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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: SOS signal  (Read 8153 times)

Deshara

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Re: SOS signal
« Reply #15 on: August 29, 2016, 09:52:18 AM »

How about if this functionality is rolled into fleet operations/faction relations? Skill line in the fleet tree focuses on faction relations, expanding the range at which you can give or take aide from friendly fleets, and unlocks a hullmod like most do at level 10 that only works for small ships, is designed to be put on a shuttle that outfits it for long-range solo interstellar travel, makes it fill itself with fuel and supplies and then locks it to not be used for repairs or cr, makes it unable to be used in combat (automatically retreats) and unlocks an active campaign ability that sends out the shuttle from your fleet with its emergency reserves under the command of a liason officer from the closest, friendliest faction who off-screen emergency burns to the nearest market and calls for an emergency resupply run at the cost of a sizeable hit to your remaining goodwill from the faction (doesn't put you in hostile status unless pirates, will come back to that).
When the fleet arrives, the dialogue gives you the options of compensating them for the cost of your fuel and supplies gained (only mitigates the damage to relations a little bit because no faction wants to be on good terms with an idiot that can't calculate their minimum fuel needs like the rest of the galaxy), you can compensate them for your costs and the cost of their fuel and supplies getting there and back (halves the relations loss, and costs roughly 3x the last option but is still a pain in the assignment for them because that's time lost they could have been doing something else), or you can offer to pay them for their costs and ask them if they want to see what was so important for you to inconvenience them, which opens a trade window from you showing them what your haul was that necessitated you stranding yourself, and the supply fleet automatically has a selection of your cargo slated to be transfered over to them, based on the value of those goods at their faction's economy, preferring goods with a high value/space ratio and with whether they're just asking you to compensate them for their time fairly or how much they're exhorting you depending on where you stood with the faction when you sent the shuttle. Oh and you could just say "sorry, I have nothing to give you" and walking away a free loader.

Then, once they've left, you have to deal with the high possibility that your SOS shuttle was seen because of its judicious use of emergency burn and what it was doing figured out and the supply fleet being followed to you by a scavenger fleet of the faction that might most want you dead (or just pirates because that's what they do), making, for a small independent fleet, making sure that the convoy is happy enough with you afterwards that they wouldn't just sit back and watch you get eaten by wolves more important the more toes you've stepped on.

I hear you asking "what happens if you're not friendly with anyone?" Well, the independent are a loose faction, and one of their traders won't care that you haven't made friends with their boss's boss, money is money.
"What happens if the nearby factions aren't friendly and you are on the bad side of the independent?" Well, you better hope you're on the good side of the bad people because if you're on the bad side of the independent, the convoy will be owned by pirates, and rather than the size of the scavenging fleet that follows the convoy being determined by how big your fleet is give or take a bit (anywhere from 50% to 120% your fleet's ship value), it's determined by how big your fleet is, exactly, multiplied by how far from maximum relations you are with the pirates, because the shuttle went to the people that sent the scavenging party (anywhere the convoy itself sent from a rival faction's mercenary group looking to see if your fleet will pay their extortion for help against the scavengers). Have you been killing every pirate group you can find and are their #1 most hated? Don't run out of fuel in a place where no friendly faction can get you
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Quote from: Deshara
I cant be blamed for what I said 5 minutes ago. I was a different person back then

michael1

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Re: SOS signal
« Reply #16 on: August 29, 2016, 05:41:57 PM »

