Asteroids and Junk

I pulled this from the old forums because I love it… I just posted the 2 main idea posts from Walldo and I. There were a TON of other smaller addons that I didn’t feel like copying. Please post comments/criticisms/suggestions.
[b:1t5mgca1]Walldo:[/b:1t5mgca1]
This idea is actually divided into several inter-related components. Please, discuss!

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For starters, change the space system back to how it was with some restrictions. Players should be able to travel to any empty sector, provided it is within 5-10 sectors of a familiar sector. I’m not entirely sure how to handle hidden systems, perhaps have them exist ‘outside the grid’ of the standard X,Y sector map.

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Scattered across all the recently-returned space sectors will be a variety of points of interest. Pirate ships, pirate nests, and ASTEROIDS. Asteroids would vary in size, anywhere from a simple one-room area to a large 10×10 grid. Players will have a number of options available to them at this point. Governments could establish colonies via structures. Resident complexes, factories, commercial areas, etc. These would basically become mini-planets, generating income and support for the clan. Alternatively they could establish military outposts, deep-space refueling points, all sorts of fun things.

Or, they could establish a MINING FACILITY.

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Let’s just completely rework the engineering item economy. There would be the barest of basic materials (crystals, ore, etc.) that are relatively shitty and useless. All the good stuff would be derived from the players. When a player discovers an asteroid, a scientist will be able to use their totally sweet ‘survey’ skill to examine the terrain of the asteroid. They’ll be able to see what sort of composition it has, and what material is best for mining. Engineers will be able to construct mining facilities for any number of material (crystal ore, spice, durasteel, etc. etc. etc.). The quality of the material will be random, based on the asteroid.

One quick thing worth mentioning – The survey skill would only give a ‘reccomended’ material for mining. It’s entirely possible to choose a material that isn’t reccomended and end up with a super rare, leet crystal. A certain amount of the material would be deposited in the Mining Facility’s "storehouse", which the owner will be able to transport to planets for selling.

The asteroid would have a limited amount of supplies to be mined before it’s "sucked dry".

I think this would really cut down on the general boringness of engineering materials and help spruce up the economy.

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Also, asteroids would be able to be blown up and the fragments refined into some totally sweet rock ore.

This is all I can think of at the moment. What’s everyone think?
Going along with this, strip out mob vendors from clan bases and replace them with player vendors. If clans want to stock up on engineering parts, ship hull, etc., players will have to keep their vendor active and supplied. Just sort of increases interaction and keeps things flowing.

[b:1t5mgca1]Rojan:[/b:1t5mgca1]
This big project is one I would very much like to complete at some point. How i envision it is similar to Walldo’s but with a few added bonuses:

There will be player-made clans. With a specified amount of funds and minimum number of members (varying for each clan type), you will be able to create your own clan without an application. Yes, this may result in a lot of crappy, useless clans. BUT, to prevent that there will also be minimum requirements needed to keep a clan going. A daily check will be made and all clans falling below the minimum active member requirements or fund requirements will simply be dissolved, with all of the funds most likely going to the leader. Now, an idea I JUST had while writing this () is that there can be clan owners as well as leaders for certain types. IE, an engineering clan would have the owner who would appoint a leader to run it. Then if the clan dissolved the owner would receive their funds back. Whats the incentive of not owning your own clan? You wouldn’t have to build up the millions of credits needed to start one and possibly fund/maintain one.

Building off of this, one of the new types of clans would be mining. These clans can go to uncharted systems and find unsettled planets/asteroids. They can colonize these planets/asteroids (also without an app) and build their own planet, essentially. Building each room/adding flags would cost money, but it would all be automated. Even more importantly, you will be able to build pre-designed structures on your planets with the buildstructure skill, to make mini-cities and possibly bases for your clan, etc. Since the systems are uncharted, some sort of skill enabling people to make a navchart for a system will be created as well to allow clans to establish real bases. Or, when finding a planet and after colonizing/building on it, a clan will have the option to make it visible to the galaxy. Not only would this allow all of your new, creative ideas simply to be..done (by you, silly!), it would make the world that much more expansive and interesting. The only thing on these worlds requiring imm interference to create would be room/mob/object programs.

