Welcome to my third and final 'Let's talk' where we'll try to cover all of the campaign and player progression content currently in 0.8. I'm writing this after spending almost a hundred hours in vanilla 0.8 and having just finished the 'end game' by blowing up an officered intact Remnant station and clearing out multiple detachement fleets in the Persean homeworlds.
You can check out my other Let's talks, on UI/UX here:
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12078.msg205547#msg205547 and on skills and character progression here:
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12158.msg206703#msg206703That aside, let's get into it:
Tutorial:It's miles better than anything we have had before and it's really almost perfect. I'm sure all the quibbles with how the procgen can get in the way of objectives will get solved as well as all the minor improvements to more clearly state what needed to be done. I also think it should be nonskippable, a core part of the game. However..
There should be a way to choose a side at start. Just to get a start up with the faction want or may want. It doesn't have to be individual, just 'reputation packs' like TT/HaegInd/LudChurchPath/PerseanSindikat/Pirates should cover it (ps: ideally killing the 'pirates' should not drop pirate rep, or if you do go with pirates, have it hardcode you back to -25). To neatly wrap this up, this could be chosen in the last-leg destination phase. Maybe choose where to take your first gamma core instead of having it just 'blip' out, given to the questgiver.
The combat tutorial missions should be integrated into the Sim/somewhere, playable straight from the campaign and they should be allowed to be completed at leisure, given as they're chunky experiences, as well as presented/informed upon before the first combat. At the very least, some of the core principles, movement, firing, etc, should be presented in the first pirate combat.
Why this is needed.The rewards may need to be hardcoded to guarantee a certain conformity with how the player will start out in the world. I got out of there once with nothing but the ships and supplies, while other times i got out with three gamma cores and 30k.
Early game:This comprises the time right out of tutorial up to the point where the player has a grasp of ways of sustaining himself and starting to make headway into the game.
While i understand the game will always start with Galatia and Corvus bounties (ideally this last bit getting triggered by which faction you go to), and that's fine for the shorter term to get people's feet wet, the rest of transition between early and midgame is quite staggering.
Named bounties are a great start up way given they push off as some crummy buffaloes and a few frigates, but they should be 'less' highlighted as being ultra-dangerous, the trip there is frightening enough for new players. Maybe try naming the (flag)ship of the enemy captain? That should be a decent indication if the player would want to take it on. The rewards also scale a bit poorly. They started for me at 50k, which is a bit much for a new player, allowing for almost an entire fleet wipe and still be in the green. The large sum of money might actually work against it.. 'psht, 50k? i don't want to know what they want me to do for 50k'. As a general idea, named bounties should also have some variety, have the player see something to strive for as a goal, even if he might not take that 200k comission with a Legion as a flagship.
Procurament missions are fine both risk and cash wise, even if needed to be adjusted so you can't complete them right then and there buying cargo locally, as well as more UI/showing where you can purchase that item from the stations you've visited lately. (atm hovering over the procurament mission item doesn't do anything, even show the normal info screen you get hovering over them in the market).
'Sensor pack' missions are completely bloody OP. At the very least, the sensor pack should be ran /after/ the combat with the enemies there, in the same dialogue log as salvaging/shooting/leaving, but even so, the rewards given for them, given that they can be finished in a single Dram, are ridiculous. Nerf now plx. Also, it'd be great for them to be more spread out. The 5LY one should not pay that much, but that 30 LY one..
To ease people into surveying, i think most coreworlds planets should have a hazard rating of 0, totally doable without skills, with a few requiring people to invest.
Salvaging works pretty wonderfully though, and i really think it's the strongest new feature of 0.8. It helps enormously building a raggedy fleet to start you off on, and the random jewels of hyperspace that you find, like an Apogee with 4 dmods or a XIV Falcon helps a lot to not feel like 'you're not worthy of bigger ships yet'.
While Remnant doesn't necessarily need to be a 'starter' career, i think they should be introduced a bit earlier. Might kill the surprise i guess but i think getting the first AI core out of a broken down Remnant ship that's a challenge to the player's starter Wolf/Wayfarer would give some context that that is something 'do-able' and that they can pursue. Shrug, i just think they're a bit 'separate' from the rest of the game universe right now.
Comissions need a large warning 'if you do this---' in regards to how there is no turning back from one. Though there should be ways of 'backstabbing' or such and picking up a new comission.
Midgame:By this point the player has a good grasp of credits, and is already working on fleet composition and refitting to tackle mid-grade threats like the random non-detachement fleets.
Getting ships via salvage/buying/restoring works well right now, if still some things are rarer than they need to be, in varying playthroughs. I've heard so many different occurences of this.. in my game i had stores full of Wolves while another player's were dry. Same for Scarab/Tempests/Apogees/Conquests. Some weapons were also hard to suss out, like Hephasteuses and specifically, Mjolnirs. In my playthrough i checked my save file, there were NO shops selling Mjolnirs. Luckily i had one from some fight and in the end i just cheated myself another one. This also applies to mods and which get to be 'in shops' and which drop from research stations. Also their rarity within the open/black/comission markets should be looked at. Front Shield Gen comes up often.
