I was reading this thread from the General forum and I realised it has an implication from the point-of-view of the RTS-style player. I was about to just reply to that thread when I realised I was really posting a suggestion. It also impacts some of the things mentioned in the limited fuel/resources thread.

The TL;DR version of this post is:
I think the death model should be something similar to Diablo 2 (singleplayer). Also, non-lone-wolf players should probably play with hardcore mode switched on.

Thoughts
So - if you have 'progressed' through the game to the point at which you are playing it more like an RTS than a space shooter then 'death' has a very different meaning for you. You will generally consider "the destruction of a significant portion of your fleet" as essentially equivalent to death. While your ship is still intact, you will have been set back by (perhaps) hours of gameplay and will need to rebuild. In a 'classic death' scenario like this, what you'd do is just load up a savegame and voila - your fleet is back in all of its glory.

Also, I think that having a large fleet as a kind of buffer for enemy attacks makes 'get out of jail free cards' (as discussed in that limited resources thread) less important and/or unneeded.

The actual suggestion
So - I think that (in order to make failures count) and to discourage constantly re-loading the game because you did badly (but didn't neccesarily die) - I think the game should be saving pretty much constantly. In hardcore mode a simple flag on your savegame file indicates "dead" or "alive" and can't be reversed. In non-hardcore mode you can resurrect, perhaps with a penalty which sets you back a little way. Perhaps that penalty could be purely monetary or maybe something else.

The technical implementation of this could well be an automatic auto-save of [the state of your ship/fleet/relationships with NPCs] every few seconds of gameplay BUT I suspect that would murder game performance. Instead it might be better to perform a full savegame when you dock at a station/planet. Then, between full save-games, stream a sort of "atomic transaction log" to the same-game file (IE: append to end of file). This transaction log only saves the things that have changed since your last save-game, as they change. Since these writes are individually small, game performance is not adversely affected.

When loading a save-game the game first loads the "complete" save-game portion of the file and then applies each of the transactions on top of it, to derive your actual game state. When saving a new game, the save game file is overwritten with a single, compact, save-state (IE: all of those 'transactions' are compacted into the main save state).

Also, quitting a game without first docking at a 'full save game' point could (optionally) be treated just like death; when loading from a non-full-save-game, the 'death penalty' is applied.

This gets rid of the "oh crap, I just lost half my fleet [quit game, reload from last save]" factor because the save-game includes the loss of your fleet as well. it's better to play the whole encounter out and (if you die), respawn.

When respawning, that transaction idea can even be used to determine the extent of the 'death penalty' to apply to the player (as a cost of respawning). Perhaps the cost is You keep none of the gains since the last full save-game and a % of the losses incurred since the last full save-game stay with you, be those 'losses' monetary, or in lost allied ships, lost faction influence etc etc.

I'm at the critical point of a campaign - it's balanced on a knife edge, as I've risked my entire fleet on the outcome of this battle. The next few shots will decide whether I win and thus take the entire system, or whether I die horribly and lose my entire fleet.

Aha! I have the enemy command ship in my sight - at last I can deliver hot ionising death to my nemesis! All I have to do is squeeze the trigger and....

DINGDONG! DINGDONG-DINGDONG! RAT-A-TAT-A-TAT!

I look around, craning my neck to see who's at the door. Huh, another vacuum cleaner salesman. I look back to hit the pause button and....

"You have died. GAME OVER!"


I'd like saves to work as saves.

If there's an insurance on your ships, you wouldn't lose them.
With RTS-compatible supply management you could have them all respawn with full stores, too.

Your insurance rates would go up, no doubt, but no time wasted.

It's not the loss of ships that would put me off. It's the hassle of re-acquiring them all over again and putting them into their proper fleet structures.
If you cut out the micromanagement, I'd be cool with "losing" a ship, even if the (immediately respawned ship) came to with a "respawn timer" to simulate that it's being built first.
The ship would stay in it's fleet / formation, though, because instead of being taken out of the game, the object is merely repaired to full and put into the respawn area.

JabbleWok wrote:DINGDONG! DINGDONG-DINGDONG! RAT-A-TAT-A-TAT!

