A player can spend resource points on ships and equipment for themselves, but also on factories, space stations and defences which the whole team will benefit from.
How do you envisage balancing the cost of ships & equipment vs the cost of a factory/space station?
If factories are really expensive compared to ships, I imagine your average player would just spend their points on ships for themselves.
If factories are too cheap, then their importance is diminished.
I’d suggest something like this:
If a ship costs X, a factory costs something like 15X.
A player has some points and wants to initiate the building of a factory.
They choose the location and pay what they can afford. (Lets say they pay 2X)
Other players can then see this ‘building project’ on their UI and give points to it.
Once the total (15X) is reached, the factory is built.
a. If a player had loads of points, they could pay for the whole thing if they chose to.
b. At any point before the total is reached, a player can withdraw their funds from the ‘building project’. If all players withdraw their funds, it ceases to be a building project.
If a noob wants to build a factory in a vulnerable spot, no one else is going to contribute and it’s not going to get built. No problemo.
We aren’t planning on charging a subscription fee for battlescape so I’m not sure what you mean by prepaid? We’re still nailing down our stretch goals so I can’t comment on how many tester tiers there will be just yet.
The Infinity MMO is (probably) going to be subscription based. Battlescape is a (very, very large) arena based combat (or combat+, if stretch goals are met, apparently) set in the same universe, but is an entirely different game.
I’ve been playing DDN (Dungeons & Dragons) DDO is a decent game but the players (generally) zerg. DDN is sad. There were three shards now just one, as of the last toon I made.
What I fear is the free to play crowd. They wont get much out of them.
I hope free to play crowd wont scare off the people who want an adult game.
I wont miss DDN.
There won’t be a free to play crowd for Battlescape, AFAIK. Battlescape is going to be a retail arena shooter game, meaning that everyone who’s playing it has paid for it. It’s just not going to be subscription based. You buy your copy, you validate your purchase, and then you play the game.
No one is worrying about the free to play crowd in GTA Online, because there isn’t one. Because it’s not a tiered subscription based game with a free bottom tier. Battlescape is going to be the same.
I would like to see a Star Craft like aspect to the game. Go out in resource gathering ships to gain materials. Then go out in station building units to construct stations, satellites, outposts, etc… Each construct would let you build bigger better ships, turrets, upgrades, weapons, etc. This would add a much more entertaining aspect to the game than setting up a few factories then waiting for resources to come in until you can get that next upgrade.
In starcraft you command the resource gathering drones.
Do you propose that you should be able to be one of those resource gathering drones? If so I can’t imagine how you would make the process (picking up minerals, running to base, dropping them and repeating) any fun.
Also starcraft is a fast paced game. The factory part of Battlescape most probably won’t be.
Could be possible to include that kind of thing without making it central to gameplay.
Your factories are basically SupCom metal extractors that continuously send a trickle of resource points back to your station(s). Maybe you can also drop by your factories in a shuttle, pick up these resources, and fly them directly to your station for bonus points.
That way a team will have some means of boosting their income when building more factories isn’t an option. You can also resource-run when out on patrol or when returning to base after a fight.
And for whatever reason, some people seem to really like mining. I enjoyed the mining in the old ICP; it was surprisingly tricky, especially as your shuttle would get really sluggish when fully loaded, and you had to safely steer it back to your carrier in that condition.
I like the idea of NPC drones as resource gatherers rather than player built factories since how would you determine where factories can be placed?
If they are predetermined then you may as well have capture points but if they are anywhere then i would imagine they would all be clustered in a single point making them impossible to assault. They could have a certain radius in which another cannot be placed that would work however.
But i like the idea of NPC drones since if the factory is invincible then players can just buy a drone spawn which will automatically harvest resources and id imagine pubbies would prefer this since it is much less of an investment.
However it retains the aspect of raiding since the drones would be fairly weak you could go in a small ship kill a few and leave hindering the opponents’ economy before they can react making defenders more important than just zerging around because one ship can’t do anything alone. But it should always take people to team up in order to take objectives.
I do however loathe the idea of build able turrets as then defending is less important and again single ships are useless although there should be some form of automatic defense possibly similar to the way Tribes Ascend handles it.
Which is a handful of static turrets which can be upgraded by the player for increasing cost and are capable of causing good damage at high level for anyone who doesn’t know. There is also another emplacement which i feel would work well: a scanner with upgradable range. I think a way to upgrade the drones’ health, speed and perhaps a very weak attack to dissuade going near them would work well if implemented.
However in most games with an economy based off something like capture points or miners there tends to be a point when one side begins to steamroll the other so there needs to be some sort of way for the losing side to catch up. This could be in the form of player mining.
Say there is an unobtanium, element X asteroid in some dangerous area which is worth huge amounts of currency, only players may mine it and it is risky to get to. The losing side could go mine some and then jump a tier in tech to retain the advantage and get back in the game.
However it would need to be dangerous to get there else it would just be used by the winning side to pull further ahead, perhaps it could be surrounded by asteroids and in a nebula so that anyone there cannot communicate (except via 3rd party programs obviously) and large ships cannot go there. Some form of NPC guards would probably be helpful so it takes 3 or so people to go get it. Also i feel shared currency is the best way (not shared as such more everyone receives an amount of money as it is earned). And again lone wolfing should be viable and have its place but not a way of winning.
(long time since I’ve been here and i never really posted hope this is coherent)
