Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: michael1 on August 28, 2016, 11:30:18 AM

Title: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 28, 2016, 11:30:18 AM
If you were to run out of supplies or fuel in the middle space and there were nearby friendly fleets, realistically you would try to contact them for help instead of slowly drifting to a planet or sector thousands of light years away, right? I suggest adding an ability to the campaign map (like go dark and emergency burn) that sends out an SOS signal that invites friendly and maybe neutral fleets to trade with you. The flip side would be that the prices on anything a fleet sells you would be heavily marked up unless they're very friendly, and the SOS signal would extend much further then the transponder so you would be potentially broadcasting your location to enemy fleets as well. This could also add a new dynamic to the game where you could sell supplies to stranded ships sending out SOS signals for extra profit or give free supplies to increase your reputation with that faction and even have pirates broadcast SOS signals to bait people looking to make profit this way.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Dri on August 28, 2016, 01:35:02 PM
Sounds like a great idea to me! I think someone has already brought this up at one point or another, though.

Anything to get more interaction with your allies is a good thing to me.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Deshara on August 28, 2016, 01:56:35 PM
Basically just plagiarize FTL here
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Sy on August 28, 2016, 02:55:37 PM
i agree with Dri.

and yeah, iirc something like this has been suggested before. can't remember what/if Alex responded to it, though.


Basically just plagiarize FTL here
i very much doubt the FTL devs were the first ones to ever come up with the idea of spaceships sending out a distress signal when they get 'stranded in space'. :P

and gameplay-wise, it would be quite different from FTL (mainly because the two games are simply fundamentally different).
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Weltall on August 28, 2016, 03:04:54 PM
I think the talk the previous time, was about an SOS signal, when someone gets stuck in a system that has no market and that happens due to lack of fuel. Once you get stuck there and you can't buy fuel, the player more or less has no way of escaping and refueling, leaving him to an inevitable death~

At least the one I remember, was this one (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=10881.0).

Not sure if that is what you remember Sy.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 28, 2016, 04:26:07 PM
Sounds like a great idea to me! I think someone has already brought this up at one point or another, though.

Anything to get more interaction with your allies is a good thing to me.

Yea, it only occurred to me that someone would probably already have suggested an sos signal until after I made the post. Still, I think the transponder is a really cool mechanic for a mount and blade style game so I would really like to see it fleshed out in the form of different signals.

SOS signals could be just a sub category of various signals you could send. There could be various signals such as sos signals, trade request signals, identification request signals, long range scan signals that would show very limited information such as marking anything it finds as an unidentified object, encrypted signals containing information, etc. If the transponder mechanic is fleshed out in this way a lot of these signals can come with an encryption mechanic where the player can level up the strength of their encryption/decryption skills through skills.

This way you could, for example, encrypt a help signal and send it to an ally which a hostile fleet can decrypt. If they have a high enough decryption level they can see that you're in trouble and find your location. If you were participating in a war you could send encrypted commands which enemy fleets could decrypt and act upon, but that would probably be hard to implement. If you wanted to find out market conditions on some planet you could broadcast an information request that if decrypted would give away your location. Perhaps there could also be merchant fleets broadcasting encrypted trade request signals that you would either need codes for by being friendly with their faction or by decrypting the signal to find their location. There could also be decryption focused fleets that just sit in space decrypting signals for factions, this would help give factions some direction in where to send their fleets, and you could destroy the decryption focused fleets to harm the factions ability to efficiently send their fleets to the right places. There could be events with wreckage in space still broadcasting signals. Another thing, an idea i got from this post:


Transponder Frequency: this kind of goes with the "fake transponder" earlier but instead of allowing docking, it simply makes your fleet appear as if they were actually Hegemony, Tri-Tach, etc. Obviously you could look like Hegemony in Corvus but as you approach Magec, you switch it to look like Tri-Tach. Would be useful if you were trying to operate in territory that you were hostile to. Of course, if patrols look close enough and see through the disguise (and they're hostile), they'll shoot on site. A smuggler's or pirate's best friend. Perhaps to get a faction's transponder frequencies you have to a.) get friendly enough that they give them to you or b.) install a comm sniffer on one of their relays. Perhaps they could even be bought/sold on the black market for a pretty penny.


