KlatuSatori

Bear in mind that DU is going to be an emergent, player led, true MMO. PvE will be quite limited. I think they are planning some NPC content, but the main focus is on players creating content. I even remember reading something about players creating missions which other players can pick up.

I just found this article on rogue planets - planets without a star. It discusses what conditions they'd need to support life, and their potential for human colonisation. I enjoyed it, maybe some of you will too https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-make-our-home-on-a-rogue-planet-without-a-sun

I think there's getting to be a lot of overlap between this thread and the Hotspots for Empire Building thread. Procedural generation allows the universe to be as large as necessary, not necessarily "infinite". A virtually infinite universe would not be a good thing. What we want is meaningful, emergent conflict between players and player organisations. That is driven by putting players close together and forcing them to fight over resources and such. Travelling far beyond inhabited space should be difficult, and something only the most dedicated explorers undertake. Building an empire far beyond inhabited space is even more difficult, because you need a large group of players willing to travel a long way. As the player base expands, new technologies can open up more of the universe. What you don't want is 100 players spread across a huge planet, or 1000 spread across a massive solar system, etc, because no one will ever see each other! EDIT: What I am trying to say is that population density needs to be between a certain minimum and maximum value in order to drive emergent gameplay in a true MMO. Density is dependent on the number of players in the game and size of the inhabited areas of the universe. The size of the inhabited areas is directly dependent on the speed you can travel. So the available techs is how you control population density.

While the game universe can be expanded indefinitely, it's not infinite, or at least shouldn't be, in a practical sense. Taking the first six months after launch as an example again, no one will be able to expand beyond the starting planet, so essentially the universe will be a single planet for practical purposes. Even then, right at launch, getting to the other side of the planet should not be something you enter into lightly. Maybe it takes a month to build a vehicle that's fast enough to circumnavigate the globe in 5-10 hours. Once building practices are established it becomes easier. This progressive improvement should sit hand in hand with the expansion of inhabited areas and the expansion of the active player base. To be honest, I wouldn't want to see resources becoming a non-issue in terms of warfare. There are lots of reasons entities will fight - just for the fun of it being one - but the most interesting are over things like resources. The fighting is all the more meaningful and fierce if it is over something that matters. I think this is another point for the OP - resources should not be too evenly spread out such that you never need to fight over valuable territory. At the same time, a determined group of people willing to explore beyond inhabited space for weeks, or even months, should be able to do so as well. I think this is the advantage of a procedurally generated universe. If a group of players can't get established because they lost an important war or can't get a foot in the door, they can find somewhere else to set up, as long as they are determined. So I think a balance needs to be found between scarcity, abundance, and distribution of resources. It's a very sensitive area and the algorithms used to generate the universe need to be finely tuned. Not an easy job but I've got faith in NQ to get it right

@Saffi I agree that planets and minerals are not the only things worth finding, and that "alien archaeology" may be a thing as well as good in-space plots for building a military or trading outposts. I'd like to see exploration have many forms - not just the motivations as those are numerous and the extent of them cannot be foreseen - but the methods and the discoveries, from looking at whole solar systems down to exploring a single cave on a barely-colonised planet. I take take or leave the naming of discoveries. If first discoverers get to name the discovery, just let current territory owner rename it. @nora I don't see why you would want to force every organisation to constantly be on the move. If an organisation of say 100 players can live on 2 territory tiles on a planet in a sustainable way, why would you want to limit their gameplay style? Personally I wouldn't like to see planets getting strip-mined easily. I want to see a dense universe that players can survive in, not a shallow one that gets eaten from the inside out and requires constant expansion to be sustainable. I'd like to see all kinds of gameplay at the organisation level. Some organisations could just live on an orbiting space station that they built and maintain as a trading outpost and base for passers by. Others might never leave the starting planet, with an aim of getting the largest piece of Alioth that they can. Others might want small colonies on multiple planets across multiple star systems, others might be nomadic... or anything else you can think of. This might be off topic, lol...

I wrote a little about resources in an old thread. I agree resources should not be perfectly evenly spread as that's kind of dull and makes it hard for neighbouring empires to form trade agreements. You also need to avoid the opposite problem of all of one particular resource being in one area, and one empire gaining an incredibly strong hold on that location, dominating and monopolising that resource. This is especially a problem if the resource is extremely valuable and rare. However, I don't think this will happen in DU as resources will not be respawned. I think I agree with Devis that it should be random, but natural. In the procedural generation there should be algorithms that tend some resources to cluster, others more even, etc. I agree with vylqun about how long it is likely to take to spread to other planets. Several months after launch is the rough estimate we have for the first players reaching orbit. The impression I have is that it won't just be a matter of training an Eve style skill. It will require huge amounts of resourcing, crafting, designing, and building to get something that works. Plus remember that the planets are huge. Up to 100km radius is the figure we have for the largest planets. That's 126,000km2 surface area, around 50,000 hexes! That is a lot of real estate. Planets won't be owned be single empires. More likely, when an organisation "colonises" a planet they'll claim one or two tiles, and so will a hundred other organisations, and the planet will still be largely untouched. Its cool thinking about interplanetary, or even interstellar empires, but I imagine many organisations will operate almost entirely on a single planet, even after FTL drives are commonplace.

