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Dear Novaquark, please reconsider your combat system.


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i am only talking about space fighting.

i think it would be a missed opportunity to not allow ramming damage and building your own missiles. the effect of these would just be that the people would need to build very versatile fleets and would have to adjust them to the specific era and enemy. let's take a look at space engineers, which doesn't have these limitations. people built incredible machines and weapons, though with differencating usefulness, it still is amazing what things players invented. here some examples:

saw missile

orbital cannon

grappling ship

now, i can understand why you chose to not give players the opportunity to build weapons by themselves, there is the chance that players will invent a weapon of mass destruction, and as you noted before, you don't want a planet killer because it just would be unfair living independently on that planet and just getting nuked. Even though you maybe could invent something like an atom bomb, i don't think it will get used, because a, the mere cost of such a weapon, and b, it wouldn't be worth it bombing away so much just to destroy one single enemy faction. it would be a move just to show power, something a warmongering faction would do, and till now, to my knowledge there aren't any communities that aren't rather civilized.

 

Now i come to my second point, turrets.

in the past you said you would let bots control the turrets and let them shoot. again, i can see your point, with the small ships simply being to fast. my idea is that there are different types of motors/thrusters. there are the normal ones, which are more sensitive and explode easier, but are faster, and the war motors, which are slower and more expensive, but can take more pressure.

if that isn't enough, my additional idea would be that warships radiate a special energy field that makes ships with normal motors slow way down (except allied ones who've been given the allowance to fly with  regular speed). the ability to place a lot of war motors on one small ship could be limited by them getting really hot so placing them next to each other would also make them overheat and explode.

 

I apologize if i said anything stupid, after all, i am not able to play the alpha right now,

and i apologize for my weird writing style, English is not my native language.

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Interesting ideas.

About Nukes, yeah i would use them, if only just once to see what it does.

 

But your idea is good, let us design weapons, maybe indeed have limitations but it would be good to be able to build and develop and research weapons. 

If i want to build a planetary mass driver that can shoot down an incoming invasion ship that would be a huge accomplishment, and i can sell it probably with a nice profit.

 

About SE, you have a good point. there i can even build bombs of [hidden]blocks and just let them fall out of my hangar deck to totally destroy a base i fly over. 

 

The thing here is, anyone who invests time or currency in these strange weapons should be able too. If you program planets to have no impact by weapons or crashes you are still fine although i would love to just incorporate it. Yes a death star is overkill, but then again how defendable is it during building? And how costly to make?

 

 

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About the invisible bombers, i don't think it would be a huge problem, when people create a strong weapon, people will create strong defenses. again, i take SE for instance, there people created special walls that let almost all weapons bounce off. Sure, it would always depend on your budget, but i think that would be really great. it would force people to join massive alliances and factions. Now, not every of these unions will be an authoritarian regime that gives their people no freedom, until now there isn't a faction that isn't giving their people a lot of opportunities, and it probably won't change because every person would just quit at that point. and i don't think being part of a giant battle fleet make you feel very bad. And there still will be small independent factions, they would just work differently.

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Not having ramming imgame isn't because of weapons of mass destruction but because you can kill large ships with cheap ones with nearly no effort, except manpower. 

 

Not having automated turrets and only a tuned down version (less dmg and less accuracy) isn't because of fast moving ships but because of balancing issues.

 

If ppl can build bombs. They will do it. And at some point, no matter the initial cost, it'll be cheap so they will just throw them around. 

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@Lethys yes, the danger of people building incredibly fast ships could exist, but again, you can somehow limit this. with my idea, the ships with regular motors would be detected fast, maybe the level of being detected could even multiply with the amount of  thrusters, and they always could allow ramming to a certain point.

 

about the turrets, you're absolutely right, i'm sorry i examined that topic, but when i found out about it, it was already to late.

 

about the thing with bombs, why would they become less expensive? in our modern world, only very few countries have nuclear weapons, and these weapons are easier to build in our world  because of such things as uranium, and incredibly complex physics and chemistry. now, in dual universe, which has a fairly simple physique and almost no chemistry, a weapon of mass destruction  could be only achieved trough a lot of ressources or some kind of exploit. Again, we both can't be really sure what is possible and what not and we should wait for an reply from an admin.

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15 minutes ago, The Nameless said:

yes, the danger of people building incredibly fast ships could exist, but again, you can somehow limit this. with my idea, the ships with regular motors would be detected fast, maybe the level of being detected could even multiply with the amount of  thrusters, and they always could allow ramming to a certain point.

It's not speed which impacts ramming the most, it's mass. So ppl could find a way to build somewhat fast ships which can't be shot that easily (no fps twitch combat, DU is based off of formulas which determine if you hit or not) and still do lots of damage via ramming. 

 

15 minutes ago, The Nameless said:

about the thing with bombs, why would they become less expensive?

At some point in the game all resource requirements are no big deal. 1.000.000 quanta, ore or whatever might be a HUGE deal to get in the first years of DU, but won't neccessarily be "a lot of resources" after a year or 2. It's not that anything becomes cheaper but everything will be mire accessible. 

