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[Okim]

Thanks for the tip with max fleets. Surely may be very handy!

[Okim]

While working on the independents ship roles I realized that these guys are going to be quite interesting in terms of weapon and ship diversity. Guess that they should get a couple of their own trading hubs somewhere in neutral territory (or a rented base in each factions` main system). Otherwise with just cargo storages they wont provide player with their weapon choices (which is much more widespread than of any of the individual faction`s choice).

Also these guys are allowing me to keep the original civilian-grade combat ships without the need to convert them to military colour schemes (which saves a lot of time!).

[Okim]

Faction icons concepts.

 

 

Guess there is no need to sign each of them?

FFS does not have a concept yet and FTG will be using vanilla independents icon. Pirates will do the same.

[Creepin]

1. Independents.

Excellent idea on its own, even without the nudge from 0.65 logic: the more lesser factions there are, the better.

2. New player generation dialogue.

Fine IMO. However, instead of making all players to spawn tied to neutrals, what about letting them to chose if they want to or rather prefer to have some allegiance right from the start, if only for roleplay/immersion sake? Unless it's a lot of work of course.

3. Map size and density.

Another good idea: if you'll condense the same quantity of bases per faction into fewer systems, I believe it would be more funny overall.

[Okim]

Regarding 2. I wish to avoid allowing player to skip the fun part of trading/hunting his way towards the good relationship with factions. Dialogue will provide some boost in relationship towards one of the factions (at a cost of penalty towards the other one), but that`s just a small kick start for player - nothing really significant.

[jupjupy]

1.) While I'm not against this idea, I do prefer 'civilian' spacefleets under the main factions. I think it added a little more depth to the parallels between Ironclads and Cold War history, what with the possible tariffs and such. Certainly many governmentally-subsidised companies would have little say against the likely trade embargo between the ISA and the RSF. I don't know anything about how hard this would be to do, but personally I'd like it if the Free Traders Guild was only a small portion of the overall trading scene, letting large, faction-oriented civilian tradefleets like it used to be.

2.) I liked the ability to 'enlist' in a factional military, though maybe not the pirates. Though I suppose this is a minor thing once the game actually begins.

3.) Less systems seems alright. Was kinda crazy in the previous versions, and especially with the new intel tab this could get cluttered way too quickly.

[SCC]

1. Yeah, why not? After all in current version of Project Ironclads every civilian faction trades mainly in faction's space (save for big trade fleets), so FTG will play role of international (it sounds brilliant ) trader, operating mainly in between each faction. I'm wondering if they will share star systems with pirates...
2. IMO there should be only dislikes from certain faction and no extra good terms (after all, to your homeland you're just another normal guy, so there is no reason for them to like you more than one another), at least now - because now it's awfully easy to make everyone like you through bounties... I also think it's good to make FFS (when they will be functional) suspicious towards you and on a brink of being hostile - they are doing things very similar to those that pirates do and one bad step should make them attack you on sight.
*sees he's been ninja'd*
Oh. Well, if you want it that way... Though it's kinda strange that you're able to buy faction's military ships from the start (unless bonus is less than 10 points - then it's... For me more acceptable, but it's just my opinion).
3. I don't really care about that.

It would be nice if it was possible to make good relations with one faction block getting high relations with other, such thing fits ideally Ironclads' situation (besides obvious ISA-RSF hate being at high position in FTG would block getting cooperative with ISA and RSF, for example).

[Okim]

The thing is that if you get cooperative with one faction and this blocks you form getting cooperative with the other - it may result in a bad situation where player just gets stuck unless he starts to be agressive with his cooperative fella.

[Farlarzia]

Regarding 3, I personally preferred the large, expansive system, and exploring it.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to do, or if you'd even be interested in doing such a thing, but would have map size option in the character creation be a possibility, like in exerelin, but with set maps for each size.
This would allow people to have a map size based on what there computer could run, or they would be interested in

TL;DR
Variable map sizes?

[DaFranker]

Regarding 3, I personally preferred the large, expansive system, and exploring it.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to do, or if you'd even be interested in doing such a thing, but would have map size option in the character creation be a possibility, like in exerelin, but with set maps for each size.
This would allow people to have a map size based on what there computer could run, or they would be interested in

TL;DR
Variable map sizes?

