Hardenberg wrote:[...]maybe a few colourful nebulae[...]

Maybe a few colourful nebulae?! Hey, that sounds dangerously close to diss against all of Mr. Parnell's phenomenally attractive work on said nebulae.
And you failed to explicitly mention dust and god rays.

Here's a potential compromise: deployable jump beacons that can bypass a few systems - single use only.

You can drop a beacon every 3 systems and ping backwards from beacon to beacon, but they are destroyed each time you jump to one. Makes it so you can spend all the time in the world "exploring" on your way to the destination, and backtracking is really quick and easy.

fatmop wrote:Here's a potential compromise: deployable jump beacons that can bypass a few systems - single use only.

You can drop a beacon every 3 systems and ping backwards from beacon to beacon, but they are destroyed each time you jump to one. Makes it so you can spend all the time in the world "exploring" on your way to the destination, and backtracking is really quick and easy.

Just trying to imagine the ways you could abuse that mechanic before I go to bed.

1. Deploy 20+ in a system and its 3-jump destination, use for instantaneous trade jumps. Probably not too bad of an abuse if the distance is short enough, but could also be mitigated with a "1 per system" rule
2. Deploy 1 in every system under a neutral faction's control. Become hostile to faction by attacking, use beacons to bypass all enemy defenses. If they're limited to player-only, then that's not necessarily too huge since the player can't bring his fleet with him. Could mitigate by making beacons discoverable and destructible by hostiles.
3. Enter a hostile system via the stargate, narrowly avoid death at the stargate defenses, plop a beacon and escape to a neighboring beacon to repair. Once repaired, jump back to the hostile system and continue your mission. Again, mitigated by beacons being destructible.

Further to your plotting different courses etc, I'd like to see some kind of trade-routing support. This ties into fleet management as much as it does to navigation and as much as it does receiving news feeds and trade/market feeds. It's one thing to have a history of known prices but things are always changing in the markets, so I'd like to be able to have multiple systems that can be upgraded that allow me to predict and/or otherwise make educated guesses on what the price of things might be in different systems so that I can alter my course to make a trade trip more profitable etc

Not a fan of the beacon/gate design in open space for the reason of them becoming restrictive choke points & the added mechanics/complexity offering little benefit, but alas, my question to the group is this.

Would travelling for 3-5 mins to traverse an entire universe be too long for an LT player?

As for myself, i've always been a fan of 'warp' mechanic, in that the player watches the 'wind-up' sequence before immediately seeing a flash or black-out leading directly into the cool down sequence after arriving at their destination. So the player has no 'wait' in between (you could explain it as they were in sleep/stasis etc). Thus travelling short distance and extreme distances wouldn't look any different, the only difference being in warp warm-up/cool-down as a factor of ship mass and/or level of maintenance/damage.

Deej wrote: Not a fan of the beacon/gate design in open space for the reason of them becoming restrictive choke points & the added mechanics/complexity offering little benefit, but alas, my question to the group is this.

you will not make yourself friends with josh by saying this

jumpgates provide gameplay by creating this chokepoints and nodes of travel between stars.
with jumpgates and wormholes you get roads and meeting points for the player and NPC.
if everyone just jumps to another system as soon a he leaves the station the universe would feel empty and small, as you never meet the population of the system.

also jumpgates and wormholes provide tactical opportunites, as defending systems would be pretty much impossible if you can jump in and out of every system at will

without gates and wormholes
build fleet -> jump to enemy shipyards and ammunition facilities -> destroy them without much opportunity for defence -> BOORING

with gates
build fleet -> try to go through gate -> heavy enemy fortress on the other side -> epic battle of awesomeness commences -> Fun

jumpgates provide gameplay and focus activity outside of docking at stations, while no gates would make the systems feel empty even with lots of NPC's

Deej wrote: Would travelling for 3-5 mins to traverse an entire universe be too long for an LT player?

i expect to take this long per system if it is not developed, and not for the whole universe.
as the universe would feel incredibly small if i can traverse an infinite universe in mere minutes.
i expect myself taking hours going from one end to another in my explored universe in the "lategame".

everything else and travelling loses its meaning, like in the X-Series, where as soon as you get your jumpdrive equipped frigate you can go from one end of the universe in seconds and the universe ends up feeling tiny even if there are countless sectors inbetween

fatmop wrote:Just trying to imagine the ways you could abuse that mechanic before I go to bed.