 

Edit" so simply stating "it can be balanced via tons of X" doesn't work that well once du runs for some time

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I think the computation overhead caused by user designed oddly shaped ships, and large number of potential objects (and other contributions to server lag -e.g. internet) makes anything involving collision detection in combat a losing proposition. And as mentioned in one of NQ videos, orbital strikes were rejected because it wouldn't be "fair" - meaning people shouldn't be subject to death without any warning that danger is near or was inescapable.

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You can't have ramming or self-made weapons, otherwise anyone with a Large core, a respawn on a nearby ship, 6 or so large engines and a cubic kilometer of dirt or carbon could make massive and remarkably cheap kinetic region busters.

 

That's just no fun to think that you could blueprint and deploy big chunks of dirt in orbit and drop them at ridiculous speeds to wipe out huge developed cities.  It's an invite to grief and in a game of persistent objects that may have taken weeks or months to build it's just really gross to think of it as an option.

 

Now launching a missile barrage from orbit could be cool if you can lock targets from that range, especially because it takes time, effort, and material cost to enact such a campaign.

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/4/2019 at 2:59 PM, The Nameless said:

About the invisible bombers, i don't think it would be a huge problem, when people create a strong weapon, people will create strong defenses. again, i take SE for instance, there people created special walls that let almost all weapons bounce off. Sure, it would always depend on your budget, but i think that would be really great. it would force people to join massive alliances and factions. Now, not every of these unions will be an authoritarian regime that gives their people no freedom, until now there isn't a faction that isn't giving their people a lot of opportunities, and it probably won't change because every person would just quit at that point. and i don't think being part of a giant battle fleet make you feel very bad. And there still will be small independent factions, they would just work differently.

I would definitely hold off on the cloaking anything as bomber or "Stuka" fleets is only fun for a minority, but I am a bit biased.

 

On 11/4/2019 at 6:13 PM, Lethys said:

Not having ramming imgame isn't because of weapons of mass destruction but because you can kill large ships with cheap ones with nearly no effort, except manpower. 

 

Not having automated turrets and only a tuned down version (less dmg and less accuracy) isn't because of fast moving ships but because of balancing issues.

 

If ppl can build bombs. They will do it. And at some point, no matter the initial cost, it'll be cheap so they will just throw them around. 

Lol man this is hilarious.

  1. Ah, so I can just get the same people > put them in cheap attack craft > swarm said large ships > only limiting factor is how good the pilot gunnery skills are vs the quality of their armor? Uh huh and this requires more effort. I got u fam . ?
  2. Yes, because balancing issues and the threads that talk about it has no coherent reasons other then the smaller picture of how it would affect them in pvp when it is likely they are more likely to fight a larger organization. Lets ignore something called a force multiplier lol.
  3. If we use that logic then people can build a death star they are definitely do it and throw logic out the window on a host of factors like cost, limitations on resources, points of failure, and just go to the super weapon thread lulz. ?

I hope you aren't the head of a major organization as I get a feeling that DU might have a historical reenactment of Ascendant Frontier and another Steve if you are lulz.

On 11/4/2019 at 7:39 PM, The Nameless said:

@Lethys yes, the danger of people building incredibly fast ships could exist, but again, you can somehow limit this. with my idea, the ships with regular motors would be detected fast, maybe the level of being detected could even multiply with the amount of  thrusters, and they always could allow ramming to a certain point.

 

about the turrets, you're absolutely right, i'm sorry i examined that topic, but when i found out about it, it was already to late.

 

about the thing with bombs, why would they become less expensive? in our modern world, only very few countries have nuclear weapons, and these weapons are easier to build in our world  because of such things as uranium, and incredibly complex physics and chemistry. now, in dual universe, which has a fairly simple physique and almost no chemistry, a weapon of mass destruction  could be only achieved trough a lot of ressources or some kind of exploit. Again, we both can't be really sure what is possible and what not and we should wait for an reply from an admin.

Well they did the recent podcast of increasing the speeds, but it looks weird and so it sounded more of an aesthetic thing (aware the time posted it is for future readers). I would wait on the turret aspect  as they are open to it from what I heard. They wouldn't get less expensive unless there are certain factors that helps make automation in industry easier and that isn't just mass production, but also resource collection. Once this hurdle has been cleared we then move on to the next set of factors which is viability in the current meta and resource allocation justified. See my first counter point of Lethy's post.

On 11/4/2019 at 8:12 PM, JayleBreak said:

I think the computation overhead caused by user designed oddly shaped ships, and large number of potential objects (and other contributions to server lag -e.g. internet) makes anything involving collision detection in combat a losing proposition. And as mentioned in one of NQ videos, orbital strikes were rejected because it wouldn't be "fair" - meaning people shouldn't be subject to death without any warning that danger is near or was inescapable.

Well I heard that it was server hardware limitations as physics would eat up a lot of resources and I think missiles was lumped in there and this was before your post it was discussed. The orbital strike was amusing as being labeled unfair. Not the fact that a large capital ship can land nearby and use the arty platform to lob shells into their base behind a large screen of fighters and tanks. 

On 11/6/2019 at 12:03 AM, Madrummer said:

You can't have ramming or self-made weapons, otherwise anyone with a Large core, a respawn on a nearby ship, 6 or so large engines and a cubic kilometer of dirt or carbon could make massive and remarkably cheap kinetic region busters.

