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[mllhild]

The new travel options sound nice, but im worried about the Slipstream mechanics, the ability create a surge, add a wormhole and a gate making the game have too much fast travel options and hence leading to a lack of loss of scale. (this looks like going from Morrowind fasttravel to Skyrim fasttravel)


I see the Inversed Slipstream mechanics causing 4 things.
1. It makes the trick of perfectly navegating the border of a slip stream going in the opposite directio to evade storms obsolete, hence reducing the fun of traveling.
2. Will prevent the player from having to take alternate routes and making the space feel too friendly and accomodating, given that the sector is supposed to feel hostile.
3. Makes escaping from persuing fleets too easy, since I doubt the AI will be smart enough to follow a player entering a stream with reversed polarity.
4. enables worlds that have eternal slipstream radiating outwards from them to be a thing. So a world you can see but only visit once you unlocked the skill. (hey at leasst one positive)


There is a mod similar to the surge mechanic called something like "hyperspace jump", which you unlock after defeating a Radiant. The consequence of the mod was that I essentially stopped using anything else besides it for traveling.(I ended up removing it from my games) While the mod didnt have the limitation of needing planetary bodies, that actually doesnt feel like a limitation, since you are essentially always traveling from a system to another system. So it works as a simple fast travel system instead of a rare oportunity. Limiting it to Black holes and neutron stars seems more reasonable and I hope it also has quite a high cost to offset the advantages of
1. ignoring terrain
2. ignoring storms
3. greatly reducing the amount of time -> supply, salary, opportunity, planning needs


As for wormhole and making a gate, it will certainly reduce the mystery of the Domain tech when you are suddently able to make one. So it certainly would need quite the reaction from the factions and some serious questing to make it feel fitting.

In the end, would this also make outposts kinda irrelevant?


As for the UI hotbar. Please make it possible to add two rows and change its size. so that its:
Alt+[0-9]
Ctrl+[0-9]
[0-9]
That would give 30 slots which is highly needed since many mods have special abilities and just no place to put the icons. (maybe with the +/- lock system from the BG3 hotbar)

On a similar vein, the infoscreens with all its tabs (gates, salvage, contacts, important....) needs to have hotkeys, since they arent ordered or color coded, so its always a pain to find the button for the right thing.
Hence it would be nice if the most used would be able to go ctrl+Initial leter.
ctrl+g gates
ctrl+c contacts
ctrl+i important
ctrl+....
or even better enable the API to assign hotkeys, then StellarNetworks can add them to all their extra tabs.

or enable collabsable hotbars where we can link buttons to spezific tabs.

[Vanshilar]

The "normal" space it roughly maps to is empty, but the hyperspace in that area is "deep" and difficult to traverse. If concepts such as density applied to the hyperspace medium, it would make sense to think of it as being very dense. So it's quite conceivable that it might "press in" more around the Sector, encroaching on areas with gravity wells, which normally keep it at bay - for whatever reason.

If abyssal hyperspace makes fleets slow down and reduces their sensor range (and maybe use more fuel), I think it makes more sense to think of it as being "dense" in some sense, like a thick soup. The reason why it's at the borders is easy: in the same way that a gravity well tends to push deep hyperspace away (and thus the area around stars are clear of deep hyperspace), a cluster of stars -- such as the local cluster that the game takes place in -- also tends to push abyssal hyperspace away.

From a UI standpoint, I'm sure this could be reinforced in some way, perhaps even by putting the fleet behind some sort of a semi-transparent veil, instead of being pure black, to reinforce that it's not so much blackness as that the fleet's sensors can't penetrate it to detect much beyond the fleet.

With a "soft" border, I'm sure some wag is going to spend time traveling to coordinate 2,147,483,647 to crash the game...

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

For a late game fleet, even several Prometheus tankers filled to the brim get emptied in a matter of few trips, its annoying to manage.

With Containment Procedures I at least break even on fuel use when a trip involves two bounties.

Maybe lay off the tugs and Onslaughts...

[Farya]

So what about some other space anomalies? Like a kind of space maelstrom that sucks your fleet in to throw it out in different direction? And there is also a risk to lose smaller or slower ships in process. Safety Procedures skill or just having a tug could help greatly with actually trying to use one for good instead of being a hazard. Getting Ox more uses aside from more burn might be more interesting in general. Especially if you could and would need to configure it with special hullmods to serve different purposes. Using a Tug to merely assist your fleet in navigation might actually reduce the upkeep somewhat.

[Nettle]

With Containment Procedures I at least break even on fuel use when a trip involves two bounties.

Maybe lay off the tugs and Onslaughts...

To clarify,  I was talking about baseline consumption rate, without containment procedures. I'm running at least one Prometheus even before I get my first combat capital, and I still feel constrained to either visiting only a handful of inner circle systems or making it strictly an A to B and back trip for outer rim expeditions.

[Gothars]

Limiting it to Black holes and neutron stars seems more reasonable

If the current surge implementation turns out to not work well, this could be a good way to fine tune it's niche. If surges were more limited in origin, but even more powerful ... they would become a  imprecise "switch which side of the Sector you are in" tool. And thus have a very different niche than other travel methods.

[Dadada]

In the end, would this also make outposts kinda irrelevant?

