Sting_Auer

My intention was for it to actually not be much of a challenge when playing solo or with a small amount of ships. It would be little more than just stopping at a friendly station occasionally and buying some food and fuel. When playing with a smaller-ish ship, it actually wouldn't be that hard to have the facilities on board to generate food and fuel while you fly. Larger ships, or large amounts of ships, would be more difficult to make self-sustaining. Filling a section of your cargo with food would be easier than trying to grow food for the population of an enormous ship. Restocking at a large food or fuel factory station would become more practical as the population of your ship grew.

Huh, I forgot to mention power requirements :o. I'll fix that now, thanks for reminding me. And yes, larger ships would require refueling at a fuel depot or factory, simply because it would become impractical to generate fuel on-site. Warships would likely have armored fuel tanks instead of large facilities dedicated to fuel manufacturing.

What Defines a Station? I propose that ships should not be defined as a station. Rather, all ships would become able to build; the speed at which a ship can make a change to a ship, or construct a new ship altogether, is tied to the amount of unemployed people in the ships population. Building Materials and Cargo Space: The materials available to a ship that is constructing or modifying a ship should be tied to the contents of the builder's cargo. Cargo would be stored in a new "cargo" block, and would have a capacity that is slightly lower than its total volume (For example, a 10m^3 cargo block would hold 8m^2 of cargo). The implication of this is that a minimum-size station will be incapable of constructing ships larger than itself without constant resource delivery. Upkeep, Repair, and Electricity: The simplest of this is a repair system tied to the amount of mechanics you have on board. I want to take it a step further, though; crew should require sustenance, and engines/weapons should require fuel. Food is generated by Ecosystem blocks, which will convert Biologicals into food at a fixed rate based on the size of the ecosystem. Biologicals are gathered from dust clouds, asteroids, and planets, and are generated at a slow rate based on population size (recycling the deceased and waste materials). Fuel has many ways to be gathered or generated. One of the easiest ways is Nebular Gathering: fly through a nebula or dust cloud and filter out the materials usable as fuel. Asteroid and Planetary mining can help you gather food as well. Biologicals can also be used to create fuel, but not at a very efficient rate. Ships also require electricity. All types of block would have electricity overhead, which would be a constant drain based on the type of block (armor requires less than hull, hull requires less than housing, etc.), along with any cost from other factors, such as a fuel factory consuming extra power during fuel synthesis, or housing blocks requiring extra power as the population increases on the ship. Population: The amount of people required to operate a ship is dependent on the variety of facilities on the ship. I'll leave this up to the developer's discretion, as I have no clue how this would be balanced properly ;) Under normal circumstances, the population on a ship will remain constant so long as there is sufficient food. If food becomes scarce, the population will begin to drop off. By right clicking on a housing block, you can change the population settings between "shrink", "maintain", and "grow". "Shrink" will cause the population to gradually decrease (limiting reproduction), "maintain" maintains the population, and "grow" will cause the population to grow at the cost of greater food consumption during the growth period than the population would normally consume. -=+ OP will be updated as I flesh out my ideas a bit more and as discussion takes place. +=-

Oh, I know full well about sharded worlds and multi-machine servers and such. I was implying that you should go the route of being able to host different sectors of the galaxy as different servers, for example. Idea: Still ahve the player-hosted servers, but give us the ability for a sharded galaxy, a la EvE Online, so that players with more computers to spare can host larger servers. I can see large groups of players collaborating with each other to host servers of several hundred players.

I'm serious man, if this got some good server support and faction tools (basically stuff that's already planned) it could overtake EvE. just needs some large servers and a means to monetarily support them.

hello fello humans i am a human to i am not taiwanese bot nope LOL i am legitmati person gimme karma. (:P)

I might be doing some editing and additions if I have the time/permissions for it. Good documentation is very important in making a good game :)

Hello everybody! I heard about this game on the Bay12 (Dwarf Fortress) forums, and thought I'd give it a try. I am totally digging it, and will probably begin hosting a public server for it. The only major problem I've had so far is the difficulty of getting part blueprints, but I'll go into more detail on that in a suggestions thread ;). I am loving the ability for custom ships and the combat mechanic. While the following statement may be a bit surprising, I see this game being able to overtake EvE Online if its taken up as more than a hobby (wink wink), and will be making various suggestions and will try to spread the word of the game. EDIT: Yeesh, tone down the captcha or get rid of it altogether, it's ridiculously difficult to tell what it says, and the audio recording isn't that good either.