Blackspace!

[Shannow]

I want my 1500 clicks back. Just saying

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Big ships need to be slower. This thread is now for people to whinge propose suggestions for thrust.

 

[Kayerts]

Whinge: Do big ships really need to be that much slower? Blinging out our ships with absurd numbers of hulls is currently the only thing for us stupidly rich people to spend our money on. So while I agree giving the little guys a comparative boost is a good thing, penalizing size beyond a certain point doesn't make a ton of sense to me; at least, not until there are other things to do in the game. Obviously I'm biased here, but this seems like a low priority. (Especially since rampaging space beasts or port raiding would be really really cool.)

Propose: Formula-wise, devise a function establishing an upper bound on thrust based on size class; make it start high and asymptotically approach some reasonable number as size approaches infinity. Thrust = min(rawThrust/size, upperBound(size)).

 

[villain of the story]

If you're gonna nerf the speed, you better give us the means to turn ships into stations where other players can dock and have the benefit of the space station moving (even if at a snail-rate of galactic proportions) with economical competition with other player-stations.

 

[Muty]

*Disregard that, I was shot.

 

[TripJack]

When you broadcast 50 messages, you unlock Advanced Communications Array

is this true or is this an elaborate ploy to make me waste my PRECIOUS CLICKS

 

[SoupNazi]

Someone attacked me and I have no idea who

 

[Baron]

WALL OF GAME DESIGN TEXT

Maximum ship effectiveness
Need a steeper J curve on everything so that costs escalate wildly on upgrades but performance doesn't significantly improve. Ship size should still improve (useless e-peen stat) so you have the forum's aging space leviathons (kingcomrade) set upon by leaner newbies.

Would be good to have an effective maximum (equivalent to approximately 6 months regular posting / play) where a Ship doesn't really get any more powerful regardless of the money pumped into it, allowing a relative newcomer to put the fear into them when attacked. I mean, gold plating your lamboughini doesn't make it that much faster than my Ford, particularly after I surprised ambushed you and shunted you through a shopfront. Don't let hardcore players get too far ahead, is my point. A competitive universe is a healthy universe. Or, make upgrades a parabolic arc where the upgrades begin to slightly decline in performance with size (would work with things like cargo, still bigger, but thins out your armour, or makes you a bloated pig of a ship). It's still cool to cruise the galaxy in a Death Star, even if it's painfully slow.

Also like the idea of players (within the constraints of the 'maximum ship effectiveness' model) being able to pursue different strategies, aka Autoduel. 'The Kali' goddess of death; lithe, sexy and brimming with weapons. Or the Space Turtle trader, as I have chosen.')


Movement
Instead of Move, 'Move, Move' what about a system where your had four Action Rounds for every map sector you move through. Space, man, it's big. And moving through it should be slow, and boring, punctuated with the occasional seconds of plasma death and terror. You can move to a new sector once per minute, making runs through space a ten minute nervous activity. After moving you have three other click turns to make within that minute (before potentially exiting the sector), and you can either--

