Future changes and thoughts... For 1.0.8

[VanderLegion]

JetJaguar2000 : You bring up good points.
2 - How would people encounter a black hole? If you are warping along and go past a hidden black hole does the black hole expose and you lose your ship, or are they visible and destroy everything passing by in a given radius?

One possibility for this would be to have the black hole just show up as a star until you discover what it actually is. Maybe you use Gravity based sensors to see where the stars are that you haven't explored yet so black holes just appear as stars because of it (large gravity field)? Then, it could eithe rwork similar to how it does now where you lose the ship and get a notification that it died there due to an anomaly, and you don't actually SEE the black hole until you have hyperspace physics, or else once you end a ship there and lose it the black hole now shows as what it is and you have to route everything around the system until you get HP.

[ChickenHawk07]

I actually really like Jet's suggestions. They make a lot of sense, and would definitely help out the players who don't or can't invest a lot of time in the game. I definitely think there should be some kind of range for ships (maybe not probes?) And refueling stations allowing for larger areas of expansion makes a lot of sense. As does having a limited range the PCCs can be deployed. In the end, without PCCs having a limited range, players will still be able to take over large swaths of space and expand uninhibited.

And Raven, Colonies and HWs are definitely NOT hard to take. I currently have 6 HWs. And I can't even remember how many colonies.

[VanderLegion]

I actually really like Jet's suggestions. They make a lot of sense, and would definitely help out the players who don't or can't invest a lot of time in the game. I definitely think there should be some kind of range for ships (maybe not probes?) And refueling stations allowing for larger areas of expansion makes a lot of sense. As does having a limited range the PCCs can be deployed. In the end, without PCCs having a limited range, players will still be able to take over large swaths of space and expand uninhibited.

And Raven, Colonies and HWs are definitely NOT hard to take. I currently have 6 HWs. And I can't even remember how many colonies.

Agreed, i really like the idea of ships having limited range especially. Jet makes good points about being able to just fly in and capture homeworlds ignoring other colonies/outposts in the process. And if you limit ship range, that would to a degree limit the land grab as well, even if PCC didn't limit the range you could colonize. You'd be able to colonize further away in the long run without limits from PCC, but you'd have to build colonies or outposts along the way to extend your ship range in order to colonize further away.

And as ChickenHawk said, capturing homeworlds is really not hard. I've captured 6 in one of my games, and control my entire starting sector (galaxy? Whatever you want to call it) outside of like 1 or 2 non-homeworld colony and an outpost or two. Beyond that I have countless colonies and outposts (I sstarted out playing as a harmless trader. Then someone attacked me (and eeryone else in my starting sector) and captured pretty much every outpost in the sector. So i turned around and captured everything he owned. After I found out that you can meet any victory condition and I realized that there's no way I'd ever be able to trade 4 billion common ore to be able to win, I figured I'd see how hard a warlord victory was. The only homeworld that's been a problem to take is the one that had stealth orbitals so I couldn't kill them. Beyond that, I've killed several outposts with a few defense orbitals, or mines, or a coupla ships, and several that have been 450-500Mu population.

Non-homeworld colonies (and non-terran so less population) are even easier to capture.

[AntiHaze]

1. easier ways to track harvest and/or trade routes and/or incomes

This is the only thing I care about. As soon as I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, this was no longer a game. It was work.

[VanderLegion]

The other reason I switched over to conquering. FAR easier...

[ChickenHawk07]

The other reason I switched over to conquering. FAR easier...

Agreed. And more fun!

[Supamand]

Not sure if someone said this, but there needs to be a way to abandon a planet! If I start a game and two of the planets in my sector are ice, I would like to have a function to abandon a colony on those planets. That way it does not count against my total planet count.

[VanderLegion]

Not sure if someone said this, but there needs to be a way to abandon a planet! If I start a game and two of the planets in my sector are ice, I would like to have a function to abandon a colony on those planets. That way it does not count against my total planet count.

Ooh, thats definitely a good point with limited number of planets you can control. In the game right now there's no reason to abandon a planet, but yah, once PCC goes in...

[zarkwizard]

Not sure if someone said this, but there needs to be a way to abandon a planet! If I start a game and two of the planets in my sector are ice, I would like to have a function to abandon a colony on those planets. That way it does not count against my total planet count.

To be honest the conversations internally are leaning towards making the PCC a radius rather than a specific planet count. We have been discussing adding a range to ships. The grid as it sits for the sector maps will probably be going away in favor of jumping to systems. Once we get a little further on this we'll publish our thoughts.

[ChickenHawk07]

To be honest the conversations internally are leaning towards making the PCC a radius rather than a specific planet count. We have been discussing adding a range to ships. The grid as it sits for the sector maps will probably be going away in favor of jumping to systems. Once we get a little further on this we'll publish our thoughts.

I sort of touched on this in my last post, but instead of PCCs having a planet count attached to them, why not make it so the PCCs radius is as far as anything other than a probe can travel. (See my past post of overlapping Radius for outward expansion) I also would like to see Probes only being "shot" out from a planet or location and traveling in a single direction until it reaches the ends of the universe. (Voyager nearing the outer limits of our solar system is what brought this idea to fruition). A single probe shouldn't be able to map out an entire galactic sector. Maybe make the probe's "FOG uncovering" be like 3 sectors wide. And once it exits the stage of play, is destroyed by a black hole or aliens, it is removed from the ship count and sends its usual Spartan Notice. Probes are cheap enough and produced quickly enough that I don't think this would hinder anyone, infact, I think it would free up A LOT of time for players and would negate the need for waypoints (making your coding changes less drastic, I assume).
A player would only need to pick the direction of travel and the probe would do the rest.