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AlexCout

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(For after release... obviously)

 

Megastructures...

Huge, expensive and profitable...

 

Many games turn around them but none really take it to a real level...

( well some probably do...)

We all know that there isn't a real limit of building in Du, but what would push a corporation to build one? 

Surface area? No planets are big enough...

Ringworld, space elevator, orbital ring and stuff are useless, or at least way too expensive for their profit...

 

We'll keep the expensive side because well reasons... I don't want the first noob that join in to start to create his own megastructure, it just doesn't make sense...

 

So which type of structure would be profitable? 

For now I can only think about 3 types of structures that could be potentially interesting for a corporation :

 

- dyson sphere ( or swarm... but might not be possible with DU's drone and energy transfer mechanics )

 

- black hole farming ( transform matter to energy efficiently via hawking's radiations... But to be fair idk if it's that profitable... it has to be quite op to be interesting considering the risk of the gravity well... )

 

- Star lifting structure ( star lifting is the act of extracting materials from a star, not by scooping it, but by accelerating it via strong magnetic fields or accelerating the star rotation speed... here is a not so short overview: 

 

 

)

 

 

So we need a few mechanisms to make these work:

 

- solar panels that produce an output which varies depending on the distance between the star it's facing and itself 

 

- Black holes mechanics ( radiation and a way to harvest them, matter consumption, a way to monitor the matter inside, maybe with a gravity probe? ) and a way to counter the gravity well ( thrusters might not be that efficient, although having to balance thrusters power consumption with the power output of the black hole to maximise the overhaul matter to energy conversion could be really interesting... + thrusters can act as a matter input, though implementing it is a bit tricky...)

 

- A way of doing star lifting... I don't know how we could fake the process, so some thinking is required here... maybe produce an amound of matter proportional to the sum of the power of the magnets divided by their distance of the star and output the matter output at one pole, which would need to be collected in some way... (i.e. Share your ideas down there :D

 

 

And what will be the gameplay benefit ? Well actually, a lot:

 

- requires a HUGE amount of organisation and coordination -> will mobilise probably everyone in a corporation 

- Will probably require different corporations to ally and share their ressources and manpower for the construction

- Will provide strategic positions, once built, it can only be destroyed or preserved, don't think about moving it, unless you have serval of them to provide a thrust huge enough to move it in a decent time... you want to see it move by your own eyes, not by your children's ones...

- Events, imagines the title of a mag: "destruction of a 100000$ facility in a video game" 

 

Many more points I didn't think about or developed...

They'll probably require a good amount of balancing and reflexion but I think it's worth it 

 

 

So they aren't like the titans in EVE, I mean, there are a lot of titans already built, but I would expect only 3 or maybe 4 megastructures to have been built after the same amount of time ( from when the titans have been implemented in EVE to now)... And i want the destruction of a keenstar in eve to be nothing compared to the destruction of a megastructure in DU...

 

Some will say " they are too expensive, no one will build them..." and I disagree....

When you are at war with a powerful corporation, you want to have the advantage, and you'll probably want to invest in having a greater ressource income... and at some point, a corporation will definitely get their hands in it...

( and it wouldn't make sense for them to be cheap... )

 

 

 

So what do you think? Can we come up with a proper balance ?

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Megastructures are awesome, but I'm seeing a few flaws in your reasoning and thinking here. The first is that you disregard some projects because they wouldn't be profitable, like a space elevator or a ringworld. You should absolutely consider that people may do things because they can or want to, not because they'll be profitable. It is a game, after all.

 

You also dismissed several construction projects that would rely on construction mechanics alone, like space elevators and ringworlds, which are already possible in DU because all they need to exist are building mechanics. You then say that projects people do would actually involve other things, like Dyson spheres and black hole farming, which require completely unconfirmed mechanics to actually be profitable.

 

Nevertheless, I think you're too closely comparing EVE macroengineering projects (which are predesigned with specific benefits) to what people can and might create in Dual Universe, which could be anything, for any reason. Players could continuously add on to a construction in space for years, it doesn't have to be a specific dead set project with blueprints, just something vague that it's a "thing" to go and build whatever on.

 

The ideas and everything you have here are cool. Nothing against you at all, I don't mean to come off as hostile, I just think you're trying a fit Dual Universe mechanics into a specific EVE economy, which is inappropriate. People in DU can build whatever they want, and as such many people will be driven less by profit and efficiency, and more so by the ability to be artistic, creative, imaginative, and simply to say "because we could".