- Scan current sector, for cloaked ships, look for salvage, scan mineral composition of space rock for collection if you've purchased a tractor beam or cargo scoop (and have the cargo room). Or discover an Unknown Object (an Alien artifact, or Jettisoned Salvage That May Or May Not Contain A Frozen Space Monster That Decimates Your Crew, or a Beacon Of Distress that leads to a crippled vessel which promises reward for towing, or you can enslave them to trade* (ethical choice) or it's an ambush, shields up.
- Scan adjacent sectors. Provides a weak scan of all 8 surrounding areas, will just reveal a readout of the sector and if an active (and uncloaked) vessel is present. The better scanner upgrades would give number of vessels, active or deactive (destroyed hulks), and the best upgrades would give ship names.
- Cloak. With Cloak activated you attempt to remain undetected as you pass through the sector, and do not appear on the map unless someone has successfully scanned. (The Cloak option obviously goes down between sectors, explained by periodically cooling the energy thingy in the drive core whatsit.)
- Shields, activate. Shields are down by default due to energy requirements. Allows a cloaked vessel to get off an attack on an Unshielded opponent (aka backstab). Also, if a cunningly Cloaked ship has waited in the sector like a spider they could launch an immediate attack on an entering vessel.
- Deactive, power down engines. Ship won't be revealed unless a vehicle is actively scanning (and even then the ship's stats will mirror a destroyed hulk awaiting looting -- Greed, you see, is a necessary ingredient in laughs). Can perhaps quietly make repairs, monitor Scanners, or lie in wait of prey. Can't Attack (until after Activated) or Move whilst Deactivated.
- Salvage. Pick from the bones of destroyed Player's ships. Like trading goods, and asteroids, server allows Players to gather a value of goods (Salvage) from the last 10 destroyed hulks on the map. Meaning everyone can log in and feed on a demised Player, just like The Great Nomask Incident of 3847. Be also good if the Salvage amount was slightly tied to the value of the destroyed ship, making profitable hulks a great ambush spot.
- Mine place a temporary mind field (detonates from debris after an hour). The Player placing the minefield presumably avoids it, but the first person to move through the sector gets blasted. Nuclear or EMP mines, a nice initial attack to shut down computer systems or blow holes through decks, potentially oblierating small craft allowing for vacuuming up the salvage. Codex Space, man, it's cold and a little bit uncaring.
-Repair, fix a scrambled component (ie. disabled engine, shields, scanner).
- Tractor Beam - Possible overlap with Salvage. Meh, work out later. Should have a commercial use and a combat use, commerical use being to collect anything of value. Military use of Tractor Beam is to attempt to hold a fleeing vessel in place for more laserin'. [Beam Strength + Ship's Power stat] vs [Fleeing Ship Speed + Fleeing Ship Power] maybe?
- Ram Enemy Ship, a somewhat desperate move that makes a single attack on the enemy of your combined Attack and Defence rating of your vessel. And the same with them against you. Meaning massive space hulks can have fun battering small ships against their impressive shields for neglible damage. Windscreen wipers are available on The Edge for 1,455 credits. Ram Enemy Ship should perhaps require to be selected twice, ie. the first selection has you charge towards them and the 2nd time selected you will collide. This gives the target a chance to withdraw or destroy them before they get too close to destroy them both. (If using the Intended Actions system below where you choose Actions 2 turns in advance, then you will get that in-game horror moment of "NOOOOooooo-" unless you were monitoring enemy comms and can order a quick Retreat.)
- Board ship. Soldiers are just like any tradable resource, bought or sold (ie. hired/fired). You keep them in the cargo and they occupy space (yes, it's the Codex, you may jettison them if Ore prices suddenly fall and you see a profit.) If you advance close enough you may select Board. It then becomes a quick statistical number crunch to see who's soldiers overcome the other. Winning I suppose means stripping it of an immediate 25% salvage, and then activate self destruct. It becomes a space hulk. (No collecting a train of space ships... due to game balance.)

Proximity
Space battle could be a ballet if you use Movement as a tactic. Commands of 'Approach' or 'Withdraw' would be used in battle to affect ship's weapons. There are 4 stages of proximity.
3 - Beyond Firing Range (safely can pass each other unless one approaches).
2 - Big Guns Range (plasma torpedos, asteroid chuckers, things that cause splash damage and big inaudible booms.)
1 - Dangerously Close (Big guns cannot be used, must pepper with a small weapons. This allows additional strategy of creating long range gun ships, or up close brawlers. Also, less chance for either to dodge up close, meaning these craft are ugly metal plated bruisers. This also adds more interesting weapons for sale: moderate but versatile weapons you can fire from either range, or specialist weapons that are more effective but restricted to the appropriate proximity.) From Proximity 1 you may give the Order to Ram Enemy Ship or Board!
0 - Ships have either collided or have been boarded.

