KlatuSatori

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.

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.

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.

There's a NDA in place for us ATV and for every gold+ backer. Period. NQ decides what information they give out, not we as customers.
 
They have plenty to do now after the ATV test and they have to make sure that everything runs well on saturday - they possibly don't have much time to just write a report for anyone because of the workload.
 
So maybe people could just chill a little bit and wait if they announce anything AFTER the gold+ backer test.
 
I really don't know if people noticed but this test on 30th was announced - NO further test. So we get to play on saturday and then we have to wait for the next announcement anyway - and I just make an educated guess here: they will announce the next test plus a short report on how the gold+ backer test went. That's ofc only speculation on my part, but who knows.
 
I know that everyone is eager and everyone wants information and all go crazy atm BUT please people remember:
 
- once you participated on the test on 30th of september you're under NDA and you CAN'T talk about that to anyone
- give them time: they try their best to make this happen. bombarding them with PMs/questions/wishes on the forum doesn't help them achieving this - it makes things worse
- think about them and their workload atm - and maybe rethink if you really help them now when you want to know certain things or if you can wait for that piece of info a week or two

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.

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.

While we don't actually have any real answers to these questions at this time, I would be very surprised if Air-to-Ground combat wasn't a thing. Keep in mind that buildings and ships are both constructs, and so there's no reason to believe they would function differently in terms of combat and taking damage (besides the fact that buildings are static ofc).
 
Not necessarily. Buildings could simply be resilient enough that destroying them isn't feasible without significant effort. We don't really know anything about automated defenses at this time, but JC has mentioned them in several interviews, and has specifically floated the idea that they would operate at significantly reduced fighting capacity for balance purposes. However, the main problem with strong automated defenses is that they are impossible to balance in an unstructured game. There's nothing stopping wealthy organizations from buying and installing tons of them all over their territory, thus making themselves impervious to attack from anything besides other major organizations. This would seriously cripple the viability of smaller organizations, not to mention solo players, and would ultimately push many people out of the game. 
 
So, while I sympathize with the desire to have strong defenses that people can't easily defeat, that would ultimately hurt the game. I'm much more in favor of very weak asset protection systems because that forces a more honest and interesting dynamic between players and organizations. If anyone can come along and wreck your stuff at any time, that will foster much more co-dependence and community unity than a system that makes this hard. Strong automated anti-air/ground systems are the antithesis of that.
 
(this might seem a little off-topic, but I think it's really important to explaining why strong automated defenses and hard-to-kill buildings are bad for the game)
 
EVE Online is a perfect example of why strong asset protection can be bad in an open-world single-shard game. In EVE there are rather robust systems in place that prevent people from quickly destroying other people's things (the reinforce and timer systems for player structures in particular). This is necessary in EVE because entire organizations can exist in high-security space where their assets are untouchable. However, huge segments of the community abuse this system and spend hours grinding down other people's structures just to piss them off, and they can get away with being this nasty and petty because there's fundamentally nothing anyone can do to stop them. This behavior would not exist if everyone was vulnerable to destruction at any time, because the community would gang up on and annihilate bad actors. 
 
DU could avoid this problem to an extent because virtually all of the game is open to PvP, so DU can (and should) implement a system that forces people to work together for mutual protection. Adding in strong automated defenses and buildings that take hours to kill would make it impossible to retaliate against people who are far stronger than you. For example: It would allow rich and powerful players to grief smaller organizations with impunity, because they could just retreat to their virtually unassailable base where the smaller players have no way of attacking them back. In contrast, If no one is ever really safe, then people will be less willing to make enemies and break other people's things just to be petty, because it could have very real consequences for them. So, going without major asset protection systems will allow us to avoid much of the trolling and nastiness that comes from giving everyone a place where they're relatively untouchable.

I would prefer to not have any teleportation at all.  Getting around a large base or ship will be a problem, but I feel having problems to solve is what makes a game interesting.  One of the challenges of building any large construct will be designing it to be as convenient as possible.  The way it is designed should matter.  If a teleporter allows someone to instantly go from one place to another, then where those places are located becomes nearly irrelevant and much of the challenge of designing them is lost.

