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Author Topic: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts  (Read 8613 times)

SonnaBanana

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #30 on: June 07, 2020, 10:10:52 AM »

Yes but it only happens outside the core sector with pre-generated derelicts.
I lost severals promising derelicts to scavenger fleets while exploring

That's a feature from Starship Legends, Vanilla Starsector NPC fleets can't scavange or recover a ship or debris field
I've never downloaded Starship Legends.
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TerranEmpire

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #31 on: June 07, 2020, 03:56:33 PM »

I don't really like the idea of a feature that would punish someone for not exploring soon enough, similar to how I wouldn't like the core factions to colonise on their own because I don't want a feeling of "this planet isnt great but I need to settle it now before someone else does". Considering derelicts and debris fields give XP to find, it'd also be quite a punishment for someone who spent some time doing something else early on. Lore should work for game mechanics, not the other way round, otherwise- why is there any debris or derelict left at game start after 200 years of exploration (if salvage fleets were to claim derelicts and debris fields).

A compromise as it were could be that salvage fleets don't actually remove the things they salvage, but WILL intercept you when you try and salvage something they're salvaging or plan to salvage. That way you still get the NPC interaction but you don't feel like you need to rush out there and explore before other people do.

A better compromise could be the frequency of NPC looting. Or we could restrict the scope of their looting to exclude certain high-value objects/artifacts and/or some ships altogether.
There are derelict ships after 200 years bcs of constant war and lawlessness.

For the colonization thing: the gameplay factions SHOULD colonize, but only occasionally. You can strike a good balance between a dynamic universe and the need for a rush. Similarly, like before, you can exclude some high-value systems or the core words uninhabited systems from their colonization attempt.

If someone is afraid that some gameplay mechanic could cause the game to change in an undesired direction, the right answer is to scale this mechanic
not to restrict or exclude, as long as the mechanic makes the immersion better and the universe more alive.
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Sundog

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #32 on: June 07, 2020, 05:24:51 PM »

Yes but it only happens outside the core sector with pre-generated derelicts.
I lost severals promising derelicts to scavenger fleets while exploring

That's a feature from Starship Legends, Vanilla Starsector NPC fleets can't scavange or recover a ship or debris field
Just to clarify, starship legends spawns recovery fleets that will only recover the famous derelicts spawned by starship legends. They will completely ignore debris fields and all other derelicts.

iceball3

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #33 on: June 08, 2020, 11:59:20 AM »

To a certain extent, a lot of debris-mining is very fire and forget, with salvaging parties that aren't the player never settling in for longer term extraction (which is tech mining).
Perhaps there can be orbital debris field descriptions which require extraction over a longer time period, in which independent factions (or the player) can set up a colony in-system "Orbital tech-mining base", allows tech mining of non ground-based structures in the system. Make it so that as other factions commit to the mining, the player can get access to the market these rare goods via their store or their black market, depending on the political situation. for example, luddic church/path tech mine that is dedicated to slagging anything hereical they get ahold of, produces transplutonics and metals on open market, may still have opportunities to intercept high tech valuables via a black marketeering diplomacy chain. Make it so factions can set up such a station on ruins too, though you'd need to make mining the ruins a much longer term prospect than they are in game right now.
I've always found it a little strange that mining stations and orbital habitats are mined so instantly quickly, with the precedent set in the coreworlds for several structures that "this is too big, don't bother mining it, don't even think about mining it."
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Serenitis

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #34 on: June 09, 2020, 10:02:49 AM »

For example, in Transcendence, there is a brown round ship called a Salvager that seeks out wrecks and loots them. 
It's annoying. Doubly so when you're depending on recovering stuff in order to keep going.
Quite a fan of "dirty" weapons to just tag them and leave them to glow until dead.

That's why NPCs collecting loot is not a great idea.
It's hard enough playing full industry/salvage due to the RNG distribution of wrecks and fields being a bit on the patchy side. If NPCs can empty this stuff beforehand, then you've potentially put the player in a dead end situation if they even try to play this way.
And they may not even know they're going to be in that situation until its too late to do anything about it.

The counter to that is that you'd be creating conflict with the salvager fleets, so they'd become the loot.

The counter to the counter is that the salvage fleets will almost always turn red anyway and you'll be fighting them in any case, so in the end you're still losing out for the sake of "immersion".