Stage 2 should be the default distance encountering players start at (yes, despite the logic flaws). Players begin in a nervous wait to see what the encountered ship will do. Can Attack, Cloak, Shields, Withdraw, Comms, etc. Makes for better gameplay, I mean fuck it, maybe sectors are big and they both come out of warp near each other, who cares. To flee you need to do enough Movement/Retreat sub-turns. If the enemy wants to fight they would have to use a strategy to keep you there, ie. Scramble computer, Tractor beam, hope that an Attack puts the engine offline (can be ordered to be Repaired), or be considerably faster than you so that they move 2 spaces.

The benefits for Cloaked ships for this system should be obvious. It might also be better to have an additional range with weapons overlapping. ie. close weapons fire at 1 & 2 ranges, and big guns fire at 2 & 3 range. 5 is safe distance.


Weather!
In space random weather plays a factor. This could be gas, gravity effects, or ion storm things. Basically have 10% chance of unusual conditions in the sector. eg,
- Ion storm : Cloaking halved / Cloaking doubled / Shields halved / Shields Doubled / No Comms
- Volatile gas - Big Guns double damage / Half damage (inert gas)
- Gravity well - Movement slowed / Movement double (high risk of collision)
etc. It's good fun to force people to change their set strategies.


Specialisation
As with the J model / maximum effectiveness / Audoduel theory... you can't have everything, you have to specialise. Meaning to get the best Cloaking device, or Scanner, you have to forego armour, or weapons, or cargo bays, etc. Fallout Stats in character creation is a good model. Or Autoduel. I like picking charisma and intelligence, but then I'm left with a weak pussy who can't carry gear or punch mutant's heads off. It's a difficult choice but makes for fun replayability.

Intended Actions!
Would work better if system had 8 - 10 turns in a 2 minute sector Movement. You must select 2 actions in advance of them being carried out (treat as Captain's orders). This allows for...
- Things going hilariously wrong!
- COMM CHANNEL INTERCEPTIONS (from a Scan) where you know the incoming enemy order and can counter it with an emergency change of your own order (not available except after a Scan). ie. If you successfully Scan a ship during combat you will know your opponent's selected Orders. You can then have the emergency ability to change your own submitted Orders. eg. Retreat in response to a Ram, or Tractor Beam in response to a Retreat, or move close to damage BOTH ships with an enemy's planned Big Gun attack effectively using his attack against him whilst you pepper him with close range weapons on top of that.
- Scramble enemy orders, which if successful allows 50% chance of enemy taking no order that sub-turn as the computer is fried. And 50% of a completely random order (Retreat, Cloak or Ram... whatever. Chaos is fun).
- And best of all, the 2 Order Intended Action system provides the hilarity of foreknowledge, knowing you'd desperately ordered Ram Enemy Ship only to see your last salvo destroy it and you plunge needlessly into an explosion and die. (Still take damage as Player is colliding with the burning salvage hulk that will remain on the map.)

- Idea! A sliding scale for Orders / Intended Actions
Small craft can react quicker, less crew and can pick their Orders every round, making them very responsive and hard to predict. Some players may choose to stay as a high decked out super expensive small craft. Larger craft must pick 2 turns ahead, Massive craft 3, etc. Even though ships will congregate just under these levels eventually the lure of a bigger ship will draw them to cross the line. But its a good penalty for Ship growth, as you become an easily predictable (with Scanning) leviathon. Still, no great advantage to the smaller craft knowing the future when a Death Star has 8 orders lined up and all say 'OPEN FIRE!'

I'm Out Of Here - Craven strategy
If you make (X) number of Movement sub-turn orders (ie. approximately half of your total subturns) you could leave the sector. For example, once you arrive in a sector, you are at the edge. You can immediately Scan for mine fields or cloaked ships. Or, if you manage to get X movement turns off then you escape the Sector (no more turns on the server that minute). Thus, you have a strategic choice of a slow cautious crawl through a sector scaning shielding and cloaking, or barrel through tripping over mines, stumbling into ambushs, and missing financial opprtunities.