@Lethys & CaptainTwerkMotor:
 
Guys, keep in mind this is "work in progress".
First, there is a need to prevent anyone to take anything they want on a whim (or else it would turn into nothing else than chaos)
Once these basic mechanics will be implemented, attention will be given to Piracy gameplay and related game mechanics (which might end with a basic version of hacking implemented, or something else. Too soon to tell at the moment, but we are working on that). Keep also in mind that we will take into account player feedback in the game design.
Please, be a bit patient on this. We want to discuss with you about all the game mechanics, but we can't present you the whole scope at once, especially this early in the development.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

Well, having to "drill" open a container for loot, is a logical step to have to maintain some semblance of order. Having a lock and key on shoes is an overkill. What? Do those fine leather boots have SpaceMagic Enchantments on them and are Soulbound? Then there's the other issue you people are so short-sighted over. If you run low on ammo or your weapon breaks in combat, you should be able to loot and use a gun. Unless we all live in the Metal Gear Solid universe and nanomachines are the explanation to everything. And if nanomachines are the explanation for everything, I'll be expecting Nanomachine Spacemagic in-game, or "brain-hacking". I mean, it's the least weird thing in Metal Gear Solid, in between plant-like psychic snipers and giant mechas.

Having an RDMS "impregnable" tag on containers and nanopacks, makes sense. Having the things INSIDE a container be impossible to loot and use, is the actual overkill.

You steal a safe, get it somewhere you won't be interrupted, drill it open, you get the gold. You don't have to drill a lock on the gold to use it. Cause you know people will abuse the "RDMS on every item in the game". Why go be a pirate and loot when you'll need to do the exact same "disenchantment" on eery single item you come across? Stealing is supposed to be the "easy thing to do but amoral". If stealing something takes the same or MORE steps than crafting or manufacturing, then something's wrong with the feature altogether.

Why bother with "disenchanting" or "washing" 100000 items a freighter carries? Are you stupid? Just blow it up and watch the nerd spacetrucekr cry his eyeballs out over his blown-to-smithereens ship. You went pirate to avoid crafting for hours or days, you ain't got time for 100000 items being "washed". Just blow the freighter and tell the freighter "Good Fight", despite them having no guns on their ship. You don't care. You could have extorted them to drop cargo and leave, but since you don't want to spend 100000 items multiplied by "disenchanting" timer long to resell them, or use them, you might as well blow them up.

See the problem now ???

I'll be reserving a judgment on this, since NQ answered already on the RDMS thread over it being a "the mechanic so far" kind of situation and that they improve on it. I voiced my concerns there on the RDMS thread and here. You got to see the game from the perpsective of pirates and thieves and that those players do it cause it's easy, not because it's hard (kinda reverse JFK there). But the logic " have every item require "cleaning" ", is not a viable option, period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There could always be an addiction level to any kind of medicine to treat the trauma meaning that if you were to die often and keep using the medicine to reduce/remove the effects then you would end up with a longer lasting harder to remove debuff as a withdrawal from the medicine used to treat the battle fatigue, this could help because it would mean that the player would have to decide whether to wait the original debuff out or to get it sorted by a doctor and risk getting addicted. I think this would still be relevant later in the game aswell because once organisations are built up more then most would be able to remove the battle fatigue quite easily and so by having the possibility for an addiction would still allow both the trauma and hospitals to exist and allow for further emerging gameplay.
 
As always just an idea.

The Black on Black Market, refers to Black Money being exchanged - not regulated or dirty money. The art of turning Black Money into Clean Money is where money laundering comes in. Which is why Uwe Boll became a director, believe it or not, as germany had a "money invested into culture" law that dictated that any money invetsted into enriching German culture (movies) were to be deemed tax-free. So Uwe Boll, made a movie with a budget of 100 mill USD - which by German law were deemed tax-free - which were used to pay productions for his films on dummy corporations. The actual movie? 10 mil USD budget at best, but 90 mil of black money were squeaky clean afterwards.
 