These came up in another post. Radar Unit - detect presence of nearby players (mentioned in the LUA scripting blog, therefore confirmed?) Broadcast Unit - send pre-written or pre-recorded messages to nearby players Policy Unit - automatically assign tags to nearby players Radar Unit - detect presence of nearby players (mentioned in the LUA scripting blog, therefore confirmed?) Also, Control Unit is confirmed. It's functions are customisable but it isn't a blank slate, it's essentially a unit controls how multiple units in a single construct work together. So I think "Image Monitoring Unit" for view screens and "Imaging Unit" for cameras are unique suggestions too. Or if you can come up with better names, feel free

I actually agree with this completely. I think different people have different motivations though. Nations may want to colonise lands in order to exploit resources or have military outposts. Scientific organisations may want to expand their knowledge of different regions or phenomena. Some groups may want to find untouched riches. Others still may want to simply go and see things, discover things, achieve "firsts". All of the above exist in history and all should be able to exist in the game. By catering to the last group, by giving them a means to sell what they find and maintain their lifestyle, you essentially cater to all the others as well by extension.

Fair enough, let's move on. The point is I think we all agree we should be able to achieve what you are asking for.

I don't see the problem with autotagging and stealth. As DevisDevine says, if you're not detected then you can't be tagged. The tagging system should be a management tool, nothing more. I see three types of prohibition scenarios with the tagging system (I've mentioned this elsewhere I think so I'll be brief). 1. Hard coded - without the tag/power you cannot perform the action. This would be things like withdrawing credits from a bank account. 2. Secure - without the tag/power, the only way you can perform the action is by hacking. This would be things like opening locked doors or containers, or accessing ship systems. 3. Insecure - nothing stops you from performing the action whether you have the tag or not. This would be things like using prohibited goods or travelling, building or mining on a patch of land. @Saffi Awesome scenario of flying out into the distance. The great reward of being far far away from the rest of the crowd and free to build up wealth and power is well worth the risk. Only problem is getting more players to join your organisation! About multi-jumping gates. I think the game would have to get truly massive for this to be a problem. If you want to travel from one end of inhabited space to the other, it should take a long time for many reasons. Having said that if you have literally thousands of inhabited systems connected by jump gates it becomes a bit crazy. Before it gets to that point you'd need a faster form of travel. My solution would not be to make it possible to have multiple jumps or further jumps, but to "invent" a new type of FTL. Say a hyperspace drive. You can go at a million times the speed of light, so you're travelling on a galactic scale. Drawback is the slowest it can go is 500,000c and you need to plan and execute your route very carefully to avoid flying into stars or exiting hyperspace in the middle of nowhere. But this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and I'm just getting carried away. I mean how many players would you need to inhabit hundreds of solar systems?

@Zen001 First of all, "go read history" is disrespectful and ignorant. My post was not a comprehensive synopsis of Christopher Columbus's exploits. Second, I agree what you are saying should and will be possible. You want to settle somewhere new? Go find a spot, somewhere in the unknown and settle there. Nothing would stop anyone from doing that. But "colonising" a place means you colonise it with real players who are a part of your organisation or a part of the organisation you are working for / are a part of. You will not be able to populate any location with NPCs, because there will not be NPCs.

