When I read Galactic Threat I instantly thought of a Galaxy wide threat kind of like the Reapers in mass effect.

Basically a threat so big that when everything and anything you encounter is puny and you have 5 huge fleets mopping up the rest of the resistance in your part of the galaxy they appear to ruin you day!

The star trek equivalent would perhaps be the Borg.

What we are talking about is an extremly powerful force that effectivley wipes out or takes over all planets i comes into contact with and is equipped with the most powerful weapons and tech in the galaxy or even better stuff. Something where a single capital ship or cube can wipe out a normally impressive fleet without breaking a sweat.


Perhaps the best solution for balance is to generate bigger and more powerful factions the more powerful the player grows.

Ixos wrote:Perhaps the best solution for balance is to generate bigger and more powerful factions the more powerful the player grows.

Or, they just remain as a giant threat that you should just plain avoid. Not everything has to be defeatable.

phil wrote:Not everything has to be defeatable.

That depends fully on what kind of player you are.

But I am actually more worried about the opposite, that there will be a point when the player gets so powerful nothing in the game can challange him/her fleet.


At that point there needs to be special game mechanics in place to keep it interresting, either making your empire crumble from within with rebellions, or an external threat bigger then anything you can imagine (or both).

You could also just restart in a completely different universe. There are 2^64 of them.

For some reason asking players to restart once the game stops being challanging that doesn't rhyme well with the words used to describe LT so far:

"Infinite : The game universe has no boundary"
"You conquer the universe."

I think it's up to you as a player.

Open sandbox means first of all that you're setting your challenges yourself. If for instance you've set yourself the challenge to explore the whole universe, then your game will by design never stop being challenging, because the universe is infinite. You can never explore it all.

The same is true for conquering: because the universe is infinite, you can never conquer it all. Even if you already have become the overlord of a hundred systems, you only need to get a couple of 1000 jumps away, and nobody will ever have heard of you. Alternatively, stay where you are, but change your career path, reject your powers and turn into a peace-loving hermit, and see whether your own empire will allow you to do that.

The game itself won't force you to do one or the other. There's no "campaign", and there's no progression that you need to make. It all depends on you.

So, the question is: why do you expect the game to stop being challenging in the first place? It's not the game that challenges you, fundamentally it's you who challenges you.

With a sandbox, there is only so much you can do untill you did it all.
Unless you take in account repetition. Many sandbox games are great fun for a while. Minecraft i could play for hours in single player, but when it was multiplayer, almost 2 years pretty much full time.i took the challenge upon me of hosting a server when there were hardly any available. that was my challenge, to hurde monkeys and cats. And I did but that became boring as well. So sure you should challenge your self. But you still need the tools to do so. There should not be just sand in a sandbox. As a kid we played king of the hill plenty of times on that heap of sand in the neighbourhood. i still have the scars to prove it

Commander McLane wrote: So, the question is: why do you expect the game to stop being challenging in the first place? It's not the game that challenges you, fundamentally it's you who challenges you.

For the explorer the game will stop being exiting when you have explored not all the systems, but all kinds of systems, stations and planets there are.
If you have seen 20 systems of the same kind with similar backgrounds and the same kind of lava planet, where is the driving force to seek out number 21?

Same thing for the conqueror, after you have defeated all known kinds of fleets and factions there are, where is the motivation to continue even if you know there are infinite amounts of them?

Yes all of them will not be of the same kind, but sooner or later it will become repetative that is inevitable. Therefor the challange needs to scale, for the conquerors that's much easier to do then for the explorer, unless you want to force some kind of combat onto exploration where enemies become more hostile the further from home you get therefor making it harder to survive and press on.

From what I've read so far of what Josh wants to do with the AI it seems that this kind of behavior is planned for it.

Ixos wrote:

Commander McLane wrote: So, the question is: why do you expect the game to stop being challenging in the first place? It's not the game that challenges you, fundamentally it's you who challenges you.

For the explorer the game will stop being exiting when you have explored not all the systems, but all kinds of systems, stations and planets there are.
If you have seen 20 systems of the same kind with similar backgrounds and the same kind of lava planet, where is the driving force to seek out number 21?

