Long-Term Background Simulation Goals

[Creeper1212]

Hi Guys, I'm a new player whose put about 17 hours into the game since Wednesday.  I'm a huge fan of the space sim genre (been following SC since it's announcement, tried a little ED, and a few other games) but nothing has really scratched the itch that I was looking for.  That is until I looked into this game (I'm another ZiggyD convert) and i've been having a blast!  The in-depth economy, flight model, ship-building, upgrades, battles, and ESPECIALLY the factions are all really alluring. 

The one thing that nags me tho is that everything centers around me being in a sector.  After doing some reading and as much searching as I'd like to do, I understand that sectors essentially pause when I leave, though some stations that I might own still produce in the background. 

So my question: What has the developer stated is the long-term goal of the AI background simulation?  I know that it's a tricky point due to the procedural nature of the game, but what I'm really interested in is seeing factions taking control of sectors and gaining more ground, helping out the rival faction, coming back to a sector to find the controlling faction has been completely decimated and taken over by pirates.  I was in a sector and was notified that a rival faction was invading, which was incredibly exciting to see play out.  When I realized it was simply a random event because I was there, the magic went away. 

I'm not one to post much on any game but this one has offered almost everything I've been looking for since my days of Freelancer.  I'm just curious to see where this is on the road map as it didn't seem to be discussed on the wiki road map.

Thank you!

[thisisoli]

Look at the latest patch notes! Still not a full simulation but it's getting better!

[Uthael]

Long-term, something like this :P

Watch from 4:42 to 5:17.

 

 

... But so far, that's just wishful thinking xD

[Hellatze]

dev need to focus on fixing things, and add core feature before that.

[Uthael]

Yeah, fixing things should be a priority. But I consider NPCs being built instead of spawned from nowhere a really big and important core feature. Right now, they're nothing more than free income for well-defended sectors (Xsotan and pirate invasions). And they're persistent about being so.

 

If you're feeling especially greedy, you can let NPC cargo ships just have "an accident" after buying your resources. Just salvage them, take your resources again and another will spawn.

 

There's really no need to leave a sector. And there are no drawbacks for it either.

[Kamo]

The main problem with dynamic warfare between AI factions is the metastability horizon. If AI factions do not split (due to more or less « random » « conflict » events) one of them will tend to conquer all of the galaxy, ruin the faction diversity, destroying all pirates and even, if the player comes to the endgame, all xsotan too !

There’s also the differing starting conditions (the player begins from scratch, the factions begin with a bunch of sectors more or less filled with stations, and defense and trading fleets to match, and pirates begin with a bunch of shipyards and a lot of rage), so if the factions grew at the same speed as the player, the player wouldn’t ever catch up (as a faction’s growth is exponential, while a player would struggle to make its first station, a regular faction would have made twenty of ‘em).

A stable galaxy is quantifiable and easy to balance, while an unstable galaxy is exciting and enjoyable to explore, so chaos has to be sown into it to avoid stability and boring monopolies… while not utterly destroying the entire infrastructure !

If only a few stations lie while their factions compete in total warzones, trading opportunities would be few and far between, production chains would desintegrate and all longterm investments would be lost to faction wars, resulting in the player not able to grow its economic and military strength :( (tl:dr example: getting repeatedly ganked in previously friendly respawn sector).

So it's kind of logical that the universe kind of revolves around the player, even if a little power play (akin to present-day faction wars, but with limits, each faction "waging" one or two sectors to board stations and complete production chains, or to assert territorial/gate grid dominance, before declaring it a win or loss) and out-of-sector shenanigans would be nice to see :).

 

Maybe a "time dilation" effect around "player-active" sectors (NPCs harvesting, acting and builiding slower and slower as distance to player activity goes), on top of faction scission when factions became too big, would result in an enjoyable galaxy ::).

[Shrooblord]

What I'm really interested in is seeing factions taking control of sectors and gaining more ground, helping out the rival faction, coming back to a sector to find the controlling faction has been completely decimated and taken over by pirates.  I was in a sector and was notified that a rival faction was invading, which was incredibly exciting to see play out.  When I realized it was simply a random event because I was there, the magic went away.

YES, so much all of this. I made a post earlier today almost exactly pointing out each and every thing you raise here, too.

 

I would love to see a galaxy that feels more alive and less player-centric.

 

If only a few stations lie while their factions compete in total warzones, trading opportunities would be few and far between, production chains would desintegrate and all longterm investments would be lost to faction wars, resulting in the player not able to grow its economic and military strength :( (tl:dr example: getting repeatedly ganked in previously friendly respawn sector).

 

It doesn't have to be like that. This is where the magic of forming and breaking alliances comes in, random Xsotan scourges upping the tension between two warring factions, now united against a common threat, random events like wormholes tearing a Sector to smithereens decimating the core worlds of a previously strong faction, now losing its power to anarchy and civil war, giving rise to more splinter cell factions in its place.

 

This is all pretty advanced stuff I'm suggesting here, of course, but I only serve to illustrate that including a dynamic universe doesn't have to mean that factions automatically win, or that one faction will be the One Ringleader to Rule Them All. Then again, perhaps vassalisation is a mechanic that could be considered: multiple factions spun under a common banner of one overlord. Who knows.

 

If you look at a typical time lapse of a game of Stellaris, you can see how galaxies splintered into multiple factions can play out. Yes, there are usually two or three superforces in the end-game, but that is seriously seriously end-game, and even they give rise to civil uprising and fracturing from time to time, breaking the steady-state.

Also galactic conquest and domination is literally the default victory condition and entire point of that game, so of course all players on the field are going to have that in their game plan. But Avorion doesn't have to go down that path at all if the devs and us community members don't want it to.

 

But you're right: factions as currently implemented in the game have a head start. Furthermore, no new factions are ever created, and no factions die unless by the player's hand. This is a bit of an unhealthy ecosystem in my view; all things change. That's the nature of the beast. Chaos and anarchy is the default state of the universe, and civilisations exert force and effort and expend energy to bring structure and what they see as balance to that chaos, but the forces of chaos will never cease.

 

It would be super interesting to see a galaxy with already established factions, but also new arrivals, baby factions in the making, or dying civilisations, on the cusp of extinction because of whatever horrible reason. Sectors upon Sectors of wreckages of once fully vibrant production lines and freighters... plague? Xsotan scum? Overzealous Pirate attacks?

 

It would also be super cool to be able to tutor a tiny sapling civilisation when you're a little further into the game yourself. Help others as others once helped you rise up in this galaxy.

 

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But yeah, most of that would require pretty significant overhauls, and I'm not sure how feasible those are. I'd love to take a peek under the hood of the game, though, and take a spanner to it to see what I can come up with. Sadly the modding efforts are great, but our capabilities right now are still limited to extending current functionality, not writing complete new mechanics as what this would require.