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I have to agree with : 

 

"People in DU can build whatever they want, and as such many people will be driven less by profit and efficiency, and more so by the ability to be artistic, creative, imaginative, and simply to say "because we could. '' 

 

As unpractical it may seem I am sure some organization will build the Death Star or something like it eventual even if its just for bragging right !

 

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13 minutes ago, ATMLVE said:

People in DU can build whatever they want, and as such many people will be driven less by profit and efficiency, and more so by the ability to be artistic, creative, imaginative, and simply to say "because we could".

This is in fact a sandbox game above all. It'll be build-centric, so completing a build would be an end of itself. So far it seems that a large percentage of the player population are people from Landmark, and their goals are going to be way way different from people who play Eve.

 

Plus one potential benefit of a megastructure as I see it is what a mega-structure can offer in defense. In games like Starmade and Space Engineers, for ship construction, mobility and efficiency are both limiting factors in structure-size. In starmade some systems have diminishing returns as you scale-up, so at a certain point bigger is not better, where in Space Engineers, things scale pretty linearly but larger constructs stress servers to a point where they can no longer track Missile impacts and only gatling guns matter or a large enough ship crashes the whole server as soon as guns turn on or it gently bumps into something.

 

But for static structures instead of ships... the only thing limiting you size-wise is resources. If you don't ever have to move a construct, more mass means more power, more storage, more shields, and more weapons (yeah it might not mean more weapons in DU due to their 1 player 1 weapon philosophy, but there might be some limited automated defense options for static constructs). Most importantly it means more structure HP and more mass worth of blocks you need to chew through in order to compromise the structure. A large station in Space Engineers where a team can afford several layers of advanced/heavy armor plating even laid out in an inefficient patter can withstand a sustained bombardment from a large ship without a breech. I've seen attacks that fail because the attacking player runs out of ammunition before the station suffered a breech, and the main reason we don't see super-stations in Space Engineers be successful is because of the catastrophic effect ramming has due to collision related bugs. In starmade, an org has the ability to make 1 "home base" literally indestructible including anything docked to it, which is a great system in my opinion because it offers the same level of protection to small orgs as it offers to huge one, limiting the oppressive effect large orgs can have on smaller ones and completely eliminating AFK raiding. Even then, the only effective way players have of taking down a very large station in Starmade is to spoof the turret AI by dipping in and out of maximum tracking range of unmanned turrets (as you can't run out of ammo or fuel in that game, you can take pot-shots forever).

 

In Rust, it takes the combined effort of a massive clan to raid a well-fortifide base structure, and it takes tons and tons of explosives to successfully raid one even when 100% of the defending org is AFK, *and structures rapidly decay without upkeep in rust*. Without a decay mechanic, a megastructure might become practically impossible to compromise or destroy with weapons given that NQ is opposed to any super-weapon category. With a fairly low hard-cap on the maximum damage output per player, and the theoretically unlimited cap on the size of a mega-structure, the only viable way to comprimize a mega-structure would be a coordinated espionage effort (rogue-one anybody?). This would make a mega-structure the optimal location for a large org's treasury, rare material storage depot, or ship manufacturing facility.

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One multiblock megastructure I'd love to see would be a particle collider. I know that automation isn't planned for resources, but it would be interesting to have a massive machine like this to generate trace amounts of a metal, at a massive cost of resources to make and power to run. It would only be worth using for the most valuable of resources.

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ATMLVE covered basically all that needed covering here. However, I do hope that the "we built it because we could" doesn't go too far, like second life nonsense that we could ruin immersion too much. 

 

I don't mind a good laugh, or a troll once in a while, etc but I hope it doesn't get out of hand. Like, I hope there aren't  pink dildo ships, butt crack taverns, or flying scribbles... ?

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Yeah I agree with what you said... but the "we made it because we can" argument will only work with 'small' ( still really really large, but not ridiculus ) structures, and a space elevator won't save much fuel, I mean, it's cheap compared to other megastructures and I would expect people to make them, but a ringworld for example, even though it's beautiful, the amount of ressources to make one is just huge, you would need to remove several planets from existence to match the ressource cost...

 

yeah i am maybe too focused on eve's system... but hey it's an mmo with similar definitions of corporations :P

 

 

and I have to remember that a star isn't small, a particle colider is microscopic compared to a real megastructure, I am even not sure if an orbital elevator is considered as one...