 

That's just no fun to think that you could blueprint and deploy big chunks of dirt in orbit and drop them at ridiculous speeds to wipe out huge developed cities.  It's an invite to grief and in a game of persistent objects that may have taken weeks or months to build it's just really gross to think of it as an option.

 

Now launching a missile barrage from orbit could be cool if you can lock targets from that range, especially because it takes time, effort, and material cost to enact such a campaign.

I feel like that there is a lot of assumptions that such weapons if allowed in the game would even be cheap to begin with if the dev's decided to put it in the game. I also think that the term city is being thrown around to loosely as I am still in the camp that if we see towns it would be impressive. I have yet to see the fundamental tools that would help with the creation of cities besides the rdms system and some automation in industry.

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Addressing the main topic

 

I like the idea of customized missiles. It's a very interesting idea to have depth in weapons customization and the implications, as have been discussed in other forum posts(linked bellow) are very fascinating.

link and link

On the topic of automated turrets, here is a forum topic that's been commented on recently discussing them.

link

 

And on the topic of ship ramming, there are other posts and topics that were created. This is a response from NQ explaining their reasoning in just one of them. I also comment on this in my response to @plmkoi.

here

 

@The Nameless very glad to see you on the forums! Hope this provides some history into the goings on of what has been discussed before.

 

Addressing plmkoi's point

17 hours ago, plmkoi said:

If we use that logic then people can build a death star they are definitely do it

btw, major groups have committed to do that because of course they have. This is a game. People will overall, go ahead and do whatever they feel like. And on that note

17 hours ago, plmkoi said:

I hope you aren't the head of a major organization

With your reference to Lethys, yes he is a major part of the organization, Band of Outlaws. Ya know, the pirate one. I assume you already knew this but just wanted to inform you.

 

 

Now that those two things are out of the way, let me address more in terms of factors that you are missing.

17 hours ago, plmkoi said:

They wouldn't get less expensive unless there are certain factors that helps make automation in industry easier and that isn't just mass production, but also resource collection. Once this hurdle has been cleared we then move on to the next set of factors which is viability in the current meta and resource allocation justified. See my first counter point of Lethy's post.

With your reference to ships, manufactured goods, resources, and so on not generally becoming less expensive, you are in some ways correct to a point.


At the start of the game, resources will be rather highly priced, eventually though dropping and stabilizing into their perceived value by the players. This value will only continue to lower though, at least for a considerable amount of time, as players advance their skills, develop more efficient systems in their infrastructure, and acquisition the system needed to survive. Once things have started to become, shall we say more developed and refined in the player space, then ultimately the resources will be put into other less immediately essential projects. Resources and manufactured goods are still less expensive than at the start but they are still not lowering dramatically.

 

Now this agrees with your point so far but why did I say that you were correct to a point?

 

It is due to the fact my example doesn't even cover us leaving our starting planet. You see, once interplanetary trade, travel, and transport become things, I can't even imagine predicting the markets. Barely at all. With the inherent reality that resources on a solar system scale can not be estimated at this point, the easiest assumption(and I grant you that this is an assumption) is that over a long period of time, baring the greatest of upheavals, the markets will become more saturated and the prices will fall. Of course they can't fall forever. They will stop at some point.

 

I imagine you could see how at some point in this constructed assumption that insane amounts small investments in the form of counters to attackers adds up. These ramming ships are counters to attacks and, if you wanted to, you could just pile on insane amounts of lead or heck even just raw stone. It's a small initial investment with one not doing much harm, but power scaling ultimately makes this a severe imbalance in the game whilst also making the meta crap.

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On 1/1/2020 at 6:59 PM, MasteredRed said:

Addressing plmkoi's point

btw, major groups have committed to do that because of course they have. This is a game. People will overall, go ahead and do whatever they feel like. And on that note

With your reference to Lethys, yes he is a major part of the organization, Band of Outlaws. Ya know, the pirate one. I assume you already knew this but just wanted to inform you.

 

 

 

So sounds like someone irrelevant just like like me, cool I guess. I just like poking fun at his posts, in my opinion, half of his posts don't really add anything to most threads and almost the rest it is clear he just types without thinking before hand. He does occasionally a sliver of the posts does have some substance. 

On 1/1/2020 at 6:59 PM, MasteredRed said:

Addressing plmkoi's point

Now that those two things are out of the way, let me address more in terms of factors that you are missing.

With your reference to ships, manufactured goods, resources, and so on not generally becoming less expensive, you are in some ways correct to a point.


At the start of the game, resources will be rather highly priced, eventually though dropping and stabilizing into their perceived value by the players. This value will only continue to lower though, at least for a considerable amount of time, as players advance their skills, develop more efficient systems in their infrastructure, and acquisition the system needed to survive. Once things have started to become, shall we say more developed and refined in the player space, then ultimately the resources will be put into other less immediately essential projects. Resources and manufactured goods are still less expensive than at the start but they are still not lowering dramatically.

 

Now this agrees with your point so far but why did I say that you were correct to a point?