So you could have pirates baiting through other means too, not just sos signals. They could bait through fake transponders and if they somehow get a hold of a Tri-Tachyon encrypted trade request frequencies, they could broadcast those to bait fleets friendly with Tri-Tachyon.

The only problem I see is that having a bunch of signals bounce around the campaign map would probably slow down the game a lot.


Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Sy on August 28, 2016, 05:04:24 PM
well, one major potential problem i see with any kind of mechanic that lets someone hide/fake their identity (beyond what is already possible) is that the current sensor + transponder mechanics are already frustratingly hard to many players, especially new ones. there's already a good amount of complexity to learn, and if you're not careful or don't know what you're doing, it's very easy to get into really bad situations.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 28, 2016, 05:25:35 PM
well, one major potential problem i see with any kind of mechanic that lets someone hide/fake their identity (beyond what is already possible) is that the current sensor + transponder mechanics are already frustratingly hard to many players, especially new ones. there's already a good amount of complexity to learn, and if you're not careful or don't know what you're doing, it's very easy to get into really bad situations.

In that case you could have whatever faction the player starts out friendly with give the player signals or decryption codes to help balance the early game. For example, if the player is friendly with hegemony and a hegemony fleet in a battle wants help, it can send an encrypted help signal that the player could pick up on. That way the player can easily find battles to participate in the early game. The player could also receive hegemony encrypted help request signals or escort request signals etc. as abilities, though the amount of signals first given to the player would have to be limited to reduce the learning curve.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Deshara on August 28, 2016, 06:16:38 PM
To be fair tho if your fleet's out if fuel and supplies, the only prudent move, with ships being so valuable and officers and crew not, is to sit on the other side of a jump point that any SOS came out of and wait till the SOS ended and go salvage the derelicts.
Best case scenario would be that they show up and offer you a shuttle with full supplies and fuel in exchange for your fleet and everything on it, and if you refuse they go to option A until you accept B.
Both of those options, in current gameplay terms, end with the player resetting as if (or because they did) died, with all their physical possessions gone and only their credits left because an extortionist can't know how much is in your savings
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 28, 2016, 06:40:03 PM
To be fair tho if your fleet's out if fuel and supplies, the only prudent move, with ships being so valuable and officers and crew not, is to sit on the other side of a jump point that any SOS came out of and wait till the SOS ended and go salvage the derelicts.
Best case scenario would be that they show up and offer you a shuttle with full supplies and fuel in exchange for your fleet and everything on it, and if you refuse they go to option A until you accept B.
Both of those options, in current gameplay terms, end with the player resetting as if (or because they did) died, with all their physical possessions gone and only their credits left because an extortionist can't know how much is in your savings

Yea, that would be the risk of sending out an SOS signal and how it would be balanced out. Sending out an unencrypted SOS signal should be a last resort ability because if something unfriendly picks it up you would end up in a forced fight with low combat readiness.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Sy on August 28, 2016, 07:16:00 PM
though the amount of signals first given to the player would have to be limited to reduce the learning curve.
that's my point, though: the learning curve is already too steep. no matter how little you add to it, any additional complexity from mechanics that are not immediately obvious will only make matters worse, even if only a little.

this might well change in the future, though. Alex certainly seems commited to making stuff easier in early game / for new players.


