This all looks awesome! Do you have any plans to have missions to acquire exotic components for industries? I've had this longing to hunt down a domain era mothership, scavenge its autofactory, install it on a super rich world, and crank out battleships. For... humanitarian purposes. Kind of like hunting down Redacted's for mutinous death robots helpful AI buddies, only requiring a large cargo capacity.
Not necessarily for missions as such, but, yeah, hunting down a Domain mothership is like a player-driven mission, right? That's been sort of the point behind the breadcrumbs the probes/survey ships leave. And it would make a lot of sense for high-end exploration content (such as the mothership) to provide high-end colony-building rewards.
I've always imagined that alpha AI cores would be quite subtle and long term in their thinking. For example, if there is a system within range with a REDACTED REDACTED in it, perhaps it syphons off some of the outpost's shipping and diverts resources there - suddenly the Redacted are spreading! (Wait a minute, didn't that outpost used to make more money?)
Also, how will you deal with battles involving player outposts and the player not being there? It can take a good number of weeks to cross from one side of the sector to another after all... perhaps invading fleets are loath to engage planetary defenses, so sieges are relatively common? With the player either attempting to run a blockade or break the siege.
With enough caveats to fill half the Sector - yeah, sieges or something like. There are layers of planetary defenses and the idea is that reducing them takes time, and some layers *have* to be reduced before certain actions can be taken, but I really don't want to get into the detals just yet.
Can we get at least some form of going over Officer capacity (storage, or just unlimited number of *unassigned* officers). They are narrowly specialized and having to fire and re-train new officers when you want to change fleet composition (no carriers <-> carriers, high tech <->armor based, kiter <-> aggro) is wildly suboptimal.
Hmm. So oddly enough, I'd just added the ability to go over capacity in both officers and admins, but the reason for that is so you can still find them in sleeper pods while exploring. The over-max admins/offices can't be assigned until some are dismissed, so it wouldn't quite work for this situation.
Let me think about it. I'm not entirely sure that changing fleet compositions drastically is a thing that needs to be supported with maximum flexibility. At this point, there's no real time pressure, so you *can* do it by dismissing and re-training, but if that changes, then that may be less of an issue since it won't be as practical in the face of continued demands on your fleet.
Do you need to be in range of a comm array to assign construction tasks for you colonies?
You don't, no. Presumably you can send orders by courier or you had the foresight to leave sealed orders or something.
I'm also reconsidering exactly how comm relays factor in to comms - I think some aspects of them are neat, but having to be near one to get certain information is becoming increasingly troublesome.
*Fist Pump* Cause I'm pumped! Also, called the solstice timing! Thanks for the update Alex, looks fantastic!
Wait a minute, are you telling us that AI took 'ur jobs as administrator as well? When will this stop!
Hah! Also, "this colony's entire infrastructure has been repurposed to mine bitcoin, sorry, no power left over for life support."
I can now look back, reading this, and think about all the initial exploration I did when 0.8 had just come out and how satisfying it would be to tie it together through starting an outpost/faction. It makes me feel hyped up.
Cool! Yeah, the whole point of exploration - from the start - has been to connect up to colonizing. But it just wasn't in place, and I'm super excited that finally some of these larger pieces can fit together the way they're supposed to.
I'm really curious as to how deep you are going to sink your fingers into the whole Nexerelin style "faction warfare" with this update, too. Stuff like random events and news between factions, faction alliances, factions invading markets and waging war, stuff like that.
I'm not entirely sure myself. Some amount of "this fleet is coming to wreck your colony and you really ought to consider stopping it" needs to be in place, but given the sheer amount of other things that need to be done, I'm not sure how much time there'll be to elaborate on that.
Will something to keep the player from just snapping up all the "pre-surveyed" planets in the core systems be needed? Like the existing factions already claiming them and getting mad at squatters.
Perhaps they're simply economically marginal; would explain why the big factions haven't already settled them.
Probably? Maybe? Was thinking about faction "claim beacons", or maybe they just wait a bit and then come claim it for themselves once it's doing well. Since some of those planets are randomly generated, they may or may not be desirable in the first place. But yeah, it'd be weird if the Hegemony was ok with you colonizing and building up militarily right next to Coatl, etc.
I was thinking that this actually won't be true in most cases, because of fuel costs. Even if a player-held market is close to/inside the core worlds, it may not have enough demand for the right commodities to compete with other nearby markets.
Once the player conquers the major markets, though...
I see what you mean, yeah. But it just seems like asking for trouble in various scenarios if things deviate at all from an ideal path where it's not an issue.
From the sounds of Alpha cores administrators, that sounds like "Wish: More XP (and money)" that will result in a fight with major demons or something. In other words, if player wants a fight (or more rare loot), stick an Alpha Core admin in a colony that outlived its usefulness (because player found better), let it take over, then farm the never-ending streams of Remnants for rare items and/or destroy its battlestation.
No comment!
Ok, I will comment that putting AI cores into admin roles would generally speaking be a valid choice, not a *straight up* trap. I mean, I may be mean, but I'm not *that* mean, am I? Or am I?
Would be awesome if then None AI admins had a chance of going rogue (turning into a pirate/independent outpost) if things are going too well for your outpost(you have a lot of money being made from a black market and weak and or strong defenses(pirate) or going too bad from mismanagement (colony thinks it can do better on its own because of a lack of admin and there is a over abundance of defenses and or money(Independent).
Hmm, we'll see. I've got a list of potential difficulties for you to run into; just a question of turning it into something cohesive. Explicitly taking an outpost away without considerable forewarning seems quite harsh, though.
Economy units go up by orders of magnitude, right? Is it possible to make a market big enough that you could "borrow" enough resources to supply your fleet without tanking the colony's economy?
The "order of magnitude" thing is only in theory. In practice, it's currently linear-ish, and likely to stay close to that. (size 1 = 0.2, 2 = 0.3, 3 = 0.5, 4 = 1, 5 = 2, 6 = 3, etc)
Actual order-of-magnitude numbers get waaaaay out of hand too quickly, even if it's base 2. That said, I'd like the player to be able to eventually grab enough resources without tanking the economy, yes. Hopefully I'll be able to make the numbers work there.
Btw, taking stuff out of "Local Resources" - at least, as of this writing - won't negatively impact the economy. It's really just "surplus + skimming off the top" that gets used when there are shortages, but the player can take stuff out at any time without consequence. Buying on the open market, though *can* impact the economy some.
I don't know what you're talking about. I am but a simple merchant.
Hah, that's awesome!
