Jhaerik Why remove BH mode at all?
Because I'd have to maintain it, and that takes time that I could spend improving the game in other ways. There's also the fact that BH just isn't up to my quality standards, and I'd rather remove it than have a sub-par feature in the game.
Jhaerik I just want to blow shit up, and have no interest in multiplayer sooooo.
I think that desire would be better served by a different, gauntlet-style game mode.
Walt Here's my quick take on how I would design the NPC's:
I think the npc's should be quite mobile and move often (except stations of course), you could trade with mercenaries with intel on where military groups or aliens are located. Also for factions I think you should be able to witness wars and even participate in some later on.
thatPolarBear I disagree about the police/military selling stuff, though. I mean, it doesn't reflect their responsibilities -- their job is to keep the peace, not to make a profit.
Perhaps they could be buying their stuff from corporations. Of course, their stuff would be of prime quality and wouldn't be purchasable unless stringent requirements are met (such as having a bounty of 0).
ResExsention
but you can still buy and sell Police and military equipment.... sure most of the time its through a 3rd party but there are police auctions where you can buy retired police equipment
ResExsention That's assuming that the role of the police/military remains consistent into the future. Of course to us now it doesn't make sense that police or military would sell weapons or parts, because that's not what they do right now, in our time. However it's not out of reason that their responsibilities as police and military may change in the future to suit the needs of the people, state etc.
As long as police and military equipments are paid for by tax payers whatever they do with it will always be subject to public scrutiny. Selling these back to the public will always be less criticized then selling them to some organization.
But how can sales be policed or restricted? I don't think it's really practical to do. Most likely the only way is to restrict the number of items per purchase.
That aside what's the point of laws preventing state of the art military equipment from getting into private hands when they can purchase them directly from police/military instead of the manufacturer? Such things should go through the black market. However, those (organizations) holding licenses should be able to legally purchase them. Since, they could resell them illegally obtaining said license should be made difficult such that reselling become less of an interest.
It would be nice to have means to track items for economic means. For example tracking how many items are on the market for sale. Also, tracking the manufacturer ID, and first buyer ID would allow to calculate market share as well as for tracking illegal sales. Illegal sales can cause negative evaluation which at some point can cause one to lose purchasing licenses (discussed above). This in turn could be used to create a path for criminal organizations...
I have skimmed through the document diagonally and the first thing I'd like to say is, please, please PLEASE don't fall into the micromanagement wormhole that has already killed so many construction and management simulator (CMS) games out there, making them complicated for realism's sake. Don't design for realism - design for fun.
The current bounty hunter mode is so cool and relaxing because it's simple and doesn't require the player to do mundane things like move stacks of stuff around manually or travel to some kind of "home" just to upgrade the ship. Of course, some players will love having full control and an RPG-like resource-collection campaign with "realistic" features (that's why there are such a mass of games out there doing it that way), but I'm sure I'm not the only person who just likes to shoot stuff, collect money and optimize their ship design and test it against NPC enemies and bounty hunter is/was perfect for that. I really hope there will be some kind of single player mode supporting that play preference. (Even if it's not the main mode.)
Please, if you're gonna support multiple resource types, consider whether it will genuinely make your game more fun, and doesn't add boring activities and frustrations. Recognize the core of what makes your game so great and make sure your design supports this core. Don't fall for the "realism" trap - first make good gameplay (you already have that), then design a story that makes sense around the gameplay. Not the other way round.
Sorry if these are things you already know or whatever, and I'm not saying you're going a wrong track, I just want to voice my concern, because I have seen some potentially fun CMS games been ruined by overcomplicated micromanagement.
ErikLeppen Don't design for realism
100% agreed. Cosmoteer has never been intended to be "realistic", though sometimes real life is an inspiration behind certain gameplay systems. It's not a goal in of itself.
ErikLeppen please, please PLEASE don't fall into the micromanagement wormhole that has already killed so many construction and management simulator (CMS) games out there
As you can probably tell by playing Cosmoteer, my own taste in games is very much against micromanagement and tediousness. That's why I've put so much work into making the UI for ships really convenient to use, it's why the player can't control crew directly, and it's why the game speed can be freely adjusted.
ErikLeppen Please, if you're gonna support multiple resource types, consider whether it will genuinely make your game more fun, and doesn't add boring activities and frustrations.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Factorio? That's a game that starts off feeling pretty tedious, but then gives you tools to automate away the tediousness and scale resource collection.
For Cosmoteer, I hope to give players a similar ability to automate and scale, hopefully without any early-game tediousness! I'm planning to give the player the ability to configure how their resources are automatically sorted, likely by marking storage rooms (or maybe individual tiles) with what kind of resource they're allowed to hold, and then letting the crew sort resources automatically given your restrictions. To actually mine resources, you'd simply right-click on an asteroid and your ship would automatically mine it until either the asteroid is out of resources or your ship has no more storage tiles that are allowed to store any of the asteroids resources. If it's taking too long, you can adjust the game speed, and if it's still taking too long, you can always build more mining lasers. That doesn't sound too tedious or frustrating to me (not any worse than crew management currently is, I don't think), but I welcome your thoughts on it.
ErikLeppen I really hope there will be some kind of single player mode supporting that play preference.
I'd love to have a very focused "gauntlet" style mode that pits the player against waves of increasingly-stronger enemy ships. (Ideally including ships uploaded by other players.) That's probably not going to be implemented by Early Access though. :/
At the very least I disagree about the vessels selling their stuff directly. I think having to make the player go to one of their stations/bases and requisition for such equipment would be more fitting because those out in the field would need such equipment,
Of course we could have the occasional AWOL vessel that may be willing to buy or sell a couple things.