Now..mining. Imagine you create a mining clan, go to a new planet, colonize it, and start scampering around in some of your randomly unearthed rooms, and bringing your team of droids to survey the room for raw materials. Huzzah, you found raw durasteel, gems, whatever. You then buildstructure a mine in this room which will enable you to, from inside or outside the mine (haven’t decided yet), start mining for materials. Each surveyed room will have a limited amount of its material. But the material generation wont be random. Some planets may have massive quantities of durasteel in its various rooms, some may have tibanna gas (for ship weapons), etc. There will also be rarer, better raw materials available as well on these planets. So, your mining clan has workers constantly digging up more raw materials (yes, it will be a skill). They then take them to one of the clan engineers who refines the raw materials into usable engineering parts and puts them in the clan store to sell to engineering clans. All but the crappiest base materials put in shops by immortals would have to be discovered and created by players.

These 3 combined ideas would make the game more dynamic, make the galaxy MUCH more expansive and interesting, and make the economy almost completely fueled by player-run activities. You may say, "we don’t have enough players for this"… But we currently have enough for 3 engineering clans, no? Imagine if one were a mining clan selling materials to the other engineering clans instead of simply having more engineering competition. Yes, we don’t have hundreds of players. But I believe we have enough to get at least a few interesting clans started and to settle a few planets and at least have ONE mining clan, which if it were active would be more than enough to supply the pbase with engineering materials.

More:

These were in the old ‘cargo update’ thread in General Discussion, but I thought they should be a part of this conversation!

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Sintaka Says:

What it entailed was the leader of the planet (at that time it was the clan leader) setting the planet to manufacture a set amount of resources depending on its production capacity. So lets say a planet has 50 factories you can dedicate 15 to electronics, 15 to fuel and 20 to weapons (as an example). And every hour the planets would produce such and such units of whatever resources were chosen for it depending on how many factories were dedicated to the resource. Also, certain planets could be flagged as being extra efficient at some things like Naboo producing water and Kashyyyk producing food or something along those lines.

At the other end of the system you have each planet requiring certain resources to function. For example, every time someone refueled their ship on a planet, it would actually draw out that exact number of units of fuel from the planet’s supply which was limited. Once the planet’s fuel ran out, there was some galactic announcement informing the populace that such and such planet needed fuel. And bingo, players had to run some fuel over to the planet quick or else people were stranded. The fuel that players brought over came from certain planets that had been set as fuel producers like…I dunno Nal Hutta or Corellia.

In the end, you would have demand for fuel to refuel, water and food to keep the population # high or else it would drop after some time, spice for crime and so on. Players could keep tabs on planetary supplies and of course the galactic announcements could come into play when things get bad with shortages. With this system you could get a pretty dynamic system going on a planet’s economic/AI interactions and players having a definite impact.

Edit: Oh and addressing the main topic…the prices for the different resources would at first be set by the immortals in order to set realistic/balanced prices. After this however, the system would take total supply of said resource into account and if supply is dwindling, the price goes up at an appropriate rate. Likewise, if there is a glut of a particular resource, then prices for that resource go down. Or you could also go with another system where you look at each planet separately and if a particular planet has lots of resource A compared to the planet’s total manufacturing capacity (like 58% of Wroona’s goods is wood), then the price for A will be low there.

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Chaka Says
I agree more with Sintaka. No planetary leader says, make fuel sell at 30!!! They would just release marketing campaigns/kick backs or what ever that would cause the price to rise.

Having said that, the reason why I agree with sintaka is because (thats right) I have another idea.

