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Hey All, I think DU is a game that could do justice to a system based around municipalities and governing. This may sound like an overreach of the free play nature of the game but I think the extremely capable playerbase will be hamstrung without these type of options. I will break it down some suggestions tier by tier: -Cities- (Mayorship) Facilities: city core unit, power, lights and respawn hub Commerce: unlinked market terminals and sales tax Zoning: city blocks, streets and zone based taxes, mining rights Policing: street level defensive structures for preventing violence in the city -Territories- (Governorship) Facilities: banks (terminals), warehouses (large vault style containers), trade hub (planetary terminals), planetary transportation Commerce: Import tax, city trade deals, industrial incentives Zoning: ability to claim adjacent territories with city progression instead of a physical territory units Policing: Major ground defenses to prevent outside aggresion -Planetary- (Lordship) Facilities: One specialized core unit chosen from a list (Large Scale Shield, Trade Center, Senate, Industrial Center), Spaceport (interplanetary transport) Commerce: Trade Center (interplanetary terminals), Org trade deals Zoning: Sanctuary zones, Conflict zones (within your influence and population) Policing: Planetary defense (Large Scale shields), Large anti-air defenses I know this is not all necessarily easy especially when you get to the Planetary tier. I believe some of the things in the first two tiers are very beneficial to having a meaningful player city experience. I would like to clarify a few things that may seem vague or odd. I know the idea of transportation hubs is odd when you have vehicles and spaceships but the idea is it to be a very fast way to travel from point A to B (at a steep cost) rather than physically traveling all that way. With such a large map this would incentive players to at the least pass through cities and traveling via personal ship would still have a place as you would only be able to travel with your character with this system. This would also generate a need for spacport adjacent ship storage. In my experience as a mayor in SWG this created a more interactive player population. Another thing that may seem odd is giving seemingly military facilities and roles to a municipal power but I tried to keep it to policing and defense as that is something a city does in real life. Lastly, I know some may see this and think this would take away the ability to build custom facilities and everything would become to uniform but most things in this list would be implemented into the game world via a core unit that could be supported by terminals and other types of units that would be linked to the core unit. Two examples of this would be a "city core unit" would be where you manage all of the linked city facilities including power, lights taxes etc... another example would be a "Trade Center" would have a core unit that would be required but then you can also attach additional terminals. From this you can physically make a voxel based building to fit whatever form you would like.This is just some ideas so please feel free to add or take away anything. The main goal is to keep it simple as I know designing and implementing systems like this is very difficult. Happy to discuss in the comments.

what I'm talking about here is essentially being able to trade permissions for specific parts of a construct in exchange for money or whatever. these permissions would have a time limit on them, and (crucially) the person who owned the construct would NOT be able to modify those permissions until the time limit expired. one example of this would be a parking lot/hangar bay in a city. if I wanted to park my ship inside a hangar bay I would purchase the permissions to open and close the main doors, toggle lights, open some storage inside the bay, etc. if I just wanted to stay there for the night then I would only buy 24hrs worth of those permissions. during this period the owner of the building that has the hangar bay would not be able to open the door or toggle the lights or open the storage etc, and would not be able to modify the permissions or delete the construct/elements until the 24 hour period expired. perhaps to enable this some option would have to be enabled in the RDMS settings, as to prevent new players from accidentally selling their homes to random players for 999,999,999 hours for 1 quanta.

Lets say I am the mayor of a small town on an unprotected planet very rich in certain rare materials. As this planet contains an abundance of valuable resources, plus it just looks cooler to have cities more densely populated, I don't want each group of friends or resident to own or have exclusive building rights to an entire territory unit. Now I could just allow several different groups of friends or people to occupy the same territory unit, but that would make it a lot more difficult to plan buildings, and could result in griefing like people blocking up ground vehicles or just building ugly crap right next to their neighbors construct. I think a subsystem within territory units that would allow the owner of said unit to give control over a specific area to an individual, who could then control who is allowed to build or do other things in that area would be a good solution to this and result in some incredible city planning and building. The sub-territory units could be as small as apartment rooms, where you are not allowed to break the walls but can build and destroy anything within the room itself, to as large as the majority of the territory, which could be useful for different groups controlling separate parts of a particularly valuable territory unit. In my opinion this would not only result in countless emergent gameplay opportunities, but would make the creation of cities and diplomatic agreements between organizations or nations easier.

Anybody thought about the idea of have a bubble shield around a base or settlement? Clearly this could broken if attacked hard enough but something basic to protect whatever is inside. Only authorised people could be allowed in etc. My thought would be to have a semi-safe zone for areas that aren’t aligned to an organisation and are meant for entertainment/social instead of PvP or resource mining.