To be fair tho if your fleet's out if fuel and supplies, the only prudent move, with ships being so valuable and officers and crew not, is to sit on the other side of a jump point that any SOS came out of and wait till the SOS ended and go salvage the derelicts.
Best case scenario would be that they show up and offer you a shuttle with full supplies and fuel in exchange for your fleet and everything on it, and if you refuse they go to option A until you accept B.
if you're friendly with a fleet's faction, i don't think it would make much sense for them to extort everything they can from you just because they can. that would be almost as bad as openly attacking you, and the involved factions as a whole would react accordingly. i think it would even make sense for factions that don't hate each other too much (like Independents and Hegemony) to have official agreements regarding lending aid to stranded fleets of the other, since unlike helping each other in combat, there's no real risk or cost to the helper besides a little lost time.

besides, just the fact that you would buy whatever you need from them at much higher price than you would pay at any nearby market would already mean they're taking advantage of the situation -- just in a much more reasonable manner.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Schwartz on August 29, 2016, 02:55:08 AM
An SOS signal could also be used as a tactical move to lure ships. It's pretty much a spaceship Sci-Fi staple by now. It'd have to be balanced to be situational and not just a winbutton for an engagement you'd otherwise have to chase, but it sounds doable. Maybe tied to your transponder with a guaranteed rep hit as an act of piracy. Faking a transponder could take it another step further.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Megas on August 29, 2016, 05:07:12 AM
I would either reload my game or, if I am poor enough, scuttle and wipe my fleet to respawn like a lich.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Histidine on August 29, 2016, 05:30:09 AM
Even without a specific SOS signal, it'd be nice to be able to walk up to fleets that happen to pass by and buy or beg for supplies/fuel from them. It seems like the logical thing to do in that scenario.

(Yeah, you can currently just transponder-off blow them up and loot their hulks, but that's not very nice is it?)
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 29, 2016, 09:00:01 AM
though the amount of signals first given to the player would have to be limited to reduce the learning curve.
that's my point, though: the learning curve is already too steep. no matter how little you add to it, any additional complexity from mechanics that are not immediately obvious will only make matters worse, even if only a little.

this might well change in the future, though. Alex certainly seems commited to making stuff easier in early game / for new players.

That would probably depend on how the information is presented to the player. I know I don't speak for everyone, but personally when I first played this game a lot of the difficulty came from trying to find out where to go on the campaign map to efficiently make credits. Mount and blade kinda has this issue too, but the developers added tracks/footprints so you have some direction on where to go to find battles. Leaving tracks wouldn't make much sense in a space game like starsector, so why not make use of the transponder mechanic to give direction instead since it has potential and is unique to starsector.

If the various signals are presented to the player as "quests", like how mmo's have a list of quests displayed on the right, then I think new players will have a much easier time understanding what they're being shown. That way, when a player first starts up starsector they will see a list of text on the right in a familiar mmo quest text format showing nearby events (like a nearby fight) occuring that they could waypoint and easily find. This would help lower the learning curve from where it is now. Since these wouldn't actually be quests, you could also have a frequency graph as a visual representation of the signals in the top right of the ui that would show a colored animated squiggly line for each signal the player picks up to help visually differentiate the signals from mmo quests. This format would also be perfect for the decryption mechanic since a player could just click on the signal/quest text to attempt a decryption.

An SOS signal could also be used as a tactical move to lure ships. It's pretty much a spaceship Sci-Fi staple by now. It'd have to be balanced to be situational and not just a winbutton for an engagement you'd otherwise have to chase, but it sounds doable. Maybe tied to your transponder with a guaranteed rep hit as an act of piracy. Faking a transponder could take it another step further.

Yea, baiting fleets should definitely give a bigger rep hit then just normally chasing down fleets. The way I see it, it would be balanced out by giving other fleets the same tools. For example lets say you're trying to bait a small Tri Tachyon fleet but a nearby large Tri Tachyon fleet with a high decryption skill picks up on it and decrypts it. Then the large fleet can send a warning signal to the small fleet that the source of the signal is actually hostile. Or, if the small fleet has a high enough decryption skill, it can send a help request signal to the larger fleet and then maybe have the larger fleet turn off their transponder or use the go dark ability to fool the player into a 2 v 1 battle.

Even without a specific SOS signal, it'd be nice to be able to walk up to fleets that happen to pass by and buy or beg for supplies/fuel from them. It seems like the logical thing to do in that scenario.

(Yeah, you can currently just transponder-off blow them up and loot their hulks, but that's not very nice is it?)