Each planetary leader can allocate a percentage of their planets workforce (where obviously the max is 100), to each of the resouces on lotj. Each resource would cause some prices to rise (as they need to consume it) and other prices to fall (As an increase in.. say weapons, might decrease demand in explosives)
BUTT also to prevent people from choosing 100% to on good, and 0 to everything else, make it a function of the square root of the % dedicated

Eg, each root(1)% in Weapons does the following
-0.001 Explosives
+0.002 ore
+0.001 goods
-0.07 weapons

etc etc etc

So essentally, each resources has a basic "production function". And every 15 minuts, this production function is "run" which modifies the cargo prices. To further increase the intrecases, each planet has certain affects (For ease of coding, its just a multiplier affect on each individual production function)

Eg, Wroona might be
Food x10
Weapons x5
goods x1/10

And because everyone likes simplicity, the prodcution function of weapons is affected by, thats right, ONLY the weapons multiplier

so on a x1 planet it would be

-0.001 Explosives
+0.002 ore
+0.001 goods
-0.07 weapons

but on wroona (x5 weapons) it would be
-0.005 Explosives
+0.01 ore
+0.005 goods
-0.35 weapons

Notice how everything was only multipled ONCE by the x5, and goods wasn’t re multiplied or anything

Oh and of course, buying stuff would make prices go up, and selling go down, (But buying/selling only affects the NEXT tick, not the immediate one, and it would have 2 affects, firstly it would negate the production functions affects COMPLETELY and secondly it would have a small absolute affect, this is to prevent buy 1 million, prices goes up, sell 1 million, price goes down, repeat)

Now a system has only one problem, after say… 1000 ticks, whats to stop the prices shooting off to infinity
WELL
The + and -‘s arn’t absolute changes, they get affected by, ANOTHER multiplier. Eg. in a simple world, 10 is the "normal" price of everything. Then then multiplier is
1 / (abs[currentprice – 10] + 1)
And its the absolute value of that
So if the current price is 10, the multiplier is 1/1 = 1
if the current price is 0 or 20, the multiplier is 1 / (10 + 1) = 1/11
so the further away you move from the "normal price" the slower the changes.

limit the calc command to the -100,100 -100,100 (or whatever) grid and allow hidden systems to be at -101, *

Totally, AWESOME idea. I love it.

I agree with Ryan, limit the calculate command to about 100, -100 to -100, 100 from a familiar sector(or whatever).

I also think that some of the asteroids, should be used as like slave mines. Or droid mines(If makedroid is ever put in..Or even playable droid races) That way Trandoshans, and the Empire have secret slave operations. Same with some crime rings. Hell, an asteroid could be used as a pirate base(Ala Empire At War). And can be blown to bits by cappies, and smaller ships.

And while we’re at it, instead of having like just Cappies able to blow up those asteroids. About 50 smaller ships can blow up one too. Or something like that. Maybe figure a way to have actual battalions of TIEs or X-wings, even when people arn’t on to pilot them.

Ona, someone can make their base that, or rent our areas on the asteroid to someone that’s going to make that happen, you don’t need to make some asteroids slave specific, it can all be made in to that with the imagination and creation of the chars.

I know that. I didn’t mean have an entire asteroid as a slave camp. But it’s still a great idea.

I just wanted to clarify something that I said in the original post.

[quote:x5kf761i]A certain amount of the material would be deposited in the Mining Facility’s "storehouse", which the owner will be able to transport to planets for selling.[/quote:x5kf761i]

In my eyes these rawmaterial wouldn’t exist in the game as some room with big piles of physical objects. It would either be represented in bulk (a cargo container of crystals is here) or just be in a state like tradable cargo commodities (of course, the ability to physically represent this is something that could be debated and lead to some fun possibilities…but that’s for another thread).

Either way the rawmaterial harvested would have to be refined into a usable material.

In order to cut down on ‘asteroid sprawl’ the asteroids would be relatively destructable. Meaning that some joe shmo with a CC90 wouldn’t be able to damage it much, but a capital ship or two are a reason for concern. This will add a strategic element for people to defend their turf, rebel hit and runs, piracy, etc.