The safe areas that are being generated by Novaquark are a great idea, but I feel they may lead to some problematic game elements. Players will likely build in safe areas and only journey outside of them to mine. Players in safe areas will likely be neighbors with bitter enemies. Trolls could interrupt multi-hex building projects by claiming hexes in the path of development. There is less of a reason for people to band together to form protection if it is inherent to the game. I am a huge believer in emergent gameplay, and this game relies almost entirely on it. Emergent gameplay is the idea that rules and systems are established which sort of "Make sense," and then players find ways to extract value, power, and fun from them in ways that the devs may not have initially intended. An example is movement patterns in Starcraft 1, Wormhole pirate guilds in EVE online, and metagame strategies in almost every game. I propose a system which in a simple manner mimics the way real cities were formed. When a new hex territory is claimed grant it "Frontier" status which offers little or no protection. Once it is surrounded by other claimed hex tiles grant the center tile an upgraded protection status and a new name like Rural area. When all the frontier hexes bordering this rural area are surrounded by frontier hexes, they become rural and the center hex becomes suburban. Continue in this pattern for a number of layers, a progression such as: Frontier Rural Suburban Urban Metropolis Adding and removing layers, changing costs of territories, and modifying levels of protection at each status would give devs control over game balance while still feeling fair for pvp. In addition, this gives groups an incentive to build together as a troll or bad neighbor building near the city would only have frontier status and likely be soon destroyed. There may also need to be other controls like a minimum of a couple of days at each status level (so that a level 5 protected zone cant be sprung up instantly) This would be a simple system which mimics the way cities start small and grow. I also don't think this should replace safe zones, but be in addition to safe zones.

When you build a ship you need a basic idea of the ship that you are building....when you are building a space station you need a basic plan or idea to build that....but cities are dynamical buildings come and go....infrastructure is upgraded and updated and so on. This topic looks to address the issue of the complicated thing that a city is, a start of a conversation in to making the most basic of things in a city urban planning. On a more basic level cities are organize districts then in Lots. DU needs to adress this from the start if it wants to make cities that really stand out. One owner per lot. City / District / Lot is the break down structure that i see the most simple to go. A idea is for example: Small City - 5 Districts / 5 lots per district Medium City - 10 Districts / 10 lots per district Large City - 20 Districts / 20 lots per district Also the ability to mode hole buildings from lot to lot, lets say that you made a industrial district and you want to move it to a bigger city or in the same regard a Small City upgraded to larger city..... Will right more on the topic...just wanted some feed back from the community on the idea.

How can a territory be obtained from another faction? Well, two main thoughts come to mind: -Peacefully Obtained through trade (land for land, land for resources, land for money) -Forceful conquest This post is to discuss how players can take territories by force Capturing territory from another faction should be no easy task, automated defenses and player defenses will be present in larger, more desirable territories. But capturing someone's land should not be impossibly hard either. It should cost more resources to launch a successful offensive than maintain a defensive line. My idea would be to set up a web of command posts or capturable locations in a large territory hex. You, as an invader, must capture all of these secured points to be able to claim the territory. This is an example of zones within a hex territory. An invading group would have to overpower zones A through F, or a majority of the zones before they are allowed to capture the master command post represented as G. This makes invading factions form attack plans to capture the outer command posts before they can take a central power, and requires invading factions to scout out where a command post lies within each zone they are planning to capture. It also requires a heavy amount of scouting to find out which zones invaders should attack based on defenses and guards. Not all territory hex's should operate like this, but the Capital hex territory, or main command point for all the other hexes. The Capital hex should be the first territory you claim in that area, and should be able to be moved to other hex territories you claim later on in the same hex cluster (connected hexes) Please post your opinion about this and your ideas!

When you build a ship you need a basic idea of the ship that you are building....when you are building a space station you need a basic plan or idea to build that....but cities are dynamical buildings come and go....infrastructure is upgraded and updated and so on. This topic looks to address the issue of the complicated thing that a city is, a start of a conversation in to making the most basic of things in a city urban planning. On a more basic level cities are organize districts then in Lots. DU needs to adress this from the start if it wants to make cities that really stand out. One owner per lot. City / District / Lot is the break down structure that i see the most simple to go. A idea is for example: Small City - 5 Districts / 5 lots per district Medium City - 10 Districts / 10 lots per district Large City - 20 Districts / 20 lots per district Also the ability to mode hole buildings from lot to lot, lets say that you made a industrial district and you want to move it to a bigger city or in the same regard a Small City upgraded to larger city..... Will right more on the topic...just wanted some feed back from the community on the idea.

What do y'all think about the possibility of a traveling city. i envision a city where each house is vertical and pillar-like. a city of floating gems almost. what are your thoughts?

In real life cities are built for a number of reasons (duh!): access to workplaces (income), shops (food, clothes, goods etc.), communication (internet), infrastructure (energy, water, waste disposing, public transportation), healthcare, leisure, etc. These fundamental factors which contribute to urbanization IRL won't be pretty much present in DU. People will be spread around different organizations, cartels, syndicates, corporations, etc., maintaining their own infrastructure, energy grid, factories, landing/docking/building sites, defense systems, etc. So I guess we won't be seeing large cities in DU, unless some very dedicated urbanists will be willing to design them just for the sake of design itself. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel discouraged from playing DU in any aspect whatsoever, however I just realized the things I've written above and it kinda made me a little upset, that's all. Or maybe I'm just plain wrong?