 

you really have to consider how huge these things are... a large station in starmade might be huge... but it's a fly compared to a dyson sphere, space engineers ships are really tiny too, even the larger ones aren't close to 10km, and we are talking about structures several millions of kilometers large... well not really millions since they will probably be scaled down.... but you get my point

 

ediy: remember, DU is pvp :P people are against each other 

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57 minutes ago, Celivalg said:

ediy: remember, DU is pvp :P people are against each other 

Yes, and the slogan is "rebuild civilization together" which means that co-operating will be easy, and destroying each other will probably be mechanically difficult. PVP is not the focus of the game as it is presented, it'll be one of many features. Expect there to be plenty of mechanics to protect people and their constructs, and substantially fewer to allow players to compete or destroy.

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1 minute ago, wizardoftrash said:

Yes, and the slogan is "rebuild civilization together" which means that co-operating will be easy, and destroying each other will probably be mechanically difficult. PVP is not the focus of the game as it is presented, it'll be one of many features. Expect there to be plenty of mechanics to protect people and their constructs, and substantially fewer to allow players to compete or destroy.

I disagree on the fact that pvp will stay minor, yeah people will cooperate, but for an average of at least 5k player connected goal, ( wich I think is reasonable for this game) you will have a lot of conflicts, pvp will definitely not stay minor nor on the small scale, I expect to see massive battles once in a while... and I don't think I'll be wrong stating this...

 

even if DU and EVE are different, they stay similar, and many aspects of EVE will translate in some way in DU... not all of them but still

 

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2 minutes ago, Celivalg said:

even if DU and EVE are different, they stay similar, and many aspects of EVE will translate in some way in DU... not all of them but still

But the fundamental gameplay mechanics are vastly different. The overlaps are smaller than you'd think, and as such it'll attract a larger proportion of very different playstyles.

 

There will probably be proper wars, but probably not "huge battles". Building a ship in DU will be a lot of work even for a small ship, and even when there is a ton of infrastructure for producing ships in factories, it is far far less conveninet that producing ships in EVE. It would be an order of magnitude more man-power to produce very large ships in DU, and you would need lots of ships of varying sizes for a "huge battle". Those ships won't just be purchasable from NPC's, people won't be making ships to sell with a click of a button. In a game where everything must be physically moved and housed, and where goods are physically housed in 3-dimentional space, even the "largest" orgs would struggle to physically organize a fleet.

 

To top it off, there will be protections for players who will be AFK, ways to protect entire tiles from attack. We have no idea what defenses will even look like, and we only have the faintest idea of what will be possible with ships. Combat will be *much more action based* than in eve just based on the flight mechanics in DU, and that also attracts a very different kind of player.

 

Lastly, and this is a doozey, with the "1 player per weapon" philosophy that NQ has for pvp in DU, and their straight-up aknowledging that the destructive capabilities of one player's weapons will be very limited, there will be no bunker-busting guns out there, no weapon that'll require a massive ship to fire. One of the reasons I brought up Space Engineers is because all of the super-destructive weapons players build simply won't be possible in DU. even more prominant, the "cover your ship with turrets" strategy won't be an option either, as again your ship would be limited to 1 gun unless its multi-crew. That means no 1-player destroyer ships, no 1-player long range missile support ships. no drone armies, no death boxes, no doom-stick ships.

 

If the devs really want to build this as a game that encourages cooperation, where pvp is a feature but not the focus, they can make it very difficult for player so ruin the game for others. Expect some effort in that respect.

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15 minutes ago, wizardoftrash said:

Yes, and the slogan is "rebuild civilization together" which means that co-operating will be easy, and destroying each other will probably be mechanically difficult. PVP is not the focus of the game as it is presented, it'll be one of many features. Expect there to be plenty of mechanics to protect people and their constructs, and substantially fewer to allow players to compete or destroy.

Actually PVP is probably the most important feature in the game. It gives people a reason to build bases and ships, to group together, to conquer land, to explore and compete for resources, to create contracts and much more. It's also the only reason the economy can work: ships and bases will get destroyed, there'll always be jobs for miners, crafters, designers and tons of other people because of that alone. 

 

Regtarding OP: there'll be megastructures and reasons to build those. Ships are physical objects always present in the game, there'll be huge stations/markets/hangars and so on to store them. Also items and materials need a lot of space, because you need to store them inside huge containers when in large quantities. Of course only bigger groups with tons of stuff and ships will need to build those.

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1 minute ago, Shynras said:

Actually PVP is probably the most important feature in the game. It gives people a reason to build bases and ships, to group together, to conquer land, to explore and compete for resources, to create contracts and much more. It's also the only reason the economy can work: ships and bases will get destroyed, there'll always be jobs for miners, crafters, designers and tons of other people because of that alone. 