I love the idea of organisation or player having a kind personal reputation "currency" which can be earned through any means deemed worthy by the organisation. I think that is an excellent way for people to keep track of friends and enemies. Obviously individual players will not have as detailed a system as big organisations, but nothing should stop them. Remember though, that stargates are something for down the line, not something anyone is going to have for quite some time. Let's say an organisation has a radar units on and around their territory and areas of operation. Whenever they detect a player it checks if they have any organisation-issued tags. Everything up to that point is possible from the information we have so far. The act of giving tags to other entities (entity = player or organisation) has not been described beyond the word "give". But I think it would be safe to assume that there will be automated way to give tags to entities, whether it is built in to the game, or preferably using some kind of element, say a Policy Unit (bad name, sorry). So Radar Units are all set up with Policy Units and a simple Control Unit assigns tags to unknown players. This tag could be anything the organisation wants it to be. It could have a whole load of sub-tags within to it that deal with, as you say, donating credits or killing enemies of the empire, etc. Another idea - a Broadcast Unit. Something that issues automated messages to players like in the example you give (give us money in exchange for rep) but removed from stargates. Similarly, very large, but welcoming, organisations can set up offices at entry points to their territory where they deal with visitors in person. Regarding how tags will work, they will all be associated with powers, duties and warranties, if you recall. Any tag can be created that grants a power to an entity given that certain duties are fulfilled, and the tag can be revoked subject to warranties being fulfilled. Regarding Market Units, they haven't said anything about two Market Units needing to be at least a certain distance apart and I don't see why it should be that why. What they have said is that you will only be able to see what is in a local Market Unit (one that you are actually standing next or that is within a certain radius? can't remember which is true). But there will also be Information Units which can be networked together to get information on distant markets. Beyond that we have little information. Market Units will have a set of predefined powers associated with them. I imagine one of them will be the power to trade at the market. So the owner of the unit can grant or revoke this right as he/she sees fit (and hopefully automatically with a system like I outlined above). It would be cool if you could dynamically assign tax rates to certain people depending on which tags they have or how much reputation they have. I think I've waffled semi-coherently long enough for now

You seem to be confusing the act of exploration with the motivation for the act. Exploration is an act of discovery. Christopher Columbus travelled into the unknown, observed, recorded and mapped what he found. That is exploration. His motivation for that act was fortune. The motivation of his sponsors was expansion. The purpose of this thread is to enable the act by two means - first ensure that there are always undiscovered territories, second ensure that there are motivations for the act. The motivations of Christopher Columbus and Spain can easily be duplicated with this system. Let's say there is an organisation X who want to find a new source of some material M. They hire a player P to go and find it specifying roughly how far they are willing to travel for it. Player P hires a bunch of people to crew his large deep space exploration vessel and goes sailing into the unknown. Eventually they find what they are looking for. They map the region and take some detailed surveys of the area that contains the material M. They take this data back to organisation X. As part of the agreement, player P gets to settle in the newly discovered region and takes part ownership in a child organisation that will be set up to colonise and mine the material. At this point, player P has retired as an explorer and is now a colonist/miner/shareholder. There is no exploration in Eve. You fly around in systems you've been to a thousand times before scanning for dungeons, "exploration sites" which spawn at random. When you find one you warp to it, fight some NPCs, and then unlock canisters that contain items of value using a special module. No part of that is exploration. Edit: Christopher Columbus spent years exploring the new world going back forth. In my scenario, the actual exploration part which I graze over by saying "eventually" could take any length of time depending on what the specifications of organisation X were. He might find what they want quickly, or it might take months, and he might be competing with other explorers.

What you're saying fits quite well with the overall idea of having different "resolutions" of data. And I agree there's a difference between map data, atmospheric data, geological data, and biological data. Each could have their own levels of complexity and depth with the general theme of better equipment = more detailed information, closer analysis = more detailed information. Explorers could choose to specialise in one field or do a bit of everything, etc.

I still like Elite Dangerous but I was really just referring to the value of exploration in that game, not the specifics of how that data is retrieved. If an explorer is mining or building, then he is not an explorer... he's a miner or a builder (having said that there is nothing to stop you from exploring until you find a good spot, then stopping, building, mining). But of course an explorer could be interacting with other players. A group of players could be exploring together, possibly in a fleet or possibly all on a single multiplayer ship. Furthermore, if you make it to easy to scan an entire solar system then you shrink the universe and it then needs to be bigger to ensure that there is always something new to explore. And then you have the problem of a big empty universe with no one in it. Exploration, by definition, is going to places that no one has ever been to before, whether it's an underground cave, a continent no one's ever been to, or a solar system never explored before. If everywhere has been visited and explored in its entirety, then exploration just becomes a word, the actual activity is something else. @DevisDevine I completely agree with everything you said. Only thing I would say is I think it should be an incredibly difficult task for a single person to get detailed geological scans of every territory tile on a planet (1000-100000 tiles!). Players might decide to specialise in space exploration or planetary exploration rather than making it easy for spacers to get everything in one go. Edit @Zen001 "Please don't make me fly all over the system" sounds like you just don't like exploring to be honest. Which is fair enough.

It's not about it being a cakewalk, it's about having the rock to break the scissors. It's about having balanced, well considered defences. All I'm saying is there should be a vast array of choices for defences. Shields should be one of your choices, not necessarily the best or worst choice, just a choice.

