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Author Topic: Economy & Outposts  (Read 64738 times)

Alex

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Economy & Outposts
« on: September 19, 2017, 02:10:24 PM »

Blog post here.
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Fusoya

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2017, 02:52:08 PM »

Will we be able to take extra ships/parts and add them to our patrol fleets? Or is more of a standard Outpost size 3 creates x amount of this standard fleet?
Same question for making a defense station of some sort and participating in defensive battles.
You mention supplying our outposts on the edge of a sector, but that requiring waystations or some other mechanism in order to grow; is this something the player can do on their own as a substitute?
All leading into hopefully building your own faction/nation and diplomacy, perhaps assigning officers or something similar for planetary governor roles down the line?
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Ahne

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #2 on: September 19, 2017, 02:53:36 PM »

Pretty cool, colonizing planets in the outer rim of the sector should be fun and made further exploration to even further star systems possible, so even bigger system generation with more systems or with way bigger routes could be interesting.
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Alex

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2017, 02:57:03 PM »

Will we be able to take extra ships/parts and add them to our patrol fleets? Or is more of a standard Outpost size 3 creates x amount of this standard fleet?
Same question for making a defense station of some sort and participating in defensive battles.

Details are a bit sparse at the moment - it'll have to be tied in with just how "ship production" and "blueprints" works - but I'll say that I'm *not* keen on having the player configure the composition of patrols or hand-designing station loadouts. It's just too much; a lot of what outposts are about is expanding your overall power at the cost of giving up direct control.

You mention supplying our outposts on the edge of a sector, but that requiring waystations or some other mechanism in order to grow; is this something the player can do on their own as a substitute?

I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but the player will be able to build waystations, yes.

All leading into hopefully building your own faction/nation and diplomacy, perhaps assigning officers or something similar for planetary governor roles down the line?

A lot of things are pointing in that direction, aren't they? :) There's even a portrait that says "Administrator" in the outpost screen.
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XCTrailBlazer

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2017, 03:09:02 PM »

My dreams come true with this blog ;D

I have multiple questions: ¿The AI factions can colonize planets in the same way as the player does, right?
The sale of survey data obtained from the planets to the factions will make sense that way.

¿We can make fleets of attack in the same way it does the AI to extend our "empire"?

¿If we join a faction will we have the same freedom when it comes to making outposts?

¿There will be actions that only the AI can do in this aspect or vice versa?

¿The maintenance of the outposts will be quite automated or we will have to do a lot of micro-management?

PD: I'm sorry for my level of English, it's not my native language.




« Last Edit: September 19, 2017, 03:12:20 PM by XCTrailBlazer »
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Cosmitz

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #5 on: September 19, 2017, 03:23:56 PM »

All of this sounds really neat but the devil's in the details... and the presentation! :) Either way, i have full trust that this'll come out great.

A different question here would be if you could not make/import any goods yourself, and just skim taxes off the waystation, creating huge trade hubs. I mean finding planets /just/ out of range and linking them with a waystation would be a great way to start on the outpost-constructing path without really heavily investing in a large development plan. It'd tie in with creating artificial demand and forcing outposts to use your waystation. And can intermediate outposts function as waystations? Something akin to creating a network? Maybe i want to move some goods produced on one of my outposts further out specifically?

Or i may just completely not get it and will have to playtest it in action. :)
« Last Edit: September 19, 2017, 03:26:10 PM by Cosmitz »
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Inventor Raccoon

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #6 on: September 19, 2017, 03:45:30 PM »

I'm liking the sound of the "ground based defenses" and will be a little disappointing if it doesn't mean that attacking fleets are occassionally shot at with an absurdly-sized anti-ship battery.
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Alex

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #7 on: September 19, 2017, 04:18:12 PM »

My dreams come true with this blog ;D

:D

I have multiple questions: ¿The AI factions can colonize planets in the same way as the player does, right?
The sale of survey data obtained from the planets to the factions will make sense that way.

¿We can make fleets of attack in the same way it does the AI to extend our "empire"?

¿If we join a faction will we have the same freedom when it comes to making outposts?

¿There will be actions that only the AI can do in this aspect or vice versa?

All very good questions that I don't have concrete answers to :)

For AI establishing outposts, for example, I think it might be nice if they did, but not so much so that it was the primary thing they were occupied with. Say Tri-Tachyon has a market that needs transplutonics, maybe there's an event where they go about finding and establishing an outpost to supply those. But I don't want the factions playing it as a 4x with quite the same ruthlessness as a player or a proper 4x AI would approach it.

