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[Alex]

If abyss has empty background map, would it have empty background for combat?

Yep! Everything is also slightly darker, and ships move a bit slower.

[Verran]

Oh, this is definitely player-only stuff.

So the player is just a better scientist than anyone else, and no other merc, or advanced military, knows or cares to use extremely convenient things that are easily learned by the player.
The player, who is just this god. Untouchable, unequaled. The chosen hero out of a picture book who is superior at everything they do - and simply just cannot stop getting new abilities that no-one else has. I really wish it had been made clear that this is what the player is intended to be from the start instead of pretending that the player is a captain in a future world for so long.

Hmm, well, personally, I have rarely felt like that in the game. How I see the the displayed captain and AI abilities when encountered in the wild as the sum of their combat skills. Their abilities that they developed/were programmed with to smite their enemies. We don't see their administrative acumen or if they overclock their scanners to see farther or if they stuff square millimeter with cargo because that isn't directly related to our glorious combat with them. The only real 'evidence' I have of this is that the Alpha Core, when we stick it into our colony, gains an additional administrative bonus over anything the player can get. Granted, we can manage two colonies without penalty so there's a counter-argument to be made.

Furthermore, to give credence to your argument, the possibility that computer captains balance their skill loadouts between combat and other does not diminish the fact that the player can load up on combat skills and become far more powerful than any computer opponent. As such, I would suggest that the game should spawn, continuously but rarely, a scattering of human and AI captains that have dedicated themselves to the art of war with the skills to back it. They could show up anywhere from bounties to just hanging out on the map. No more noticeable than any other captain but still standing as potential challenges to players, or other captains, who stand against them.

Now, to return to the general topic of this thread and examine the idea of either the player being, or having access to, scientist(s) beyond the ken of anyone else in the sector to pull off these feats in hyperspace, I admit I have no immediate answer. Not any that don't put words into the mouths of the developers. (As opposed to interpreting the world that exists.)

[Worldtraveller]

The way i see it (and the 'conversation/lore' in game seems to suggest) is that the player isn't specifically smarter or better, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, with a competent crew. It's not like we the players researched and developed the tech to unlock gates, we just happened to be there when the 'coup' happened at the university.

[Dadada]

As such, I would suggest that the game should spawn, continuously but rarely, a scattering of human and AI captains that have dedicated themselves to the art of war with the skills to back it. They could show up anywhere from bounties to just hanging out on the map. No more noticeable than any other captain but still standing as potential challenges to players, or other captains, who stand against them.

I kinda like the idea.

[MikeMyers111]

The way i see it (and the 'conversation/lore' in game seems to suggest) is that the player isn't specifically smarter or better, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, with a competent crew. It's not like we the players researched and developed the tech to unlock gates, we just happened to be there when the 'coup' happened at the university.

It is worth noting that, if you take either of the tier one utility skills (transverse jump and scanner), the university comments on the sheer impossibility of doing what you did without help. S-modding is something that certain fleets (mercenaries, generally) have, but conventional militaries and everyday people generally don't, indicating that the player is at least exceptional, if not unique. The player's level cap being eight higher than the next-best humans out there, and capable of taking general fleet support skills that AI officers will never take, might be a gameplay abstraction.

[Doctorhealsgood]

The way i see it (and the 'conversation/lore' in game seems to suggest) is that the player isn't specifically smarter or better, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, with a competent crew. It's not like we the players researched and developed the tech to unlock gates, we just happened to be there when the 'coup' happened at the university.

It is worth noting that, if you take either of the tier one utility skills (transverse jump and scanner), the university comments on the sheer impossibility of doing what you did without help. S-modding is something that certain fleets (mercenaries, generally) have, but conventional militaries and everyday people generally don't, indicating that the player is at least exceptional, if not unique. The player's level cap being eight higher than the next-best humans out there, and capable of taking general fleet support skills that AI officers will never take, might be a gameplay abstraction.

To be fair on transverse jump it was more like manually tuning your hyperdrive thing to transverse jump was already a rumor that some captains managed to pull that one off.

[Gothars]

It’s unlocked by progress in the Hyperspace Topography “event”


Also unlocked by increasing Hyperspace Topography progress

I want to suggest to link these abilities also to active exploration success, not just Hyperspace Topography progress. While more content for the HT-progress is a good idea, exploration also needs more things to discover. And I think finding something and unlocking a new ability with it is way more exciting then just slowly working away on a progress bar. I'd suggest suggest that you need both the thing(s) and sufficient progress to unlock the new abilities.

The creation process of new slipstreams comes to mind as something you might interact with to unlock related abilities. But there are many strange things and loose threads in hyperspace that could lead to a discovery.

[Alex]

Hmm - I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure how the details might shake out here. If, say, you need to find something to unlock an ability, then - is that something in a specific place? Or is it randomly placed somewhere? In the former case, I think that would work, probably as part of a "set piece" of content. The latter seems like it'd be frustrating. Or it could be some kind of mission chain, perhaps an implicit one like discovering the Domain mothership from breadcrumbs... hmm. That sort of thing might be the best option, but it's also a large chunk of extra content.

And, notably, I think "discovery" things like that would only be really exciting once. Still absolutely worth doing (and e.g. the wormhole anchors etc are like that), but the general "exploration points" - well, hyperspace topography points - are there to let you make progress without requiring you find one specific thing somewhere. It feels like a more comfortable way to tie exploration in with specific rewards that you'd like to rely on the player getting access to at some point.