It's interesting that we both want the same thing - player choice - but in different ways. Different types of shields are just all the same thing to me, just with different stats. That's not much of a choice in my eyes. How does building a wall compare with fitting a shield? What are the differences in, cost, set up / tear down, maintenance, relocating, effectiveness, and practicalities during battle? Now how does a titanium wall compare with a wall of some other material? Well, they just have different stats, maybe the materials are harder to come by. How does a deflector shield compare with a different type of shield - just different stats. If you make it so that there's a shield that can block projectiles or players just as effectively as a wall can, why would you ever opt for the wall? Yes, we are definitely in agreement here

There may be many theorised types of deflector/energy shield but they are usually not so straight forward to implement or to use. Practical shields lie firmly in the realm of science fiction. In any case what I am interested in here is what makes for good, varied gameplay that allows for player creativity on both sides of the coin. When we talk about shields we tend to think about something that is negligible in size compared to the area that it can defend, that is invisible while not being fired upon, and that only blocks shots in one direction. Even if you say that there are different types that block different weapon types, that to me is the same kind of defence and doesn't allow for the kind of creativity I'm looking for. If you also make it so that they can block anything, and make the area they can protect extremely large as some have suggested in this thread, then they are a superweapon that everyone has to have. When I talk about advantages and drawbacks I don't just mean what it can block and what it can't. There are huge range of things to consider such as set up costs, set up time, energy requirements (or none), space required, area protected, visibility from the outside (will this defence make our base more or less visible?), visibility from the inside (will this obstruct our view of the surrounding area and potential threats), defence against vehicles, infantry, aircraft, how the thing integrates with surroundings and the rest of the defences, does it cause damage to an assailant, and a whole lot more besides.

I think shield generators should be shield generators whether they are on a ship or on the ground. Just have different sizes that are able to cover more or less area while requiring more or less power. I wouldn't want to see the biggest ones covering too much area though - say max 50m radius? That's a pretty big area. Have them adjustable so you can shrink the area they cover, concentrating their defensive power. What I definitely would not want to see is energy shields being the ultimate defence against everything as that just limits creativity. Shields should be one part of a much larger puzzle. Should shields stop people or vehicles from walking through? No way. Should they stop projectiles? Nope. Plasma weaponry? Maybe partially. Particle beam weapons? Yes, stop them dead in their tracks. Players should have to think about where and how they lay out their base and choose defences and defence placement that would be most effective. Some possible base defence choices are shields, walls, CCTV, surveillance drones, fixed, automated weapon batteries, stealth technology, huge player numbers, mines, etc each with their own advantages and drawbacks.

There are a whole host of problems that come with including planet busters in the game. However, if - planets with an ASA are immune - planets with an arkified territory (if these are implemented) are immune - they require enough power sources that they would literally cover a continent - they require enough fuel to literally fill an ocean for a single shot - the game is at an advanced stage where there are hundreds of thousands of players in the game at any one time - it is easy to install planetary defenses that would block a shot then I think you can implement them

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/381-macroscopic-events/

I don't disagree with you about better techs and installing techs that can make repairs. I'm just trying to figure out how "Hull Repair Engineer" might be a real player-held position on a large spaceship.

@jonnyhicks The problem with pre-made jump gates is as you say. However in DU jump gates will be player made and destructible. This makes them an important strategic asset to control or destroy. In interstellar war if you can destroy key enemy controlled gates then you can cripple their ability to move around quickly. They are a super weapon though, so I think their capabilities need to be tempered somehow. I've got mixed feelings on wormholes. If I've got time later I'll share my thoughts.

I can set that as being a tactic, but with drawbacks. If you want shields extending way beyond your hull then you should need shield generators that are very large on comparison to your hull size and hence a comparatively large power source. So essentially your drones would be flying shields with virtually no fire power because there's no room left. That would make sense to me as there is push and pull, and natural balance.

I think there are some good qoutes to take from devblogs here. In the multiplayer ship blog So it sounds to me like they want repairing damaged components of a large ship to be an active task that players need to focus on. Maybe there will be automated, less efficient ways of doing patch up jobs - these would be essential one man vessels, of course - but for a large ship, the best (only) way to fix something is by having a player go and fix it. How this would work, I don't know. Perhaps literally going taking voxels and putting them in place? I'm not sure, as that wouldn't really make sense considering that there will be automated mass production of items using blueprints Another interesting quote: That's not the only time construct snapshots are mentioned for repairing damaged items. Auto-rebuilding is mentioned here. But maybe physically re-building something is the fastest way to do it and in the heat of battle you want fast repairs. About shields - I'd love for shielding to be completely modular. Like you can have shielding around specific subsystems of your vehicles, shielding around specific sections of the hull - whatever design you can come up with. Let's say there are 5 different sizes of shield generator and you can adjust how large an area you want them to shield - the larger the generator the larger the area it can protect but the more power it requires; the larger the area you want to protect the less shielding is provided; and the shielded area can be increased and decreased with manual or automated control systems and the power supplied to the generators too.