I absolutely agree that PVP is a key feature in the game, but to say it is the most important feature is an overstatement. It defiantly needs to be present, and its the thing I'm most excited for above all else in DU too (I'm aboslutely jazzed to build military tech).

 

However, the destructive capability of individual players, and even groups of players, has to be pretty limited for a game to actually build anything that resembles a civilization. If it is too easy to destroy, and too difficult to create, then it would only take a few very destructive players to destroy the work of dozens and cripple entire cities. One of the many reasons we don't see large clans doing large scale battles in Space Engineers (apart from the fact that it would melt the servers) is because of how destructive ramming is. A dirt cheap ship can cripple a large station (built to withstand traditional weapons) just by ramming it at the normal max speed (which is pretty low).

 

In Eve though, its easy to repair and replace ships. It will be far harder to do so in DU, so for there to be player-built civilizations (as the devs intend) it will have to be harder to destroy than to create, and you can do that in a game.

 

Anybody who expects they will be able to play around a little, hop into a ship, and play through battle after battle after battle is totally delusional. There will be serious limitations in how many large fleets and large structures can be built in a given time, since it all needs to be made by players. Theoretically there will be a time where ships can be mass-produced in factories, but that will still be much more work and complexity than the click of a button.

 

I think we'll see that TU's and the ability to set protections and laws will have a serious impact on the number of "murder-hobo" players that'll enjoy the game. There will be parts of the universe that feel a bit more like Rust (where clans are routinely killing off newbies for little-no reson and raiding each other all the time), but those battles will be more like skirmishes and less like the huge wars in EVE.

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It makes me wonder, how hard will it be for a single player to construct a space elevator? There's no physics that are going to be constraining the design of bases... so can't we just build straight up? If you keep it thin enough, it won't take much in the way of resources.

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I want to give my opinion on everything, so I'll put them in categories.

 

Mega-Structures: I love the idea of Mega-Structures personally; It's a great way to test your building skills, and show off the wealth of an Organization. To some degree, it may even aid in the defense, since destroying large structures will take quite some time. I personally (not speaking on behalf of my Organization at all here), want to see or make either a space elevator, or a Dyson Sphere.

 

PVP: The game shouldn't be too PvP heavy. I will tell you know, if you are expecting it to be, lower your expectations so you aren't disappointed. If ships and constructs truly take so much time and resources to build; There is going to some serious levels of loss, and a life will be valuable. More so than other games like EVE, considering we actually have to mostly build them. I actually expect most combat to be player vs player, not construct vs construct; Lots of boarding and use of assault rifles.

 

Weapons: I do not believe that it will be 1 person per 1 weapon; From what I gathered there should be some degree of automation, though it'll be more inefficient than a player; I also believe you can use elements and LUA to tie multiple weapons together, to let a player control and fire a group of weapons as one. I also think while doomsday weapons are out of the question, there should be capital weapons in the future (Not too strong, wont blow a continent or planet up, but put a good hole in a cap ship).

 

Ship Selling: As for ships, being sold. While it is true, I cannot email a ship to you, once you purchase it; Nova Corporation does intend to flat out sell ships. We may even offer ship parking services for a daily, weekly, and monthly rate. Nova Corporation is here to make your life easier, and bring you a better tomorrow.

 

Mega-Structures: Topic is all over the place, but, I hope Mega-Structures are thing. I hope Solar Panels are a thing; It seems we can build a Mega-Structure, but the real question is just how far, could a Dyson sphere be possible? Lets try it in the Alpha/Beta tests!

 

End.

 

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7 hours ago, DangerPugilist said:

Well technically, you can ONLY have a space elevator BECAUSE planets rotate.  The mass at the end of the elevator attached to a strong tether creates the forces that keep the tether taught....

while that is true in RL, it's not true in a game....which we're talking about here

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I see the "factions" are starting to solidify ! ;)

 

Over the coming months, there will be many forum battles fought between the "PVP is primary, everything else comes second" and the "building of things is primary, everything else comes second" groups. Both sides will claim to represent the "true vision" of what NQ intends for the game. Balancing these opposing approaches will determine the future of DU.

 

Mega structures will be conflict magnets. Just as some will build things for no other reason than "because we can", there will also be those that want to destroy them for no other reason than "because we can".

 

But destruction is inevitably faster than building, and in MMO's, the deck is almost always stacked in favour of the aggressor.

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