use stargates to get into the system anyway. The only way an enemy could get in would be to send their own stargate probe, which could be sent to anywhere of their choosing. Once it arrives, instead of jumping through equipment to build a stargate, they jump a fleet through. In this scenario they've bypassed the defenses and can attack in the same way as I describe above, except without the difficult journey. A smart commander might send several probes so that they can attack from different angles and guard against the possibility of some probes being spotted and destroyed before they reach their destination. This pretty much ruins your entire argument.
However there's an elephant in the room here. We're talking as though single organisations will control entire solar systems. That seems really unlikely to happen within any reasonable time frame. Have you seen the size of individual planets? Tens of thousands of hexes, hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, quadrillions of voxels. I don't see any single organisation controlling even a single planet, let alone a whole solar system. Wars are more likely to occur between organisations living on the same planets and the same solar systems.
EDIT:
the guy with the FTL drive who wants to stomp your mining facilities agrees.
theres definitely no need for deep space interdiction that could keep him from jumping on top of your factilities and nuking them out of existence and jumping out of the system again before you can react.
[sarcasm]sounds like a very balanced and fun approach for everyone[/sarcasm]
Missed this bit. Again, we're not talking about any different kind of travel. Just the same "normal" FTL that would be used for interplanetary travel.
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I agree it exists, but that it's trivial. However, I think you're right that there isn't really any need to have sensors/interdictions at interstellar ranges anyway.I agree that the choice you outlined exists. I suggest we do break something: deep space interdiction. There's really no need. And if you did want it, there's other solutions with a "normal" sized sensor range.
I agree with all of that except there shouldn't be literally nothing out there. There's lots of potential for things to be out there.There's already a limit on freedom of movement. DU is supposed to be focused on emergent, cooperative gameplay. In accordance, FTL speeds are extremely slow relative to the scale of interstellar distances. There's no reason to go out into nothing, except on the rare occasion of a probe (but that's unmanned anyway) since there's literally nothing out there that is reachable in a reasonable amount of time.
There may be those who want to break from that mold, but they shouldn't be punished with artificial limits. The core idea of the game is what will limit them.
Require a Declaration of War to Attack a TU
in Idea Box
Posted
I'd just like to add that I'm against timers for many of the reasons already on here. Something I haven't seen mentioned is that these kinds of organised battles also shutdown a whole host of war strategies and grant additional advantage to the side with the most numbers - organisations with more members already have a numbers advantage, they don't need that advantage artificially swelled.
I'm also against war declarations for similar reasons. It's also too rigid. I'd like to see, as part of the organisation management tools, a relationships management system, completely customisable by and for each organisation's needs. These shouldn't have any effect on who you can and can't attack though.
I also am not in favour of requiring an adjacent territory to be owned by the aggressor. This also shuts down gameplay and warfare options. An organisation should be able to own vast swathes of territory without ever once planting a TU if that is the MO they choose.
The difficulty of conquering a territory should be proportional to the strength of that territory's defenses and the effort its owners put into its defence. It shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult or time consuming. If there's no resistance, it should be quick and easy, but that doesn't mean that it should be easy just because you attacked when the owners were asleep. It also shouldn't require shooting at structures by necessity. It's not an easy puzzle to solve. I'm sorry I don't have answers, but at this time I just know what I don't want to see.