How about if this functionality is rolled into fleet operations/faction relations? Skill line in the fleet tree focuses on faction relations, expanding the range at which you can give or take aide from friendly fleets, and unlocks a hullmod like most do at level 10 that only works for small ships, is designed to be put on a shuttle that outfits it for long-range solo interstellar travel, makes it fill itself with fuel and supplies and then locks it to not be used for repairs or cr, makes it unable to be used in combat (automatically retreats) and unlocks an active campaign ability that sends out the shuttle from your fleet with its emergency reserves under the command of a liason officer from the closest, friendliest faction who off-screen emergency burns to the nearest market and calls for an emergency resupply run at the cost of a sizeable hit to your remaining goodwill from the faction (doesn't put you in hostile status unless pirates, will come back to that).
When the fleet arrives, the dialogue gives you the options of compensating them for the cost of your fuel and supplies gained (only mitigates the damage to relations a little bit because no faction wants to be on good terms with an idiot that can't calculate their minimum fuel needs like the rest of the galaxy), you can compensate them for your costs and the cost of their fuel and supplies getting there and back (halves the relations loss, and costs roughly 3x the last option but is still a pain in the assignment for them because that's time lost they could have been doing something else), or you can offer to pay them for their costs and ask them if they want to see what was so important for you to inconvenience them, which opens a trade window from you showing them what your haul was that necessitated you stranding yourself, and the supply fleet automatically has a selection of your cargo slated to be transfered over to them, based on the value of those goods at their faction's economy, preferring goods with a high value/space ratio and with whether they're just asking you to compensate them for their time fairly or how much they're exhorting you depending on where you stood with the faction when you sent the shuttle. Oh and you could just say "sorry, I have nothing to give you" and walking away a free loader.

Then, once they've left, you have to deal with the high possibility that your SOS shuttle was seen because of its judicious use of emergency burn and what it was doing figured out and the supply fleet being followed to you by a scavenger fleet of the faction that might most want you dead (or just pirates because that's what they do), making, for a small independent fleet, making sure that the convoy is happy enough with you afterwards that they wouldn't just sit back and watch you get eaten by wolves more important the more toes you've stepped on.

I hear you asking "what happens if you're not friendly with anyone?" Well, the independent are a loose faction, and one of their traders won't care that you haven't made friends with their boss's boss, money is money.
"What happens if the nearby factions aren't friendly and you are on the bad side of the independent?" Well, you better hope you're on the good side of the bad people because if you're on the bad side of the independent, the convoy will be owned by pirates, and rather than the size of the scavenging fleet that follows the convoy being determined by how big your fleet is give or take a bit (anywhere from 50% to 120% your fleet's ship value), it's determined by how big your fleet is, exactly, multiplied by how far from maximum relations you are with the pirates, because the shuttle went to the people that sent the scavenging party (anywhere the convoy itself sent from a rival faction's mercenary group looking to see if your fleet will pay their extortion for help against the scavengers). Have you been killing every pirate group you can find and are their #1 most hated? Don't run out of fuel in a place where no friendly faction can get you

I really like the idea of unlocking hull mods that turn ships into independent fleets. It can be fleshed out more by having other types of fleets the player can deploy like a small combat fleet or a decryption focused fleet. So if you had 3 combat focused ships you wanted to group together and send out, you would tag each one with same combat fleet hull mod so all 3 ships can be grouped together and deployed with one ability.

The emergency supply fleet can also be fleshed out. If you were an accomplished privateer with a large fleet participating in a war and you were running out supplies, you would probably send a small fleet to fetch supplies instead of sending your whole fleet right? So maybe you could also have resupply fleets that don't damage relations but would be risky to send out because they would require a large amount of supplies to make the trip (depending on distance), and would be easy to intercept because they would move slow. So it would be like a gamble, you would have to risk losing a large amount of supplies if you want to gain more. You would also have less precise control over what the resupply fleet buys then if you were to go to the market yourself.

As for integrating all this into another skill tree, I'm worried that having too many skill lines would increase the learning curve, especially since the industry skill line will add even more skills. I think it's a bad idea to have a ton of skills available to the player from the start because it might overwhelm the player with too much information. The ideal would be to merge fleet/signal/encryption skills with the technology skill line, maybe merge them with or replace the less useful skills in the technology line. If that's not possible though all the fleet/signal/encryption skills should at least be kept in one skill line.
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ZeroEffort89

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Re: SOS signal
« Reply #17 on: November 20, 2016, 12:26:23 PM »

Not much to contribute that hasnt already been seed but I think SOS signals would be very cool. The hotbar for the overworld map has plenty of free tabs that im thinking could be filled with cool stuff like this =)

And regarding new players I and making it too complicated I get it, but SOS signal is very simple and self explanatory.
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