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[SonnaBanana]

How will reputation with a faction influence interactions with contacts from that faction?

[FooF]

You're probably not going to be swimming in "very high" importance contacts, no. That said, you're probably going to want to stick to the higher-importance contacts overall. It's very much something I want to keep an eye on and also see how it feels in more dedicated playtesting. One idea is perhaps that having lower-importance contacts is required to get higher importance ones, or some such... the "how you get contacts" is an area of the system that's probably the most likely to see some changes/additions, though we'll see.

I think it only makes sense for Contacts lower on the ladder to introduce you to more important ones up the same chain. In fact, outside of randomly saving a high-importance Contact, why would these higher-ups having anything to do with you without some kind of bridge? I guess your reputation could precede you...

Perhaps that's a way of combining Contact acquisition with faction-wide reputation? The higher your faction rep is, the more likely a more important Contact within that faction will reach out. Since it's possible to raise faction rep outside of Contacts, the player has another avenue of getting decent Contact status if they don't grind Contacts from the start.

[Piemanlives]

I have been waiting for this moment for years now.

Finally personal relationships matter.

[Gothars]

It's very much something I want to keep an eye on and also see how it feels in more dedicated playtesting. One idea is perhaps that having lower-importance contacts is required to get higher importance ones, or some such... the "how you get contacts" is an area of the system that's probably the most likely to see some changes/additions, though we'll see.

You could have a local (per faction) reputation, where the game builds a single score of how you are liked by patrol captains, harbor masters and merchants and such in a system. Explorers you meet could also contribute to the opinion about you back in their home system.  Those individual reputations are already in place after all, but don't lead to anything. With a low level system reputation you only meet low level contacts, but their good opinion of you also contributes to a higher score.
Only then, when your local reputation increases, your chance of meeting high level contacts also increases.

[Xeno056]

Glad to see we're getting lots of story and exploration stuff the next update. I especially can't wait to see what other types of megastructure stuff might be out there. Also going back a bit a Light high-tech cruiser is great. Not really my cup of tea, but it's new and something you don't really see in ship packs mods even. Really psyched for that. And story missions oh, the story missions. I've been waiting, and hoping. Mostly for more immersion into this universe you've made, and a little for the missions not just being slammed against a wall of [REDACTED] ships like the two we have. I'm bad a combat lololol.
 
So were is the next update in terms of development if I might ask? I know it's kinda taboo to ask for a timeline but knowing how far along stuff is nitty-gritty wise would be nice. Seems to me that features are set, art is (probably?) done, and now comes the coding. Most of what you mentioned in this blog is story and mission stuff, though what about the other stuff? Obviously, if there isn't a good or easy answer then that's fine as well. We appreciate you Alex.

[Alex]

How will reputation with a faction influence interactions with contacts from that faction?

Currently, it won't. Or, put another way, having contacts and doing work for them is a good way to get back in the good grace of a faction if you have a falling-out.

I think it only makes sense for Contacts lower on the ladder to introduce you to more important ones up the same chain. In fact, outside of randomly saving a high-importance Contact, why would these higher-ups having anything to do with you without some kind of bridge? I guess your reputation could precede you...

Perhaps that's a way of combining Contact acquisition with faction-wide reputation? The higher your faction rep is, the more likely a more important Contact within that faction will reach out. Since it's possible to raise faction rep outside of Contacts, the player has another avenue of getting decent Contact status if they don't grind Contacts from the start.

Hmm, yeah. The idea of using the current faction reputation to gate contact acquisition is I think an interesting one.

You could have a local (per faction) reputation, where the game builds a single score of how you are liked by patrol captains, harbor masters and merchants and such in a system. Explorers you meet could also contribute to the opinion about you back in their home system.  Those individual reputations are already in place after all, but don't lead to anything. With a low level system reputation you only meet low level contacts, but their good opinion of you also contributes to a higher score.
Only then, when your local reputation increases, your chance of meeting high level contacts also increases.