Germany has retracted this law since 2011, which is incidentally, when Uwe Boll stopped making terrible films and graduated to BMovies (which are so bad they are good, instead of oh-god-have-mercy-on-me bad).
 
Same thing will happen in DU, especially with people who are nuts with regulating the money in circulation of their territory and will demand to see your manufacturing corporation's transactions to see if you were buying from external sources and syphoning money into black markets, instead of your local production line of refineries and miners.
 
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.

I won't go into details as of what Battle Fatigue is in real life, although THIS sums it up pretty nicely.


The TL ; DR version, is that a person loses efficiency, in a statistical way, depending on the amount of battle and / or injuries they have accumulated (along with other things, that are too dark to elaborate).

This can be emulated with a Trauma mechanism in the game, so death has some consequences that go beyond material loss and punish people who actually went looking for trouble, as well as make assassins something more than just glorified bounty hunters.


 
This suggestion covers :

1. The logic behind it.
2. The suggestion of a powers system on a timer.
3. Ways to overcome it faster via emergent gameplay and player interaction.

Without further ado, here we go.



1. The Logic Behind It.


Discouraging mindless PvP and turning the game into a bloodbath. While a Bounty System is welcome as a precaution, as a good fella in Discord pointed out "I am not worried about the Bounty System, it will only bring more content for me as a PvPer, it's a reward for PKing people more than anything". 

So how do you make that person think twice before going after you? What prevents them from going into a killing spree?

That would be a skillpoints loss system, right?

Well, wrong. Skillpoints are like your money in-game, they are there as a "save" button, they are there to signify your progress and "power", in an abstract way. They should be secured.

But what if there was a way to take away efficiency, without taking away skillpoints? And well, money are meant to be spent anyways.

That would be the Trauma mechanic.


2. Powers on a Timer.


If a person dies once, they suffer a Trauma debuff, that is chipping away a percentage of their attributes, which are linked to the skill training system, as skills are operating on increasing the bonuses of a person's attributes, while attributes are there to justify how fast a person learns skills and what skills they can learn.

For this suggestion, the percentage loss for the first death off of a person's attributes, is 1%. I know it sounds very small, but it's for ease of understanding more than anything.

When a person dies, they suffer the Battle Trauma debuff, which is on a timer of 10 minutes. It sounds very little for one death, BUT, if you die again within that timer, your Trauma increases in duration and intensity.

The equation for the timer is :

(BattleFatigue-Timer)^(times of death)

While the Efficiency Loss beyond the first death, is :

[ (Efficiency Loss Percentage) + 2(times of death) ] / 100
This means for the first death, the equation is :

(10 minutes)^1

Timer is 10 minutes. No biggie, 10 minutes with 1% attributes loss. That will make your 100 Strength character have 99 Strength, who cares, right? Well, thing is, certain skills, require certain attributes, and attiributes assuming the Devs went the EVE way) take time to learn depending on your attributes. So a 1%, equates to a certain extension of the training timer to fill up.

But if you die AGAIN (somehow you fell off the stairs or something, I'm a Twerkmotor, not a fortune teller) within 10 minutes, the timer begins to look something like this :

(10 Minutes)^2

[1 + 2(2) ] / 100

So, you got 100 minutes of Trauma, at 5% efficiency ratio. It's still fine, it's 1 hour 40 minutes of 5% less effciency, it's not something devastating, it's not the end of the world. Maybe you'll log out anyways, and by the morning you will be feeling fiiiiiiiiine.

But somehow, you die again within the timer ( Fail Hard 2 : Fail Harder , Evil Stair had its way again).

Timer begins to look something more like ... erm, this : 

(10 minutes)^3

[1+ 2(3) ] / 100

I'll save you the hassle, that timer is about 2/3 of a day long and it is for a 7% efficiency loss. You might say, "that's not too bad, it's only 7%", but then again, that equates to skill training taking longer, so that one week, is more like 2 weeks more on a high level skill. It is punishing :|

But for some unknown reason, you went for the lucky 4th time in a row and died.

That would be 1 week worth of trauma, for 9% efficiency loss.