IMO this is the point where you should have pressed 'Pause'.

Gazz wrote: If there's an insurance on your ships, you wouldn't lose them.
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Your insurance rates would go up, no doubt, but no time wasted.

To me that concept of an insurance premium is really just another way of framing 'the cost of respawning'.

But what this brings us to are two (in my mind) mutually exclusive suggestions/ideas:

• When you die, you die (classic death). Your options are to re-load from a previous save-game (with zero losses) or start anew. Optionally it may be permitted to maintain multiple save-game files for a single pilot/game-instance.
  
  Concepts such as insurance/respawning do not exist. Also, I guess that 'Hardcore mode' would not be implemented as a game feature if save-games worked like this. It would just be up to the player not to load from a save-game if they were killed.
• The game uses the 'Diablo style' save-game as described above - Diablo was the first game in which I recall seeing that style of savegame. Each pilot/game-instance has only one save-game file associated. For non-hardcore games there will be some form of respawn mechanism, hardcore games remove that mechanism.
  
  There would also be some kind of mechanism to add a cost to losing allied ships and/or dying. Whether the same mechanism covers both or whether they are different (insurance for loss of allies, "respawn from death" or "escape pod + insurance") for losing your own ship) is yet to be decided.

ToreadorVampire wrote:IMO this is the point where you should have pressed 'Pause'.

Very true. However, my immediate train of thought switched to blasting the salesman with hot plasma, leaving glowing vacuum cleaner fragments tumbling through space. Loss of concentration.

• When you die, you die (classic death). Your options are to re-load from a previous save-game (with zero losses) or start anew. Optionally it may be permitted to maintain multiple save-game files for a single pilot/game-instance.
  
  Concepts such as insurance/respawning do not exist. Also, I guess that 'Hardcore mode' would not be implemented as a game feature if save-games worked like this. It would just be up to the player not to load from a save-game if they were killed.

Actually, I reckon that would work quite well. I always felt the insurance model was a bit of an immersion breaker. Too much like Valhalla, where everyone wakes up and starts fighting again. No moral hazard.

Well, in the framework of a game, I see the "classic death with unlimited reload-from-save" scenario as the one containing no moral hazard. No matter what happens, you can always drop back to a previous save-game and go again as if nothing happened.

With a continuous-save/continuous-campaign model, every action has a consequence and it's impossible to rewind those consequences. Unless you're playing hardcore though, those consequences will never mean "game over man, game over".

Edit: Minor rewording for clarity

Two major thoughts come to mind.

The first, have an option where you can choose whether it auto-saves or you have to manually save. Choose the autosave increments.

Second, and more realistically is, why do we need to worry about something like this? If someone wants to constantly reload, that's their choice on how they play the game. Just because a feature is in the game doesn't mean you have to use it.

Simply put, if you don't want to constantly quicksave/quickload before a battle, or before any shots are fired, that's up to the player's prerogative. If you force a method like what is discussed upon the player, it will only be a matter of time before someone figures out and/or publishes/creates a work-around.

Don't get me wrong, I can definitely see where you're coming from. Although, this sounds like just forcing the player to play the same way that you can already play regardless of which way the feature is implemented.

I believe Josh mentioned in another thread that he could implement an ironman mode, similar to XCOM: EU, that would restrict you to a single save track, including auto-saves, so you could only reload the most recent save in the event of death.

Respawning is pointless in a single player game. There is no reason to not make use of saves. You can choose to not load a save if you die and instead start over, but respawning would not be a logical choice. In a multi-player game, you can't just stop everything and reload, but there is no obstacle to doing just that in a single player environment.

There are other threads that discuss alternatives to a complete 'new game' if you decide to go hardcore and not reload a save/want to do something new but not give up your familiar universe, so I won't go in to those ideas here.

Gazz wrote:If there's an insurance on your ships, you wouldn't lose them.
With RTS-compatible supply management you could have them all respawn with full stores, too.

Your insurance rates would go up, no doubt, but no time wasted.