The problem with that is that it can be very had to catch a moving ship when you have a low burn level. And being able to buy supplies from other ships with no other consequences then higher prices might be too unbalancing.

Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: Deshara on August 29, 2016, 09:52:18 AM
How about if this functionality is rolled into fleet operations/faction relations? Skill line in the fleet tree focuses on faction relations, expanding the range at which you can give or take aide from friendly fleets, and unlocks a hullmod like most do at level 10 that only works for small ships, is designed to be put on a shuttle that outfits it for long-range solo interstellar travel, makes it fill itself with fuel and supplies and then locks it to not be used for repairs or cr, makes it unable to be used in combat (automatically retreats) and unlocks an active campaign ability that sends out the shuttle from your fleet with its emergency reserves under the command of a liason officer from the closest, friendliest faction who off-screen emergency burns to the nearest market and calls for an emergency resupply run at the cost of a sizeable hit to your remaining goodwill from the faction (doesn't put you in hostile status unless pirates, will come back to that).
When the fleet arrives, the dialogue gives you the options of compensating them for the cost of your fuel and supplies gained (only mitigates the damage to relations a little bit because no faction wants to be on good terms with an idiot that can't calculate their minimum fuel needs like the rest of the galaxy), you can compensate them for your costs and the cost of their fuel and supplies getting there and back (halves the relations loss, and costs roughly 3x the last option but is still a pain in the assignment for them because that's time lost they could have been doing something else), or you can offer to pay them for their costs and ask them if they want to see what was so important for you to inconvenience them, which opens a trade window from you showing them what your haul was that necessitated you stranding yourself, and the supply fleet automatically has a selection of your cargo slated to be transfered over to them, based on the value of those goods at their faction's economy, preferring goods with a high value/space ratio and with whether they're just asking you to compensate them for their time fairly or how much they're exhorting you depending on where you stood with the faction when you sent the shuttle. Oh and you could just say "sorry, I have nothing to give you" and walking away a free loader.

Then, once they've left, you have to deal with the high possibility that your SOS shuttle was seen because of its judicious use of emergency burn and what it was doing figured out and the supply fleet being followed to you by a scavenger fleet of the faction that might most want you dead (or just pirates because that's what they do), making, for a small independent fleet, making sure that the convoy is happy enough with you afterwards that they wouldn't just sit back and watch you get eaten by wolves more important the more toes you've stepped on.

I hear you asking "what happens if you're not friendly with anyone?" Well, the independent are a loose faction, and one of their traders won't care that you haven't made friends with their boss's boss, money is money.
"What happens if the nearby factions aren't friendly and you are on the bad side of the independent?" Well, you better hope you're on the good side of the bad people because if you're on the bad side of the independent, the convoy will be owned by pirates, and rather than the size of the scavenging fleet that follows the convoy being determined by how big your fleet is give or take a bit (anywhere from 50% to 120% your fleet's ship value), it's determined by how big your fleet is, exactly, multiplied by how far from maximum relations you are with the pirates, because the shuttle went to the people that sent the scavenging party (anywhere the convoy itself sent from a rival faction's mercenary group looking to see if your fleet will pay their extortion for help against the scavengers). Have you been killing every pirate group you can find and are their #1 most hated? Don't run out of fuel in a place where no friendly faction can get you
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: michael1 on August 29, 2016, 05:41:57 PM
How about if this functionality is rolled into fleet operations/faction relations? Skill line in the fleet tree focuses on faction relations, expanding the range at which you can give or take aide from friendly fleets, and unlocks a hullmod like most do at level 10 that only works for small ships, is designed to be put on a shuttle that outfits it for long-range solo interstellar travel, makes it fill itself with fuel and supplies and then locks it to not be used for repairs or cr, makes it unable to be used in combat (automatically retreats) and unlocks an active campaign ability that sends out the shuttle from your fleet with its emergency reserves under the command of a liason officer from the closest, friendliest faction who off-screen emergency burns to the nearest market and calls for an emergency resupply run at the cost of a sizeable hit to your remaining goodwill from the faction (doesn't put you in hostile status unless pirates, will come back to that).
When the fleet arrives, the dialogue gives you the options of compensating them for the cost of your fuel and supplies gained (only mitigates the damage to relations a little bit because no faction wants to be on good terms with an idiot that can't calculate their minimum fuel needs like the rest of the galaxy), you can compensate them for your costs and the cost of their fuel and supplies getting there and back (halves the relations loss, and costs roughly 3x the last option but is still a pain in the assignment for them because that's time lost they could have been doing something else), or you can offer to pay them for their costs and ask them if they want to see what was so important for you to inconvenience them, which opens a trade window from you showing them what your haul was that necessitated you stranding yourself, and the supply fleet automatically has a selection of your cargo slated to be transfered over to them, based on the value of those goods at their faction's economy, preferring goods with a high value/space ratio and with whether they're just asking you to compensate them for their time fairly or how much they're exhorting you depending on where you stood with the faction when you sent the shuttle. Oh and you could just say "sorry, I have nothing to give you" and walking away a free loader.

