Possibly. To be fair, I never really ventured into nullsec. I played Eve online only to get contacts for later use in Dust514, so my experience might differ slightly from yours (especially regarding the number of deaths).
I can assure you that you were in the minority and that your experience most definitely differed from most eve players.
Regardless, Iâm a huge fan of the module based gameplay as far as fitting your ship goes. Not only does it let you customize your ship to the role you want it to be, but also allows you to gain intimacy and cherish that damn ship of yours(depending on who you are) since you made it what it is. Iâm not sure if it is out of scope or not, but getting âmoniesâ for doing various things in matches to be able to buy better mods(per a match basis) a la League or something. Actually, as Iâm typing this I wouldnât like that on a match basis. I would like for the money to cross over so you can start saving, and only have the mods be unlocked in games once certain requirements are met.
Requirements such as "control this planet based manufactory, have an extractor or 5 on requireed places, etc. I think it would introduce the need for people to scout out these places for the best spot to place a building(if possible and funded), people to head out in a slow transport ship that has the materials to âbuildâ it which would need to be guarded, and the rest of your pew pew pew fighter peoples. It also makes you decide which modules your team is going to âunlockâ first, so every game could be different depending on the circumstances and who your playing. The monies probably isnât even needed at this point either.
Since Iâve seen it enough, i really hope we get funded and go to the stretch goals because I would love to see this as a playstyle.
How about getting the modules directly from your efforts? That is, what your team ends up controlling gives you a particular module or modules and/or additional supplies. Each match would put a certain number of sites on the line, and the two teams would decide how hard they wanted to pursue each one. Some sites might even overlap in requirements.
âDave needs a Blastomatic 6, so we should definitely capture the munitions site. Besides, we need to replenish our supply of explosive rounds.â
If you know that your enemy is trying to get one last module to turn one of their ship types into a real beast, you can work harder to deny them control of a certain site.
The sites would follow the requirements pattern that youâre describing, except that instead of placing 5 extractors, youâd have to capture enough existing extractors to feed some system that opens up the manufacturing site. There might be 20 of the extractors around. Some unworkable. Some can be fixed. Some high capacity. Some low.
What period of time would you want to hold onto your assets? If you worked on building up your ship for a couple weeks, then refined it for a couple more as you used it, would that be enough time? The idea is that at the end of the month, the overall match is over and everything resets, including your assets. Or at the end of two months, six months, a year.
Sounds exactly like the âWorld vs Worldâ from Guild Wars. Youâd acquire resources on a regular basis from the lumber mill / mine once captured, and either youâd directly collect it from them, but with not much capacity, or youâd have to escort a caravan heading to the nearest fort (slower but much greater capacity).
The caravan or the factory itself can be disrupted by raiding parties, provided theyâre good (or big) enough to defeat the NPCs guarding it and the eventual players around it.
This all depends on multiple factors. Is the arena separated from the rest of the world ? Is the reward of winning rounds of the arena match something youâd see in the regular world as you suggested before ?
Thereâs a lot of good thinking here, but IMHO, one can stand on the shoulder of giants, espacially when there are quite a few of them.
I was assuming that the extractors were already connected to the facility. No menial tasks involved. Just find the right extractors and turn them on. For all I know, turning on an extractor might cause oause a short in the system, requiring some other action. Everythingâs a puzzle.
Meanwhile, youâve gotta defend the facility and the extractors.
My question was in response to @Skyentist noting that players develop an attachment to their ships after a while. How long does that take? Once the attachment is formed, how long would Skyentist want to hang onto the ship before being willing to discard it and start over again? Or even discard it in favor of a different ship?
I came up with the Durable Ships idea because I want players to build that attachment to ships. I wanted players of the MMO to say âLook there goes old KnockHead. That was my first frigate command, back in 2021.â That only happens if ships survive for a long period of time and are sold and reused time and time again.
In a match game, is that an important bit of persistence - the playerâs ship? Does that leave the match game experience fundamentally the same as Elite:Dangerous, where players are constantly grinding games in order to upgrade their ship? Will they form an attachment to it if itâs constantly being upgraded - and even discarded in favor of a better ship?
Could go one step further than some kind of global resource pool have have ships actually transporting stuff. if mines/factories have enough defenses by nature of not being weight limited, the other side then has to weigh the option of raiding the supply lines or the source. Also, if thereâs enough player control and the transport ships are infrequent and high capacity enough, people will do coordinated defended resource runs which will then get raided, players will figure out how many ships they can afford to defend and attack with.
Another Battlescape gameplay suggestion.
Ground Effect
@INovaeKeith commented recently on the ED thread that thereâs no plan for buggy dropping in Battlescape, Thatâs very sensible as the scope needs to be as tight as possible. But what if we could have some of the fun of driving a buggy around a planet without all the development effort of implementing ground vehicles?
When playing the old combat prototype I would fill my time whilst shuttle mining by turning my shuttle into a hovercraft. To do this you held the âSâ key down to continually fire your down thrusters. The shuttle then acted like a hovercraft and you could explore asteroids, jumping off hill tops and skidding along the bottom of canyons. It was a cool hidden feature of the prototype.
Could this same feature be embraced in Battlescape and made a part of the game?
The suggestion is that I-Novae simulate ground effect in the game. Thrust levels would be amplified at ground level so that ships would automatically hover when they are at thrust levels that are too low to overcome the gravity of a planet. When stationary, landing gear would deploy and the ship would land normally. However when forward thrust is applied the landing gear would retract and the ship would travel forward using ground effect and behave like a hover vehicle.