ResExsention
Well yea of course you’d have to trade with the stations rather than the ships themselves I though that’s what we were talking about
Jared I think the previous discussion was pretty generalized but ok.
And as I said we could have the rare AWOL vessel that may be willing to buy or sell things -- or pirate you.
now what if there was a kinda mmo mode with a bunch of factions players can join and they can fight over the rule of the galaxy? that will really increase depth without adding too many feature just because people now would have to use strategies against other players rather than dumb AI
DanielTheMooCow now what if there was a kinda mmo mode
This is not technologically feasible, sorry.
Actually, it's possible to introduce large ships by just increasing part's size.
Check this mod out (the idea of the mod): rawr-mayhem-mod
Those days I was testing how game handles big (even huge) ships. And what I found, game freezing only if there large amount of parts/crews, but the size of a part doesn't reduce performance. What if all the ships will have about same amount of parts, but the size of those parts will be different? Crew... Maybe the large ships will be automated (crew only in captain bridge).
The point of large ships is that they can shoot from long distance, siege stations, be a mother-carrier or have a large cargo.
i juste read quickly the whole thing (may have negleted some details) and i overall like what you plan to do with cosmoteer. i was a bit worried you would just create a revamped campaign with similar rogue like mechanic from the free version, but it turns out that you plan on creating much more and i like it 
nothing to do with solo campaign but about multiplayer:
i love the domination game mode you created and since you mentioned ressource management system and ore mining.. It would be awesome to have a similar game as domination but with ore to mine at specific locations instead of points to capture.
this could be implemented in the campaign as being able to cut out ressource line from a specific faction or subfaction so they will not be able to launch as much ship in a war as it would have been with that ressources. like a malus to an empire for each mining zone taken over. at the same time some missoins could be to defend those mining site from pirates , mercenaries or other faction at war.
at one point we could maybe be able to start our own faction? (like in mount&blade ?)
for end game (or new game + ?) you could add a galaxy wide cataclismic event like in stellaris with a special alien race (or machines) trying to destroy everything (or a plague that decimate crew and need an antidote to be countered^?)
if you want more inspiration you can look at what 'starsector' did (a space game with mount&blade similarish gameplay)
ultimately, and i don't think this your goal here but, you could also consider a total war like approch with turn based management and real time battles/missions.
akinata you could also consider a total war like approch with turn based management and real time battles/missions.
I've thought about this a lot. Basically a strategy layer where you build up a galactic empire, fighting individual battles with the fleets you design. Controlling sectors would earn you money, crew, resources, and supplies (food) over time that you would use to maintain and expand your fleet. Ideally you would be able to construct your own mining, farming, and construction ships/stations, but the problem then becomes how to integrate the ship simulation mechanics with the strategy layer mechanics in a way that makes station design important (like for determine farming speed, mining speed, and construction speed), and I'm not sure how to do that.
Walt Ideally you would be able to construct your own mining, farming, and construction ships/stations, but the problem then becomes how to integrate the ship simulation mechanics with the strategy layer mechanics in a way that makes station design important (like for determine farming speed, mining speed, and construction speed), and I'm not sure how to do that.
Isn't it just similar to the stats for ammo production and their stats bar. So strategic parts need a component and its stat which will be processed on the strategic level. Ship count shouldn't be a problem. The storage for mining and their global counting are probably a problem. They may need to be localized, too, for production type decision, For example should ship's storages be counted or only designated ones or only those that have a strategic part (mining control module). There prabably needs to be different levels of strategic parts - those that only provide economic stats (mining ship) and those like stations that can take construction commands. Then using those stats the strategic level AI would make its strategic decision. A local territory management is probably most simple to implement.
Walt I've thought about this a lot. Basically a strategy layer where you build up a galactic empire, fighting individual battles with the fleets you design. Controlling sectors would earn you money, crew, resources, and supplies (food) over time that you would use to maintain and expand your fleet. Ideally you would be able to construct your own mining, farming, and construction ships/stations, but the problem then becomes how to integrate the ship simulation mechanics with the strategy layer mechanics in a way that makes station design important (like for determine farming speed, mining speed, and construction speed), and I'm not sure how to do that.
you could run mining simulations like you would run a battle, in real time.
so when it is your turn you can design your mining ship and then run a real time battle against time where you need to mine the maximum ore you can mine with your miner ship design and come back as fast as possible to the station.
the quantity of ore you mine and the time it takes to come back and deliver the ore will be the amount you get per X turn. X depending on the time it took to mine all of this.
then you can proceed to build your mining ships for future mining.
with this system you could mine with precision the right amount you want in a particular given time.
with this system you could also make some special mining battle event where some region would have rare environmental hazard like asteroid everywhere or slowing effect nebula with which you would also need to do a Ore gathering time battle to set what you will get mining there with your current design.
as for the AI they can either have some generic ressource collecting depending on stats and numbers or a pre calculated simulation depeinding on their design using the same factor as the player. (+ a little bonus because its the AI :p)
aside for some few particular mining site all of them should be the same to avoid having tu run a mining battle for each mining zone.
this system would automaticaly calculate what you get from several mining ships without looking at them buming into each other in real time.
but all this may work only if your station (which would also be totally handcrafted by the player unless he use the generic base station provided by the game?) is always set at the same distance from the Ore to mine.
with this minigame style gameplay you could even add social events like a racing event where you compete with your racing ship against some AI to win some prize cash! (unless you are at war with that empire, etc.. )