But no worries, Emergent Gameplay is here for you. Time to get to the Doc Mitchell's house to patch your noggins up (if you get the referrence, you are Cazador-proof then).


3. Ways to overcome it faster via emergent gameplay and player interaction.


Many a person in these forums, have asked if they can build medical centers. Well, with the Trauma suggestion, they can be part of the gameplay in more ways than just a med-kit vending machine.

A medical skills trained person, has the ability to reduce or even remove the Trauma, via the level of their training and of course, the material costs behind it, either by producing medicine that can counteract the effects of Battle Fatigue that cost a lot, depending on their effectiveness, or via Elements that heal the injured fella.

The twist is, Doctors can only affect Physical attributes, like strength, endurance, agility and dexterity.


But I hear you say "but what about Mental attributes?". 

Enter the Bar. No really, there should be bar in the game :|

Not exactly bars, but alcohol can be used to reduce the Trauma timer for Mental attributes, like memory, charisma, intelligence and perception.  The twist is, you can't get too much alcohol at once, otherwise you get poison damage (because logic) and also, you get withdrawl, which affects your physical attributes in a very very minor way compared to Trauma.

This will reinforce the social aspect of the game, having people take time to chill as they wait for their Trauma debuff to wear off, possibly in a bar in-game, or by drinking on their own. Can't force people to have social interactions if they don't want to.

Afterthoughts.

This will also create venues for players of more ... RPish backgrounds, to have a legit reason for being in a bar, rather than w/e RP people do ( I don't know, I'm not a turbonerd :| ) , as well as hospitals being legit places to be built and of course, NOT being attacked via interfactional agreements on Laws of War (if there are any).


This opens up also the economic and politic aspect of the game. Logistics for war, take a whole new meaning. A person that does not die and has a high KD, becomes recognised in their organisation as Cost Efficient, as that guy or gal is melting people without dying, not requiring new armor every time after dying and of course, not costing a heckton on Trauma therapy, not to mention, their character being drunk or in alcohol withdrawl debuff, that needs another medicine to make it go away.

This also opens up the Drugs Industry in the game. Drugs are much cheaper to make than high-tech medicine, but they cause you SEVERE withdrawl effects (gotta send the message out there people, not everything is as harmless as weed). The Empire of Baconstone, may have an issue with its troops being unreliable bacause of them drugs they use to avoid paying for real medicine that's non-addictive, therefore banning them, thus needing them smugglers to fly in to capitalise in that sweet sweet revenue of illegal tradings. It's far more a legit and organic way of banning drugs in-game, rather than "I wantz drugz illegalz by Devz".

Politics though are not limited to that. The good ol' tactic of "STORM THAT HILL, THROW MORE MEAT INTO THE ENEMY'S GRINDER" takes in DIMINISHING RETURNS. Every time your soldiers die, they lose their armor, and they lose efficiency. You may have the money to support their armors, but the medicine costs begin to pile up.

Defenders become more weary and they are on an efficiency level as well. 

If a faction relies in attrition warfare, they will have to tax people who are not in their fleets or armies, thus politics, take off on a whole new level, as people start protesting on the Protection Bubbles having more Rent, sales taxes going up and in general, Emergent Gameplay of rebellions.

It's a mechanic that branches everywhere. 


 

Hello! I was wandering the web a few days ago searching for single shard MMO's when I stumbled across this game. I am a science fiction fan and proponent of the open world immersive sandbox concept of gaming so Dual Universe being as ambitious as it is has really appealed to me. I hope to watch it grow and develop all the way to launch and beyond.

Funny you say that I've been thinking about this lately.  Maybe not the timey-wimey stuff, that's just too trippy, but the cosmic speed limit.  So instead of F=ma, use E=mc^2/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)).  i.e. as speed increases and gets closer to c it's gets harder and harder to increase speed more.  This is all nicely self balancing and doesn't require weird speed limits like in Eve and Elite.  Also, just imagine massive space battles if you've got engines good enough to propel little fighters up to 80% of c, hundreds of them zooming around the solar system...

