Thoughts on farming ships

[fluidmind]

I was curious after playing yesterday and disconnecting, why all the alpha through charlie ships I'd blown away the day before were respawned. I double-checked the behavior by taking out a few echo ships and then docking, to find that on page reload, they were immediately re-spawned, but that after further checking, the asteroids I'd mined the day before remained destroyed. This brings to mind a few things:

1. The pirates can always rebuild (real-life scenario), but it may not be wise to have them rebuild all at once on refresh for a few reasons:
a. (real life) it takes time to rebuild ships.
b. (game balance) what's to stop me from hanging near the echo scapper station and building up tons of cash by farming the nearby echo ships, then docking in the nearby echo dock and going at it again? Nothing, but this could be handled in other ways, elements of level design rather than engine design, but eventually these elements might meet again in another map.

2. While the asteroids in the game are currently motionless (and probably good as a few weapons were lost to incidental bumps, let alone full-throttle collisions) the game balance aspect of this might be large in edging a character out of a map. I have not tested sacrificing my ship to re-start a new to test asteroid respawns that way, but if they behave as they do now, and the first deadhead did early mining, there's nothing but ship farming for the new player to do (see point 1b) to get back up to speed. These can count-balance one another, but in the higher levels, the ship farming really can overtake asteroids any day.

[Darkond2100]

What if Farbs brought back that great aspect of Captain Forever, and if you were to strip out an area, it would be replaced with pirates a level higher.
And for balance, players can't dock at, say, a Beta docking station if they have Delta parts of higher. Which would force players to go out searching for higher leveled ports rather than leveling up their nearby enemy spawns.
And there's the danger of accidentally stripping a high level area that had few enemies to start with, and suddenly being faced with much more even higher powered enemies faced against you.
The leveling up of an area could probably be introduced to the player with a pirate broadcasting a message saying "Unclaimed territory detected, resetting territory parameters."

[fluidmind]

Then the only trick for balance is what's the trigger? If a player lands in a spree of bad luck to a pirate of higher level, would an option be to strip the ship and start at alpha again? Not sure. I like your suggestion, but I would like to see the move-in to be in the region, rather than right on screen. This is the sort of game that I've enjoyed taking the combat slower, even with this aspect of it, so I would hate to see that tossed out for a replenishing mechanic. The dock limiting would make a certain kind of sense, but in that case, they might need to be a bit more plentiful than they are now.

Messaging could be attached to the pirates "changing shifts" as it were, so more powerful move-ins could be the first ship announcing that he intends to run the place now, and perhaps if lowering the level is in the cards, the first lower level announcing some thing like "they finally moved out" with some level of snark thrown in.

[Darkond2100]

Nov 28, 2012 2:35:48 GMT 10 fluidmind said:

I would like to see the move-in to be in the region, rather than right on screen.

That's what I meant, the area parameters that, on your map, that show up as "a" or "d" or "e", would permanently shift to a higher level if you cleared them out.

[Ozzatron]

...Wouldn't that result (eventually) in the entire sector teeming with Juliet titans? And what if then the player loses their ship?

Having the map dynamically change tier seems like it would cause more problems than it solves.

Extensive scrap farming doesn't really help you that much. Even if you acquire millions of credits at Echo tier, you'll only be able to buy Foxtrot modules with that money. You still have to progress through the game to get higher tier modules, as normally. The only difference is that you spent a lot of time banking credits, which you could use later to buy lots of India and Juliet modules.

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

I find farming ships interesting, honestly.