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« on: June 13, 2019, 03:39:49 PM »
I'm going to piggyback on this since I decided to do a vanilla run and ran into a lot of similar issues. I haven't quite finished (and haven't done much of the story since my role playing has led me to have a fleet that really can't take artificial planet fleet right now). For the record any example solutions I give are just that, examples. Not saying they're perfect but just an idea to better demonstrate what we have vs what might be more interesting.
1. Fleet Strength scaling-
I really don't like how bounties scale throughout the game. It feels very "gamey" and also seems to limit playstyle. I get you don't want people farming super easy bounties the whole game ,but at the same time it feels silly that if I'm messing around with weaker ships that you can very quickly feel outclassed by the bounties, and it makes you wonder where the basic bounties went. Combined with the logistics of travel (i'll expand a lot on that below) large bounties feel very limiting. To add it's a little odd that I can get a 200k pirate base mission that's a level 2 base, and a 350k pirate base missions that's not even a full level 1 (and that happened in the late game). Would be nice if more info was given on bases seeing as how vastly more expensive it can be to break a tier 2 vs a tier 1.
2. Trade-
While it is super nice to be able to see the best 5 places by item to buy/sell, I would very much like a feature that lets me see what a specific systems prices are. One of the ways I keep logistics costs in check is by trying to make sure that even just traveling to find weapons servers a purpose, often by carrying goods that can be sold. This is easy when going to Askona as it's almost always in one of those lists, but going east especially led to me not knowing what I should stock up on because those systems weren't often in the top/bottom 5. Maybe this exists ( i know it used to) and I missed it, but I did look for it and couldn't find it (mostly in the intel tab).
3. Outfitting-
It's always gotten to me that finding almost all weaponry is random. Some of this is mitigated by getting a commission but often you're dealing with just randomly noticing that a location has something you might want down the line and stocking up. That or salvage. It feels a little odd, and takes some identity away from planets, that there's nowhere where you can say "yes i can get X here". I'm not looking to be able to always find the best weaponry, but it feels a little silly when my storage is a walking armory but i'm rummaging through it like a lego bin and suddenly realizing i'm out of sabots/harpoons. Colonies also help with this, but it seems like a very odd problem to be having in the first place.
Weapons in general though still feel off when you wind up with an apocalyptic supply that's worth pennies. Maybe less salvage unless you skill into it and making weapons/hulls actually worth something is actually worth investigating because right now it just adds clicking. If not, a "Store all weapons" button would be nice.
4 Travel-
This is probably what 70% of your playtime is spent doing, and it's in a kinda bad place of "not that interesting" mixed with "not easy enough to ignore". I'm just going to rapid fire into this but I think you could do a whole patch on just making map travel better and vastly improve an already great game.
A. Active Skills(active travel)- Interdict was a good addition, but it's still mostly meh, along with the rest of the active skills. 99% of my travel time is spent in the following rules-
Turn on long range thrust
autopilot towards target
Turn off transponder if I can/accept prompt to turn back on if i need to (this should probably just be a fleet stance like toggle that's in the skill bar)
Hover finger over the 4 and 5 key, max zoom out, turn on free look and pan as far as I can in the direction i'm headed.
If it looks like i'll hit a storm and can avoid it while long range is on, start rapid clicking like i'm playing dota to get the ship to turn until the route is safe and then hit A to go back on autopliot, repeat.
If I CAN'T avoid, pause, turn off long range thrust, un pause, realign, pause, turn on long range thurst, un pause (maybe not always that bad but gets my point across).
This is not interesting. The fact that I can turn off long range thrust instantly, re point, and turn it back on basically instantly, means why bother having it make you less maneuverable? It's just a nuisance tax.
My proposed solution for this is make long range no longer have a speed cap (or affect it much less, like 18 at the slowest) based on your slowest ship, just an acceleration cap. The larger your ships the slower you accelerate, but if you can keep it on long enough you WILL hit 20 (or maybe 18/19). This rewards players for smart planning and trying to keep the thrusters on long range for as long as possible, or even taking extra time in system to build up speed so you can get the jump on a target, and the "Stop and repoint" method will cost you much much more and now makes travel a slightly more interesting mini game of "how long can I keep the thrusters on to build up speed".
Smaller ships/fleets will accelerate much quicker, still giving them the advantage, but you could get your all cap fleet to haul around at 18/19 speed without skills if you're willing to plow through things long enough. Getting interdicted again ruins your built up acceleration and now a bigger deal, and in general your base speed will matter a lot more.
Likewise the idea of entering a system from a transjump to get past their patrols, with your transponder off, and then going dark as you get very close after hiding in a belt so you can smuggle/raid/whatever is a really cool idea. And you do something like that once in the tutorial, and then almost never again (i did it maybe 5 times my last run and I was looking for opportunities). I think some of this is because going dark might need more depth to it in general, but also because the payoff rarely matters.
I think it'd be interesting if you could have an "ambush" state where if you sneak up on a fleet from a nebula while in going dark they get a much lower deployment cap (maybe only for a certain amount of time, hell maybe even get to choose 2 ships the enemy must deploy?). This could majorly change engagement strategy (can't beat them in a fair fight but if you can get the jump you might get to pick off some stuff and win).
Further you could maybe make the black market not accessible unless you come in dark.
Of course neither of these ideas would work great in the current system (not enough straight lines to really get up to speed if you make it take longer and going dark is too slow to catch anyone in 90% of cases and most planets will notice you), but then that's where more passive skills could come in. Now that these systems have more depth you can have the "Pirate" character who's got skills in being faster during the going dark stance or whatever.
I really think that since we've got a skill bar that can have all these skills, I should be thinking about using them a lot more, rather than wondering if I should just make a macro.
B. Storms/Space(long range/passive travel)-
There's basically 4 kinds of space-
1. Empty (most of it)
2. Tedious (nebulas, deep space, asteroids)
3. Mostly frustrating (storms, corona, flare)
4. Outright dangerous (Pulsar, black hole)
Pulsars are kinda interesting if you actually need something from the system. I hope colony mehcanics in general get expanded to where we see more colonies (or just stations) with reasons to exist in systems like that so I actually have a reason to explore them.
The rest...eh? 90% of the time there's no decision. I want to be in empty or tedious space to the point that i'd ignore the game if i could. Things in tier 3 exist so I can't just leave it on autopilot because it's absurdly expensive if your capital gets bounced into a bunch of storms.
The only way you interact with these are some passive ways (skills/hull mods) and if you want using your E burn to plow through them. I think there's a LOT more room for depth in this, from having different storm types/severity (so i can actually make decisions on if i want to risk it) to just having it matter more overall. Again this works into having more interesting active skills (maybe a batten down skill that lessens the effect of tier 3 and 4 things but slows you down so it's not just e burn everything), but in general it seems a waste to have such little variety in travel.
The other important thing here is that this can affect tactics. If i can go through storms but the doomfleet chasing me can't (or will be affected by it much worse) that's something I can use. Yeah i can kinda use that now, but I e burn, they e burn, and we're back to square one (barring the passive skills). I don't have time for examples on this one and i've been putting this off long enough, but I really feel that just a little more depth to deep space travel would do wonders.
Going to cut it here due to time constraints, and as always if you stopped developing now the game would still be an all time favorite so please don't take any of this as "wow this sucks". I will just add that while I agree that colonies shouldn't be heading in a full on 4x direction, it would be nice to be able to have "outposts" of some sort that could give you a reason to care about some of the really interesting systems with no habitable worlds (like an expedition outpost you can throw up around a gas giant to harvest something or a black hole to gain something)