Having anything like this be "local" I think creates more problems than it solves. You need to present this info to the player, first of all. Which, alright, that's probably doable. But then this - a local reputation - becomes a mechanic the player actively engages with, and there's not nearly enough content to make that worthwhile. So then you add a ton of content here, and... that's looking more and more like mirroring the contacts system. Basically, the minor rep changes with patrol commanders and whatnot are just there for flavor. They're not "in place" in a mechanically meaningful way, if that makes sense. If anything, I think it's probably more reasonable to remove those rep changes (since they admittedly do seem to point players in a direction that there isn't anything in) than to build something up around them.

To put another way, if one wants a local reputation mechanic that ties into contact acquisition, it'd make sense to step back and consider it as its own thing, not as, say, "expanding" those patrol interactions etc. There's just nothing there to really expand.

So were is the next update in terms of development if I might ask? I know it's kinda taboo to ask for a timeline but knowing how far along stuff is nitty-gritty wise would be nice. Seems to me that features are set, art is (probably?) done, and now comes the coding. Most of what you mentioned in this blog is story and mission stuff, though what about the other stuff? Obviously, if there isn't a good or easy answer then that's fine as well. We appreciate you Alex.

Hmm. In broad strokes, much of the story mission *writing* is done, but much of the implementation isn't, so that's the bulk of what's left, along with whatever tweaks etc are needed to make it all work. Then there's playtesting. And a pass over the long-term TODO list which includes modding features/QoL stuff/etc, picking off whatever is either quick and easy or particularly important. Along with a few loose ends, that's more or less the sum total of what's left to do prior to the next release.

[Tartiflette]

Interesting, I'll stand by my late February 2021 bet for the release.

[intrinsic_parity]

It seems like the players relationship with the contact themselves would be a natural way to gate contact acquisition.

I guess that begs a question: are contacts generated when you go to the bar/see the mission, and deleted if you don't choose to make them a contact? Or is there some underlying list of contacts that already exist that you have a chance of meeting?

[Alex]

I guess that begs a question: are contacts generated when you go to the bar/see the mission, and deleted if you don't choose to make them a contact? Or is there some underlying list of contacts that already exist that you have a chance of meeting?

Yes.

(To clarify: the people you see in the comm directory now, you can end up meeting in a bar, getting a job from them, and them becoming a contact. This depends on the type of job it is/whether its appropriate for that kind of person. If a mission is generated and there's no suitable existing person, then a new one is created/deleted if it's not accepted.)

[Schwartz]

Nice. This is exactly the kind of thing I have been waiting for. More emergent storytelling "meat". Do these missions have an impact, i.e. if you do enough missions, is it possible to weaken a colony or faction in the mid-term or to force a war or a peace treaty between two? Because I see that as the missing link. Storytelling will take off once the player realizes that what used to be random events in the game now actually emerge or are influenced as a result of the choices he makes.

[intrinsic_parity]

I guess that begs a question: are contacts generated when you go to the bar/see the mission, and deleted if you don't choose to make them a contact? Or is there some underlying list of contacts that already exist that you have a chance of meeting?

Yes.

(To clarify: the people you see in the comm directory now, you can end up meeting in a bar, getting a job from them, and them becoming a contact. This depends on the type of job it is/whether its appropriate for that kind of person. If a mission is generated and there's no suitable existing person, then a new one is created/deleted if it's not accepted.)

In that case, my suggestion would be to make those people have a default/base relationship value equal to the faction relationship, and then have your interactions with them doing missions raise or lower that relationship from the baseline. Then you can base all sorts of things on that relationship including a relationship threshold required to add them as a contact (rather than using the overall faction relationship).

That seems natural and fairly simple to me, and it could easily lead to other more complicated interactions like remote mission acquisition requiring a high relationship, having access to ship yards/military markets be based on the local commander relationship etc. You could also 'tie in' less significant people like patrol captains by making interactions with them affect your relationships with their superior directly rather than giving them all individual relationships (i.e. getting caught smuggling is -5 rep with the station commander directly, and helping out a random dude in the outer rim might give you a +5 with some independent station commander somewhere).