Funny you say that I've been thinking about this lately.  Maybe not the timey-wimey stuff, that's just too trippy, but the cosmic speed limit.  So instead of F=ma, use E=mc^2/(sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)).  i.e. as speed increases and gets closer to c it's gets harder and harder to increase speed more.  This is all nicely self balancing and doesn't require weird speed limits like in Eve and Elite.  Also, just imagine massive space battles if you've got engines good enough to propel little fighters up to 80% of c, hundreds of them zooming around the solar system...

That's a fair assessment.

gates dont need to be hard-linked to provide limitations to travel, but dont need to be instant dial-anything to avoid a billion-and-three jumpgates in every system.
Have them take time to connect and disconnect stargate connections.
 
Important and high throughput connections will rarely or never shut down.
While the odd out of the way system would be dialed in on request or on a schedule from a secondary gate.

That's a fair assessment.

There are two assumptions that have been in this thread that I disagree with. The first is that choke points can't exist in space without stargates. That's like saying that they can't exist on planets without roads. Stargates (and roads) obviously contribute to the creation of choke points but they are only one small piece of the puzzle. Choke points on land are created primarily by natural geographical features. Others are created by artificial features - I.e. cities, bridges, roads, mines, houses, etc.
 
If you expect stargates to be the only type of choke point in space then you are setting your sights far too low. There are a plethora of natural features that could be added to space to create choke points and interesting terrain. Some examples:
 
- black holes - anything within a certain distance of the hole needs to maintain a minimum speed/mass ratio or else it is pulled in. This distance and ratio can be determined by the size of the hole but could be really large, potentially encompassing multiple nearby star systems.
 
- a region of space that is dense in tiny rock formations, ships passing through take damage. Maybe the amount of damage taken can be reduced by having dedicated scanners that detect them, and/or by traveling slowly.
 
- nebulae / molecular clouds, the effects of these could vary depending on the type, but sensors and visibility could be drastically reduced in effectiveness.
 
- ionised regions of space could have adverse effects on certain types of electronic equipment and/or DPUs
 
- fresh supernovas could make large regions of space completely impassable for scifi-ey reasons
 
- black holes eating stars spew out streams of plasma. Exaggerate the effect so that there are streams of plasma flying through space (maybe I'm getting carried away with that one...)
 
Now imagine these in all shapes and sizes (any of these can be on the scale of a battlefield, on the scale of multiple star systems or anything in between), many overlapping and interacting with one another. Now you have real terrain in space and real choke points. And these are just a few things I came up with while sitting on the train to work, I'm sure there are plenty of other things people could come up with both real and imagined. Then throw in artificial structures - colonies/cities/settlements, stargates, trade routes - the things the players will make. These create strategic points of contention to be fought over. And what you build and where is all the more important when the environment is alive with features.
 
The other point I saw made is that "free" travel somehow makes the greater force always win, while stargates-only travel makes things more strategic. I'm convinced I've misunderstood this because it is blatantly obvious that, if anything, the opposite is true. Needing to actually travel to an enemy site opens up all kinds of interesting strategic options and difficult decisions. It allows for interceptions, ambushes, diversionary tactics, splitting or concentrating forces, misdirection, and lots of other exciting possibilities. Stargate-only travel on the other hand means you know exactly where the enemy is going to be. So you put everything you've got there and slog it out.
 
If it was "free" instantaneous travel that was being referred to then I completely agree. That would completely remove all interesting and strategic options. What I'm talking about is real travel that takes time and effort and can be intercepted, not instantaneous travel.

Another interesting thing which definitely exists are rogue planets - planetary objects not orbiting a star. I read somewhere these would outnumber the stars in the galaxy. As in Oort clouds, it would be pitch-black there - one would have to rely on radar, night vision, searchlight, flares ...

In Jumpgate, there was one big dark asteroid between two jumpgates, lovingly christened "Emma" by the pilots; countless ships were lost by "kissing Emma" if one forgot to watch the radar carefully.
 
So, there could be dangerous places "out there" which can only be handled by experienced pilots with special equipment, who take their time to caerefully scout routes to rewarding destinations.