A primary gameplay role of player-built colonies is getting the player into trouble. Generally speaking, this trouble should be resolved through combat, since combat with context and real stakes is fun. And, after all, what would be the point of building a battlestation if your colonies never got attacked?
One natural source for this kind of trouble is, of course, pirates.
Since the last post, I’ve been working on a lot of framework stuff. All of it is directly in support of the content for the next release, but until now, it hadn’t all come together in a way that would make it easy to demonstrate. Now, though, there’s a good vertical slice to talk about; a new piece of content that uses many of the new pieces – the comm relay.
We’ve talked about events and information gathering in the previous blog post, and that’s where comm relays come in. You need to be in a star system with one to receive news reports and other kinds of intel. Here’s what one looks like in-game:
