PolishFernix

Just because something sounds like Eve doesn't mean its not fun. A lot of the stuff I suggest can only appear in a late-stage game. probably around the Awakening.

Interesting, because me and my group in war thunder have an issue with comms during combined arm battles. Would like to see how are you doing it.

So, I've been absorbing any information I could find about DU, this post will be about some of the ideas that I have, related to all aspects of this game. Let's get to it, shall we? Now, I've tried to refine my ideas and sort of compile them together but they might still be a mess, I promise I will try to give full ideas only, not bare concepts. The first thing on my list is something that for now will have no use but later could be a vital part of warfare in DU. Player Developed Jamming System by Fernix, I'm working on an acronym. Too many times in too many games space warfare gets limited to a good old slugfest and numbers game, no much space for any flashy tactics or strategy, not much to take into account at all, the equation is more or less like this: more and bigger ships = win. That's pretty much it, you can see it clearly in Eve Online, specifically World War Bee if I'm not mistaken, the Empire got simply overwhelmed because their enemy had trillions upon trillions of ISK from various sources and could dish out more ships than the Empire could kill. This is why diversification of combat on a tactical and strategic level has to be as diverse as possible, sooner or later one alliance will trump all others and WHEN that happens unless half of the people rebel the main empire will have too much of an advantage, any rebellion, be it a regular army uprising, insurgency or a pirate empire, will be crushed by simple numbers if they are not given the possibility to outclass their enemy in a tactical engagement. Now, the jamming system, how would it work? There would be 3 levels of this technology, or 5, depends on how is it done. The communications officer (I will get to this part later) would use a specific "frequency" (aka type in xx, xxx "x" is a random number) and disperse this information throughout the fleet. The enemy vessels would be affected in the following way: 1. Lack of IFF. No vessels would be marked as friendly or as an enemy, just a white symbol showing its position. 2. Any sort of tracking/homing missiles would not work. 3. Any remotely controlled vessels would seize to function. 4. Automated defenses would be of no use since they couldn't select out the enemy ships, switching them to autofire would work but it could potentially kill friendly forces. Now, what would all this accomplish? What is the goal of this? The point here is to allow a technologically superior/better-equipped force to gain an advantage against a numerically superior opponent. This would also force all organizations to use a specific color scheme to avoid friendly-fire as much as possible in case the group gets jammed. Of course, installing jammers on all ships would be VERY expensive so at the start it would force smaller groups to create a ship dedicated to serve as both a jammer and an anti-jammer. Empires could afford to mount low-level jamming system on all of their ships of course, but it would come at a great cost and almost no gain since the number of jammers of the same level would not increase the difficulty for the other side to counter the jamming. And high-tech jammers would be EXPENSIVE. How would it be countered though? I thought about it for some time and then I found a solution, the "comms officer" (simply someone handling this and a communications array) would have the tools to try and decipher the jamming frequency, allowing his side to effectively counter the jamming by simply filtering it out(aka typing in the numbers he got and pressing "enable") How would he do that though? The tools (in his specialized console) would create a specific number of random math problems for him to solve that would lead to the final number being the enemy jamming codes, the higher level of the jammer the higher difficulty and number of equations to solve. Level one could just be simple adding subtracting multiplying and dividing, level two would be that plus square roots and exponentiation, level three would be that PLUS trigonometry, 10-15-20 equations each. They would be automatically generated and it would not only be simple equations but also (on the 3rd level) adding a missing part of the equation or a specific number. After this is handled, the officer would get the enemy jamming frequency, allowing his team to counter it. Recalibrating the jammer would take time and the codes would have to be re-send to the entire fleet. True, 1st and 2nd level would be just annoying but if activated at the right moment it could provide a significant advantage in an important part of the battle, they could be solved by anyone with a calculator BUT it would still take time, during which this could change the course of the battle. The highest jamming tech would require someone who actually know enough math to figure this stuff out or a group of people, whatever you decide. Automated Mining Systems by Fernix. (AMSF for an acronym sounds good, don't ya all think?) What would this be? To put it simply, the galaxy is HUGE, I mean, REALLY huge. And its FILLED with low-level resources like iron, ice, silicon. Basic resources would be crucial to sustaining any organization be it a pirate squadron, big-ass empire or a factory. Basic resources are needed but they are also abundant and it takes a lot of them to build capital ships. If mining guilds were to hire players for mining it would drive the costs of materials so high that even a simple cruiser would be a colossal undertaking for a lot of groups and majority of the players would be forced to use fighter craft for any combat, with light frigates serving as frontline capital ships. The drones would change it all, and I don't mean remotely controlled drones, I mean drones, fully automated. How would it work? Well, a sort of a programmable block (like in Space Engineers) would be required for this, it would allow creating a basic mining algorithm telling the drone what to do and how and where to mine. It, of course, could be modified by the players however they wish so they can use it, sell it or rent tamper-proof drones with this algorithm already in. What would it serve? 