People like to use the word "immersion" a lot these days. And while its nice to able to lose yourself in a world, that is always secondary to gameplay concerns. Like accomplishing a thing quickly for the sake of not interrupting the flow of the game.
This is what is referred to as an acceptable break from reality. This is also why all docking is instant, instead you sat there waiting for a virtual queue to run down in real-time.
It doesn't matter how "immersive" a game is if its tedious to play.
Also, immersion is what happens just prior to drowning.

This is why the other suggestion mentioned upthread, is also extremely ungood.
Making salvage take more time than it does already would be not at all welcome. If anything this process needs streamling more, not padding out.
When you're playing full salvage, you spend a LOT of time salvaging. Almost every object you render for resources needs to be interacted with / salvaged multiple times. With the extra time padding added on to this, that would make the process far more dull.

Don't have any issue with NPCs hanging around wrecks and trying to bully the player away tho.
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Morrokain

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #35 on: June 09, 2020, 12:29:45 PM »

People like to use the word "immersion" a lot these days. And while its nice to able to lose yourself in a world, that is always secondary to gameplay concerns. Like accomplishing a thing quickly for the sake of not interrupting the flow of the game.
This is what is referred to as an acceptable break from reality. This is also why all docking is instant, instead you sat there waiting for a virtual queue to run down in real-time.
It doesn't matter how "immersive" a game is if its tedious to play.

Not at all saying that you don't have good points because you do, but the sarcastic response to "immersion" that a lot of people tend to bring out when they disagree is not a valid argument by any means and I really wish it would stop. I've seen it many times now. It's just your opinion of what's "an acceptable break from reality" and what's not. That opinion can vary greatly from individual to individual. And that's perfectly ok.

Read what you wrote again and try and put yourself in another's mindset. There are some people who would actually enjoy having docking take time and maybe even have a video clip of it each time (not me but I can guarantee they are out there)- just as there are some people who literally autoresolve all combat for the exact same reasons you bring up. Does this mean we should get rid of combat completely and just have better autoresolve? It would certainly save everyone time that's for sure... What if people think the combat layer is tedious? If you want some "gameplay concerns" for active combat, how about kiting AI that requires you to chase them down? Plenty find this to be annoying and it emphasizes the fastest ships and speed skills as the "better" choice in many sitautions. What about CR? Autoresolve rarely costs as much as a player letting their CR degrade too much. Yes, it's their fault for letting that happen, but it sure does make the idea of a better autoresolve instead of a combat layer all the more appealing in that sense... (No I don't actually want to get rid of combat I'm just giving an example of my point using "everyone's favorite mechanic".)

You can make the argument that combat brings something valuable to the table such as "fun" or "tactics" but at the end of the day this is all subjective. A salvage timer or derelict-stealing salvagers could also bring such things to the table if done in a responsible way. In general, however, I agree that because of how often you salvage things a timer would slow things down, but lots of things intentionally slow things down (Com relays, credit limitations, player level, rep grinding) for various reasons. If it slows it down but brings value to the game without making salvaging tedious (because the value counteracts the tedium) then the mechanic is fine. (I'm not necessarily for nor against the idea.) And still, some people will complain about it just as some people still complain about just about everything currently in the game because it's not their idea of fun.  :)

Also, things like "interrupting the flow of the game" don't make a lot of sense because there is no cut and dry definition of what that flow actually is. The "flow" quite literally changes each and every update. My brother quit this game once he couldn't deploy his whole fleet cost effectively because that was his idea of how the game should flow.

Now things like "It's hard enough playing full industry/salvage" are much better. It's more specific and something clearly defined as a gameplay element or playstyle.

If I'm coming across as harsh, that is not the intention and I apologize. I'm trying to point out that sometimes people jump to conclusions about how a suggestion will look or feel and respond with generalizations and blanket statements of "This is so bad!" instead of approaching the situation with: "Hmm, could work, but how would we solve X?"

One isn't helpful and one is. The more we discuss things in a positive way, the more likely we as a community can flesh out the potential problems and, far more importantly, attempt to solve them so that a cool new feature or mechanic can be added to the game. You can find *something* wrong with any suggestion if you look hard enough.
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TerranEmpire

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #36 on: June 09, 2020, 12:50:16 PM »

Very good comment, sir.
My idea is that if you can scale a mechanic not to impact specific types of playthroughs very hard, then if this mechanic enables another type of game experience/playthrough it should be implemented.
That makes thig game so great.
You can choose to a certain extent what type of experience you want. All of us should be for more choices, not for less.

