Miamato

I don't understand your concern about having drone. If you created a blueprint in ghost mode, why do you need to build the same thing but physical again manually? According to your logic there should be totally no automated building, that means people would need to create things manually again and again, that would be fun only for first 2-3 times. Then it becomes just grind. If you read my previous messages - I suggested approach to take time and require player to be within drone operation range. Why? You shouldn't be able to build it in few minutes or hours. But if you are rich enough and have all the resources, plenty of time, then why you can't do it? Just because 'team-play rules the world'? It would be harder but not impossible as you want it to be.

Probably you got it wrong. Even without this mechanics in theory you will be able to build huge ship. What I described won't make much difference, as you still need to spend time and much manual effort to build anythings. But at the same time you won't need to salvage your ship if you decide that some of modules inside it was placed incorrectly or decide that you need another module there. The drone idea is just to replace routine work - for example you want to create 3 similar ships, regardless of their size - if you'll need to place everything manually, that is insane and not interesting at all. It's not about communication, it's more about reduce stupid grind where it's not needed. Teams will still have advantage and it would be much faster for them to build anything, especially big constructs. I was not talking about mass production, just a way to make building and design process easier. And I disagree with people that want to build everything by hand and in a team. I'm fine to spend x5 time more than some team and design or build smth on my own, but at the same time I want it to be convenient. If mass production would exist - I believe it should be smth like automated factory, and creation of such factory means you spent enough time for factory itself to allow you to build smth automatically there according to your factory size.

Reminds me about DU lore a little bit

When I was thinking about how I would like to see building process in this game, there were several variant that should prevent abuse and still allow people to design vehicle before actual blocks are placed: - Have shadow mode where you can place any of blocks that exist in game. - Once you have created your vehicle you can save it to private blueprint storage. You cannot trade or give such blueprint to anyone else. - Then two options: -- building drone - some short range drone that has some kind of cargo for blocks and can get them from player or storage defined by player (you should have access rights to that storage). So this drone continues building your creation if you have all needed parts/blocks and until you stay in operating range. -- player has some hand-module that places blocks according to blueprint, if those blocks are available in his inventory. - After at least one construct for the blueprint is finished - those blueprint is unlocked for trading or exchange. So with such approach you cannot just spawn smth in a minute, you spend time both for designing and actual building process, you cannot abuse blueprint sale without having your blueprint built. But you save much time as you don't need to make a physical thing first and realize that it's not what you wanted to build. From experience in Empyrion - I don't like building on live servers without blueprints as it takes too much time to navigate around a vehicle, especially if it's not smth tiny, and much more time for replacing badly placed blocks/modules. At the same time I don't like immediate placing by blueprints in that game.

From my point of view that is not much needed for small scale ships or constructs if you have possibility to move with jet-pack (I believe there is smth like it in the game). For bigger creations it should not be kind of special surface but more like a module that generates gravity inside and probably on outer construct surface. As for non seated avatars floating in space - this should be not controlled by some safety system, but by the people themselves. I believe no-one wants to travel with some intruders attached to the ship without possibility to leave them behind.

That's not true They can publish at least some screenshots from pre-alpha and that would be still counted as an update

I think it's not a problem to post news both via email and forum For me such updates are important as I remembered about the game after kickstarter campaign was finished and now cannot view closed tester forums or enter the game. Also as NQ members do not reply much on forums it's hard to understand if they ever read suggestion section, because now I have feelings that most of ideas won't go further than forum members imagination but we will realize it only after release. Anyway much time left till release, hopefully we will get more updates at later development stages.

As only very limited amount of people have access to pre-alpha I think it would be nice to have at least some forum dev blog posts that in written form give short list and idea of what was done and what is planned next. It would take much less time and still will be really helpful.

And this was initial idea of free version - people don't need to start new trial every 14 days and can endlessly play. Is this an issue that company provides endless trial instead of 14 days in pay-to-play game? Or if you want to return to the game but first check if smth interesting appeared there - now you can just login and browse ingame items/skills/chat with people, before you had to pay first. So again what is the issue here? Lol, what project do you mean? Browser game, that is given to another company for development? Valkyrie that is actually developed by another wing of CCP that exists for a long time already? From what is told by NQ and people on forums - the same would be here, unless you cooperate with people - you would have either less possibilities or need to spend more effort to achieve smth.

I can fly/craft anything except titans, and also used Stratios much, from my point of view it's not the best ship. For WH and DED complexes Tech III ships are much better and efficient. For farming WH of 5-6 class you should have Dreads. For efficient mining - you need other cool stuff. And playing on free account you won't have all of that. Free account limit you greatly, even having cap of 20 mil sp (only 5 can be trained without paying for subscription or injectors) - you lose a large portion of gameplay that EVE can offer. Probably for some people it's fine, but most active players will continue paying for the game.

Actually when you are playing for free, it's just endless trial period. You won't be able to do most of interesting and profitable things in the game.

But that safety would be just a kind of agreement within community as I understand, isn't it? So there won't be direct pvp restrictions, just possible player response for aggression acts. Then only time can show how several thousands of players will start from single location on single planet. As I understand next Alpha and Beta stages should involve more people, so probably we will get more information how this approach works with initial design.

