McDuff wrote: I'm not in favour of "just paying money" that vanishes into a sink.

Nor am I, but you would be paying for the quality of the crew member. And crew upkeep seems to be coming to the game anyway. Losing crew results in nodal ship system fallout (in an engagingly personal way), so I don't see wear and tear bringing any gameplay that's worth the extra complexity.

The fuel system you mention seems different from a 'wear and tear' system. From a game perspective I wouldn't like a system that would allow me to strand somewhere. But I might be interpreting your system wrong.

Eery Petrol wrote:The fuel system you mention seems different from a 'wear and tear' system. From a game perspective I wouldn't like a system that would allow me to strand somewhere. But I might be interpreting your system wrong.

My own thoughts on fuel mechanics exclude the possibility of being stranded anywhere. Please check out Heisenberg Extractor and my latest thoughts on the matter here.

Essentially, the penalty for running out of fuel would scale with the size of the vessel (and therefore likely the expertise of the player), with no fuel penalty for those in sufficiently small ships (which new players will be most likely flying) and severe but not deadlocking penalties for the largest vessels. The costs of fuel and the penalty for running out of it scale up but never to the point where you can be stranded. A lot of people seem to be in favour of these mechanics.

ThymineC wrote:My own thoughts on fuel mechanics exclude the possibility of being stranded anywhere. Please check out

Ah, a very interesting thread. I hope you won't mind me responding before reading through its extensive length. Could I summarise its significance in this thread as the introduction of an upgradeable ship reactor with distributable energy, that responds interestingly to the other game systems, including making ship nodes less operable? If so, I see a crude similarity with the reactor in the game FTL from a gameplay perspective, with ion storms, solar flares and hacking affecting it.

I love your system so far, but it also has a game impact that dwarfs the subject of this thread. I still hold that for the purpose of this thread specifically, a fuel or wear 'n tear system's game impact is already sufficiently carried by the planned crew and combat/collision damage mechanics.

Interestingly, the current discussion isn't representing the dominant vote of age dependant wear and tear. It's now more about losing available resource (be it crew, reactor energy or conventional fuel).

Eery Petrol wrote:

McDuff wrote: I'm not in favour of "just paying money" that vanishes into a sink.

Nor am I, but you would be paying for the quality of the crew member. And crew upkeep seems to be coming to the game anyway. Losing crew results in nodal ship system fallout (in an engagingly personal way), so I don't see wear and tear bringing any gameplay that's worth the extra complexity.

Well there's also fragility of scale and obsolescence. If an empty ship doesn't cost anything, I can stockpile capitals as something to do with my vast stacks of cash. If I do that in a system where that adds significantly to the negative side of my cashflow statement, I'll reconsider.

As it has been brought up in a few separate posts I won't quote (Can't be bothered, yay for laziness hey Thymine?).

I am generally against any massively abstract form of 'upkeep' IE an upkeep that doesn't feel like upkeep. That has no depth or weight. The system of logistics managers and mechanics was thought with the construct of adding depth while also keeping the option for automation so that the players who wanted to be involved could be, and those who didn't want to could avoid it.

Now as I read that paying wages isn't really an option per Josh it could all be handled in the form of the jobs. IE each time the maintenance/refueling is necessary they simply request the money or take it out of the fund.

McDuff wrote:I'm not in favour of "just paying money" that vanishes into a sink.

What if that was merely a gameplay option? IE the logistics managers having an account that you could choose to put money into that would get drained as needed until it ran out then they'd start hounding you and if you didn't pay things wouldn't be refueled/maintained?

You misunderstand. I'm not against conglomerating budgets to make automation easier, and indeed I'm in favour of automating systems which dynamically allocate budgets based on the arrangement of AI assets in an organisation.

What I'm against is stuff like paying "upkeep" to a random black hole where it simply vanishes from the game. It's much better for depth to create interacting systems with inputs and outputs, mediated by an economic system of credits and currency.

Use one facility to repair and you're not just providing money to them, but to everyone who supplies them, and in turn everyone who supplies *them*.

Using up spare parts or what have you (which are actually manufactured) is certainly better than a random upkeep black hole.

I'm not convinced that increased upkeep costs increasing as a ship ages is a good choice, though. It necessitates scrapping and replacing ships occasionally, which seems inevitably tedious. You might have to cross the galaxy to find somewhere that makes your favorite ship, and it'll get pretty much untenable with a large fleet.

Revoke wrote: I'm not convinced that increased upkeep costs increasing as a ship ages is a good choice, though. It necessitates scrapping and replacing ships occasionally, which seems inevitably tedious. You might have to cross the galaxy to find somewhere that makes your favorite ship, and it'll get pretty much untenable with a large fleet.

Scrapping and replacing ships is, again, part of the point.

I would probably suggest having larger items degrade at a slower rate, so that space stations can be pretty invariant in their maintenance costs, and large capital ships themselves don't necessarily degrade that slowly. But, things like reactors, power couplings, engines, anything you fit onto a hardpoint, degrades a little faster depending on what it is, and requires replacement more frequently.

Your ship chassis might last a long time, but need four or five reactor changes over its lifespan.

As technology progresses, you'll find your ships becoming outdated anyway. Your "favourite" ship will probably change. This is the sort of problem that "custom classes" is designed to solve. Rather than telling your AI managers that you want them to buy 100 Joshcorp X-100 Class IIB fighters, you say "find me ships that look like this and have these stats."

For bulk orders, I envisage people contracting specifically out to dedicated manufacturing corps anyway. If you really, really need 100 Joshcorp X-100 fighters at a certain part of the galaxy, and nothing else will do, you set up a contract for delivery by a certain date, or at certain intervals, and the manufacturer subcontracts as necessary to various intermediary companies in order to deal with the problems of actually getting them to you.

