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[Jonlissla]

As the title reads, I feel there is too much reliance on a single ingame resource which is Supplies. It is literally used for everything in the game, and every action you take affect it. Too much crew? Supply penalty. Took a hit in combat? Have to repair, which costs supplies. Low CR? Supplies to bring it up to manageable level. Accident? You damage a ship, take a CR hit, perhaps lose some stuff in the process. All which in the end affect Supplies. It's a single resource which is used for everything, and this is excruciatingly annoying.

My suggestion is to split it up into either two or three parts in order to distribute the burden over several resources, so you are no longer dependant exclusively on Supplies.

Each resource would have its own function;

• Resource for crew upkeep
• Resource for ship repair
• Resource for ship CR

These items can obviously be made to affect one another in some way or remain exclusive, and it's fully possible to only use two instead of all three, as long as the player is not solely dependant on Supplies.

Thoughts?

[FloW]

The decision to just use supplies was actually made to reduce micromanagement and just abstract all the things you mentioned. There will be different trading goods, but supplies probably stay.

Pretty sure that some will like it the way it is now, while some want more stuff to fiddle around with.

[Cycerin]

Why would it magically become more interesting just because you need to spend 30k credits on three different types of supply as opposed to a single type? Because you'd have to figure out which one to spend the most money on? That just sounds tedious.

Anything directly related to the health of your fleet should boil down to Supplies. Anything else is likely to be covered by a trade commodity, industrial resources or whatever down the road. Then you will have actual reasons to plan ahead and figure out how much you can bring on a trade run while still leaving enough supplies to plan for any eventualities. That will IMO be a meaningful way to make a player figure out what to spend the most money/cargo space on.

[Doogie]

Why would it magically become more interesting just because you need to spend 30k credits on three different types of supply as opposed to a single type? Because you'd have to figure out which one to spend the most money on? That just sounds tedious.

Anything directly related to the health of your fleet should boil down to Supplies. Anything else is likely to be covered by a trade commodity, industrial resources or whatever down the road. Then you will have actual reasons to plan ahead and figure out how much you can bring on a trade run while still leaving enough supplies to plan for any eventualities. That will IMO be a meaningful way to make a player figure out what to spend the most money/cargo space on.

This is mostly true, but a complex resource system, if done well, can add a multitude of depth to the game. I'm thinking of Age of Empires right now, as the triple resource system sets them apart from their competitors. I know it's a different type of game, but I still think that with this it is very possible to implement a good system of several resources.

[sirboomalot]

I believe the reason why multiple resources add to the game in a rts is because the player can choose to harvest more or less of a resource depending on what they want to do. More stone in age of empires, for example, can lead to more defences with walls and towers.


I don't see how multiple necessary resources in starsector will really add anything. If you split supplies into three resources, it will be three resources that you are exclusively dependent on instead of one resource you are dependent upon. The only change would be the addition of the player having to balance their three resources.

I'd rather the supplies be kept as a single multi-purpose item, I don't play this game to micromanage resources, and it seems to me like that is all splitting supplies up would do.

[Alex]

Hmm. I don't think you've really explained why you think relying on supplies to cover all these is a problem, and what benefits splitting them out like that would bring.

Consider the downsides, too: impact on the learning curve and extra demands on the UI, as well as extra micromanagement the player has to do to keep the fleet running.

It's not something I'd reject out of hand, but I've thought about it quite a bit, and ended up with supplies being the main resource. (There's also fuel, let's not forget that.) It's important that new mechanics actually offer interesting choices to the player, in this case why you'd stock more of one than the other.

Fuel vs supplies is fairly clear - fuel to be able to go farther, supplies to be more durable and have more time. Plus fuel just has a sufficiently different feel that handwaving it to be the same as supplies would feel weird, though that's subjective and could really be worked around. You could probably abstract it into "supply points" and have it work as fuel, too. Besides, I do like the idea that later on fuel can become a major consideration - you can putter around all you want in a single star system, but making a long journey would still be quite an undertaking.

