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Re: Factional Organization Management

#16
I had never seen this thread, didn't know I inspired it :lol:

But as for faction control, I think it should kind of scale with how much territory or assets you own. Like, if you only control a small mining op, you should be able to tell the AI which types of 'roids to harvest, where to take the ore for refining, how long to mine this belt for etc. Then as a big investment (for a corporation that size) tell them specifically where build a dedicated refining/manufacturing station, what parts it should have and all the little nitty gritty things.

But when you start to control a massive mining empire (the mining is just an example cuz its what I like to do in space games ;) ) all that micromanaging would start to get tedious if you have a ton of systems to manage. So I would say you should be able to allocate a certain amount of cash to a specific op and let the AI manager do what it thinks will get the most investment back, and give any profits straight to the faction leader (aka the player).

So if for example I allocated 1mil money to a mining op, and they hired some AI's gave them standard mining ships and they started to do their work, they could do whatever would make the most money as in upgrade the ships or build a station etc and once they start making over the allocated money, all the excess of the 1 mil allocation would go back to the faction as a whole (or its leader)

So basically what I am trying to say, it should somehow scale based on how big your Faction is, or at least give you the option to focus more on macro as it gets larger, but still have the option to micro everything if you still want to.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#17
i'd separate "faction" gameplay and "RTS" gameplay.

in an RTS you dont have to deal with internal strife because individual members of your workforce disagree with the party line/your line/the other people who are in the faction.
in a faction you have to deal with differing interests.

and many people conflate those two aspects.

one can have most of the aspects people think are implied in "faction gameplay".

we can have the interesting (non-social) aspects of "faction gameplay" without introducing the major hassle of actual factions.
owning multiple ships and stations and exploiting large swathes of space for our own purposes can all be archieved with only RTS aspecs.

and i think that is what the people dont want to give away, the many-ships gameplay.

but it has a very different complexity than having full social faction aspects.

so i think the poll would be more significant with that distinction explicitly included.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#18
I still like the X3 model, you still pilot your own ship, but you can give instructions and somewhat autonomy to all your assets anywhere from your ship alone. I don't want to deal with the whole "differing opinions" and your faction being taken over from within for no inexplicable reason, that would tear the fun in half for me. I want my conflict to come from other large factions or a bunch of smaller factions coming together to fight me. And I don't mean only in combat either, control of stations, prices of goods, who controls the best sectors of space etc. Of course you can take all these things with force traditionally, but also being able to buy out and shut down another faction/corporation or just absorb them into your faction, or even sell under-profiting sectors to other factions would all be cool things to do. Having corporate espionage and faction splitting from withing would just take out all the fun I could have in the way I play.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#19
MrPerson wrote:I still like the X3 model, you still pilot your own ship, but you can give instructions and somewhat autonomy to all your assets anywhere from your ship alone. I don't want to deal with the whole "differing opinions" and your faction being taken over from within for no inexplicable reason, that would tear the fun in half for me. I want my conflict to come from other large factions or a bunch of smaller factions coming together to fight me. And I don't mean only in combat either, control of stations, prices of goods, who controls the best sectors of space etc. Of course you can take all these things with force traditionally, but also being able to buy out and shut down another faction/corporation or just absorb them into your faction, or even sell under-profiting sectors to other factions would all be cool things to do. Having corporate espionage and faction splitting from withing would just take out all the fun I could have in the way I play.
Although I am a fan of X3, I think that the 'faction' mechanics are too disconnected from you as a player. You don't really feel like you own anything since you barely interact with them in any way. (Except when you see the green icons on your map/HUD and you're like "I OWN THAT!!!"). I would hope that the interaction with the factions would go beyond just the RTS mechanics into the social, but at the same time I believe that it shouldn't be possible to just straight out lose your faction or something like that if someone disagrees.

Though this may have been a flaw in the AI programming for X3, I hated the fact that when you built a station it was barely even used by you nor the AI unless you feel like including it in a supply chain for your Traders, I want the stations in LT to be an integral part of faction dominance, system ownership and gameplay in general. I want them to feel more like X3:AP's Gate system that it gives you with the station rather than just simple production - A home.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#20
When I think of faction gameplay I always think of setting up automated pipelines, RTS style battles, and company management. Think of it as owning a business. You have costs and profits, along with several friends that will help with the work.