1st. Human manpower would be used for deep core mining only since drones would have a hard time doing it, and only for rare resources where they are hard to mine. This would stabilize the economy at usually low-prices for basic resources(excluding wartime), the rare resources would not only be rare but also the price would have the cost of hiring a miner to mine it within it, driving it up, making sure that the most high-tech technologies stay expensive and not available to all. 2. It would encourage piracy and through that, law enforcement. Yea, this is a plus, the further away from civilization the better deposits of rare resources that are untouched, but also more pirates, if a mining guild would try to claim more, its transports could be raided by pirates looking for an easy score. This would force miners to higher protection or pay the pirates off. The level of piracy would impact the economy significantly if the outlaws decided to raid some of the heavier transports en-masse. 3. During wartime, this would be an awesome target. War means the destruction of assets, assets need replacing, hence why during such time resources are more expensive, both factions would be forced to protect its mining operations, from pirates emboldened by the recent losses of warships by one of the sides, from another empire trying to cripple its enemy... this would give us a load of options and allow us to fight proxy wars before the main conflict begins. Galactic Trade Market and trading outposts. Not much to say here, but I do have one point. 1. The GTM outposts have to be separated. What does it mean? Let's say I want to buy some resources, I visit the closest GTM outpost (player-owned station of course with either a docking fee or a trade tax in place, but I will have to think of a way how this can be implemented) and while there are those resources for sale, they are in other GTM outposts far away (it would be based in which outpost the items are sold) so this would force me to go to another system and claim my already bought resources from that station. What would be the purpose of this? Seems like just making it tougher for players doesn't it? Well, you're right, it does. But this is closely tied to how the expansion to new resource-rich systems would work later. When a GTM station has multiple mining operations in range, a lot of small companies would simply look to dump those resources in the closest GTM outpost (which would be linked to the main trading system of course) but this issue has a lot of angles: distance, price, safety, amount of resources, political situation, shipping. Distance: to be frank, some of those outposts will be in the middle of nowhere, it will take a long time to reach them. Price: because it's distant, you would have to lower prices, you would still make a profit if you mine enough but it would be a lot lower than in more civilized and resource-deprived systems. Safety: as the outpost becomes larger, it would draw more people in and might possibly become a part of another organization given its location, it would also be a good spot for pirates since there would be a lot of raiding to do in the area. Amount of resources: new deposits = a lot of resources to mine and process. and sell, more work for people to do. Political situation: during wartime or an economic crisis separation of individual GTM outposts would mean that in many cases the situation is contained to a specific region, not the entire galaxy. Effectively creating a buffer that can be drained before any major crisis hits. For example, 2 major empires rage war, their resources are running out and they need more, they can start buying on the GTM but if they do they will only drain the stockpile from their region of space first, then others, but it will take time, time miners can use to increase production to meet the need for resources. This will also serve as a countermeasure to jackasses buying out the entire stockpile of a specific resource and then for a limited time getting a monopoly on selling it. I've seen this in SWTOR, in 2014 when there were a lot of new players who wanted to buy a lot of player-made components (they were better than npc-vendor stuff) but it required a lot of Rubat crystals, they were easily obtainable but the demand was always relatively high so while getting a set of a dozen or so would cost you more or less 349 credits, you could sell each crystal for 200 credits. One night some genius bought ALL of them on the market, changing the prices from ~ 200-250 to almost 1750 per crystal. It was good business for me because I had a fresh stockpile to sell at a time, but from his later gloating in the chat, I remember that it cost him 3 mil credits to buy all of those rubats and he made 7 mils on selling them. I know, player-driven economy, but dividing up the individual outposts to prevent an immediate flow of resources from one end of the galaxy to another would prevent this sort of thing on a mass scale and allow people to throw resources from other sectors, effectively making that temporary monopoly unviable. After the resources run out in one sector, those empires would have to import, that means logistics and hauling. And pirate attacks, and ambushes by the enemy. Loads of fun. Shipping: don't want to fly across half the galaxy to get resources? Fear not! Hire a shipping company to do it for you! This would also let individual entrepreneurs WITHOUT a group to play with to do something other than mine, invent new stuff, enlist or become a pirate. In the grand galaxy of tens of thousands of players online at the same time, wars and conquests, new inventions and the crisis it would be up to them to restore the price balance throughout the universe and make decent money in the process. Okay, I had much to say here... Communication Systems for individuals and Empires by Fernix. The more players this game has the more chaos there will be, it's up to you to make it a controlled chaos or an anarchy. The Communication Systems are a must-have, plain