1. Deploy 20+ in a system and its 3-jump destination, use for instantaneous trade jumps. Probably not too bad of an abuse if the distance is short enough, but could also be mitigated with a "1 per system" rule
2. Deploy 1 in every system under a neutral faction's control. Become hostile to faction by attacking, use beacons to bypass all enemy defenses. If they're limited to player-only, then that's not necessarily too huge since the player can't bring his fleet with him. Could mitigate by making beacons discoverable and destructible by hostiles.
3. Enter a hostile system via the stargate, narrowly avoid death at the stargate defenses, plop a beacon and escape to a neighboring beacon to repair. Once repaired, jump back to the hostile system and continue your mission. Again, mitigated by beacons being destructible.

1. Instead of one per system, just make them expensive so that it's not profitable to use them for trade runs.
2. Never say anything is "player-only". Anything the player can do, the AI can also. Anything the AI can do, the player can too.
3. Beacons should be detectable and destructible, agreed.

Hi,
Didn't Josh say in one of his monthly updates that you would be able to research jump drives after a while? Would be a great way of combining 'one-use' jump beacons with jump drives.
Cheers

Yes, jump drives will be a thing. I'm more concerned about opportunities for early-game exploration, prior to researching jump drives and sitting on huge wads of cash.

Maybe these beacons can be mass-specific, and the cost increases with mass. So you bring your tiny little scout on a deep-space run for 50 jumps, and the total cost of return beacons isn't that high. But you bring your battleship on the same run? You're going to spend 5 battleships' worth of cash on your return beacons.

Expanding ont he ideas here gave me another idea...

If backtracking really is an issue, maybe something similar to WoW's hearthstone? Something that can be used once every 30-60 min that is like an emergency warp back to your last 'home' base (while docked, you can choose whether to set your 'home' to be where you're docked)?

I know I'm a huge proponent of the "Don't let the player do something the AI can't", but in this case, with how it's restricted (say, only affect the player avatar's ship and have a decent spool-up time to make it infeasible during battles / wars) it might work. If someone wants to use it for a very slow trade run, let them. Carry some consequences though; say you use it while your allies engage in a battle (effectively running away) you could also gain a reputation of being a coward.

I do like fatmop's idea as an alternative though. If we really want to be friendly to new players, give them a stack of 5-10 when they first start the game (maybe akin to Minecraft's bonus chest--or hell, make it toggleable; might be immersion breaking but giving new players a little extra help at the start of the game might be worthwhile).

DWMagus wrote:Expanding ont he ideas here gave me another idea...

If backtracking really is an issue, maybe something similar to WoW's hearthstone? Something that can be used once every 30-60 min that is like an emergency warp back to your last 'home' base (while docked, you can choose whether to set your 'home' to be where you're docked)?

I know I'm a huge proponent of the "Don't let the player do something the AI can't", but in this case, with how it's restricted (say, only affect the player avatar's ship and have a decent spool-up time to make it infeasible during battles / wars) it might work. If someone wants to use it for a very slow trade run, let them. Carry some consequences though; say you use it while your allies engage in a battle (effectively running away) you could also gain a reputation of being a coward.

I do like fatmop's idea as an alternative though. If we really want to be friendly to new players, give them a stack of 5-10 when they first start the game (maybe akin to Minecraft's bonus chest--or hell, make it toggleable; might be immersion breaking but giving new players a little extra help at the start of the game might be worthwhile).

maybe just make the jumpdrive capable of remembering a target and jump there at the press of an hotkey?
more or less just an "jump to this position" with an precalibrated target mapped to an hotkey
same functionality without immersion break

The difficulty with these jump beacons, or jump memory sites, etc., is that every ship basically has to have a jump drive. If we're still assuming that only cap ships have jump drives at all, the whole conversation is moot unless you come up with an alternate explanation. Say, instead of your ship having a jump drive, you're carrying around a ship-size portable emergency wormhole generator, and the beacons you're dropping are the anchors for the other side of your wormholes.

Is there a consensus on how cap-ship jump drives will be used? If this particular feature is implemented, you will want to have capital jump drives be a massive improvement somehow. For example, cap ships don't require these beacons to jump to a designated target star.

fatmop wrote:The difficulty with these jump beacons, or jump memory sites, etc., is that every ship basically has to have a jump drive. If we're still assuming that only cap ships have jump drives at all, the whole conversation is moot unless you come up with an alternate explanation. Say, instead of your ship having a jump drive, you're carrying around a ship-size portable emergency wormhole generator, and the beacons you're dropping are the anchors for the other side of your wormholes.

Is there a consensus on how cap-ship jump drives will be used? If this particular feature is implemented, you will want to have capital jump drives be a massive improvement somehow. For example, cap ships don't require these beacons to jump to a designated target star.

of course, you'd need an approbiate jump drive which afaik are only mountable on capships

Right, which misses the whole point of the discussion - how do you make travel less boring earlier in the game?

That's why I'm looking for solutions that are fighter-sized.