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Author Topic: Let bounty targets be the fleets of other players (asynchronous multiplayer)  (Read 902 times)

goduranus

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"Hegemony has posted a bounty for bringing Goduranus, a notorious pirate, to justice. Goduranus is known to be skilled in coordinated maneuvers and electronic warfare and is in command of a large fleet.

The bounty posting also contains partial intel on some of the ships under his command.
[Astral][Astral][Astral][Astral][Heron][Heron][Heron][Heron]..."

Like that game called reassembly, when a player defeats a boss fleet his own fleet is uploaded, to become a boss enemy in another player's game.

It would be fun to run into people who are trolling the system by using a fleet of 30 paragons.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2019, 04:40:07 AM by goduranus »
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Midnight Kitsune

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Mod ships would be an issue though. And settings file tweaks.
I can see this possibly being a mod, but not a vanilla thing though
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Morbo513

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This would be really cool. My biggest issue with bounties and NPC fleets in general is that they're usually not very diverse in ship and weapon types, usually restricted by faction, whereas the player might have an absolute mishmash of ships and weapons. This would be a great way to break that up.
Mods are certainly an issue, but I do wonder if there could be some kinda workaround - If the upload part contained some data about the ships in the fleet analogues could be used. Eg. my fleet has Mantis <Frigate> with 60 OP, X hullmods, Y armour, Z speed. For a player fighting my fleet who doesn't have BRDY installed, that ship would be replaced with the closest thing in their modset according to those parameters. Same could be done with weapons and hullmods - but as a layman that all sounds terribly complex.
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Amoebka

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My biggest issue with bounties and NPC fleets in general is that they're usually not very diverse in ship and weapon types, usually restricted by faction, whereas the player might have an absolute mishmash of ships and weapons.

I suspect player fleets will be much worse in that regard. Your average player doesn't run an absolute mishmash of ships and weapons, they run a fleet that works. Best case you will get some epic memers with 30 SO hounds, but much more often it will be Astral-Heron from the OP, or SO Hammerheads, or pirate Falcons, or some other broken meta strategy.

Another issue is that a lot of good player ships are bad for AI. I'm pretty sure Dooms and reaper Gryphons would be overrepresented in these player bounties, yet AI can't fly that nearly as efficiently.
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Goumindong

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It also means writing a query for player fleets and maintaining a server that collects and distributes the information

It would be easier to accept player submissions and make a mod that included those fleets as bounty fleets.
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goduranus

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It wouldn't be that hard right? While nothing in programming truly simple, uploading and downloading a ~1kb text file for every player that plays the game is probably among the simpler things. I suspect the majority of the players of any game don't play with mods, so if this were a good feature(whether it is or not, the merits of which we are still debating), then building it into stock game will let more players have fun being a part of it.

bobucles

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For a vanilla game, taking a screenshot of the player's fleet and weapons seems like a perfectly doable thing. As soon as mods jump into the picture, all bets are off. There will be ships and weapons the game has no understanding of, and a fancy mod might include new types of mechanics that the core game can't grasp. Tracking all the possible variables across all the possible combinations of mods and keeping them coherent against each other? That sounds very hard.

goduranus

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With regards to network traffic, maybe it could be limited to just ~10 enemy fleets downloaded and 1 player fleet uploaded  per session or something. Maybe retain only a limited number of fleet composition per game key on the server, so that if I play 10x as much as another guy, and therefore my fleets gets uploaded 10x as often, my fleet wouldn't be retained 10x as much on the server, wouldn't be overrepresented compared to a guy who plays less.

Or, fleet design could be integrated with Steam workshop, if that ever becomes a thing, so players could subscribe, and either refit fleet from import, or fight the fleets they subscribed as bounties.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2019, 11:24:33 PM by goduranus »
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CommandoDude

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Saying mods make this idea unworkable seems pretty silly to me.

The game's autofit algorithm can already replace weapon mounts with suitable substitutes if you lack such weapons. Likewise, mod ships can be either ignored or replaced by vanilla variants easily.
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bobucles

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Saying mods make this idea unworkable seems pretty silly to me.

The game's autofit algorithm can already replace weapon mounts with suitable substitutes if you lack such weapons. Likewise, mod ships can be either ignored or replaced by vanilla variants easily.
Aha. So it's a system that tracks and uploads player loadouts, but completely ignores the data and does whatever it wants.