¿The maintenance of the outposts will be quite automated or we will have to do a lot of micro-management?

Highly automated, I don't want the player to have to micromanage a lot. Adjust the settings and let it do its thing, basically.

For example, it's *possible* for you to do things like bring Food to an outpost that needs it, but in the normal course of things that would be handled by automated trade fleets that are created by your Spaceports.


PD: I'm sorry for my level of English, it's not my native language.

No worries, it's certainly better than my Spanish :) (At least, I'm assuming Spanish based on the ¿; apologies if that's incorrect.)


A different question here would be if you could not make/import any goods yourself, and just skim taxes off the waystation, creating huge trade hubs. I mean finding planets /just/ out of range and linking them with a waystation would be a great way to start on the outpost-constructing path without really heavily investing in a large development plan. It'd tie in with creating artificial demand and forcing outposts to use your waystation. And can intermediate outposts function as waystations? Something akin to creating a network? Maybe i want to move some goods produced on one of my outposts further out specifically?

Good question; was actually thinking about that myself. I think that'd actually be tricky to get to work well - either there wouldn't be any placs where such a waystation is good, or there would be and every game would involve "put down waystation at planet X" for an optimal start, since the starting economy conditions are not randomized. Plus that's in conflict with the design goal for waystations, which is "extend reach of market, at a price".

You can build a waystation at an outpost with a population, btw. And there'll probably be some way to convert a waystation to a proper outpost.


I'm liking the sound of the "ground based defenses" and will be a little disappointing if it doesn't mean that attacking fleets are occassionally shot at with an absurdly-sized anti-ship battery.

Haha, I wouldn't expect to see those in combat. The way I'm thinking about these - and this is *so* subject to change due to playtesting/implementation/etc - is that "heavy batteries" protect a planet from bombardment, i.e. they counter ships being able get in close enough to use their weapons, with some high degree of success. Ground defenses, on the other hand, counter raids conducted by shuttle-drop. So ideally, you want both - as well as an orbital station, to prevent bombardments entirely w/o a fight - but of course upkeep.

Basically, these are things with a campaign-level impact that determine the tactical options available, either to you or, say, to any pirates trying to make a buck off one of your outposts.
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Inventor Raccoon

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #8 on: September 19, 2017, 04:33:32 PM »

Eh, that's a neat enough implementation. Just thought something that has a more direct effect on combat would be nice as a thing you can invest in. Players might see more value in an upgrade where you see a Hound bumble into a mine and explode or see a Cerberus get swatted out of the air by a big gun, rather than a little "Attack on Outpost X repulsed" in the corner of the screen. Also might spruce up combat a bit.
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xenoargh

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #9 on: September 19, 2017, 04:36:42 PM »

Not bad overall; it definitely feels a lot more solid and I like the approach to clean up the system under the hood a lot!

A little bit of minor critique here:
Spoiler
I feel that one of the key things still missing here is numbers; the symbol approach worked in MOO because there were just three resources, but I think it gets a little hectic/cryptic in your example UIs and the "symbolic" system for showing players what's going on might need some more tweaking; for example, I wouldn't use the Faction symbol to declare that they're getting supplies "in-house" but a generic symbol that can be generally understood immediately rather than causing a little internal cognitive dissonance when players move from Market to Market; smuggled goods need something a little more interesting than the red box; the faded-out item might be best outlined in yellow because it's unclear that it's a temporary bargain as it is, and so forth.  

It also feels like a lot of pages to look at to do any analysis, with few keys in the main UI to steer players there explicitly.  "You'll discover by mousing-over things during <context>" probably won't be enough guidance.

As a practical example of how "they'll discover by doing" can go sideways:  after playing this new build for a couple of months now and thinking that left-clicking in the System Map was dead (and steering via radar to places we could no longer click to go to)... I just now realized that I could right-click on random locations to set a Way Point, whereas left-click / Set Course was already intuitive.  I don't know why there is a two-button system at all, now that I know it's a thing; why not "left-clicking on the System map brings up "Set Course" after a half-second" and keep it all left-click?  But aside from that, the issue here is that, given how left-click the rest of the interface is, it wasn't intuitive.  Probably to a large degree because it was all left-click-centric up until 0.8, but ah well.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #10 on: September 19, 2017, 04:47:25 PM »

I can't wait to set up my own little corner of hyperspace, make them self sufficient then eventually fleets that are large enough to have their own "Imperial Death-march" theme as they fly to their enemy's stations
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XCTrailBlazer

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #11 on: September 19, 2017, 05:22:56 PM »

All very good questions that I don't have concrete answers to :)

For AI establishing outposts, for example, I think it might be nice if they did, but not so much so that it was the primary thing they were occupied with. Say Tri-Tachyon has a market that needs transplutonics, maybe there's an event where they go about finding and establishing an outpost to supply those. But I don't want the factions playing it as a 4x with quite the same ruthlessness as a player or a proper 4x AI would approach it.