Then, once they've left, you have to deal with the high possibility that your SOS shuttle was seen because of its judicious use of emergency burn and what it was doing figured out and the supply fleet being followed to you by a scavenger fleet of the faction that might most want you dead (or just pirates because that's what they do), making, for a small independent fleet, making sure that the convoy is happy enough with you afterwards that they wouldn't just sit back and watch you get eaten by wolves more important the more toes you've stepped on.

I hear you asking "what happens if you're not friendly with anyone?" Well, the independent are a loose faction, and one of their traders won't care that you haven't made friends with their boss's boss, money is money.
"What happens if the nearby factions aren't friendly and you are on the bad side of the independent?" Well, you better hope you're on the good side of the bad people because if you're on the bad side of the independent, the convoy will be owned by pirates, and rather than the size of the scavenging fleet that follows the convoy being determined by how big your fleet is give or take a bit (anywhere from 50% to 120% your fleet's ship value), it's determined by how big your fleet is, exactly, multiplied by how far from maximum relations you are with the pirates, because the shuttle went to the people that sent the scavenging party (anywhere the convoy itself sent from a rival faction's mercenary group looking to see if your fleet will pay their extortion for help against the scavengers). Have you been killing every pirate group you can find and are their #1 most hated? Don't run out of fuel in a place where no friendly faction can get you

I really like the idea of unlocking hull mods that turn ships into independent fleets. It can be fleshed out more by having other types of fleets the player can deploy like a small combat fleet or a decryption focused fleet. So if you had 3 combat focused ships you wanted to group together and send out, you would tag each one with same combat fleet hull mod so all 3 ships can be grouped together and deployed with one ability.

The emergency supply fleet can also be fleshed out. If you were an accomplished privateer with a large fleet participating in a war and you were running out supplies, you would probably send a small fleet to fetch supplies instead of sending your whole fleet right? So maybe you could also have resupply fleets that don't damage relations but would be risky to send out because they would require a large amount of supplies to make the trip (depending on distance), and would be easy to intercept because they would move slow. So it would be like a gamble, you would have to risk losing a large amount of supplies if you want to gain more. You would also have less precise control over what the resupply fleet buys then if you were to go to the market yourself.

As for integrating all this into another skill tree, I'm worried that having too many skill lines would increase the learning curve, especially since the industry skill line will add even more skills. I think it's a bad idea to have a ton of skills available to the player from the start because it might overwhelm the player with too much information. The ideal would be to merge fleet/signal/encryption skills with the technology skill line, maybe merge them with or replace the less useful skills in the technology line. If that's not possible though all the fleet/signal/encryption skills should at least be kept in one skill line.
Title: Re: SOS signal
Post by: ZeroEffort89 on November 20, 2016, 12:26:23 PM
Not much to contribute that hasnt already been seed but I think SOS signals would be very cool. The hotbar for the overworld map has plenty of free tabs that im thinking could be filled with cool stuff like this =)

And regarding new players I and making it too complicated I get it, but SOS signal is very simple and self explanatory.