happyguy142 wrote:We are treading in dangerous waters here. There is no leveling up in LT, the experience you gain is your own. Also LT is not a game full of pre-determined "random" encounters. If you happen to be on a cargo run and you meet up with some pirates, that because there were some pirates that just happen to be hanging around close enough to detect your ship.

To make it so because you have level 5 tech on your ship means you are going to meet up with more level 5 tech ships defeats the whole free sandbox play of LT. Personally speaking I don't think there should be any sort of difficulty leveling. I guess one way to handle this would be to make it so the initial system and maybe the systems immediately surrounding it hold ships that stay around a lower tech. Gives you sometime to build some funding and upgrade your ship. But once you start exploring further out you will start to meet whatever is out there. You will just have to work out how to deal with higher and lower tech factions and the such.

So a SPAZ-like (but inverted) or a Cpt Jameson-like model? (you can see that I like to make analogies with existing games, for ease of comparison).
Alternatively, you could do what EVE does and do a nexus-edge model, with a central ring (rather than core) of secure systems. Not sure how this is going to work in an infinite universe though:
The risks of that approach at least is to make the levelling curve not too extreme, but still "interesting". Jumping from a lvl1 to a lvl10 encounter is frustrating. Grading each encounter by 1 level progressively is boring.

My model for progression was initially something like Space Rangers, which had continued player progression along with slower (but fairly fast) "galaxy" progression:
However, on second thought NOT a good idea for a sandbox game like Limit Theory, which has the danger of the progression curve trumping everything else (basically dedicating all of your time to progression-related activities instead of exploring for fun, and ... well having fun.

jimhsu wrote:However, on second thought NOT a good idea for a sandbox game like Limit Theory, which has the danger of the progression curve trumping everything else (basically dedicating all of your time to progression-related activities instead of exploring for fun, and ... well having fun.

And see, I think you're trying to quantize something that hasn't really yet been discussed and/or fleshed out. We don't know what constitutes progression in this game. Theoretically, if you have zero rep (no good or bad rep) then you can fly through some territories that would be otherwise incredibly hostile if you had rep one way or another. Until we can define what progession is in this game, some of this speculation doesn't even work.

You talk of difficulty scaling, but when the difficulty is your own doing (i.e. if you gain a tiny bit of rep for faction A, how much will faction B respond), there really is much scaling. It almost turns into an all-or-nothing type environment.

I think before we can really focus on issues that you bring up, jimhsu, we need a little bit more information from Josh, unless of course someone has some ideas on how to actually implement scale. For all we know, the way that it is implemented (if at all), your ideas may or may not work for it. Don't get me wrong, I like your ideas, but I just don't think we have enough info about the workings of the game yet.

However, the best understanding I have is that Josh is simply building a universe simulation. A simulation that is nothing more than an economy and political (faction-wise) workings, and that the player is just a cog in the machine. A simulation isn't exactly progression-based.

happyguy142 wrote:We are treading in dangerous waters here. There is no leveling up in LT, the experience you gain is your own. Also LT is not a game full of pre-determined "random" encounters. If you happen to be on a cargo run and you meet up with some pirates, that because there were some pirates that just happen to be hanging around close enough to detect your ship.

To make it so because you have level 5 tech on your ship means you are going to meet up with more level 5 tech ships defeats the whole free sandbox play of LT. Personally speaking I don't think there should be any sort of difficulty leveling. I guess one way to handle this would be to make it so the initial system and maybe the systems immediately surrounding it hold ships that stay around a lower tech. Gives you sometime to build some funding and upgrade your ship. But once you start exploring further out you will start to meet whatever is out there. You will just have to work out how to deal with higher and lower tech factions and the such.

I agree with this its more realistic and well generally more enjoyable.

I'm reading a lot about levels and I have to say surely this game is all about having access to the best weapons etc from the start with the limiting factor being how much cash you have to spend. I can't wait for any more gameplay footage as it seems with each video released Josh has added more features and just makes me wish I had a time machine to go to release day and start exploring the universe.