It hasn’t been said enough, but that updated cargo trading system is a lot better than our current shenanigans. I think an important thing to include is a way for the system to manage itself. IE, if a government is going through a dry spell in pbase size or what have you, the system can go on a less-effective autopilot to keep things running smoothly instead of having the rest of the mud get affected.

Also wanted to re-touch up on the point of asteroids being used as pirate bases. I was thinking they could be something more along the lines of the pirate bases from the game ‘Freelancer’. In Freelancer, the only people who could visit pirate bases were those associated with the pirates (those not aligned with government/paramilitary/etc. clans). The pirate base would be incredibly strong hitpoint wise (IE would require a decent sized fleet to destroy it) and would spawn a steady stream (speed depending on blackmarket cargo?, see below). If the base is under attack, it will start spawning aggro ships that shoot down anything in the system but specifically those attacking the station (think scramble-ish). Otherwise the ships that it spawns are the pirate ships that will actually then go attack systems, etc. Players who can safely land on the pirate base will have a few minor things available like ‘blackmarket’ cargo trading (I dont have any thoughts on the blackmarket actually fleshed out, someone else can do that) and things of that nature. The more blackmarket traffic that comes through a pirate base, the better ships it spawns.

Pirates wouldn’t just kamikazee ships. They will actually fly through space looking for freighters. They auto-broadcast a few messages (give us yer booty matey!). If the cargo ship ejects, the pirates tractor in the goods and fly off. If they don’t, they’ll attack. Pirates should be more deadly!

I really like that idea. It would then give way to the Smuggling ideas. Someone goes to a pirate base, picks up some black market cargo and goes to sell it in a inner rim world, make a boat load of creds (compared to a normal 40k cargo run) and should also have smuggling exp tied to it.

Black Market cargo could involve but isn’t limited to:

Spice (30 different types are known in the SW universe)
Illicit weapons (Like the current weapons, but they’d be related to the Black Market so they’d be stolen/modified etc)
Slaves (Ryloth is well known for selling Twi’lek slaves)
Technology (Anything from illegal cybernetics to Military Grade ship parts to stolen droids/droid parts)
Explosives (This option is in, but with the Imperial regulations on weapons, they should be illegal and harder to obtain)

Also a side note. The more illegal cargo pumped into a planet, it should change the current state. Like the more weapons pumped into an Imperial world, the more likely they are to rebel, that sort of thing. There could be a level tracker, and after a certain amount of something, they could become saturated with the good and smugglers will find it’s harder to sell that type of illicit cargo at that particular planet.

This idea also offers a way for Shadowports to come into play. Where people who don’t want to be found by the Empire/New Republic, can go and hide out, associate with each other. It would give the players an easier way to access those criminal organizations in game.

This is a really good idea, I see crime rings allying with the pirates in some way shape or form to land on them to be able to transfer the blackmarket supplies, and the money should automaticly go toward the Clan’s funds. Or something like that.

Oh, definitely. What ever criminal organization owned this ‘shadowport’ would supply the illegal goods, and the credits used to buy those goods or at least half would go right into the clan’s funds. That’d be awesome.

Bump this thread for coolness. This entire idea rocks, I wants it.

You seem to be adamantly and persistently against people bumping old threads. Why is that, RJ? Who cares if the topic is old? Maybe one of the new players (we do get them occasionally) won’t have bothered to search through the older stuff and will have another great idea to add to the thread. And even if they don’t, seeing this implemented would add so much diversity to the game I don’t think even you could bitch about it.

Asteroid systems have been around for quite a while now. Or at least, [i:495g2j70]an[/i:495g2j70] asteroid system. Which is a snippet. Which is half finished. Which doesn’t work properly.

It’s not as simple of a system as you might think.

I have the unreleased version 2 of the asteroid snippet. But if we were to use it, I’d recode it from scratch.