I would like to see a more dynamic universe, where I don't feel that I'm the only actor with brain cells.
So I'm for expanding factions for eg. But not because I want to race against them. I'm ok, that if they only expand occasionally. The feeling that they might DO SOMETHING instead of waiting to become overwhelmed by the player makes the game better imo.
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Grievous69

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #37 on: June 09, 2020, 12:56:28 PM »

God I hate these ''let's write an essay about someone just because he disagrees with the suggestion so he looks bad in comparison''. Disagreeing with someone is NOT being negative, stop with that ridiculous line of thinking. If he replied something along the lines of ''Nah that would suck'', then yeah I'd agree kinda, but he actually wrote why it's not a good idea, or anything similar that kills gameplay. I agree 100% with that mindset.

@Morrokain

My dude, you non ironically compared combat, the most fleshed out part of the game, the thing that attracts most players and a large part finds entertaining, versus a video clip that will always be the same every single time you dock somewhere and you can't skip it. Sure it's gonna look cool first couple of times but it'll get pretty annoying after. And for who? Maybe less than 1% of the playerbase who like doing nothing in a game. Yes, everything is subjective, everything will have people who like it and people who dislike it, but the important part is how large is the difference between those two groups.

I'm not saying you were super harsh or anything, but I just don't like people getting flak for no reason whatsoever. He shared his mind on the subject and was civil, let him be.

P.S. I had to write this because I've seen the exact same thing happening to other people, including me (not only here, in general).
« Last Edit: June 09, 2020, 01:20:28 PM by Grievous69 »
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Morrokain

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #38 on: June 09, 2020, 02:00:56 PM »

God I hate these ''let's write an essay about someone just because he disagrees with the suggestion so he looks bad in comparison''. Disagreeing with someone is NOT being negative, stop with that ridiculous line of thinking. If he replied something along the lines of ''Nah that would suck'', then yeah I'd agree kinda, but he actually wrote why it's not a good idea, or anything similar that kills gameplay. I agree 100% with that mindset.

@Morrokain

My dude, you non ironically compared combat, the most fleshed out part of the game, the thing that attracts most players and a large part finds entertaining, versus a video clip that will always be the same every single time you dock somewhere and you can't skip it. Sure it's gonna look cool first couple of times but it'll get pretty annoying after. And for who? Maybe less than 1% of the playerbase who like doing nothing in a game. Yes, everything is subjective, everything will have people who like it and people who dislike it, but the important part is how large is the difference between those two groups.

I'm not saying you were super harsh or anything, but I just don't like people getting flak for no reason whatsoever. He shared his mind on the subject and was civil, let him be.

P.S. I had to write this because I've seen the exact same thing happening to other people, including me (not only here, in general).

Sorry I truly wasn't trying to give him flak. Yes he was civil and sharing your mind is fine. Sharing your mind in a more constructive way is even better though! Everyone, including me, can improve upon that point. Notice I only enclosed the portion of the post I had a problem with. The rest I didn't because it was fine to me.

I mean, you just did the same thing I did, only to me, because you don't agree with my thoughts on the game. I am not trying to make anyone look bad just to be clear, but I think this community could stand to be more constructive and less "we know the way and this is not it", that's all. Give counter points all day long just do it nicely without any sarcasm or the tiny little barbs shot at the opposing opinion... Some of you seem to have a very hard time with that if you disagree.

The thing here is that you and others seem to think you "know" the majority of the player base and what they want when that is actually impossible. Maybe your group is in agreement, or maybe you think you read the forums/discord enough that you think you have an idea of the "best things" but: Many people don't even post here or there after all. If all the posts fit your vision or are rejected, then only those who agree with it will post! It's a self fulfilling prophesy.

When someone goes outside the box of what you *think* you know the majority "wants" (which you don't, really, because literally noone does and its almost a fluid thing based upon experience and testing things out and divergences of opinion happens all the time) saying: "the important part is how large is the difference between those two groups." doesn't make sense even if it seems obvious to you. I was also very clear in that I was making a point and not trying to compare the two features. Yes combat is the best part of this game to me and that's why I chose it for the comparison. To prove that even when something is "agreed upon" there can be outliers and sometimes things we see as outliers aren't really outliers at all- if that makes sense.

My friend, please look at your post. "And for who? Maybe less than 1% of the playerbase who like doing nothing in a game." That is a big assumption and its tone is very clearly negative - even bordering on derogatory or dismissive. That is exactly what I am talking about. You also indirectly called my line of thinking "ridiculous" and then accused the prior suggestion (again indirectly) as "killing gameplay."