a simple. I don't only mean chat and voice chat between people but also between ships. How do we achieve this and how would it work? Communications console as a separate prop. Or an integrated for the smaller ships. For larger ships and fleet command stations there would have to be a lot of the specialized comms consoles to handle everything. First, let's look at how normal hailing would look like shall we? Open the console, select a ship you want to hail, an icon will show if they accepted your hail or not (they would get a message on the console that they are being hailed by you) after that you can either send a text or a voice message to them, a data pack(I will get to that later) or a set of coordinates, whatever you want to. You could also encrypt the comms but I will explain it once we get to Fernix's Espionage Revolution. In combat, when you have a carrier for example and fighters have to refuel, this would allow a wing or a squadron or a formation leader to contact a ship and inform them about it and ask them to for example open the hangar. "Hold up Fernix! You can do that on Teamspeak or Discord!" some of you are probably already typing something along those lines. Hah, bullshit. Yes if you a have just a small carrier with a few fighters you can do that. Good luck doing the same with a full battlegroup, nevermind a fleet! "But smaller groups can still stay on their own channels and the CO can simply use the super speaker option to skip channels!" True, but irrelevant, let's say you spot a boarding skiff on a CBDR with a fellowship, have fun switching TS channels in the middle of combat and alt-tabbing all the time while you could just tell you comms operator to contact that ship himself and relay the information. This would essentially create a requirement for a real-life hierarchy and structure like in a normal navy battlegroup. I believe it would be an awesome feature that in many cases could determine the outcome of a battle, it would also mean that empires would use ONLY the best and most active players for their most powerful ships, forcing people to learn and stay active if they want to progress in the ranks, it would also mean that once those players get assigned to the post they wanted for some time already, they will be a lot less likely to quit and more likely to play more, making them even more experienced in their role, making them desirable by many organizations and allowing them to capitalize on their skillset. If you ask me, it would be an awesome thing if being posted at a renown ship would mean that if you decide to leave this faction, you won't have to start up from the bottom because others will WANT you on THEIR capital ships and in command positions because of where and how you worked earlier. Communications meet Spies. Something that is a must-have in a sandbox with empires is an active espionage system. What would that even mean though? 1. You can encrypt all communications AND intercept communications. Pretty simple and basic, as to what communications you could intercept read next points. 2. Keeping in contact with automated outposts. They are supposed to be just that, automated. The players would set how often are they supposed to send a status update, meaning full inventory list and list of contacts or any relayed communications. This would mean of course that if you intercept such communication, even if it is unencrypted, you would know what it has, who owns it and that it is in the area. Also if its full you would know that soon there will be a ship arriving to transport the mined resources to another place, good info for pirates I think. 3. Active spies. Let's make a scenario shall we? Two groups, A and B, both are of equal strength and they hate each other, A has a spy inside B, said spy manages to get access to the comms console and copy a list of mining outposts and their locations. A wipes out all of them in a surprise attack. B is in deep shit now. 4. What could be gathered? Blueprints from the shipyard mainframe, jamming frequencies before the battle, encryption codes for comms, list of active ships, a location of other bases, coordinates for mining outposts. Anything could be downloaded by clicking "copy information" while looking through information on the enemy mainframe. This would require an in-depth computer system in-game but I think it would really be worth it in the long rung. 5. How would it be gathered? Gain access to a console, a comms console, for example, each transponder could be assigned to a specific directory in the comms overlook, sort of a "friend directory" option. From there you could select any set of information and select "copy to data disk". Why like this? Simple, having access to a mainframe without authorization for an hour can be... lethal, and doing screenshots of a list of a hundred outposts ships or blueprints where you would have to select it and check it's coordinates or any info manually... well, have fun getting caught. This would force the player to do either of 3 things: exfil, send it OR a dead drop. Exfil means your mission is over and you lose an asset inside an enemy structure with access to crucial information. Sending means you possibly leave a trail because (ideally) you would have to log-in with your ID or a passcode or whatever and send this to someone, this leaves a trail and you can get caught if someone checks the logs and who was using the console at a time. Dead drops can never reach the intended person or can get compromised by accident. As you can see, this would be a lot of fun. And it could decide a fate of the war before it begins, just like in the real world. This is it for now. If you've read this far, thank you, you earned a right to comment on this and either criticize or agree or make some suggestions using all of this. If you didn't read all of it and don't understand how it is all tied together in a lot of ways, I don't care about your opinion. This is only an idea that would require a lot of players and is mainly focused on the structure of long-term gameplay, something I hope you understand. It's also 5 A.M when I finished writing it and to top it English is not my primary language, so I'm sorry for errors. Fernix