*Pirates!
Anyone who has attacked another Player, opens up a few Contraband goods on the market as morally dubious people approach them. Higher profit margins but come with a % chance of goods entirely confiscated as soon as they Dock - meaning they would tend to loiter in space more, using Cloaking devices to effectively log off safely in space instead of a planet. Trading contraband, attacking (especially killing) other Players should go towards an increasingly lucrative Bounty. A pirate's life should be rewarding, but ultimately a short one.

You need ways to get people to explore the map. Looking for profitable Artifacts (which could provide money or free ship upgrades such as rare/better ship components) is one way. Hunting pirates is another. Searching for weak NPCs opponents is also good. Players should be like the capital ships of important alien races, but there must always be the space equivalent of the kobold to kick around. Always include a kobold race, it's fun. But spawn them the occasional capital ship in payback of kicking them around. An 'Oh shit!' moment, and something it is funny to have chase you into the path of another hapless Player.

 

[Zed]

How do I do something in this game?
I can dock at places and buy stuff.
How do I get missions/stuff to sell or whatever?

 

[TripJack]

at the moment all you can do is buy/sell commodities, blow up other ships or get blown up by other ships, spend all your cash on making your ship bigger, and spam random crap in the comm channels

oh yeah and you can mine apparently but i havent tried that it sounds like a deathwish

*edit*
also

is this true or is this an elaborate ploy to make me waste my PRECIOUS CLICKS

it seems to be the latter haha

 

[Wild Slop]

Baron, some great ideas.

I see little problem with these big ships confronting near immobility at the moment.
Barring the idea of turning ships into stations (at which point ? begin again and take % of the stations profit?) maybe a total size limit is in order. Honestly how large can these get before they start having their own orbit?

Now as with my previous suggestion to helping those killing bastards get people to hold still I have little clue on how practical or whatever implementing the next idea is:

Boosters: Could refill at shipyard and/or/if not, stock with compatible resources via booster fuel tank (its own type if cargo hold for fuel type).

Then click a boost button out in space to spend tank and gain a onetime trust amount. Any gained click however great or little would go away after docking if not utilized.

 

[SoupNazi]

what is mining

 

[villain of the story]

What is the point of repairing shields? It's a fucking energy field, it should regenerate over time, not repaired. It costs 1.5B to repair what could be sold/discarded and bought again for a fraction of that amount if you didn't have to repair it first. What a fucking joke.

Also, I just lost $5B to thin air!

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

I'm severely disappointed with the ability to destroy and plunder those huge ass slow zero defense space ships. All I ever wanted was to be a space pirate plundering some space ships for some space goods. Then dock at some space port and use the space credits from selling said stolen space goods on some space hookers and spice rum.
Well I guess I'm going to have to make my own space game with black jack and hookers.

 

[villain of the story]

As ships get bigger and packing more energy (ie. cores), they should be spotted from increasingly longer distances and shown on the minimap with a different colour. Eg. Size 500, spot from 1 cell away, 2 cells at 1000 or maybe more etc. The same with energy (Captain! We read an energy signature 2 clicks away!) and maybe the weapons systems too. If someone's packing enough plasma/whatever to take anyone half his size in one shot, that should be seen at least from one cell away.

There could be new ship components as measures to lower detectability range, perhaps large and power hungry enough to balance it out, eg. less thrust per hour.

Also, did you take the stats page down? I can't see stats in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera and IE9.

 

[Kayerts]

Barring the idea of turning ships into stations (at which point ? begin again and take % of the stations profit?) maybe a total size limit is in order. Honestly how large can these get before they start having their own orbit?

I've got four of those power plants with the "power of a star inside your ship" description. I'm pretty sure planets should be drawn along by my gravitational pull when I undock. THIS GAME IS ILLOGICAL.

Regarding the booster suggestion, that seems to be overpowered for the big fat traders, since as your ship's cargo capacity grows, the amount of money you can make per click increases. Consequently, given a sufficiently fat trader, the value of a booster will outweigh any price.