This also ties in naturally to requests for some significance to your choice of faction because contacts from hostile factions will have a lower base relationship that you need to overcome to maintain good standing, but it still allows the player to maintain good standing locally while being hostile to faction which seems like a cool possible interaction.

[Zelnik]

I am currently guilty of checking the forums for a new update release every day now. Stop torturing us!

[Gothars]

   Deployment point distribution between opposing fleets now based primarily on number/level of officers
      Is no longer updated as ships are destroyed; only computed once when an engagement round starts
      Officer contribution does not depend on what type of ship they're in
         But they do have to be on a ship, unassigned officers do not contribute

A thought: Maybe unassigned officers could be auto-assigned during deployment? A big limit to the usefulness of frigates is the limited numbers of officers, combined with the fact that the officer combat bonus are much more effective on bigger ships. That promts you to use them mostly on your biggest ships. If an unassigned officer was auto-assigned to the first officer-less ship deployed, you could use that to have him in a cruiser in some hard battle, and in a frigate during the next lighter light engagement without the hassle of manual reassignment.

[Alex]

Interesting thought! Seems like it'd be hard to keep track, though. And you might have to do odd deployments like "this one cruiser, THEN a bunch of other stuff" to make sure you got exactly what you wanted. Manual reassignment is a bit of a pain, yes, but this seems like it'd also be a pain but in another way.

Stepping back, though - conceptually, I think it's better for officers to generally be assigned to a specific ship, instead of having a fleet of a bunch of different ships for every occasion with officers transferring between them. It's less hassle all around, right - neither transferring officers nor having to figure out what gets auto-assigned how when you deploy. And having officers be associated with a specific ship just feels more right to me.

I'm pretty confident that frigates will be useful in the next release, regardless - it'd be surprising if your 8-10 best ships didn't include one or two of them. Not only do several fleetwide skills have less of an effect when they affect too many deployment points worth of ships, but - why would you have, say, 10 Paragons or some such? It's technically the most power, but you can't deploy that all at the same time anyway, and they don't help for determining deployment points any more than having those officers in other ships would. In fact, if you have those frigates cap something, you'd come out ahead deployment points wise.

And when you consider that frigates/destroyers will provide bonuses to your *other* deployed ships (via some officer skills - Gunnery Implants provides an EW bonus when in a frigate/destroyer - larger bonus in a frigate, and via Coordinated Maneuvers)... And, also, it's possible to boost peak time - both specifically for frigates, in by flat amounts that matter more for frigates. And the EW skill gives a flat bonus instead of it varying by ship size. I think there are *a lot* of different factors working together here - some of them making frigates better, but more importantly, other factors making them into more of a force multiplier.

[Thaago]

...

I'm pretty confident that frigates will be useful in the next release, regardless - it'd be surprising if your 8-10 best ships didn't include one or two of them. Not only do several fleetwide skills have less of an effect when they affect too many deployment points worth of ships, but - why would you have, say, 10 Paragons or some such? It's technically the most power, but you can't deploy that all at the same time anyway, and they don't help for determining deployment points any more than having those officers in other ships would. In fact, if you have those frigates cap something, you'd come out ahead deployment points wise.

And when you consider that frigates/destroyers will provide bonuses to your *other* deployed ships (via some officer skills - Gunnery Implants provides an EW bonus when in a frigate/destroyer - larger bonus in a frigate, and via Coordinated Maneuvers)... And, also, it's possible to boost peak time - both specifically for frigates, in by flat amounts that matter more for frigates. And the EW skill gives a flat bonus instead of it varying by ship size. I think there are *a lot* of different factors working together here - some of them making frigates better, but more importantly, other factors making them into more of a force multiplier.

Speaking of deployment points and small ship usefulness, is there a particular battle size that you've been thinking/testing against for the skills? It seems like most effects scale, but at the end of the day larger battle size will favor larger ships, driving the fixed number of officers into larger classes.