Outpost are going to take a great place in the current gameplay. Have you considered an actual endgame, a clear objective that end the game when reached?
Yes, I have considered it
And would the new update (and the ones after) allow several types of gameplay or will it be only focused around outpost? If I take the present version as example, I tend to play exploration fleets, not looking for bounties, or zombie-fleets bounty-chasing, or faction provateer until I kill something big and scary in space. So, different play style, but all very funny.
So, will I be able to have fun without creating outposts? And if I build outposts, can they all be oriented toward, say, trading, or I will have to build a more generic outpost with a little bit of everything (trade, resource, fleet...) to make it work?
It's hard to say exactly. In general, I'd like to support different playstyles. My guess is having at least one colony would be beneficial - maybe not required, but useful. I'm not sure that outposts are a playstyle in and of themselves, but more something you do alongside whatever else you're doing.
Anyway, wow, it getting bigger and better, you're really far from the beginning with just Tibicena, Jangola and Asharu around the lone corvus star (and it was already great at the time!)!
Oh, wow, Tibicena in the Corvus system! That brings me back.
Glazing over the details at the moment, but... Hopefully, the next update will mean 1) more rare stuff are more common (no more reloading games the moment I lose a ship with any weapon not commonly available in open market or pirates' black market), 2) I can produce and acquire undamaged ships without paying a stiff restoration fee, and 3) ability to declare independence from factions by endgame.
1) - probably, yeah 2) it'll take a bit of doing to produce non-(D) ships, but it's possible, and 3) I would imagine so!
R E M O V E T H E M A R K E D T A R G E T T O A C C E P T C O N T R A C T
Haha, yeah. Stomp an unarmed guy with a mech and then pretend you're one of the good guys.
Also love that we get WYSIWYG material for setting faction doctrine and other fun stuff previously only available by braving the .json files.
Cool! Yeah, I'm excited about the possibilities here, even if a lot of it is mostly flavor-fun.
Being able to customize my faction fleets is interesting and matters when I'm fighting along them, but isn't finer detail mostly lost on auto-resolved battles between AI fleets?
Are there any plans to make more complex/precise auto-resolve to make these things matter more?
Yeah, the finer detail is mostly lost for auto-resolve, but that's entirely the point! I'll have to make sure that the officers/quality/quantity options all produce fairly auto-resolve-balanced fleets, too. If some set of options was better for auto-resolve, then you'd pretty much have to always go with those.
Also on topic of player faction AI fleets - how interactive are they going to be?
I mean it's one thing when they just spawn randomly and you do not care what happens to them as long as colony does not get destroyed and you do not need them to support you locally right now. It's quite different if they have costs, maintenance, supplies, bring spoils, interact with local events, etc. That is something approaching 4x.
Honestly, not sure at this point. I don't imagine they'd have maintenance costs at a base level, but I could see, say, having to invest credits into larger fleet operations, that sort of thing. A lot of that is up in the air right now, though.
Amazing blog post, thanks for this.
Thank you!
You mentioned exploration to help us with colony gameplay, I was also thinking if exploration can help us in making our factions more unique too. Are there any blueprints in the game that aren't used by any factions at all? Such as Remnant blueprints or, say, an old Hammerhead design that was used by the TT a long time ago and has now been abandoned in a fringe outpost. I'm not trying to ask for spoilers here, I just would like to know if I can make my faction more distinct and unique instead of it being a weird mix between Hegemony and TT.
That's a possibility, but, as I mentioned a few posts up, I wouldn't necessarily count on it. I do think the doctrine controls offer a good amount of opportunity here with the base ships, as does being able to focus on a few specific ship types. For example, mostly-phase or mostly-carrier fleets would already be pretty different from what the vanilla factions offer. As do any of the doctrinal extremes, really. Will have to see how it feels, though. I think this categorization of ships into Hegemony and TT... well, it makes sense given how the game has been, but I don't subscribe to it, and I think the blueprint system takes steps towards clarifying why that's not the case
Also, I'm no modder but since you are very keen in making this whole system mod friendly, I suggest releasing the Photoshop files behind the blueprint icons so modders can easily make their own.
Oh, excellent - the icons are actually rendered using the ship and weapon sprites, with various effects and overlays, so no extra modding work is required. That it doesn't look like it at first glance is a good sign
Here's my updated suggestion. I threw in numbers in the trademark yellow, it may be clearer than using boxes in the same color.
Oh, hey, yeah - sorry I forgot to respond to this part of it! The "free points" display isn't necessary because the points just get reassigned as necessary, as you adjust the levels. There's some logic to make sure it doesn't do this in "annoying" ways, undoing things you just did.