Yep, i got it, but reply my was directed at captaintwerkmotor, just had to respond to that post.

First of all, i think you completly misunderstood my argument, i never claimed that NQ should have anything to do with in game politics. Second, radio stations, deosnt matter if thats multi or single, music is music, hence why while driving in a car you can either listen to what you put togather, or you can listen to one of dozens radio stations. Again, completly missed my argument. Third.yes, some people don't have time to dig through dozens of of sources, THAT IS WHY YOU HAVE TV NEWS AND NEWSPAPERS, and yes, they cover stuff they deem important! How dare they! Giving us stuff that we might find interesting and useful! That's disgraceful! 4th. I never said that DU is a single player, in fact, i proposed a feature because it's multiplayer, at this point i'm not sure if you actually read my post, or did you read some twisted version of it. 5th. "Why did X-Org went after Y-Org" , according to you "Y-Org was bad, cause Y-Org is bad, you don't need the details". That's not how poltiics work. Nothing is ever simple." Der fack is this? And how is that "according to me?" you seem no to be able to understand how news reporting works. So, i will try to explain it to you real fast. An unaffilated with either side newspaper might report it like this. "Border dispute has turned into a full war after weeks of mounting tensions bewteen Y and X, both sides accuse each other of attacking each other through indirectly sponsored pirates, in the opening battle, X have crippled the Y defense fleet in system Z, but when reinforcements arrived, X fleet has been pushed back from the system's colony. Mining guild K has issued a warning to all civilian ships mining within close proximity to not approach system Z." This is one way to cover it, a very short way, but it is as unbiased as it can be and it conveys the message, plus i don't have time to write a full story on theoretical event just to strenghen ny argument, my point is made. I said that newspapers could be used as propaganda by organizations, not that ALL will BE used as propaganda. 6th. Text does not take much space, your argument about the server having to store few thousands line of tex is ridicolus, and if it would only store the current edition of the newspapers, it would be difficult for it to take up more than the files related to one planet. this argument is simply moronic. 7th point.Why are you so hung up on newspapers not giving any context, did you ever even read a newspaper? Your last aegument doesn't make ANY sense. 8. Your argument about the clan from EVE at least has some logic. So i'll go with Orwellian thinking here a little. If the majority of players think something is good, that means 2 thing, either it is good, or they are misinformed, if it's the latter, then there should be means to explain that they are wrong, change their opinion. If you're unable, that means either people are idiots or your argument isn't good enough. Some would say 'So what if they sometimes act like goons, when x happens, they do Y' every opinion is subjctive, people focus on stuff that matters to them, not you, hence why appearently some like them, because there is something about them to like. All in all, your arguments seem to be based on some completly misrepresented form of my arguments and my idea, i do not understand why or how, because i'm fairly sure that except for my slight grammar and spelling errors, my arguments were decently made. Fernix

I do understand your point, but the matter of fact is, in game newspaper are an awesome feature, there is a reason they were added in Red Dead Redemption, they are quite fun to read, if the editor is worth his money, radios in Fallout also served a purpose while they could ge substitiuted by internet sources, besides, i'm just throwing ideas that can be implemented someday, i do realise how low of a priority adding this feature would be, but i think letting the people decide if they want to do it or not, read it or not, it's not that they are vital, they would just be fun and if players write them like they should, pretty sure that some would buy them.

By your logic, irl radios and newspapers are not in demand and we might just as well not have them, because we have youtube, spotify, and twitter/fb (political forum) not everyone want to go through dozens od threads regarding the in-game politics, looking for a fresh one. Not everyone will be in an organization, there should be something akin to a newspaper(it wont really be that hard to do really, i mean allowing people to do it) because forums and reddit while they more or less support a DEBATE they wont really be a good substitute for a newspaper. Unless you create a section devoted only to in-game community news, but who would run it? How would we choose people to run it? In a free market, the better newsteam will crush the others, and if they don't provide the content people look for, someone else will rise to the top. And there can he different press leaders focusing on different topic. Pls tell me how to subtitute that with the forums which half the platers wont read at all.

While i can somehow agree about in-game comms and tutorials, when i talk about newspaper and radio, i mean giving us the possibility, as mentioned, by players, for player, simply allowing us to create a newspaper and sell it in game, NQ wouldnt write it, they only would have to add a possibility to do it, same with civilian radios, they would be a nice addition to the game. I know we're talking theory, but if this game DOES kick off, such things will be in relatively high demand, because politics, policies and conflicts will influence economy and by that, everyone. And forums in this case won't cut it, it's simply ain't gonna be good enough or fast enough.