@DarkUnderlord: Like Villain, I also had some money mysteriously disappear. I went from ~$110B to $2B. This happened at some point after I made repairs. Also, remember how you dropped from $4B to $2B after I attacked you, for no apparent reason? I'm going to guess that the repair functionality is using a 32-bit int in some local variable, probably the one it uses to calculate how much money you have leftover after repairs.

Edit: Actually, like you and apparently like Villain, I had been attacked when this happened, too. I've attacked other people and made repairs while having similar funds (~$100B), but never encountered the bug. So it seems to be a defender-only thing, maybe?

 

[villain of the story]

Yes, I was also attacked when that happened to me. My shield held off the attack but somehow, I lost $5B AND $500M worth of cargo.

 

[Wild Slop]

it was a tongue in cheek remark about how ridiculously large ships not realism.

I know the booster was a flawed weak suggestion. I was also kinda hoping maybe someone might pick up the ball and make it ... not as weak.

what is mining

In the lower right map is a new station (Melcar Mining) where mining drills can be purchased. The more drills the the wider range of resources mined from asteroids. With gains being minimal and mining costing precious precious clicks my initial impression is its not all too attractive, maybe groundwork for later game mechanics.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Damnit, neglected to fix (int) casting credits in the combat system. Is now corrected. Given the billions everyone has and that no-one has negative credits, I'll let you re-earn your wads of dough the hard way.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

What a dark blunder, lord.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Let's talk combat.

1 ship, size 3,331 meets a much smaller (by comparison) size 70 ship. What's the chance of one hitting the other? The size 3,331 is a Behemoth - in fact it's so big that half of its guns are probably on the wrong side of the ship at any one time and the much smaller ship would be harder for it to bring all its guns to bear on. So the Size 70 should be agile, nimble and able to dodge most weapons during any given combat round, right?

• Size: 70 | 426sc
  Holds: 10 cubits
  Mining: 0 - 0
  
  Shield Armour Hull
  Dmg.: 7,920 2,063 6,870
  Def.: 0 7,500 1,050
  Rating: 1,685 / 855
  
  Power: 855pu
  Thrust: 3 (per hour)
  Mobility: 0
  
  Equipment:
  
  * Freighter Class Hull (70x)
  * Gen-C "Bainbridge" Nuclear Power Plant (2x)
  * Cijaa Systems TSEIT IV (1x)
  * K7 Total Steel Plating (15x)
  * MIV Laser Penetrator (60x)
  * 88mm Gauss Cannon (25x)
  * p66 Rapid Turbo Blasters ("Shredders") (85x)
  * InterTek k12 Communications Array (1x)
  * Elvis Bobblehead Doll (1x)
  * Fuzzy Dice (1x)
  * Rubik's Cube (1x)
  * Scented Pine Air Freshner (1x)

Was 3 clicks away from taking out Faceless Man and his 110k Defense - simply because he couldn't hit me and could only manage to do 500 Armour dmg per round average. Is that right?

From this:
Administrator One (DarkUnderlord) [70] | 1,685/833 vs Relationship (Faceless Man) [3,331] | 11,731/10,492

... to this:
Administrator One (DarkUnderlord) [70] | 1,685/504 vs Relationship [3,331] (Faceless Man) | 11,731/2,409

In about 7 rounds.

 

[Kayerts]

That's correct! You got me down to 24K of hull. (I had very minimal shields/armor at the time.) For what it's worth, I had 17K damage worth of Gauss cannons (anti-armor).

Edit: Although actually, I did attacking back once or twice. So it was probably more like ten rounds. Also, it seems worth noting that with your diabolical powers over wealth and speed, you don't need engines or holds. Hitting that perfect damage distribution as a player seems tricky.

 

[villain of the story]

* Elvis Bobblehead Doll (1x)
* Fuzzy Dice (1x)
* Rubik's Cube (1x)
* Scented Pine Air Freshner (1x)

Does any of this stuff actually do anything? Knowing DU, I bet so but what?

 

[TripJack]

if you buy 50 of each you unlock the ultimate weapon

 

[;]

What affects to-hit chance?
(sadly my attempt at boosting mobility up didn't work too well...)