Wording and implied tone is everything and yours is clearly negative so all you are doing is proving my point here. Disagreeing in and of itself is not bad- Its how you give your opinion that matters and 90% of that was fine in the case of Serenitis. I was trying to give a gentle reminder to avoid that behavior in the other 10% of the post... not attack the person to make them look bad.

*EDIT* Anyway, lets get this thread back on topic. I am not going to continue to argue this. I have said my peace on the subject for now.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2020, 02:03:53 PM by Morrokain »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #39 on: June 09, 2020, 03:12:34 PM »

The way I see NPC's salvaging stuff working would be if there was a debris generation system that added new debris at roughly the same rate it was salvaged by NPC's, otherwise, exploration would become harder the longer the player waited to go exploring, which would stack with the players increasing logistics costs as the player fleet grows potentially causing problems. I think it could be detrimental to exploration in the late game and could also make things start to feel too empty. With debris generation, you could still have some interesting interactions with NPC fleets without long term gameplay consequences as the sector gets sucked dry by pesky salvagers. Not sure how that would interact with rare loot like stations though, they could just be ignored by salvagers, or also generated over time, or given defenses so the salvagers aren't strong enough to get them.

P.S.
Just a thought relevant to the off-topic discussion: in terms of phrasing and subtext, its worth considering that people from other cultures, or who have learned english in different contexts can interpret tone and subtext differently, and sometime things that seem harsh or hostile to you, are not meant or interpreted as harsh by others (or vice versa). I don't know if that is what is happening here, but it's worth considering.
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Terethall

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #40 on: June 09, 2020, 05:23:42 PM »

I think NPC salvager fleets actually salvaging is fine, but only provided salvage randomly respawns over time. I love industry/salvage style gameplay and hate spending time in the core. I would not want to feel like I was in a race against the clock (given the way things currently work) to hoover up all the loot, and as it stands today I actually think it's a drawback that the sector slowly becomes 100% mapped and looted until there is nothing left. How can the player fleet do it in like 5 years when in the past 200 no one else has, yet the fringe is practically brimming with salvage, prospector, and pirate fleets? Debris fields and derelicts could certainly respawn. Probes... maybe, if the idea is they are drifting through realspace and sometimes captured by a star. It's not clear why so many lootable ruins, mining stations, etc. still exist in the sector. Even less clear why factions will pay the player to find, scan, and then (presumably) loot them of their obscene riches despite the faction offering the contract knowing where they are. Also, come to think of it, funny that you can sell survey data but not mining station/orbital habitat/equipment cache locations.
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Eji1700

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #41 on: June 09, 2020, 07:02:00 PM »

I think there's a lot of worse case scenario thinking here.

Again, i don't know how hard some of this is to code, so it really depends on what they have setup/feels i the effort, but you could do things like "placebo" salvaging for wrecks that are over a certain "value" (basically anything unique).  I just think it'd be nice if they were out and active cleaning up the corpses of pirate invasion 55. That's hardly some huge value issue. 

Have them "placebo" salvage anything that was prespawned (stations and the like), and maybe even let that reflect by them having cargo that you would normally find there.  Let them actually salvage fleet wrecks post fight after X seconds maybe?  And even then have the results of that salvage in their hold if possible?

So you explore a system with a mostly full hold, see a research station that you plan on coming back for.  Notice a salvage fleet hit it.  It doesn't affect the research station at all (still there any everything) but if you're feeling nasty you can now attack the salvagers and expect to find a small amount of whatever you could've gotten on the station (so it's easier to fit in your hold).  You probably want a "nice" option to interact as well (but that strikes me as more of a hailing thing and that's a separate subject) but I think something like that adds a ton of life to the game and some neat emergent behavior.
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Morrokain

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #42 on: June 09, 2020, 07:52:26 PM »