The only system we can adopt is by function, not size. And even with this it's gonna be messy, but that is a good idea, it would streamline any potential design trade.

Basically, this is something that is sort of a must have for a game that will be getting more and more complex as it develops. Unless a huge game reset is planned when the game is released, it will be very important for new players to get their bearings, for this they will need some sort of tutorial, i'm not talking about game and interface tutorial, but a community tutorial, current political, economical and social landscapes explained in some degree. For example, information about planets, cities, more powerful empires/organizations/corporations, explained basic stuff about procuring and selling resources, companies, but also information about jobs, since the economy is player driven, it means that a job board of sorts would have to be made available with information which organizations are hiring and what skills they require, that could be anything from pilots and soldiers, to miners or construction workers. Also information about distances and travel in-game would be a very welcome addition, so new players can better understand the game. Basically, an in-game wikipedia plus basic information about the current politics(this would require an algorithm or a human to write it as it changes). Another thing that would be useful to new player when joining the game for the first time, would be newspapers. Written by players, for players. As the game develops, empires and politics will be established, newspapers will allow to inform people about current events in the galaxy, or a specific system, or a company, or even used as an Imperial propaganda machine. Radios would be an addition to spaceships, bars, stations etc. allowing the owner to choose the station he wants to listen to. The range of said radio stations, that's what's tricky, it would require a specific architecture to be build, specific antennas, signal boosters, receivers in other systems etc. but it would also mean we can implement that into the in-game military forces. For example, we have a Federation with a huge territory and a rival in the region, the radio system i'm proposing would allow a little laggy(the more stations and distance the signal goes through, the more signal lag you would get) all sensory data and positions would be sent to the sector command (i'm creating this structure while i'm writing this so don't go all "this is not how the game works now" on me, this is only an idea on new features in-game, which are not too hard to implement) and relayed to the high command for example, the in-game radio would mean that patrols can communicate with their higher-ups in the HQ by voice chat as well, or text if that's their policy. Now, you want to start an attack, but there are enemy forces in the area, so you take out their comms relay, the Federation A looses it's contact with its forces in the region, and is virtually blind while Empire B is launching a full scale invasion. Before the word goes up the chain of command, Federation A can loose a lot of ground, or it can batter the Empire forces, no one knows, but being able to effectively knock out enemy comms and sensors is a vital part of waging war. BEFORE some people point out that it can be substituted by discord, TeamSpeak, skype, whatever. It Can Not. Let's jump into the future, one year forward let's say, we have 1 000 000 players, and let's say there is an organization with 3000 people online on avg entire day, which is not really hard, good luck coordinating that by teamspeak. A military-like comm system is required in-game for the military fleets to function. This would also allow us a new aspect of game: hacking. Hacking and spying to be exact, trying to infiltrate the enemy and get information from their systems, redirect some communication if you're attacking, making sure reports don't reach the main command for some time, or selling information to pirates about patrols in the region, so they can evade them, or getting blueprints and schematics for a military outpost you wish to invade, or hacking their comms and listening in, learning their secrets. It's natural that sooner or later, organizations will try to hide locations of some of their projects, bases, labs,(i'll write about developing new technologies some other day) mines, shipyards (take out those, the enemy can't replenish their numbers that easily) and hacking the enemy and infiltrating him will let you get the information. With hacking, we can actually base that on real life security and real life hacking, with improved graphics of course. Jamming enemy comms would also be nice. If we're trying to merge Space Engineers, EVE, Star Citizen, Stellaris (creating empires) and few other ideas, we need to have some sort of a system to introduce new players, and we need to expand the possibilities as much as we can, we need to make this game as realistic as it's possible, player-made radio stations and newspapers would certainly be an interesting addition, giving us dozens of new possibilities on what to do in Dual Universe world, this would allow to make kiosks with info, or radio stations, we would need people to speak on the radio, interview important people, and people would actually listen and read, because information is the key to many branches in economy, if there are reports of pirates in system A, people will react to that information, and move to system B where there are patrols established by some organization, or they will hire protection, so they can mine in that system or use it as a shipping lane. Flow of information is the key in establishing economy in space. Soon i will follow with more ideas, this time about medical sciences in-game. Also, i would love to hear what you guys think about my idea, i do like constructive criticism, so feel free to criticise. And, this language is NOT my native language, so sorry for grammar and spelling errors, but it shouldn't be more than a little annoyance. Fernix