You manage the workers, their salaries and any costs associated with their work. The employees do the labor in exchange for payment.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#21
I didn't mean an exact copy of what X3 does just the same concept. Obviously X3 didn't handle the AI reacting to player created elements very well and I am hoping LT does. Basically I want what BFett said above, and see the other non-employed to me AI's react to my decisions and created elements as well.

Most of that was an argument against faction splitting and in-corporation power wars. The only time I would want my faction "split" would be to give a manager AI control over certain sectors or something so I didn't have to micro as much as my faction grows.

But I happened to think about it, if the AI are only in it for the money, how would we go about giving them ships/items? Like if I want all my mining fleets to use one ship with a particular upgrade set, or my combat ships to all use a certain type of ship but they all have a mind of their own, how would we tell them what to use? Would it be like driving a company car in that you get a certain amount of a ship, they use that until they decide to stop doing the job and they go park it in the Faction hangar then get in their personal ship and go about their business?
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#22
MrPerson wrote: But I happened to think about it, if the AI are only in it for the money, how would we go about giving them ships/items? Like if I want all my mining fleets to use one ship with a particular upgrade set, or my combat ships to all use a certain type of ship but they all have a mind of their own, how would we tell them what to use? Would it be like driving a company car in that you get a certain amount of a ship, they use that until they decide to stop doing the job and they go park it in the Faction hangar then get in their personal ship and go about their business?
You know that theres two kinds of AIs in the game?

The executive AIs with full minds and equivalent capabilites to the player.

And the major population of AIs, the workers.
Who man most of the ships and are rts minions of the player and executive AIs.
They just follow orders and generally dont have their own will.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#24
MrPerson wrote:I remember hearing something about it but don't remember much. Maybe the executive AIs are the ones I could give control of certain faction elements to like I mentioned above to reduce all the micro in large Factions.
I think that Josh was planning to give us this feature post LT 1.0 because of complexity. But yes, this would allow an AI to manage your faction, but you also run the risk of having it form a sub faction against you. It could be something that depends on the executive's relationship with the player and if they think they are being treated fairly.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#25
MrPerson wrote:I remember hearing something about it but don't remember much. Maybe the executive AIs are the ones I could give control of certain faction elements to like I mentioned above to reduce all the micro in large Factions.
Yes, and exactly there the distinction between RTS play and faction play comes into existence.

In RTS play you dont have the executive AI with their own goals. (You may have leutnants who do some microing, but they dont decide that they want to do something different now)

in faction gameplay you can have the independently thinking executives.
Who, as bfett pointed out, decide that they dont want to work for you anymore (or decide to ignore your orders and do something awesome instead).

And faction gameplay has been relegated to after-release a long while ago, but RTS gameplay will be there from the start.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#27
Graf wrote:Speaking of RTS gameplay, do we have any details on how that will even work? I don't remember it being demoed in any of the update videos. I'm hoping that the RTS aspect plays out like an open world Homeworld.
The game never got to the point that these controls were in use by the UI, only the AI had use of these tools.
But it was based on the bounties system I believe.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#28
Look at any of the early videos, there the RTS interface is demoed.

Its simple and not very refined, but pretty much what you'd expect. Point and click.

The bounty system had nothing to do with the RTS interface, iirc it was a thought before the executive/worker dichtomy to get RTS like authority over the hordes of fully self determining AI's.
to get them to do what you want in the first place.
Last edited by Cornflakes_91 on Wed Feb 01, 2017 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#29
Cornflakes_91 wrote:Look at any of the early, there the RTS interface is demoed.

Its simple and not very refined, but pretty much what you'd expect. Point and click.

The bounty system had nothing to do with the RTS interface, iirc it was a thought before the executive/worker dichtomy to get RTS like authority over the hordes of fully self determining AI's.
to get them to do what you want in the first place.
That sounds more right, I haven't watched the videos in awhile.
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WebGL Spaceships and Trails
<Cuisinart8> apparently without the demon driving him around Silver has the intelligence of a botched lobotomy patient ~ Mar 04 2020
console.log(`What's all ${this} ${Date.now()}`);
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Re: Factional Organization Management

#30
I think there's an element of "appealing in theory, rubbish in reality" to the gameplay aspects of faction control.

I say this after starting this thread, in which I image some control mechanics. They multiply quickly, and I could imagine growing totally out of control if the factions become complex. Would we really want just pages and pages of radio buttons or check boxes? I'm sure Teh Josh could make them look good... but in the end it would just be like a bunch of civics from Sim City. Or what am I missing?

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