Just be aware that the moment you make tradeoffs numerically unequal, you enable vertical progression. The longer you play, the more advanced at least one of the attributes of a product can become (subject to increasing research costs, but still.)Echo wrote:What You guys want is to make it so that the total increase after research, for exemple :
P1 = 95
P2 = 100
P3 = 110
This subject got quite a lot of discussion, but there's probably still room for additional thoughts. It's an important question: how do you have no hard cap on research benefits in a game that -- unlike the typical 4X game -- has no defined win/lose ending state?
Actually, that gets me thinking.MyNameWuzTaken wrote:Someone explain to me how the factions are deciding how much to spend in those kill contracts? is that a plug for the time being, or are they actually valuing their budgetary contributions?
It seems odd to me that all cultures attaining the level of interstellar spaceflight would have murder-for-hire Craigslist boards. Any culture respecting life with legal force would immediately go after any person or organization soliciting contract killings.
I understand we're talking about a game here, and that the "contract board" is a well-established trope, especially in MMORPGs. Even so, something about all civilizations being just fine with paying to destroy the lives and property of others just feels off to me.
What about the idea of two kinds of contract terminals -- regular and secret?
Regular contract boards would have all kinds of contracts except those that call for the infliction of damage on someone else's life or property. These boards would be publicly available to anyone not being actively pursued by the local police.
Secret contract boards would be private boards that could be hosted by a person or faction, and which could hold contracts of any kind, including destructive ones. You'd have to gain the trust of such a person/faction before they'd give you the location of their contract terminal. But once you have it, you can access any of the missions on it, including the usual destruction missions.
Note: there ought to be some inherent danger in doing so. If the local police discover a rogue contract terminal with destructive missions on it, maybe the owner of that board becomes kill-on-sight, and anyone who has offered or accomplished a destruction contract is fined.
This would tilt gameplay in LT a bit toward non-destructive play. I'm not sure that's a good fit for the kind of game that Josh wants to make. On the other hand, it would give a little more zest to blowing things up -- there could be additional kinds of gameplay related to covering up your lucrative but destructive deeds... or hacking datalogs for evidence of such deeds.