It's not the loss of ships that would put me off. It's the hassle of re-acquiring them all over again and putting them into their proper fleet structures.
If you cut out the micromanagement, I'd be cool with "losing" a ship, even if the (immediately respawned ship) came to with a "respawn timer" to simulate that it's being built first.
The ship would stay in it's fleet / formation, though, because instead of being taken out of the game, the object is merely repaired to full and put into the respawn area.

So players shouldn't care about losing a ship?

You shouldn't just be able to pass off losing something you bought, it's ridiculous and makes the game far too easy.

So players shouldn't care about losing a ship?

You shouldn't just be able to pass off losing something you bought, it's ridiculous and makes the game far too easy.

I do understand where he's coming from. The other extreme would be that upon losing a ship, you'll have to meticulously backtrack your way across 20+ systems in order to get the items and hulls needed to build an identical replacement.
This gets especially grating when the ship in question is something like a fighter, and you end up needing a few dozen of them. Micromanagement hell in a handbasket.

That said, I don't think either solution is optimal. I abhor insurance systems (because you'd either have to model them on existing insurances, which will render them a useless waste of time and money in about 80% of all cases, or have them pay you regardless of how idiotic the circumstances were that caused the loss, making you wonder how they make money in the first place), but having to micromanage every single ship replacement isn't the way to go, either.

I'd rather see the player pay man up and pay for his losses in big chunks of cash than to nickel and dime him to death over fuel, ammo, taxes, insurance, mortgages, alimony payments, supplies and what-have-you. KISS should also apply to the flow of money for the player. It's bad enough that you have to put up with this crud in Reallife™; it adds no enjoyment to the experience.

That said, I'd appreciate it if you could just hand over a template of your favorite ship(s) to the next shipyard and have them build it, as opposed to having to grab parts from 20 different systems in order to duplicate your favorite vessel. Add a (10%-25%) customization fee if you must, but don't make me do spare part runs every time a fighter pops.

We don't know how ships are made yet, they can be completely random or the system can just generate ships that are universally used across factions. Until Josh says how ships will be decided on for factions than I don't think we can say much.

We're pretty much coming back to the risk vs. reward scenario.

You're not going to take on an Enderman in minecraft without properly preparing.

+ 1 for classic RPG style of saving. Bonus points for a Baldur's Gate style Autosave and Quicksave slot on top of manual saves.

It's possible to design the systems so that you can always run if you don't like the odds but what would be the point?
You have a mission to assassinate the cargo convoy... but they decide to run before you even hit a single ship. Mission failed.
With a zero-risk approach you simply don't have any interesting gameplay.

That the player will reload upon the loss of an entire fleet but not upon losing a single ship is a wild assumption without any context.
Why did you field that fleet in the first place? I would assume you were playing for big stakes. Big stakes imply big risks.
That's what all those hardcore / iron man / whatchamacallits modes are about.

Gazz wrote:It's possible to design the systems so that you can always run if you don't like the odds but what would be the point?
You have a mission to assassinate the cargo convoy... but they decide to run before you even hit a single ship. Mission failed.
With a zero-risk approach you simply don't have any interesting gameplay.

That the player will reload upon the loss of an entire fleet but not upon losing a single ship is a wild assumption without any context.
Why did you field that fleet in the first place? I would assume you were playing for big stakes. Big stakes imply big risks.
That's what all those hardcore / iron man / whatchamacallits modes are about.

Which is why you wouldn't abuse the save feature like a little girl and proudly boast your game with a 0 save count, or have a disable option that simply freezes your game when you quit and resumes right where you were when it shows up that gives you a little "Hardcore M-er F-er" sticker to slap on your hull to impress the rest of us .

It would just come down to playstyle in that argument. Some people made Escape velocity characters, took a mission and force quit the game so that the auto save at planet land was before they took it, if it was something that cost them too much (Little sister was best at that game *Rolls eyes*). Cowards will find a way, might as well make it convenient for casual players, all the better if the "Hard-core" players get a pride badge in reward for their willingness to live on the razor's edge.

Perhaps make it an option box in the universe to allow manual saving would be a palatable compromise?