It's worth also pointing out that this is a problem if you have to replace your ships because of obsolescence and age, or just because they got blowed up by bad guys. If you're buying ships from 100 systems away it's a costly problem regardless.

I selected "age dependent wear and tear" because it makes sense to me that ships will need to be upgraded every 25 to 50 hours worth of play. The items being upgraded could be sensors, engines, capacitors and other non-weapon items. For weapons, I'd be happy with seeing more variety as the game progresses but I don't want to see better stats on the same weapon. Weapons should almost not have durability since they relate directly to items on your ship which will have durability.

There's no getting around that age-dependant wear is going to add extra hassle for no real gain, though. Requiring full chassis replacement is surplus to requirements; the purpose would be fulfilled just as well by requiring an overhaul that consumes (ubiquitous) spare parts. Plus, this sort of fiddly stuff that only makes sense on a per-ship level is always going to be difficult - I don't want to keep track of 50 different age numbers in my fleet.

People always say the same thing. "It'll be too fiddly!"

This despite the fact that it's obvious the AI will be able to manage it - because the AI will be managing it for their own fleets.

Just tell your workers to sort it out, keep their ships in repair, and swap them out for the right class of ship at a certain point.

If I thought it was going to be fiddly I wouldn't want it either.

I'd like the most realistic option

Nope! I only say it's too fiddly because I think it can't be handled opaquely. There's too much of a drastic change involved. Of course my AI fleets can handle this without me worrying. The actions involved are shipping in replacements, and scrapping old ships, which really seems a bit too major to be happening unpredictably.

I guess I'm just not convinced that there's any interesting choices or gameplay to be had in interacting with maintenance issues directly. It's important for other reasons, but it can be in a format that can be handled largely automatically and still address those reasons.

McDuff wrote:What I'm against is stuff like paying "upkeep" to a random black hole where it simply vanishes from the game. It's much better for depth to create interacting systems with inputs and outputs, mediated by an economic system of credits and currency.

Oh I agree completely. I like to know that everything that goes into and out of a system is quantified. However 'money' or 'credits' become a bit more difficult to quantify in that sense. If my idea were implemented and you were paying your NPC hirelings then I would expect that their credit balance would go up and up. But that isn't something that necessarily has to be conveyed to the player. After all, are you sharing your financial information with everyone? No.

I think the main issue here is that unless 'components' are sufficiently expensive to buy or manufacture then you're basically creating a complex system that really has no weight. Basically my logic is this. Either the money has to come from somewhere (quantified) OR there needs to be money sinks. "Black holes". Even if the black hole is merely an annoyingly high overhead for something IE maintenance. Now ideally it shouldn't be prohibitive, but if there is one thing that annoys me in games is when there aren't money sinks. To use Skyrim, when you have tons of money and nothing to spend it on. Fact is, if there is no origin point for the money and it is being magic'ed into the world. Then there needs to be black hole sinks. Now maybe there will be a quantified origin for the money. Then this won't be such an issue. But then the player AND the npc's will still need ways of losing that money. I doubt Josh is going to have NPC wealth simulated that hardcore. Though it would be interesting if he did.

McDuff wrote:Use one facility to repair and you're not just providing money to them, but to everyone who supplies them, and in turn everyone who supplies *them*.

I'm not against using public repair facilities. As far as quantified parts this isn't an issue. With money though it becomes a bit harder. But since we don't really have any idea how Josh is planning to handle that in the final product I don't want to speculate too much on that specifically.

TGS wrote:If my idea were implemented and you were paying your NPC hirelings then I would expect that their credit balance would go up and up. But that isn't something that necessarily has to be conveyed to the player. After all, are you sharing your financial information with everyone? No.

Well, why are you paying your hirelings if they have nothing to spend it on? Why do they need money? Why are they coming and working for you rather than sitting still doing what *they* want to do instead?

If I'm paying people wages I'd expect them to be spending their wages on stuff. Food, entertainment, booze, living facilities, perhaps buying some property on a little moon near Space Barbados for their retirement.

Anything that has no needs isn't going to come work for you, unless it's a custom built AI that just does what you say.

Now maybe there will be a quantified origin for the money. Then this won't be such an issue. But then the player AND the npc's will still need ways of losing that money. I doubt Josh is going to have NPC wealth simulated that hardcore. Though it would be interesting if he did.

Well Josh is still at present planning on basing currency off a specie metal, so we can presume that money is "created" as that specie metal is mined. But regardless, another reason games like Skyrim don't work so much is because the economy doesn't grow. You put all that work into it, making armour and killing beasties, but nothing grows and changes dynamically. Occasionally a shopkeeper will have a bit more stuff once his or her timer has reset and they have a new supply of goods. But nobody else is buying and selling goods in that world.

In LT, everybody else is buying and selling goods and investing and making the economy grow. Money is moving around and doing work.

You don't need ways to arbitrarily take money off people. You need useful things for that money to do.

McDuff wrote:Use one facility to repair and you're not just providing money to them, but to everyone who supplies them, and in turn everyone who supplies *them*.

I'm not against using public repair facilities. As far as quantified parts this isn't an issue. With money though it becomes a bit harder. But since we don't really have any idea how Josh is planning to handle that in the final product I don't want to speculate too much on that specifically.

I'm not quite following this. You dock at the repair station. You say "how much to repair this?" The Space Mechanic says "1,000 credits." You say "here is 1,000 credits." He says "I will now repair your ship." Ta da.

Then, of course, they go spend some of that 1,000 credits on replacing the materials that he used to repair your ship, buying new tools, hiring new workers, upgrading his drones, getting drunk on a weekend bender in Space Acapulco, etc etc.

What's hard about that?