Huh? They are a Nex thing, not Vanilla, unless you mean respawning Pather and pirate bases.

[MikeMyers111]

What I'm getting from all of this is that there's now a button I can press to give my fleet a cool purple trail at all times, at no cost to me.

On a more serious note, something that would be really cool is NPC fleets that take advantage of these abilities. Not commonly, of course, but seeing the occasional S-modded mercenary fleet yeet itself into or out of your area of operation with a slipsurge would add a lot to the sense of depth; to the idea of the player being one guy in a living world full of other characters with their own goals. All of the effort put into having fleets maneuver cleverly in the overworld (avoiding losing battles, grouping up for a winning one, dodging the player with E-burn) really does show.

Not to make the post too long, but I'd feel bad not acknowledging it: I love when games put things outside of the map. I remember an old game, Shellcore Command, that had that as a plot point - go out of bounds, and the things outside of normal space will come after you. I'll admit that when I first played the game, going out into the void to see if there was something there was one of my main objectives. Because I had no idea how fuel mechanics worked, it was a fairly late-game thing.

[Arthur Revan]

Awesome!
Even greater if NPCs can also use the wormholes.
I can see it as a bridge between the core and our colonies.
Makes the player less overpowered with gate travel.
Also colonies on the other side of the map will stop being the islands ( with added risk of invasions in Nexerelin ).
+
Can't describe the excitement for "Here be dragons"

[errorgance]

alex, super cool, I'm excited for some dark horrors, any chance we'll have another use for marines?

fun thought, if one of the old Von Neumann probe motherships made it to the abyss, what would of happened to it?  talk about one hell of a ghost ship if you ask me, ancient scarred tech with an AI core driven mad by something is a great opportunity for treasure & bump in the dark void stuff!



similar thought, what would happen if a working Von Neumann mothership finished replicating itself in the past & just so happened to arrive at a habited system in the current time frame?  could be a fun event, also a reason to issue a mission to back track it to the source, which could be anywhere, including a scary abyss. 

[Hiruma Kai]

Interesting read. 

Reverse Polarity is certainly going to make the ability to detect slipstreams with the neutrino detector much more valuable, since you're not looking at a 50/50 odds of them going the right way.

I also second the suggestion of just put more ability slots without direct keyboard key mapping.  I don't suppose it is possible to make that UI element configurable in the number of ability slots it allows for?  I.e. 10 or 12 or 15 at the player's choice?

I also have a note to reduce the fuel use bonus of Containment Procedures, though - I feel like it's actually *way* too much right now.

I tend to agree with Grievous, that skill was not on my list of must takes, or even particularly strong.

Its a tier 3 (requires 2 pre-requisites) that provides a max of 25 fuel reduction.  I tend to think of that in terms of 2.5 Ox fuel costs to be honest, since a competing campaign layer skill is Navigation, which is only a level 1 skill that can provide +2 sustained burn (to get to that max of 20) for no fuel cost as well.  2.5 Ox is worth +2.5 burn.  Late game, I'd argue Containment Procedures is either on target or weak for a tier 3 that requires the same number of prerequisites as Flux Regulation or Phase Coil Tuning.  It kind of is at the same level of commitment to the industry tree as an Officer Management/Training is to leadership.

And early game, the effects can basically be duplicated (in terms of range) by spending 10,000 credits on a Dram and 10,000 credits on filling it up with fuel.  Late game, a single extra Prometheus is more of a range increase than this skill for nearly all applications.  Reducing your need for logistic ships by 1 when traveling to the very edge of the sector just doesn't sound like it is in need of further balancing downwards.

[Amoebka]

Abyssal hyperspace being a very dense syrup doesn't match well with its visuals - which is just an empty black void.

Right now we go from empty foreground with light background ("shallow" hyperspace), to heavy clouds in the foreground (deep hyperspace), to complete emptyness in both fore- and background (abyssal hyperspace). The visual "density" doesn't scale with "depth". It goes from somewhat clear, to super visually busy, to perfectly clear.

[Fenrir]

Abyssal hyperspace being a very dense syrup doesn't match well with its visuals - which is just an empty black void.

Right now we go from empty foreground with light background ("shallow" hyperspace), to heavy clouds in the foreground (deep hyperspace), to complete emptyness in both fore- and background (abyssal hyperspace). The visual "density" doesn't scale with "depth". It goes from somewhat clear, to super visually busy, to perfectly clear.

Imagine it as being too dense and too deep for any light to travel through, with pitch black visual as the result of no light coming into your eyes.

[Amoebka]

Imagine it as being too dense and too deep for any light to travel through, with pitch black visual as the result of no light coming into your eyes.

Of course we can explain it from sci-fi perspective if we want, I'm talking about visual design, not "lore" necessarily. It just looks wrong, imo. Maybe it's the screenshots being static and there's some subdued animation in the black void, but probably not?
Guess I'm not fond of how hyperspace clouds look to begin with, but the contrast with the abyss highlights it much more.

[CrashToDesktop]

I imagined abyssal hyperspace to be much less dense than regular hyperspace. The lack of density could explain the reduced sensor range and the reduced speed, plus I feel thematically the total blackness of the place reflects a lack of density better than a higher one, as a nice foil to what you would normally associate with the blackness of the deep ocean.