Re: Combat balance - 1.80 and 1.82
Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 10:31 am
Galaxy Chart 1 should automatically be the safest of the 8, the player starts there and it represents more "Law and Order" than say Galaxy Chart 4 (which seems to have extremely strong anarchy, communist, and democracy movements which trigger violent civil wars that spill over into unsafe space conditions.) Lave and Xeer might also have influence well beyond their system boundaries due to a certain Navy with a dubious role and mandate.cim wrote:Though most sandbox games have perhaps an easier job in terms of "safe" and "dangerous" areas - sure, there'll be places you can't reach until you're good enough to beat a particular challenge, and more you'll have to to take a very indirect route to get to, but Oolite's map mixes safe and dangerous systems very closely together to the extent that getting anywhere at all much more interesting than the Leesti-Diso or Isinor-Zaonce run involves going through a system in the upper half of the difficulty range. That makes it quite difficult to balance the game to allow new players to start enjoying the trading/exploration parts of the game, without leaving very little space for the tougher systems to actually be tougher - the curve would need to be almost flat at least to Dictatorship, before moving up incredibly sharply for Feudal and Anarchy.
One should question how piracy itself works in the game -- violence as a 1st resort when you don't get your way? These types shouldn't last long and indeed they don't if you stay in-system long enough and watch as a "fly on the wall". Pirates have to be added to the system from time-to-time to keep their numbers up. Police Vipers don't even need to get them, the average trader convoy of 1 freighter and 4 small fighters tends to get them possibly even on a 1-per-1 ship basis.
Were the most dangerous systems to get out-of-hand, all that has to happen to make them "safer" is for a huge trader group to travel through there ONCE. While the core game doesn't add these directly, the closely-timed arrival of 2 or more trader groups can roughly simulate it. Also, trader groups tend to "pile up" at the first indiscriminate pirate ambush they run into until they overwhelm it. I ran across this phenomena also when testing large-scale Thargoid attacks on a system. No matter how large I made the Thargoid group attacking, it tended to get wiped out...the bigger groups just took longer. Thargoids abandoning their Thargons after one fight didn't help them any.
So for piracy to be in any sense sustainable or at least ongoing, there has to be a ready source of new pirates and lots of old pirates surviving longer.
Even the aggressive ones need to flee if things look bad. Fortunately, they often currently do that...so not really any further work needed there.
Lone, greedy beggars might ask for a single cargo canister...in barely-functional ships and have tiny bounties that make them almost not worth killing. Their fighting skills might be equally as limited as their ship's quality but they might have one last missile left for anyone cruel enough to end their existence. They might never attack first.
Attacking them may make others think you're the pirate!
Traders leaving the station might announce which system they're jumping to, in case someone wants to hitch a ride. (free escorts!) Very rarely they might be pirates in disguise? ...Or lying about which system they're going to?
Such friendly traders might be conveniently helpful for new players starting out...