So, I've just written a "warp drive" Ability that throws players across the Sector in no time flat.
It took a little doing. SectorEntityToken setContainingLocation() doesn't actually appear to function correctly in the sense of, if I give it a new LocationAPI, the fleet isn't teleported there, at least when applied to player fleets) etc. It also took a while to unravel how to feed it the correct parameters for tooltips and all that.
But hey, it works now. Uses Fuel and everything. If anybody's interested in that, let me know; you'll need to start a new game and change a line in abilities.csv as well as compiling the code, so it's a little non-trivial to add in, but it's interesting.
Anyhow, my initial reaction was gosh, it's nice to not have to travel through Hyperspace for the long hauls. Not in terms of "oh, hey, a working cheat", but more "oh, hey, a mechanic that improves my Fun".
It's not as nice, polished or bug-free (lol) as Fast Travel in a Bethesda title, but it's doing something similar, in that it removes the sheer tedium of walking from A to B.
Hyperspace travel's a lot like the early economies. It's surface-functional, but it's not doing what it should be doing, which is adding Fun. Internal travel within Systems is inherently pretty Fun; I like traveling around, looking for things after I've killed a Bounty or wrecked a Station. It feels eminently polished, and it should; for waaaaay too long, it was all we had, and the sheer amount of playtesting shows.
I've raised the effective speed of Burn a bit, and that made it even more fun; waiting for your fleet to arrive at a planet is a little dull after a while, but a little speedup made a big difference, at least for me; saving a few minutes of tedium to get to the parts that are neat (What's in that floating box? Who's hiding out here?) is fun, and rarely feels like a grind to get <stuff>, at least in my current game.
But Hyperspace travel is pretty dull.
At best, it's time spent watching a fleet move; at worst, it's watching the fleet do crazy pinball antics because you got unlucky with Storms. The minute I tried pushing up Burn speed was when I actually had some vague urge to actually play beyond feature-testing and bug-hunting again.
So... thoughts on how to fix:
1. Travel from star to star needs to either be a lot faster, or have a lot more in the way of meaningful choices happening.
In the Core Systems, at least in early-game Vanilla, I'd imagine things look vaguely scary, at least until you build a fleet of Drovers. I get that it's probably still feeling all right, and any harder and newbies will just run away screaming. That's fine, but that's not where the problems are. Outside the Core Systems, instead of feeling riskier... things feel much safer.
Seriously, unless I accidentally land on a Pirate / Pather base, there's nothing out there that's going to kill me, other than totally-avoidable [REDACTED] infestations. There's nothing flying around in Hyperspace that's dangerous; at worst, maybe I'll run into some Scavenger that wants to fight. Usually, that doesn't end well for them.
This seems like the inverse of how things should feel. In most games like this, the risk / reward of pushing outside the Newbie Zone is clear; you take more risks (and may meet things you just cannot defeat at all) but you get bigger rewards. Here, the "risk" is that I'll run out of Fuel or Supplies; I rarely encounter existential threats or battles I need to save-scum.
The rewards are also a bit goofy. Hull Mods that I cannot get any other way other than taking Commissions are very big, although the impact's pretty muted in Vanilla, where we simply can't mount that many, so it's mainly a matter of finding that one thing you need (but most of those One Things are in the Skill tree unlocks, so it's cool). So it's largely about getting Blueprints and rare weapons / ships. There aren't many of those, in a long game where we're doing a lot of Bounty-clearing, except for the goofy stuff like Auroras where they aren't showing up much in Deserter fleets. The real prize is farming [REDACTED], of course, but it takes time to work up to it.
Meanwhile, exploration for anything other than Class V worlds is pretty pointless past the midgame; if you're playing well, you should have most of the Hull Mods by then and weapons and money a-plenty. I really think there should be dragons out there, waiting on hoards worth the fight.
So, mainly... I end up just wanting things to go faster. Especially once we hit "interstellar whack-a-mole" time, where taking out Pirate bases becomes increasingly important.
2. I'm not in favor of a system of "hyperspace lanes" to get this done unless it's in the context of late-game empire management. In early and midgame, what's really needed is real speedups that affect time spent waiting for the next choice to come up. Sure, in early game, it can be tense, hoping you don't hit <something you can't fight>, but frankly, that's a savescum re-roll; it's annoying RNG, not an opportunity to tell a good story.
Freelancer handled this fairly well; they had lanes that offered the best travel times, but they were inherently risky, because you could get jumped at any moment. This somewhat mitigated the boring of Travel.
It got a bit silly in late-game play, when your ship massively out-classed the low-threat enemies in the safer systems; unfortunately, this area was hard-coded and the lanes couldn't scale their threat to the player's power. Something like that, where it's a bit of a dice-roll, might be satisfying.
3. I feel Hyperspace is far too empty. It doesn't have meaningful places; other than the occasional random floating wreck, there's nothing to see. Honestly, I think that's the biggest thing; when you've seen one bunch of auto-generated clouds, you've seen 'em all. There just isn't that feeling of "over there, we'll run into something Totally Else".
The proc-gen Systems are actually varied enough, both contextually and visually, that I rarely feel this way; other than a few too many one-sun, one-planet Systems, they're fine, in the sense of feeling like places. But Hyperspace doesn't.
How to fix?
Maybe Hyperspace is littered with wormholes that take us somewhere wonderful and weird. Maybe we'll occasionally encounter lost objects from the Domain that teach us some of the lore and embed us into the experience more. Maybe there should be Pirate bases there, so that there are sometimes parts where you can expect regular patrols and serious danger. Or ghost battlefields of wrecked mysterious vessels that clearly predate the arrival of the Domain. There should be dragons, hanging around in the mysterious edges of the map, waiting for the unwary. I think that's the biggest issue; after driving out to the edges a few times, I kept expecting... something dangerous, interesting or inherently weird. Something to make pushing outwards feel worthwhile, vs. optimaxing my Colonies and quitting when I was pointlessly rich.