 

It is due to the fact my example doesn't even cover us leaving our starting planet. You see, once interplanetary trade, travel, and transport become things, I can't even imagine predicting the markets. Barely at all. With the inherent reality that resources on a solar system scale can not be estimated at this point, the easiest assumption(and I grant you that this is an assumption) is that over a long period of time, baring the greatest of upheavals, the markets will become more saturated and the prices will fall. Of course they can't fall forever. They will stop at some point.

After chewing the cud on your post I would say that there may be some fatal flaws in the argument that needs to be addressed.

 

Yes, you are right that prices will fall (you see this in the Eve economic report consumer price index not dropping below 100 until after Revelations release), but I think that it is a major assumption that it will fall enough for this game that entities will put resources into vanity projects. Here are factors that I see limiting this and I will address them in order.

  1. Lack of automation in mining
  2. PvP being manual
  3. Significant costs of logistics 

Lack of automation in mining

The lack of automation when it comes to mining and the easiest example is Eve. Eve allows you to multi box and there are very strong incentives that had some people maintaining easily 8-10 subscriptions using a combination of plex/gtc's +  the credit card. The reward is that you can do industry pretty much by yourself, without another humans input other then buying your goods. For this game the only incentive I see on having a few different accounts is for espionage or specialization, of which the latter it is more efficient to use your social skills to overcome that problem.

 

The only way I would see this factor removed is if the developers decided to introduce mining drones or in game scripted a.i to assist human players. Where the human player can have the drones mine one area a certain X meters away while the individual is also mining. Or ships that allow you to lock on an asteroid and you hit the F1 key,  the result being ore added to your cargo hold. The purpose of such tools is to efficiently collect resources with the minimum amount of people that have the skills and enjoy the activity. Now you can say "our members has to have mining at X level", but this is a major risk.

 

Another factor these organizations in DU are going to have to maintain is motivation/morale. All these Eve epic betrayals that are sensationalized in the media are 7/10 times dissatisfied/disgruntled players. If they don't try to stick it to the organization they would just end up joining another that won't force them to mine or pay for their own pvp ships. There is a major reason why both small & large organizations have SRP welfare programs and that is people don't play/pay for a video game as a second job. So burning your players out in this game is easier then in Eve and we didn't even come to the difficulties of mining op's.

 

 

Pvp requiring more then a F1 monkey

Now we need to consider that the developers has said that it is going to be more efficient to have people man the turrets/modules themselves over just one pilot controlling the entire ships functions. Well with the above point on the costliness of resources being a factor, even if the developers decide to allow all turrets being controllable by one person minus slower tracking/etc, I am skeptical serious people are going to utilize the option. This also puts a major emphasis on player skills depending on how pvp turns out in its final form. The analogy I am thinking of is on the lines of the Battle of Trafalgar, where the crews coordination and experience is going to make a large impact and be a factor in pvp engagements. 

 

Because of the above, groups that are really cohesive is going to be the bane of large organizations compared to Eve. In Eve it is pretty easy to steam roll entities if you attack a large alliances strategic assets and the response is getting blobbed easily 2-3 times your number. A lot of these large organizations also get pretty much perfect information from the Esi that CCP provides, local that shows who is in the system (so perfect intel), and you can utilize a lot of third party services like Dotlan that shows what celestials are in the system. As for as I know, the studio hasn't came out with any tools that allows the above. So imperfect intel means that unless you have a spy in the opponents organization you are pretty much exponentially increasing the complexity of the fleet commander. As losses are probably going to hurt and it may even have certain entities go under if they have no reserves or something to fall back on. 

 

The there is also the traveling time factor which is pretty significant as you can probably drop a mobile depot in the middle of an enemy alliances territory and launch insurgent attacks against soft targets without them knowing. Which can possibly be circumvented if you build structures, but with the above point again that is diverting resources. You are also going to be limited when you get sent back to this titles version of high sec. Example when the newer iteration of an organization of BoB decided to reconquer a region they set up the staging point in Aridia (which is npc space), if you click that map you can see the routes start to multiply on the routes you can take to move war material to the staging point. Well to my knowledge there is only one safe planet and I don't see why an organization wouldn't hire out a "Varys"  to see if the defeated entity tries to regroup and intercept them when they try to relaunch. So what is this point? Well if you are defeated, it could mean pretty much that is it and so the most resilient organizations are going to have territory that they can fall back on. Competent leaders are going to not wade into the unknown and I am sure there are more experienced players in Eve then me that can tell you personal stories of "fire sales" as people panic.

 

Almost forgot, mining op's. This is already going to be a challenge as a defenseless mining op is going to be easy prey for raiders and this also includes the transportation of said material. I won't comment any further as I am unsure how the studio plans on handling resource depletion. I do see a large incentive to control large regions of space as a buffer to give the defending side more warning with the spamming of small outposts. 

 

Significant costs of logistics

There is an old saying, "Amateurs study tactics, armchair generals study strategy, and professionals study logistics". Well from the current info I see this isn't as simple as taking a jump freighter and jumping X amount of systems with a cargo full of supplies. Convoy's are going to be mandatory unless you want to experience the chaos of Viking raids and so organizations are going to decide if it is viable to ship everything in one large loot pinata? Or multiple small loot pinata's? This is assuming the developers don't put anything that makes traveling trivial. In Eve logistics isn't much of a hurdle and so invasions in my view tend to be trivial to some degree. It only takes a small number of people over a certain amount of time and I cede this to someone that has more experience as I am just getting into my first freighter myself. I just know from experience my corp leader was able to transport all kinds of stuff that was requested during the week in the Vale region. 