So, to sum it up: additional complexity has to bring interesting choices, interesting enough to justify the downsides that inevitably come with it, and more interesting than other things that could be done instead. In this particular case, the downsides appear massive.

[ValkyriaL]

I think fuel should also be on a constant drain, however minor it might be, because even while running on idle or simply propelling the ship under low power while in -in-system travel, an engine still drains fuel, if you completely run out of fuel, you run at 10% of your fleets maximum burn speed.

[PCCL]

I feel when industry is a part of the game, there might be further need for other resources

Resources are scarce in the world of SS, and when sustaining a faction, being self sustaining shouldn't be just down to holding one lava covered mining planet and letting your crew eat the metal. The lore said something about the farmers of Verdaria II and the industrial autoworld of Hastaeus Prime, would be nice to make the distinction between things like this

I mean, when for example I want to bring down the Hegemony, I'd want to be able to lay siege to Verdaria and cut off rations to her other core worlds, forcing them to attack me or starve. Or when a faction is laying siege to my farm world, it'd be nice to be forced to seek out other means of feeding my people instead of just holing up in other systems

[FlashFrozen]

If I wanted to think about the future of starsector for I'd want to diversify logiatical ship requirements, while sure having only one real resource is simple its not necessarily good, like examples before what's the difference between a metal Rich lava planet producing supplies vs a farm planet producing supplies, it doesn't matter which, you have no need to decide on which to invest in, your supplies are magically and one all produced. This is with industry in mind.

I'd rather split ships to ammo-material-resource and the current supplies only for crew use. If you want to keep it simple make lower tiers have same material usage as its supply usage. I find the full cr 10% supply usage fairly learny curvy/ui based.

This way you can have an idea that can be changed/expanded on as you tier into higher ships with differing material needs (after battles think supply usage a day to repair cr) in addition to supply usage for crew

More is not necessarily better but having so little choice is not exactly a positive either (cough x rebirth)

[Alex]

Without getting into too much detail, managing the logistical situation for your fleet and managing planetary production don't necessarily have much bearing on each other. I certainly wouldn't assume that they're going to be the same.

[Gothars]

It's important that new mechanics actually offer interesting choices to the player, in this case why you'd stock more of one than the other.

That's not much of a choice when it comes to fuel and supplies though, they use different storage facilities after all. It might be interesting to let each resource use the storage space meant for the other one, at higher cost. Say, once the cargo hold is full but there's still space for fuel, supplies are automatically stored there, but each supply takes up three fuel space units.

[Alex]

You're right, right now there isn't because fuel is intentionally very cheap and the fuel capacity of ships relative to the distance there is to travel is very high. The choice would be how much to actually spend on it, whether to, say, set up a fuel stockpile somewhere to enable further exploration, etc.

[Jonlissla]

Hmm. I don't think you've really explained why you think relying on supplies to cover all these is a problem, and what benefits splitting them out like that would bring.

I feel like there is a overdependence on Supplies, putting all eggs in once basket so to speak. It's like universal ammunition in a FPS game. Does it simplify the game? Yes, it does, but it also adds no variety at all.

Supplies are currently used for literally everything aside from travelling in Hyperspace, even crew upkeep. Adding a new item for the crew entirely will not only make the game more immersive but also get rid of the constant supply drain.

Consider the downsides, too: impact on the learning curve and extra demands on the UI, as well as extra micromanagement the player has to do to keep the fleet running.

Learning a game takes times, a tutorial and some help messages will help you out but in the end playing a game is a learning experience. I can't see there being more micromanagement in the game by adding, for example, "Provisions" for crew upkeep in the game. It makes perfect sense that your crew will need food in order to survive the trip instead of eating Flux Capacitors for breakfast.