My idea is that if you can scale a mechanic not to impact specific types of playthroughs very hard, then if this mechanic enables another type of game experience/playthrough it should be implemented.
The way I see NPC's salvaging stuff working would be if there was a debris generation system that added new debris at roughly the same rate it was salvaged by NPC's, otherwise, exploration would become harder the longer the player waited to go exploring, which would stack with the players increasing logistics costs as the player fleet grows potentially causing problems. I think it could be detrimental to exploration in the late game and could also make things start to feel too empty. With debris generation, you could still have some interesting interactions with NPC fleets without long term gameplay consequences as the sector gets sucked dry by pesky salvagers. Not sure how that would interact with rare loot like stations though, they could just be ignored by salvagers, or also generated over time, or given defenses so the salvagers aren't strong enough to get them.
I think NPC salvager fleets actually salvaging is fine, but only provided salvage randomly respawns over time. I love industry/salvage style gameplay and hate spending time in the core. I would not want to feel like I was in a race against the clock (given the way things currently work) to hoover up all the loot, and as it stands today I actually think it's a drawback that the sector slowly becomes 100% mapped and looted until there is nothing left. How can the player fleet do it in like 5 years when in the past 200 no one else has, yet the fringe is practically brimming with salvage, prospector, and pirate fleets? Debris fields and derelicts could certainly respawn. Probes... maybe, if the idea is they are drifting through realspace and sometimes captured by a star. It's not clear why so many lootable ruins, mining stations, etc. still exist in the sector. Even less clear why factions will pay the player to find, scan, and then (presumably) loot them of their obscene riches despite the faction offering the contract knowing where they are. Also, come to think of it, funny that you can sell survey data but not mining station/orbital habitat/equipment cache locations.

This would be the way (at least initially) I would handle the issue of putting the player on a clock to salvage the sector with this feature. Also, exceptions should probably be made for rare derelicts like the Legion (XIV) and rare loot in general. Theoretically this would only impact "common" salvage to preserve the idea that the sector is in decline and rare salvage is generally inaccessible outside of "crazy vigilantes/especially brave mercenaries" (AKA the player) who are willing to brave the attempt. That's why factions offer missions in my mind: they expect the expedition to end in failure and don't want to waste their fleets?-  an idea at least.

Defenses of rare stuff that can counter the salvage fleets is a neat idea. I think that would have to come hand in hand with a reduction in salvage fleet size though. Or the defenses would have to be significant. Does anyone think a recurring spawn of things to salvage would cause performance issues? That is one thing I can think of that could be a problem considering it would happen periodically in the middle of the campaign. (This would likely be more of a concern when using lots of mods than in vanilla in my mind.)

P.S.
Just a thought relevant to the off-topic discussion: in terms of phrasing and subtext, its worth considering that people from other cultures, or who have learned english in different contexts can interpret tone and subtext differently, and sometime things that seem harsh or hostile to you, are not meant or interpreted as harsh by others (or vice versa). I don't know if that is what is happening here, but it's worth considering.

Absolutely. If I am misinterpreting or others have misinterpreted me then I'm sorry. This is not the case every time I've seen this behavior in the past however.
My advice here is to try and use Alex as an example of appropriate behavior. Everyone slips up, but I can't remember the last time I saw Alex be rude or downplay a point through sarcasm rather than give candid counterpoints that still respect the opinion of the poster. He also takes counterpoints seriously and considers them rather than dismissing them outright. We should all strive to emulate his conscientious diplomacy. Any of the moderators I've seen post here also follow this protocol and look all the better for it.
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iceball3

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Re: NPCs should salvage/recover derelicts
« Reply #43 on: June 10, 2020, 06:57:43 PM »

This is why the other suggestion mentioned upthread, is also extremely ungood.
Making salvage take more time than it does already would be not at all welcome. If anything this process needs streamling more, not padding out.
When you're playing full salvage, you spend a LOT of time salvaging. Almost every object you render for resources needs to be interacted with / salvaged multiple times. With the extra time padding added on to this, that would make the process far more dull.
I didn't strictly mean that salvaging should "take longer" so much as that the maximum amount of salvaging that can be done in a given location ought to be much larger. Specifically, at the bare minimum, would be the ability to "wring dry" your share of the salvage without rendering the location completely devoid of goods, while also not rendering the location a bottomless pit in which to summon space-trash by dumping crew into it.
Thusly, you can still commit to the act of being a space vulture (and ingame, you can already get a renewable source of this by shadowing fleets in a warzone), without having the player rush to a system before a single opposing fleet instantly renders it treasure-less, while also allowing salvage to exist on an industrial scale that'd be implied by what the domain left in it's wake.

To a big extent, this is exactly what tech-mining does colony wise, though in my opinion the period of time in which interesting breakthroughs can occur cuts off too early for a whole industry slot. At least the industry refunds modestly, and packing up the colony in it's entirety isn't especially problematic.
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