 

As of right now it seems like something simple as you having one large structure and house all your stuff there, similar to putting all your eggs in one basket. Well if you are going to be a large entity it is going to be beneficial to take large swaths of land to but hardened underground bunkers to store supplies. This is one example of what organizations are going to do to mitigate risk, something they call a continuity plan. There is more, but I wasn't expecting a well thought out response as yours and have to come in an hour or two earlier and I apologize. 

 

 

 

 

As for the rest of your point I only expect to see one market and that is the trading hub at the moon. To expect markets in organization territory is going to be surprising, only because it would either cater to the organization, as you have to get permission to pick up said goods or an organization that operates a NRDS policy. The latter being a very costly endeavor and already difficult to do in Eve if you are holding valuable territory.

 

As for the ramming of ships, well if the side getting rammed has poor quality ships then of course they would lose. But lets put in the scenario that it is faction quality ships T2 armor and the ramming ships being used is cheap T1. Well the ramming of ships can be problematic if the organization has 15k people, all in one time zone, engaging in that particular battle, and the opposing side didn't bother to intel gather. Because if you figure out where they are supplying from you can knock that out. Remember there is no local, there is distance, and there is a cost of minerals + fuel.

 

Kamikaze attacks was ineffective in one war because of actual costs, so unless this game decides to go down the route of trivializing the costs, I still fail to see how this is more efficient. I think it is a little smarter to calculate the max amount of damage each turret can do, arm the ships with just enough fuel to orbit said ship, just enough ammo they can fire before getting destroyed, and scavenge whatever ammo they can off their dead buddies if they are still alive. Anyone that tries to run will be shot by our side for desertion (hope you get this reference).  

 

Now maybe I am over thinking this, but I enjoy analyzing things. There are a lot of factors and I try to assume as little as possible, by using other similar examples. A lot of people are assuming that empire building is going to be easy, I see it as an almost impossible endeavor depending on the studios planned expansion releases. I will admit that the only scenario that it is a possibility that the organization can build any vanity project is if people decide to use diplomacy and blue most of conquerable space like they do in Eve. I look forward to your post and I will try to be more detailed as it is extremely late for me. 

 

 

 

 

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So, I am thoroughly impressed by your response. Apologies for the delay in my reply for I did not decide to look at the forums over the weekend. Now I'd like to dive into a couple counters and corrections. Overall though, you have somewhat convinced me of the economics. Though I still feel that for the meta I hope to see in combat, I prefer for ramming not to be a factor. I could see now that if someone does has a different preference, it makes sense why they could view ramming as being possible and a good thing.

 

On 1/3/2020 at 1:22 PM, plmkoi said:
  • Lack of automation in mining
  • PvP being manual
  • Significant costs of logistics 

To start out, these are good points. The most significant one that I have not considered thoroughly in a while would have to be the lack of automation in mining.

 

On 1/3/2020 at 1:22 PM, plmkoi said:

The purpose of such tools is to efficiently collect resources with the minimum amount of people that have the skills and enjoy the activity. Now you can say "our members has to have mining at X level", but this is a major risk.

This point stood out to me due to experience I've had in mining and helping keep mining going. It is definitely very difficult to enjoy the activity for long. The only thing that seems to be somewhat effective at keeping resource stocks up is having everyone mine a little bit to distribute the load. However, you are correct that it does pose a risk and the only way to sustain it is to have people who are extremely resilient against prolonged periods of boredom and who do kinda treat DU like a second job. It's not... truly workable from my viewpoint to have great swaths of resources always coming in from one organization without extreme dedication.

 

This point, I concede to you fairly easily because you reminded me of experiences that completely confirm this.

On 1/3/2020 at 1:22 PM, plmkoi said:

This is already going to be a challenge as a defenseless mining op is going to be easy prey for raiders and this also includes the transportation of said material. I won't comment any further as I am unsure how the studio plans on handling resource depletion. I do see a large incentive to control large regions of space as a buffer to give the defending side more warning with the spamming of small outposts. 

This I believe to be a good point but it's largely brief. I assume you knew that this point could be expanded on, so I'd like to go ahead and expand on it.

 

You are correct in some capacity that mining ops are easy prey. As well, you are correct that some organizations will own large regions of space to serve as a buffer. However, where this is applicable the most is in rare mining resources. For instance, it makes a lot more sense to build up a buffer for gold, titanium, and scandium than it would for aluminum or iron. Inversely, it appears that for miners that are targeting common resources, it makes sense to just get a small cargo barge, go out and setup to mine, finish and then return with the ore. If you wanted to setup large machines to process the ore on site and maybe setup scanners, it would have to scale so that you could mine more ore. Then as well, the risk would increase. So the

point here ties in with the following one.

On 1/3/2020 at 1:22 PM, plmkoi said:

so organizations are going to decide if it is viable to ship everything in one large loot pinata? Or multiple small loot pinata's?