So, not really disagreeing with anything here, just some thoughts!

[Popel]

Hah, that post (on website) was fun to read - I liked it. Clever stuff - feels like all that was very well thought through.
Good to see that Developer have his brain between ears

[Verran]

Throwing more pennies of thought into the ring that will be more related to the general topic this time, I promise.

Anyway, from a gameplay perspective, I think these are great. Expanding upon an a new mechanic to give us rewards for exploration. Both refreshing general exploration and giving us more ways of traversing the galaxy. Personally, I look forward to learning, and finding hilarity in, the catapult system to see how far I can hurl myself across the sector and see what trouble I'll find myself in from wherever I land. I look forward to trying it out!

I also sat and pondered the lore question as to why the player would be the only one with these abilities and I think I have a semi-reasonable answer. It certainly isn't perfect but I think it holds water as a general theory. To lay it out: we can see that the major factions struggle to truly explore space on their own. We can see this through two major point. First, there are the numerous missions offered by the factions to the player in bars, contacts, and over the open comms. The last one shows that these exploration missions are meant to be open to everyone. NPCs and the player alike. Which is why they can just be removed at random. Second, when we go exploring, the factions that are out there are: independents, pirates, *REDACTED*, pathers, and bounties. In other words, the major factions of they Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon, the Persean League, and the Luddic Church vessels do not leave the core very often. There are a few exceptions, but they are few and far between. So what does this create? It builds a situation where there is only a group of captains who are willing/able to leave the core to conduct salvaging and exploration operations. This isn't inherently small, but it also isn't necessarily massive. As such, only this group of captains will have the chance to collect the hyperspace data to build up to these technologies. You, the player, are one of those captains. The other half of this point is survival. Our dear developers have created a universe that is full of danger. You can browse these forums and find plenty of players who have lost their ships to pirates, *REDACTED*, etc. And, of course, plenty of us also cruise the sector and wipe out plenty of fleets. As such, the collection of captains who would also live long enough to build sufficient hyperspace data to even create these hyperspace techs is likely small.

To bring it all together, we play in a deadly sector where the the major factions rely on independent contractors, like us, to explore the universe and that the captains who would even survive long enough to develop the tech is a subgroup of those contractors. As such, we, the player, would be one of the few, and maybe only, ones who could exploit the information that we acquire to create such fantastic abilities. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Have a great day!

[Candesce]

In other words, the major factions of they Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon, the Persean League, and the Luddic Church vessels do not leave the core very often.

Well, Tri-Tach does at least sometimes, given the phase fleet.

But given that they tend to depend on mercs a lot more for their various hidden research bases, including hiring Callisto Ibrahim's Hamatsu for use as a supply vessel for Alpha Site, I have to suspect they suffer from the same difficulty as everyone else: if they send their own fleets out into the dark, they not only don't have those fleets nearby in case another faction starts a fight, whatever fleet they sent out is at risk of "accidents" happening and not coming back.

Independent captains, meanwhile, could theoretically hire out to anybody, and so if they go exploring there are fewer reasons to spend the effort ambushing them.

Which probably spells out the most critical trait of the phase fleet: it's sneaky. A fleet in being. Other factions don't know where it is, so they can't jump it or time a fight for when it's not around.

[Sabaton]

If abyss has empty background map, would it have empty background for combat?

ships move a bit slower.

Is this a flat amount or % based? Same for all ship classes or differentiated? Depending on how it's handled it could hurt wolfpack meta a lot.

[IDA Frigate Captain]

And will I find the Orion Spur on the other side of the Abyss?

[FGRSentinel]

To be fair on transverse jump it was more like manually tuning your hyperdrive thing to transverse jump was already a rumor that some captains managed to pull that one off.

One of the Academy missions (the one that gives you the Transverse Jump ability if you don't already have it) has the staff at the Academy shocked by the casual "yeah, I know how to do that" response during the briefing, while the researcher you're trying to locate and rescue more or less makes it clear that even the Academy doesn't believe it's possible without very precise calculations and tuning done by programs the player is implied to not actually have and the Academy hasn't developed yet. It's not the fact that the rumors are true that spooks the Academy and their researchers, it's the understanding that the player and their crew seemingly do manual calculations and calibrations that no sane person would dare to do.

[Nettle]

Sebestyen does come off surprised that you know of it, he is prone to exaggeration though and isn't someone extremely important, he also mentions that they've heard "spacer rumors". That and Galatia didn't actually develop the tech, you are specifically tasked to extract academician who stole the data chip from TT black site, so its safe to assume at least the higher ups in their corporation know about it, I would go on a stretch and say some of the elite TT task forces or allied mercs know about it too, thus the rumors. It also doesn't seem to be an extremely complicated piece of tech, essentially just a software patch for the hyperdrive, and may I remind you that Zal put a Janus device together while locked up by Kanta in a pirate cesspit, then subsequently integrated it with your fleet in a matter of minutes.

I think its not so much about the genius of one particular individual or faction, but extremely sophisticated level of technology left behind by Domain. Persean Sector might be going through its little dark age, with some pieces of recovered tech treated like artifacts, but pre-collapse it could be standard issue stuff by Domain standards.