Tobi-wan_Kenobi Perhaps a ship with less than 100% FTL efficiency cannot perform blinks at all?
Yeah I thought of this, it's an option. It's kind of weird from a lore standpoint though. (You can jump light years with a low efficiency but can't jump 10 feet without a high efficiency?)
Tobi-wan_Kenobi I still think there should be a discrete part as well that unlocks the blink command.
If you only need a single part to unlock the blink command, then this makes blink cheaper on larger ships relative to their total cost, which I don't think would be a good thing. If anything, blink should be cheaper on smaller ships. I would like some way for the cost of blink to scale with the size of the ship. And assuming that means needing to add more blink drives/cores, then I also want the locations of those cores to be a design factor.
Tobi-wan_Kenobi Cosmoteer didn't set out to be a competitive multiplayer game, right? Multiplayer concerns should be secondary to single player fun.
No, Cosmoteer didn't set out to be a competitive multiplayer game, though it's proven to work way better than I anticipated, so I'd hate to do anything to detract from multiplayer.
My lack of concern about having parts that are useless in multiplayer is not because I don't value multiplayer, it's because I don't think useless parts significantly detract from multiplayer.
Tobi-wan_Kenobi And there's no point in giving much thought to multiplayer balance until the game is finished, with all new parts implemented.
I don't agree with this. While obviously there's a point of diminishing returns since things are changing, keeping the game relatively balanced is important for keeping and growing the existing player base and for providing a solid foundation upon which new parts can be added.
Tobi-wan_Kenobi On a related note, if having 50% FTL efficiency or thereabouts is sufficient for typical usage, it would present an interesting design choice to players in the single player campaign. The choice of whether or not to make your ship/fleet highly FTL-efficient, which would make it feasible to reach out-of-the-way missions - lucrative missions which might use too much of your fuel if you don't build an efficient FTL ship. I'm thinking of this in relation to the single player fleet escort campaign mode that Walt recently described in another discussion.
As an aside, my current thinking for the eventual singleplayer campaign is that FTL Fuel is relatively cheap & plentiful but it has to be stored on your ship. Extending the range of your ship could be done by either increasing capacity (cheap in the short-term, expensive in the long-term) or by increasing efficiency (expensive in the short-term, cheap in the long-term).
Dalas120 I guess this is just a difference of opinion. I'm personally ok with every ship being able to short-range FTL, as long as it's usually useless in battle. IMO it would still feel special when you find a ship that blinks effectively in combat because very few ships would be able to. That's just my opinion though.
I think I'm in the middle here. The specialty advantage of separate parts and the lore advantage of a single part counter-balance each other in my view and I think I'm likely to be ultimately swayed by other factors.
Dalas120 This approach sounds reasonable to me, though still not my favorite 🙂 Might be confusing for players who don't understand the relationship between FTL drives and the blink core, but honestly anything to do with blink drive will probably be at least a little confusing at first, so probably not a big deal. If there needs to be a hard requirement for blinking, this is the sort of thing I would prefer.
You would prefer this to a wholly separate system? Is that because it'd keep the systems unified instead of having two separate-but-similar systems?
Having an add-on to enable blink is my least-favorite option. It seems like the only advantage to it is that it makes blink more special. But I think it muddies the lore behind blink/FTL worse than separate parts does, and there are some unanswered mechanics questions about it, like why do you need multiple blink cores? Either there's just a hard number based on ship size (which is weird and as a general game design philosophy I prefer to avoid hard numbers and rely more on the underlying simulation) or they have their own efficiency equivalent to somehow factor in to the overall efficiency equation which is even more complicated than either of the single-system or separate-systems approaches.
Dalas120 Obviously fighting will never be perfectly comparable, but at the very least players should be able to use the same warship effectively in both modes.
Honestly, I think that is likely to be an unachievable goal as singleplayer gets more fleshed out. Imagine, for example, if things like hydroponic farms and research labs and holodecks get added, basically anything that plays a role in long-term singleplayer progression. Those will be pretty useless in multiplayer.
(As an aside, I think that ideally in singleplayer these non-combat support systems could be "shared" with other ships in your fleet as well, so you could build support ships and pure warships. Bringing the support ships to a multiplayer battle would be pretty useless, but the warships you designed in SP could still be viable in MP and vice-versa. Perhaps there's some way to make long-range FTL "shareable" so that not all your ships need FTL drives.)
Tobi-wan_Kenobi Worst case scenario for the development of any project is tinkering til you burn out and never complete it.
I try to aim for a sweet-spot middle ground between the game being totally unbalanced and being a perfectionist. Not sure how well I succeed at that though... 😛
Elethio I'd begin by setting the standard jump at something like 800m, basically, a nice long distance that will get you away from combat but not out of arena completely. This sort of distance is ok for getting into or out of combat fast, but of no use for manoeuvring when in combat.
Being able to quickly jump out of combat is still extremely useful. I don't think you should be able to do it (at least not easily) with an average FTL setup.
Elethio One other thing I'd include is a limit to velocity after using a blink.
If velocity is zeroed or reduced relative to the background grid, then this is still something kiters can easily take advantage of and would probably make kiters even more powerful. You just have to blink to a position where now the enemy's momentum is carrying them away from you instead of toward you. The only solution I can think of is to reduce velocity relative to the enemy, which would be pretty weird and confusing.