In order to mitigate risk, probably small loot pinatas. :) I seriously have a hard time imagining large transports that aren't in the form of battleships and carriers. It makes only a small bit of sense in terms of fuel economics to transport large amounts of resources. While that fuel is a factor, so is the fact that the target of a large load and accompanying escorts with the fuel that goes with them probably makes the small option worth it. Indeed, smaller is better in this case from what I can tell.

 

Granted, I've only done logistics for a little while now. Admittedly, it's a hobby interest at this point but I cede that the reality may even be more complicated than this.

 

 

On 1/3/2020 at 1:22 PM, plmkoi said:

As for the rest of your point I only expect to see one market and that is the trading hub at the moon. To expect markets in organization territory is going to be surprising, only because it would either cater to the organization, as you have to get permission to pick up said goods or an organization that operates a NRDS policy. The latter being a very costly endeavor and already difficult to do in Eve if you are holding valuable territory.

This really is the one thing that I can make a correction on. While there are likely to be markets in sanctuary zones(though I forget how these zones work in entirety), it doesn't make sense from two perspectives that organizations would give up on their own markets. Here are the two from the perspective of an organization which I have thought about heavily.

 

1. Markets owned in organization sovereign land of course are controlled by them completely; competitive advantages by owning markets are super nice.

While not needing to explain this too much, we can imagine that the larger organizations would prefer to have the taxes from markets in their territory go into their coffers to some extent. While they would be incentivized to make the territory around their markets safer and more friendly to those who travel there, this very well can be worth the effort because it does push growth and gives power to the organization.

 

2. Markets owned by allied organizations can give discounts, deals, and reduced fees to their other allies.

This is a major incentive for organizations to support allied markets. Refer back to point one about why the allies would like this.

 

Overall, the push for smaller markets outside of the massive market will be present. Whether or not it succeeds to what extent is luck of the dice honestly. Organizations have reason to make it easy possible for their markets to be accessed. Once again, a good 'ol game of chaotic capitalism will have to be played here.

 

______

 

As for the rest of your point following that, I believe this goes back to meta. I personally wouldn't prefer this meta of ramming but your points are valid. Honestly I probably wouldn't mind the ramming either because your points of economic cost from ramming is, from my knowledge, proven correct. Though, at this late of stage, I couldn't see NQ going back on their word or even the implementation of it being very easy. It has been so very much worth my time thinking about it at least.

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On 1/6/2020 at 1:00 PM, MasteredRed said:

So, I am thoroughly impressed by your response. Apologies for the delay in my reply for I did not decide to look at the forums over the weekend. Now I'd like to dive into a couple counters and corrections. Overall though, you have somewhat convinced me of the economics. Though I still feel that for the meta I hope to see in combat, I prefer for ramming not to be a factor. I could see now that if someone does has a different preference, it makes sense why they could view ramming as being possible and a good thing.

 

Well in my view, I think ramming isn't something to fret about over the studio deciding that by some e-honor or chivalry they are going to stick to a strict schedule and not give this title more time. This game is a bit more complex then Eve and they haven't put out a lot of info that seems relevant to the fundamental building blocks that can sustain anything bigger then a small organization. With the current info in industry I suspect that it is just going to be similar to Rust with small clans running around or just massive blobs that will put treaties in place to not attack each other. The latter killing the hope that you can get free marketing of large events like CCP has.

 

On 1/6/2020 at 1:00 PM, MasteredRed said:

To start out, these are good points. The most significant one that I have not considered thoroughly in a while would have to be the lack of automation in mining.

 

This point stood out to me due to experience I've had in mining and helping keep mining going. It is definitely very difficult to enjoy the activity for long. The only thing that seems to be somewhat effective at keeping resource stocks up is having everyone mine a little bit to distribute the load. However, you are correct that it does pose a risk and the only way to sustain it is to have people who are extremely resilient against prolonged periods of boredom and who do kinda treat DU like a second job. It's not... truly workable from my viewpoint to have great swaths of resources always coming in from one organization without extreme dedication.

 

This point, I concede to you fairly easily because you reminded me of experiences that completely confirm this.

This I believe to be a good point but it's largely brief. I assume you knew that this point could be expanded on, so I'd like to go ahead and expand on it.

Well if you ever get a chance to play Eve (shameless plug check my profile) try out the industry side of things. You will see that mining "was"/is easy. Once you have done it, you can easily see how one can just start 10 accounts and mine enough to get a fleet of 30  battleships. Everything in Eve is automated when it comes to industry, but this studio is strict on the manual mining (which is questionable imo). In "Eve" industry you only need one person to have the blue print, resources, and the station to manufacture stuff on. The equation can change a little depending on the goods where it is simple (T1 modules & ships) to challenging (combat boosters, T2, T3, Rigs, and now multi plasmids). If an alliance needs miners for lets say  the size of 1k-2k people, 50 people even if that needs to be care bears, the rest being the foot soldiers. In Eve you don't really need even that as you can go through contractors that can sell you stuff on agreed on price from high sec. 

