Switeck wrote:Disembodied wrote:That, to me, isn't an argument for starting the player in a Cobra 1, though: it's an argument for altering the stats, and earning opportunities, of the bottom-ranked ship (i.e. the Adder) to make it a viable starting point for the player.
No, the Adder is a limited purpose very cheap ship with a tiny cargo bay and a speed too low to outrun much more than an Anaconda. It would be cruelty to subject new players to the game to it. Best to leave that "hard mode" to the experts and masochists. By the time you've changed its stats to make it a viable starter ship, it won't be an Adder anymore.
My point is that – in any game which allows for player development – the player should always start at the bottom. Otherwise, whole chunks of game experience are being missed out, and the amount of player achievement is being needlessly limited. Every other game starts the player on the bottom, without requiring them to be either experts or masochists.
Escape Velocity is a prime example, where you start off in a shuttle. You potter around some more-or-less safe systems, learning the ropes, eager to earn some cash so you can get to fly something better, and just at the point where you're feeling like you've got the hang of things, you find you've got enough cash to move to the next ship up the ladder and can start working on a few more challenges.
It's not worth doing unless the game is getting a major overhaul, so an Oolite 2 Adder might indeed be quite different from an Elite Adder. The important thing isn't the actual stats of the player's starting ship, it's that the starting ship is sitting on the bottom rung.
Aspects of the gameplay might need to be changed, too – for example, creating a broader spacelane from the witchpoint to the station, so players don't get caught up in traffic so much (although this has an impact on meeting pirates, of course). Alternatively, inbound traders could shift course away from the player and/or slow down, allowing the player to overhaul them and avoid getting masslocked in traffic. Other changes could include making a number of systems around the player's starting point relatively gentle and forgiving, quite low on any sort of traffic, hostile or otherwise. Trading and moneymaking opportunities need to be revised. You could also introduce a new built-in mission with some minor risks and a decent-enough little reward that puts the next ship up in reach.
These things, and/or others like them,
have to happen if the player is going to start in any ship except the Cobra III (although I'd support the idea of other inbound ships moving to one side and allowing the player to go past, cutting down on masslock time, regardless of any other changes). Currently, the game works under the assumption that players are in a Cobra III – because that's how it was in Elite. Hence, currently, using any ship slower than a Cobra III is a massive pain, and making money in any ship with a smaller cargo hold than a Cobra III is a real struggle. If this basic assumption isn't going to change, then I don't think it's worth changing the starting ship at all; keep the player in a Cobra III. But if a major overhaul is on the cards, then I think it's worth making enough changes to put the starting player on the bottom rung. A properly constructed bottom rung, of course, which isn't hard to fly and doesn't present any terrifying challenge; where, for example, it's really easy to dock, because it's so small; and where the next rung up is within reach without too much effort. In short, if it's not worth doing properly, it's not worth doing at all.