The main problem with variable map sizes is that you then have to either: 1) Build two versions. 2) Make the mod as an "extra systems" version, but remove / skip most of them by default, which can be pretty damn hard to balance.

And one way or another, extra systems means extra work unless some sort of procedural generation is in play.

Not that this doesn't stop me from agreeing: I also like the large sector with lots of systems, and I prefer many systems over less. If the performance issues can be resolved, I'd say go for many systems.

[PerfectDeath]

If you think about it, how would the RSF and ISA know if the merchants are trading between the two? Traders travel light years to get to their destination. SO I really doubt they'd be bothered to enforce any trade embargo.

However, I do recall seeing smugglers turning red (Pirate colour) while loading or unloading from a pirate planet. What if this applies to the free merchants where they swap allegiance while loading/unloading allowing you to attack these merchants only while they are clearly trading with an enemy faction. Or is that something only exclusive to smugglers?

[Okim]

Well, after 12+ hours of constant modding i finally managed to set up 6 RSF systems with various markets in them.

It was quite a tedious path, but i managed to cut through all the stings and burst towards the stars. The most problematic was to hunt down some stupid typos i`ve made in various IDs that caused me so much trouble (and hit Alex with spam of my 'why do i get this error' messages)...

Current build has just 3 factions - RSF, pirates and free traders. These guys manage to spam 100 allowed trade fleets just during initial game creation! 60% of these fleets sit in just 2 systems making it almost impossible to select the station they all orbit. Hope this will auto-resolve once more factions kick in.

Out of 6 runs made so far (each at least 20minutes long) i`ve noticed some funny things. Starting from FTG selling AI Pulsars ending with FTG trading station having full inventory of every commodity in the mod (including trophey plates and rock fly parts). Those are easy to fix once i start working on Ironclads-specific market conditions.

One playthrough turned out pretty bad for RSF - the whole faction experienced devastating shortages of every single commodity. Even worser - 3 major food production colonies had food shortages resulting in more shortages blasting in other systems

I`ve noticed that pirates are somewhat too devastating to any market. Even markets of size 8 with military bases are suffering from pirate raids - they just shot down unloading/loading traders one by one while outrunning any patrols and defenders. Probably i should move pirate bases somewhere outside of any faction systems (currently there is a size 1 market with just criminals condition sitting on a distant moon in one of the richest RSF systems).

[Okim]

Plans for the economy system thus far are to:

- introduce some extra 'vice' goods: UIN produced 'psi-benders' as a legal kind of drugs. 'Rock-blast' as a out-of-rock-fly produced high price drugs (FFS-made).
- intoduce fabricated ship parts and weapon components as well as a Fabricator Complex to produce these out of metals, volatiles and organics. Weps for military bases. Probably will make some kind of script to add extra weapons for the military market.
- introduce a ship yard (or modify a space port) to demand parts, metals and basically every indusrtial commodity. Probably will make it to add extra ship hulls in far future if a demand of the market is met at some point.
- introduce advanced hydroponics condition that will produce food out of organics, volatiles and heavy machinery regardless of planet type.
- introduce rock fly incubator that will produce 'fly brights' as a luxury resource (greenish crystals as juvelry) and fuel out of metals and rare metals.
- introduce rock fly pens that will produce the same brights, but instead of fuel it will produce Rock-Blast drugs. Might put on a fancy event that will spawn an angry rock fly to smash anything in orbit - kind of an escaped beast.
- introduce medicaments and make out an epidemy event to demand these. Might create a Medical Factory for this one that demands volatiles and organics.
- add some events for production boosts (and prices going down), production drops and etc when/if i figure out how to do them.

[DatonKallandor]

I`ve noticed that pirates are somewhat too devastating to any market. Even markets of size 8 with military bases are suffering from pirate raids - they just shot down unloading/loading traders one by one while outrunning any patrols and defenders. Probably i should move pirate bases somewhere outside of any faction systems (currently there is a size 1 market with just criminals condition sitting on a distant moon in one of the richest RSF systems).

Do you have Mercenary and Bounty Hunter fleets set up for the Independents? I think that's what keeps the Pirates in check in vanilla .65.

[Okim]

The problem is that i don`t have that much FTG stations (to be precise - currently there is just one station). FTG should not have any major forces present in faction systems.