Same thing for the conqueror, after you have defeated all known kinds of fleets and factions there are, where is the motivation to continue even if you know there are infinite amounts of them?

Yes all of them will not be of the same kind, but sooner or later it will become repetative that is inevitable. Therefor the challange needs to scale, for the conquerors that's much easier to do then for the explorer, unless you want to force some kind of combat onto exploration where enemies become more hostile the further from home you get therefor making it harder to survive and press on.

I understand what you mean, but I don't think that scaling is the solution. It's right, if you've become powerful enough, you may face a galactic threat, which will keep you busy for a while. But finally, you will have conquered that threat as well. And then? What comes next?

What you're describing is basically an arms race. The more powerful the player gets, the more difficult the challenges that the game has to throw at them. In overcoming the current challenge the player becomes even more powerful, so the next challenge has to be even more difficult. And so on, back and forth, ad infinitum. Wouldn't that get boring and repetitive as well? After all, an infinite arms race is not winnable.

That's why my first suggestion was to start from scratch, in a new and completely different universe, if you get bored with your current game. Take on a fresh challenge. If you're bored with being all-powerful, experience again how it feels to be an insignificant grain of sand in a desert, a small drop of water in an ocean. And perhaps take a totally different career this time. The new universe (if you choose to start with a different seed) will also look and feel differently (within certain parameters, that are perhaps yet to be established). That should help with building new excitement.

So yes, in an infinite universe boredom may sooner or later kick in, and it may feel like getting only variations of the same (although Josh has promised that his procedural routines will minimize this effect; we'll have to wait for the final game in order to find out). But the game doesn't contain just one universe, but 2^64 of them, and they'll all be different at some level and to some extent (although it isn't clear yet at which level and to what extent). This should suffice to keep many players excited for a long time (hmm; maybe I'm seeing a totally different problem coming: not boredom from seeing always the same, but frustration from not being able to scratch even the surface of even a fraction of all these universes … (B&B could famously have implemented billions of galaxies in Elite, but deliberately restrained themselves to eight (although due to the technical constraints Elite was much more repetitive and only-variations-of-the-same than I expect Limit Theory to be))).

Perhaps one of the hardest things to aquire would be a ship large and powerfull enough to travel to the next Galaxy.

Commander McLane wrote: I understand what you mean, but I don't think that scaling is the solution. It's right, if you've become powerful enough, you may face a galactic threat, which will keep you busy for a while. But finally, you will have conquered that threat as well. And then? What comes next?

Someone mentioned the idea of you getting defeated and while not having to start from scratch, is set back a good deal. This would force you to adjust tactics and strategy to overcome the new threat.

Now if the player isn't challenged by very hard challenges that will likely never happen.

There isn't really a traditional endgame here is there. You can never dominate an infinite universe because there is always infinitely more to dominate in it. For that matter, somewhere in that universe there can always be somebody like you that has always got one more credit than you and one more kill than you and one more planet/system than you - you might never meet them because of the infinity

So, if you are somebody that likes to target an endgame then you will have to set your own goals upfront (or at some point). For example, control 100 systems, or earn so much money, or destroy so many ships etc.

Well, yeah. Infinity is a real damper for expansionists.
How do you win that game? How do you even build a computer that can keep your owned space in memory? And the fleets that you maintain to secure it?
Ze entire Internetz doesn't have enough memory for that!
Damnit Josh, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Gazz wrote:Well, yeah. Infinity is a real damper for expansionists.
How do you win that game? How do you even build a computer that can keep your owned space in memory? And the fleets that you maintain to secure it?
Ze entire Internetz doesn't have enough memory for that!
Damnit Josh, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

As for the second question, it's difficult to say without having worked much on saving. I will certainly have to be clever about what I choose to store, and indeed, it's probably true that after a certain amount of play, your savegame might become too large. But I will strive to make that certain amount impossibly high. The good news is that my saving system is really space-efficient, and I will layer compression on top of it. I don't anticipate this being too much of an issue, even if you play for 2000h. But it's certainly something that I'll have to keep an eye on and solve incrementally.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13#p45

So the save games wont be a problem.