Coming back to comissions, they really should only drop a flat number of rep, not a hardcoded limit. If i'm 80 with Haeg, drop it to 20. I can already raise it myself from -50 to 0 or more with bounties, or cheese it from -50 to -49, non agressive, with a single gamma core. Comissions also pay way too little for the engagements you're facing.
Unnamed bounties start to fade out right about now since they don't guarantee any serious money given the investment of time you put into them. But i don't know if they /have/ to, they should be fine being left for 'early game' reasons and maybe some bonuses when you're comissioning around.
In my game, named bounties were almost always put by Haeg/Sindikat/TT/some Ind and rarely Perseans. Ludds almost never put bounties up. Named bounties scale well though and these are really the recommended things to be doing.
Comparatively, procurament missions don't really scale, or well at all. There is no 'midgame' or lategame for procurament really, apart from just hogging cargo and seeding it in stations to have it handy for insta-completing. This leads me into how missions respawn weirdly in stations. You could undock, dock, and there's another set. Or undock, just go to the jump point and back, and another set availible. This should be more tempered. Either way, in the current trading/cargo hauling environment, i'm not sure what use or goal the 'food shortage' events serve.
If we lead off the core-worlds easy surveying, this should feed well into getting the player moving away from the core worlds for more worlds surveying and getting juicy Class4/5's. I know this is a 'stepin' and not a real goal that the player should be having in later editions of the game but if we are to keep surveying as a quasi profession, i don't see the harm in creating this road for them.
Survey pack missions at this point are 'backup cash' in case of a full wipe. If we work off them being small combat encounters, at this point the player should be facing serious Domain probes, and at long ranges from home.
Beacon systems start to become a thing here, but i feel that we don't really need 'green'/easy/1pulse beacon systems. Domain probes take that prize home as the 'easier' Remnant, don't feel we need to trivialise Remnants as combat encounters. To be fair, it took me a while to get that they're 'different' factions.
Endgame:Endgame is when you can afford to take out multi-capital ships and engage anything in the known universe, have multiple ships in storage to fit multiple fleet setups and when you're using Atlases and Prometheuses to haul 'strategic amounts of stuff' back to your homebase.
Comissions still work here, allowing you to take on detachement fleets and generally engage in max-fleet-limit combat. Builds up on the fun bit of fleet combat and is something of a real goal some people will be building towards. These are less dangerous that going into a red beacon system though and that's fine, given the safety of the core worlds.
Mass-systems surveying at this point becomes dull and boring, but given it's not supposed to be an end game for it, i guess it's fine.
Salvaging only works at this point to farm specific hulls you're having trouble outright buying from the markets, but it's still a mechanic you use to top up supplies after a battle, to soften the post-battle repair costs. I like it and how it works, forcing you to stay at the combat site after the engagement, putting yourself at risk.
At this point you have a full list of all the beacon systems in your game, and you're gearing up for the Remnant battlestations. I really like them and the combat with them. It's tactical, it's interesting and it's a fitting and unique 'end game boss' kind of deal, given how much you've been fighting fleets and then you get this curveball. Even if we'll be killing a lot more 'faction' stations/outposts in a few years in SS, i think these will continue to be a cool end game goal.
However, i dislike how entering Red beacon systems is more of a logistics challenge than anything else. I don't mind the attrition per se of engaging multiple fleets at the same time, but i do mind when i am starting to 'group them together' to fight more at the same time since i don't want to deploy my ships for just two Lumens and assorted frigs only to have just a second later fighting another two Lumens. Maybe that's part of it, but it feels a lot more gamey/cheesy than it should be.
Overall:The player fleet is a lot more sustainable, the game skips you past the fabled classic 'hound 1v1 agains the world' frigate start and actually, all in all, i think it may be too rewarding, credits-wise, to the player. I love the concept of dmodded ships, though the price should be per removing individual Dmods, not a flat one for all of them, and i had hoped they'd have more of a presence in the midgame, but by that point you can afford to restore ships and fly undamaged ones easy peasy.
In any case, i don't think SS ever had a more stable and more fleshed out, full-bodied experience, beginning to end. I'm hyped for more, but a lot of the 'baggage' of the older versions needs to be looked at moving forward. How reputation works, comissions, events (what does the war event even do in systems that don't contain any of the war participants?) as well as smuggling and trading as a whole. (-30% tarrifs everywhere? ehh)
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And that was about all i had to say about the campaign progression. I'm did not and am not going to be delving into the combat imbalances of 0 OP fighters, how torpedoes are in a bad place compared to Harpoons and how i dislike fighters engaging after the carrier dies (not that the Moras ever die). These are combat balance considerations and the forums are full of them, and i think it's all been said.
Either way, thanks for reading.