 

While I don't mind mining, I understand that it  isn't everyone's cup of tea and I am experiencing this disgust with trading in Eve. I don't find it fun .01 isking people to death as it is a grind due to my time zone limitations, the need to ensure that my orders will beat theirs by at least 30 min after they changed it is tiring. The only rare times the "market pvp" is a little rewarding is when the industrialists say "fuck it" and cash out of the market or just stop updating their orders for the remainder of the 90 days. "Traders" on the other hand will do it regularly and will not be deterred and will chug along.

 

They would have to in my opinion create tools that allowed it to be easier for people to mine resources at an "industrial scale" which I believe is the term I should have emphasized. It seems to me that the mining aspect for DU is akin to a cottage industry.

 

"This point, I concede to you fairly easily because you reminded me of experiences that completely confirm this." 

I prefer not "concede" but more of "valid point" or some other term. I don't like forum pvp and it does sound from my limited perception to be similar. I look at forums as place of discussion to refine the understanding of view points and ideas. I look at it as a place where people can throw out a point and it can be analyzed, like I go to a major city and decide ass less chaps is the way to go and people can tell me why this is bad idea vs saying it is great idea and I get yelled at for right to stay silent with my face in the dirty street. So I would learn more and also get more experience as everyone has something valuable to say, just maybe not all the time. As someone told me "sometimes one can't smell their own brand and that is why you ask other people". It was a ref to body odor, but I believe it applies to ideas as well. 

 

On 1/6/2020 at 1:00 PM, MasteredRed said:

You are correct in some capacity that mining ops are easy prey. As well, you are correct that some organizations will own large regions of space to serve as a buffer. However, where this is applicable the most is in rare mining resources. For instance, it makes a lot more sense to build up a buffer for gold, titanium, and scandium than it would for aluminum or iron. Inversely, it appears that for miners that are targeting common resources, it makes sense to just get a small cargo barge, go out and setup to mine, finish and then return with the ore. If you wanted to setup large machines to process the ore on site and maybe setup scanners, it would have to scale so that you could mine more ore. Then as well, the risk would increase. So the

point here ties in with the following one.

In order to mitigate risk, probably small loot pinatas. :) I seriously have a hard time imagining large transports that aren't in the form of battleships and carriers. It makes only a small bit of sense in terms of fuel economics to transport large amounts of resources. While that fuel is a factor, so is the fact that the target of a large load and accompanying escorts with the fuel that goes with them probably makes the small option worth it. Indeed, smaller is better in this case from what I can tell.

 

Granted, I've only done logistics for a little while now. Admittedly, it's a hobby interest at this point but I cede that the reality may even be more complicated than this.

 

I do agree that it would make sense for miners trying to get small resources they could get a small mining barge, but doesn't this sound more akin to a cottage industry? I can't say I know the resource costs of ships and the repairs for it in pvp for DU, but ask yourself if this is sustainable for a large organization. Now hopefully DU has "nicer" people that come into the game, but if there is "Eve" like players, instead then you have Code that targets miners in high security space. As for player controlled space, you see this on a daily basis with Rorqual capital industrial ships, where people lose a few every day. To put this into perspective, the avg price is what 5 billion isk? Well if you converted that it with plex, you get roughly $40.00 ships people lose everyday to do industrial level mining to feed those forges. These losses are sustainable only because of the industrial level mining. Here are other examples people post online of  killing mining fleets: Bomber Bar, GS locust fleet, and finally GS again (prob NSFW). This is just a handful and the "locust fleet" is what Goons call their Rorqual mining fleets, they strip all resources in a system, not sure how long as I am not affiliated with any of the null blocks. That locust fleet dread bomb costed them probably $143k in losses if that even mattered. Now knowing that alliances lose these expensive ships will hopefully put into perspective the cost of large organizations just in term of resources if you just surf the losses from alliances.

 

As for battleships & carriers, are you saying that it is economically feasible to make a hybrid industrial combat ship over one that specializes in one or the other? Some factors one has to consider if location on the map, players we have, type of organizations, what we have to get from the main markets, and what is the attrition rate between convoy ops? I am not on DU and so I am unable to give a better answer then this as I don't know the costs of ships and how skill trees will take place, let alone the map. Just remember that if I wanted to attack an organizations "center of gravity" the biggest marks are the resource generation and logistics as this game is fundamentally a attrition based game. 

 

I only know little of the Eve side of logistics as I always try to learn from other people. The only thing I know for sure, is that it burns a lot of people out traveling back and fourth with goods. The activity can take up hours of your time to get to alliance territory and so if you don't enjoy traveling in a ship it can be boring. Larger the organization the more supply runs a person is going to have to make and if the ships are not industrial focused, it can take even more possibly. I will find out later this year once I can fly a freighter around and hauling goods myself. 

 

On 1/6/2020 at 1:00 PM, MasteredRed said:

This really is the one thing that I can make a correction on. While there are likely to be markets in sanctuary zones(though I forget how these zones work in entirety), it doesn't make sense from two perspectives that organizations would give up on their own markets. Here are the two from the perspective of an organization which I have thought about heavily.

 

1. Markets owned in organization sovereign land of course are controlled by them completely; competitive advantages by owning markets are super nice.