I understand the fact that you do not want the game to become a 4x game, but if only the player can "colonize" planets, I could build an empire and almost no one could oppose me, which would not make much sense.

I suppose there are a limited number of planets that we can have under our command, right?

I would like an event that if I sell data from one planet to a faction, as the faction more inclined to claim.

The more valuable the planet is, the more likely that that happens, it would also be great if that event is influenced by the needs of that faction at that time.

It would not make sense that factions colonize planets with scarce resources or that it is not profitable.

Highly automated, I don't want the player to have to micromanage a lot. Adjust the settings and let it do its thing, basically.

For example, it's *possible* for you to do things like bring Food to an outpost that needs it, but in the normal course of things that would be handled by automated trade fleets that are created by your Spaceports.

I'm glad to know that it's going to be a fairly automated system.

No worries, it's certainly better than my Spanish :) (At least, I'm assuming Spanish based on the ¿; apologies if that's incorrect.)

Yeah, I'm Spanish :D

I have more questions:

The AI factions will be able to improve their industries just like the player?

Are we going to have a limited number of structures that we can build according to the type, size and resources of the planet?

One last question that has nothing to do with the future update.

I feel that we still lack capital ships and ships unique to the factions, with the exception of Try-Tachyon and the Hegemony they have enough exclusive ships.
Are we going to have new exclusive and non-exclusive ships in the future for the factions?

Thanks in advance for your answers

« Last Edit: September 19, 2017, 05:59:00 PM by XCTrailBlazer »
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DatonKallandor

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #12 on: September 19, 2017, 05:39:43 PM »

Does demand being met by supply spawn trade fleets doing the trading between those two markets? If so, having a way to highlight their path on the map would be really cool - makes it easier to be a pirate and/or market-disrupting capitalist. Plus, those routes would make for good places to spawn mission targets in the style of "pirate John dickerson is wanted dead, he's been spotted preying on traders on the System 1 - System 2 route" and "market X is putting out a bounty on pirates on the Market X - Market Y route (spawn targets as appropriate)".
« Last Edit: September 19, 2017, 05:41:47 PM by DatonKallandor »
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Fusoya

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #13 on: September 19, 2017, 05:47:39 PM »

Will we be able to take extra ships/parts and add them to our patrol fleets? Or is more of a standard Outpost size 3 creates x amount of this standard fleet?
Same question for making a defense station of some sort and participating in defensive battles.

Details are a bit sparse at the moment - it'll have to be tied in with just how "ship production" and "blueprints" works - but I'll say that I'm *not* keen on having the player configure the composition of patrols or hand-designing station loadouts. It's just too much; a lot of what outposts are about is expanding your overall power at the cost of giving up direct control.

You mention supplying our outposts on the edge of a sector, but that requiring waystations or some other mechanism in order to grow; is this something the player can do on their own as a substitute?

I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but the player will be able to build waystations, yes.

All leading into hopefully building your own faction/nation and diplomacy, perhaps assigning officers or something similar for planetary governor roles down the line?

A lot of things are pointing in that direction, aren't they? :) There's even a portrait that says "Administrator" in the outpost screen.

Thank you for the answers. As for the first, I understand. Maybe not to the point of personally designing every loadout, but more of "Standard Patrol Fleet A has two cruisers, 4 destroyers, 8 frigates, etc." and "Planetary Defense Fleet has Two capital ships, and assorted escort" is what I would envision for some player control but not too much micromanagement.

For my second question, I'm asking whether it would be possible for the player to build up and supply a fleet entirely on their own via personal convoy or would it absolutely require a waystation chain? Example: I find two Earth like planets relatively close to each other on the edge of the sector. I establish a couple outposts/colonies. Will they survive long enough for me to go back to the main space and return and supply on my own, or do I have to build that chain of waystations to have any chance?

Third, I saw administrator but didn't want to jump the gun since this is such an early look.
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Nanao-kun

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Re: Economy & Outposts
« Reply #14 on: September 19, 2017, 06:37:34 PM »

Oh man, this looks great. It's going to be interesting figuring out where to build outposts for maximum profit.
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