This could look bad for some ship models that do not have a flattish profile so maybe each ship would have a stat to specify how effective it is at hovering on ground effect. Smaller ships should also benefit more from ground effect than larger ships.
Advantages:
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Crash landing would be more forgiving with ground effect in play. As thrust would get amplified close to the ground a ship that would otherwise crash may simply bounce off its own thrust cushion.
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Players should have some reward for using âhover modeâ. The simplest advantage to grant would be a much reduced radar signature.
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Hovering is fun. You get most of the fun of buggies without even having to get out of your ship.
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It will look great on videos.
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Hover racing.
3 Likes
Yep, I have brought this up in the past (internally), as I would have liked a ground vehicle with nice suspension animations, but the logical choice is a hovercraft primarily due to scope.
1 Like
Mechanical space elephants / whales. Do it now!
I suspect that this could be better presented as a terrain-following flight mode using thrusters.
It could be switchable between âAttractiveâ and âRepulsiveâ. Attractive keeps the ship stuck to the surface of the body, while Repulsive makes sure that the ship never touches the surface of the body. Attractive would be like rolling a magnet across a steel undulating surface, while Repulsive would be like rolling a ball across a steel undulating surface.
Both modes would rely on the shipâs thrusters, so the shipâs thruster authority and the bodyâs gravity would impact how effective the ship executed the mode. It would not be affected by air pressure - or lack thereof.
Oh, and the goal would be maintain a standoff distance that could be set by the pilot. âI want Repulsive flight at 10m from the surfaceâ Or âI want Attractive flight at 100m from the surfaceâ.
Note that the Attractive mode fires thrusters in all directions, while the Repulsive mode only fires thrusters away from the surface of the body.
Not sure about that, one of the most fun things in the ICP âhover modeâ was doing jumps, seeing if you could clear canyons, that sort of thing. Terrain following to me suggests that Iâll be glued at a fixed altitude. That loses a lot of the fun and magic of being in a hovercraft.
If itâs easy enough to implement, itâs something Iâd like to test during alpha for sure. A lot of people hated the Mako from ME1, but I liked tooling around on the surface in that thing. I didnât at all like the M-44 Hammerhead from ME2, the controls/feel was kinda crap.
If we can do it in a slick/fun way with existing ships, sounds like a win to me.
1 Like
What would be the point?
There are real, physical, benefits to low altitude flight. This is why hovercraft were invented. They can be experienced by simply comparing how much thrust you need to use to make a RC quadcopter hover at various altitudes relative to the ground below it.
Would interplanetary combat-capable spaceship have more than enough thrust even without these benefits? Sure, but if someone is trying to hit you with a missile that extra .1g of burst acceleration might very well be what saves you - especially when combined with the missile having no space to turn around.
The alternative, an autopilot setting to maintain a certain altitude, would do nothing but limit you. I ask again, what would be the point? What possible benefit would you gain from being exactly 100m above the terrain, making your path to any point on the surface that much longer? I just donât see it.
Guys, read the proposal again. There are two modes, called Attractive and Repulsive. They behave differently.
Attractive: fire up and down thrusters to maintain a height of X meters. Hardcore terrain following.
Repulsive: fire up thrusters to avoid going lower than X meters. Hovercraft mode. Without aerodynamics or air.
I was so sad when the mako was removed. It was honestly my favorite part of me1âŚI know we wonât be able to get out of the ship but something resembling hover and âground fightingâ/would be awesome and something I hadnât even thought of
Itâs ok.
These people are wrong.
4 Likes
How about the behaviour of ârepulsive modeâ as JB calls it, being always on by default? So you can just fly down to a planet and fly close to the surface without crashing. Nose up and you gain altitude as youâd expect.
If you want to land you deploy your landing gear and the hover behaviour is disabled. The pilot would then have to control the thrusters to land gently.
If thatâs the default then we just have the Terrain Following mode that JB proposed (with settable altitude) that can be turned on and off.
That sounds like a kids game where you canât get hurt/crash.
6 Likes
I used to play a game that did hovertanks pretty well, wulfram II. I dont know how well it would translate to a spaceship trying to emulate a hovertank but you could control your altitude with q/z , higher had the advantage of more ground clearance for certain hills and it was useful for peeking over terrain to get a shot off, lower meant youâd use less energy and go slightly faster but you might have clearance issues. You could also go low enough that youâd just land, either anywhere on terrain or at a dedicated repair/refuel pad. Your facing was controlled dependant on the ground angle, so going over hill you needed to compensate for the change in orientation, thesedays hovertanks in games do that for you. You also had a jump which would throw you up pretty far and with a good enough angle to throw a cannon shell and some autocannon fire down on the heads of your enemies, if they didnt counter-jump. It was a pretty good system, but it would work best with an exclusive hovertank rather than a ship pretending to be a hovertank.
Iâm confused⌠you just said you approved of the hovercraft ideaâŚ
My post was in response to JBâs suggestion of various modes⌠I suggested it would just be the default behaviour, as Crayfish described.
It would still be very possible to crashâŚ
- While zooming along playing hovercraft, fly into an obstacle eg rock or cliff or sudden incline.
- Enable your landing gear - the automatic hover thrusting is disabled and you fall out of the sky. The pilot must control the landing.