While not needing to explain this too much, we can imagine that the larger organizations would prefer to have the taxes from markets in their territory go into their coffers to some extent. While they would be incentivized to make the territory around their markets safer and more friendly to those who travel there, this very well can be worth the effort because it does push growth and gives power to the organization.

 

2. Markets owned by allied organizations can give discounts, deals, and reduced fees to their other allies.

This is a major incentive for organizations to support allied markets. Refer back to point one about why the allies would like this.

 

Overall, the push for smaller markets outside of the massive market will be present. Whether or not it succeeds to what extent is luck of the dice honestly. Organizations have reason to make it easy possible for their markets to be accessed. Once again, a good 'ol game of chaotic capitalism will have to be played here.

1) You are correct, alliances aren't going to give up on markets and you can see that in the Delve and Drone region markets in Eve. I don't because I am not allowed access to said region and would be killed on site as I am not affiliated with either organizations. So I can either be a spy or someone that can awox their fleets. The difference is that the alliances themselves usually don't stock the market and relies on enterprising individuals that transports the goods from secured space and sell it for the max margin allowed by alliance policies. People in the alliance benefits from easier access to goods, make passive income for transporting said goods, and the entity from taxes. 

 

Like I said in another thread, people has this weird idea that it is easy to implement a NRDS policy. The entities that are foolish enough to adopt it are also going to be the ones that suffer the dread bombing of the locust fleet video. That day 1 old character just sitting  there, is the person just afking? Or is it basically a security cam of what is going on in the area? I see it more rational to just be wary of insider threats over the additional baggage of dealing with randoms that can feed intel to your enemies. I can assure you that the alliances makes their money not from the markets in null, but the markets in empire. 

 

2) Yea they could, but the bigger reason is more likely because of risk aversion. 

 

The only thing I can say for certain in regards to markets is that it is hard to build up one. Molden Heath, Bleak lands, Black Rise, Placid, Great Wildlands, and etc takes a lot of work and that is hauling said items in bulk and all the pieces. All pieces being, if I sell amarr ships I need to not only sell the gun modules that go for said ship, but also propulsion, armor, capacitor modules and this also includes the ammo. Or why would a person bother buying said ship in that region to begin with? These regions are dangerous and so I do it solo, but lets say an organization is what I am under. Are people willing to escort me 8 times a week +25 jumps, every week for free? If I were to get an escort it would have to be 5-10 at least as anything less is pointless as people in those region go in groups at the bare minimum of 3 and usually with combat battle cruisers if not T2/faction ships.

 

Yes, I could pay them, but in most cases, profit margins are <80%. I could just run npc missions and make more money for the effort as I have to compete with other traders. These markets are under npc control aka empire high/low sec or null in some cases not under player control. Exception being of course the Great Wildlands as you still have to deal with the power brokers in that region of npc space. I am sure people played escort missions in mmo's, I wonder how fun it would be if people had to ferry ships back and forth those long distances that 50% of the time nothing happens. How likely is a player going to want to stick with the organization much less the game if your limited 3-5 hours 75% of that was spent watching a freighter move from point a to b. 

 

I prefer the distances as yes it may suck, but it caps the entities in my opinion to some degree. CCP has removed a lot of the caps that prevented large power blocs from running rampant with industry and logistics. Which is why there is still a lot of people whining on reddit and sometimes the forums.

 

On 1/6/2020 at 1:00 PM, MasteredRed said:

As for the rest of your point following that, I believe this goes back to meta. I personally wouldn't prefer this meta of ramming but your points are valid. Honestly I probably wouldn't mind the ramming either because your points of economic cost from ramming is, from my knowledge, proven correct. Though, at this late of stage, I couldn't see NQ going back on their word or even the implementation of it being very easy. It has been so very much worth my time thinking about it at least.

 Yes, meta will play a key role, but I think this discussion has ballooned past ramming to the crux of what I see as major problems that the studio has to somehow address. I think my piece in nothing about ramming at this point, but how is DU going to be a "civilization building mmo" they are advertising themselves to be? As a large organization these are some enormous hurdles just like it is for the smaller ones. I don't see how one is going to open a market for everyone when a small entity of 50 people can take advantage of this weakness and possibly make a devastating attack. In eve it is irrelevant short an insider threat that removes sov or more strategic assets. But here in DU it seems things that are considered tactical assets in Eve with the expectations it will  be lost is at the strategic level in DU. 

 

Everyone here is talking about stuff you hear on Eve of large markets, capital ship battles, large organizations that you hear about in Eve. Well how does this game give the fundamental features to achieve that before the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th expansion? I am skeptical it will be in the base game before final launch, which is next year?

  • You have a cottage mining industry trying to feed a massive production industry. So you can achieve producing a lot of ships if you can overcome the major bottle neck of resource collection. 
  • Large logistical hurdles because you are not only trying to supply your organization, but also a free market. Have fun telling players that they are pulling security or hauling stuff in a video game that might feel akin to work with no pay. 

Like I said before in other threads. A lot of the stuff DU is trying to do, Eve has already done and each expansion they made a lot of mistakes and some good choices. The only difference between the features DU is advertising short of voxels/ship design etc you can already do it in Eve to some degree. 

 

 

 

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