In many Pirate themed games and such you often have three classic resources; food for the crew, cloth to repair the sails, and planks to repair the ships themselves. All of these have exclusive purposes and having less of one of them gives a penalty without breaking the gameflow. For example, having no cloth to repair your sails? No worries, the only penalty you get is having reduced speed. No planks to repair your hull? No worries, even though you can easily die in combat your speed is unaffected. Having no food? Slight worry, morale will go down and you might have a mutiny and lose crewmembers. In Starsector though, having no supplies means that you are, effectively, dead. Because every egg has been put in the same basket.

[Toxcity]

I think a better idea would be to let the player decide how many supplies are spent on what.

[Aeson]

Supplies are currently used for literally everything aside from travelling in Hyperspace, even crew upkeep. Adding a new item for the crew entirely will not only make the game more immersive but also get rid of the constant supply drain.

How will splitting the current supplies resource into a 'food, water, and air' resource and an 'ammunition and spare parts' resource remove the supply drain? The crew will still be consuming the 'food, water, and air' resource at some rate dependent on the number of people present, and presumably there's some amount of maintenance, and perhaps gunnery practice, being performed on all the ships in the fleet, which would result in some consumption rate for the 'ammunition and spare parts' resource. All that splitting supplies up does is to create two resources which are consumed at some rate all the time, which you then need to balance when preparing your fleet.

Is it a potentially more interesting situation than having a unified resource? Yes, if you happen to like the logistical side of things. Is it harder to get right when you're new to the game? Yep. Does it get rid of the slow drain on supplies, be they the current version or the split version? Not for any reason that I can see.

It's also at least one more resource which must be displayed on the UI - both 'food, water, and air' and 'ammunition and spare parts' are things which are essential for any theoretical starfaring vessel. A 'food, water, and air' resource simply has to be constantly consumed by the crew, and while you could probably argue that the 'ammunition' component of an 'ammunition and spare parts' resource would only be consumed in battles (though I know of no real-world navy which never engages in some form of gunnery practice), routine maintenance and occasional component failures would impose a small, continual drain on the 'spare parts' side. Since (presumably) the crew will die without the 'food, water, and air' resource, and the ships cannot be maintained in an operational condition without the 'spare parts' side of the 'ammunition and spare parts' resource and cannot fight without the 'ammunition' side (or at least the weapon systems which use ammunition are unusable without it), both resources are sufficiently important to be displayed somewhere in the UI - presumably, it's a loss condition if your crew starves to death, and it's probably also one if your ships are in such poor repair that they can neither fly nor fight; it's certainly a loss condition if your ships are in such poor repair that systems are failing and killing off crew members or destroying ships.

Yes, it's currently true that supplies are the only consumable resource that you need to worry about when determining how you will allocate your cargo space. However, since the game is intended to include a trading component, we will presumably gain at least one resource which will compete with supplies for cargo space, and I don't see that balancing 'food, water, and air', 'ammunition and spare parts', and whatever we get for trade goods will be particularly more interesting than balancing the current supplies against whatever we get for trade goods, especially if we get multiple kinds of trade goods which have varied values dependent upon where you are. Another thing to consider is that fuel will presumably become more valuable as a resource once there's a good reason to make frequent trips between star systems, and between 'trade goods', 'supplies', and 'fuel' you do have a three-resource model - fuel for (long-range) movement, supplies for keeping your ships workable, and trade goods for acquiring the supplies to keep ships operational, the fuel to keep your ships moving, and the money to acquire additional or better ships.

I will agree that fuel could potentially be more interesting if there were something to compete with it, but on the other hand, if the fuel is a liquid or a compressed gas, it's possible to store useful amounts of it in areas of a ship which cannot reasonably be used for storing solid goods, and it's not at all unbelievable for the fuel to be of a type which makes storing goods in empty portions of fuel tanks, or in empty fuel tanks, undesirable. With liquid or gas fuels, it's also entirely reasonable for the interior of the tank to be inaccessible (or nearly so) without damaging the tank, and for any access points added to the setup for maintenance purposes to be less than ideal for cargo handling.