Today incursions are also a good source of money. But the fastest stable farm is on motherships in nullsec, it gives you stable 300-400 mil/hour income. So in worst case it takes 5 hours to buy subscription. Side effect is that mothership costs ~23-25 bil now.

I see no problem with it, in case players are limited to first solar system without skills. First of all this will decrease load on server and increase performance on client side. I doubt that player computers can handle few thousands crowd within small playfield/visible horizon. At least people should be able to reach closest moons/planets in 1-2 days at least, keeping in mind that they still won't have advanced ships. just minimal setup to make it possible.

Probably, I haven't played the game yet, so maybe we'll be grinding for a long time until first ship is built, but I doubt that everyone will stick to safe zone. Everything depends on how much toxic people will be present on launch and how many of them will be trying to kill each other or camp safe zone borders

Depends how deep you can dig I doubt that everyone will start mining right after launch. Someone will try to escape starting planet as fast as possible, someone will go deep into jungle, etc. On practice you won't see all those 2.5k players at the same time in safe zone.

It was 'free'-to play for at least one year already. Now they are planning to extend list of skills that you can get on free account. Not much fun until you like to fly on some trash or to suicide someone in secured space.

I want to have farm with cows, tomatoes, salad, cucumbers, some other vegetables, craft burgers and coke, sell it in my fast-food base. Then when it becomes popular, poison all burgers with uranium, all visitors die and I grab everything that was in their pockets. Then drink a glass of whiskey watching sunset of twin-stars, get into my ship and begin new life... build a church to help poor, teach them how to grow tomatoes and cows... find some new uranium deposit...

Wasn't the AI supposed just to watch over people that are in cryopods? I thought explanation for time needed for 'remembering' skills is not about some researches made by AI but about side effect of being frozen and time needed to recover memories after amnesia. This is said in Lore topic.

If you are referring to EVE lore, then during those 23k years humanity developed almost from scratch. PEG system itself was not developed at all by humanity, it was just found on planet surfaces, people just figured out some of its features. I believe for now DU will be going live without any alien tech, or at least I didn't find any official info about it. So at least at the beginning we can rely only on human technologies. The big difference is also that EVE story had no 'crio-state', so it was continuous years of development and inventions just build civilizations and try to play with PEGs. In DU all time spent for traveling there were no scientific discoveries, so technologies would be the same as people had in ~2500 year when they left the Earth.

Not only in difficult natural terrain. For example if you are mining deep inside the planet or want to reach planet core at some point, you need some vertical cave. You can use such rails as an elevator for your resources or for transferring mining vehicles deep.

I'm against physical invisibility at all, as for me it makes no sense. You found good example about recon ships that are not available for d-scan in EVE. That is almost what I mean for all the suggestions from post above - I was talking only about visibility for any types of scanners, but not direct visual contact. Also it would be cool to have countermeasures for such systems, for example some EMP rocket, that can be sent into such 'scanning anomaly', when it explodes - cloaking systems go offline for some period or until manual reactivation with delay and your can scan what was inside those anomaly. Probably there should be natural places where scanning works worse, and this may be logical inside some gas clouds, near some active stars. etc.

Agree. So in previous post I was talking only about docking. As for attaching constructs together - this may be cool, but would be hard to balance and maintain. But probably this may be easier if we have some special module that marks one ship as primary construct (this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design), also it should have kind of 'consumer attaching' spots/modules. The other ships design to be attached have 'attaching provider' spots/modules and special module that marks it as secondary construct (again this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design),. In this case control over all the system always is granted to primary ship, secondary ships lose control over systems, except turrets or some modules that can be operated by direct interaction (not from cockpit), that means primary ship just becomes bigger and have more modules. In other words, even if this vehicles can be operated separately, you should design them together or at least considering properties of each other. In attached state you cannot modify any of the vehicles, when you want to separate them - constructs are split according to information stored in primary/secondary determining modules

In Empyrion game it's possible to dock small ships to Capital ship, if you have privileges to do so. No ownership or control rights are transferred. Both vessels are controlled separately. As they wrote on their forums things become complicated when you want to have more hierarchy in docking - when you want to dock a ship, docked to another ship. I believe DU should definitely have possibility to build some carrier ships, as this is logical that one big vessel may carry many interceptor class vessels. But there should be size/class/mass limits for it. For example you should not be able to dock a construct that is few times bigger so some small ship. Also docking means stacking mass, but that should not be a big problem.

Agree that EVE approach should not work here, as in EVE there is a different physics involved (and by the way explanations on how it work appeared only recently compared to when such mechanics was introduced in game). In EVE cloak is a state between normal and warp subspace, depending on which module you use - common one or cover ops, you put your ship on the very surface of 'energy' subspace or closer to warp subspace (that allows enter warp without decloaking). For DU if cloaking would ever appear - I would like to see it as a state resistant to scanning/radar electronic of other players. So you can see the ship only on visual/physical contact. Also from my point of view your construct should be able to enter such state only if it is not moving at all and not in aggression. I don't like idea of invisible fleets that appear from nowhere. Or the other mechanics that may work - you have a module for your base or capital ship that works as a buble, everything within it cannot be scanned from outside, until you cross buble border. Buble itself should be visible for scanners as some disruption area, so you know smth is around, but you don't know what exactly.