Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game

Using a ship to visit each planet and moon in a star system to explore all space objects is tedious and boring (tons of clics, and clics, and clics... and tons of our time to do repititive and not interesting things)

I suggest to program a function to autoexplore a system with the appropriate reports (aliens artifacts, type of planets, mines....). The time to autoexplore should be based on the FTL MK of the exploring ship and should take more time than doing it manually with the same ship. In a contest between many captains, it would be faster to do it manually. A message should be sent when the autoexploration is completed (like for LR jumps). The fuel cost should be the cost it would be to do it manually.

The autoexplore would also give a chance to captains that work in RL and do not have all the time that other have.

I could get into this if it only gave vague exploration details. Like how many orbital stations, planetary modules, and player ships were in the system as well as just a list of every mineral and gas in the system without saying what planet they are all at. That would leave it up to the player to do the actual exploration and if they had a goal like, "Oh, I want to find where that diamond is!" it would be much more fun scanning through the planets.

You could also develop advanced scanners that told you who owned modules/stations/ships in the system without actually going to the planet. Could be part of the reconnaissance/surveillance  update that I keep suggesting ;)

What mata is talking about is the ship going planet to planet taking scans. Not scanning from the safe zone. So since the ship would have visited them all, it makes sense it would record in it's computers everything on each planet/moon it visits. I for one thing this idea of his is very good.  Though people would want to perhaps use it with caution.  After all ships could still be attacked while jumping from planet to planet.   Though with a high MK FTL that shouldn't be a huge problem.  As for the issue of looking for diamonds. If I wanted to find diamonds, i'd just keep doing a bunch of nest. You make far more on diamonds from those then you do from mining.

I was using the diamonds as an example... There are other players in this game that would be interested in diamonds besides you JJL... But I digress.

Why don't we just automate everything then! What's the point of playing the game if you let the computer explore everything for you? Exploration should take a little bit of effort on the player's part. So I do not like this idea

I'm with Rostin on this...

So make it a VIP option then and for non-vip incorporate into the autopilot modules.  From a technological standpoint with how things are in the game right now there is no reason we shouldn't be able to do it. If you still want to do it manually you can. Hell most of the time I still would. But it can get a bit tedious. Especially when trying to search systems while managing a crap ton of other ships at the same time.

A VIP option or a combo (AP + System Exploration Extension) could be done... and it will work similar to the autopilot. It will wait 5 minutes between plotting new courses / jumping etc. It will be a lot slower then manual, but it could get the job done :) It's low priority but will note it, thank you.

What if FTLs could plot advanced courses through a star system? So you tell it what path you want it to take, as in: Go to Alpha first, A1 second, Beta third, B2 fourth, B1 fifth, and so on. Then the system could process the time required for all the jumps at once, and then we can manually explore, but without those annoying little 1 minute wait timers. That would preserve the joy of exploring for me, but it would make things less boring for Mata and JJL, I bet :).

I think we should be able to do it either way. lol.  BTW this entire system would make it quicker and less tedious to try to find stuff belonging to IMG. I am sure your boss would find it useful.

I'm still a relatively new player. Only have 2 ships. Have accrued probably 3-6 million research.

My feeling is exploring is ok for ME. It gives me something to do besides collecting mining production and managing my assets and traveling to/from sol on occassion. (note I haven't done any missions yet) However, I think some players have been around so long that it's no longer just finding a new system every once in a while. Instead it's like having enough ships to explore a dozen systems at once, but not being able to control all of them timely. For example, I only have presently 1 ship I use to explore systems for resources. But imagine if I had 15 exploration ships? It'd get quite tedious to explore systems that way. And if I was part of a corporation and I had to explore several systems periodically to know who's nearby or to checkup on something else, it'd be a very tedious thing as well on top of everything else.

One thing this kind of reminds me of is X2: The Threat. The creators added minimal automation to the game because it required lots of time to have a lot of ships. Early on the burden wasn't bad. However, as a player gains assets it became increasingly difficult to do things with them. This is why players created scripts to automate certain things, depending on what they wanted the ship to do. It's as though the creators of the game failed to create a compelling "high level" game and banked on the early game.

I also think as it's exploring the planets for resources is very uneventful. In space games I've played before, you didn't explore 100's of planets without anything happening. Typically, you'd be attacked now and then by pirates just traveling between two stations. You'd also discover more things than just minerals or gases. You'd discover races or you'd get a new kind of mission or something of that sort. Presently, the "event" system seems to be in the interstellar space between stars, as opposed to also being possible inside the systems themselves.

Maybe the game could scale exploration better as players gain power or ships, so they don't become bogged down by it. And in addition to this there could be some events thrown into planetary exploration to give explorers more eventful gameplay.

And don't automate everything because I like to have stuff to do. It's a balance.

Yes, I agree. Basically just add more random events in the game. Like a random pirate raid (on stations, planetary modules, and on interplanetary and interstellar jumps), maybe random alien attacks. Also random events on Sol where everything will cost less or more due to various reasons.. I could add more samples of random events but you guys probably get my idea. :)

Random Zod attacks  :19:

I'd love some random events.  it would certainly help to keep things from getting too dull. Though the rewards from them better be worth it.

I really like this idea... I wouldn't want ideas that could cause damage to planetary modules... mining is already the least useful thing in this game, making it harder to mine would be a bad idea IMO. But maybe events with response timers, so if a station comes under attack you have 24 hours to get a ship in position to fight the pirates. If they had decent rewards, that sort of thing could actually enhance the mining experience.

As for random Sol events, I'm very much in favor of those... maybe a spike in the price of bromine. They could even be based on the community... aka, a shortage of bromine causes a spike in the price. But once the game community sells 10000 bromine (at a greater profit of course!) or whatever, the price can come back down. This is another way to make mining more relevant :). Heck, if you really wanted to go hard, Sir Emi, you could program in a supply and demand element to Sol resources, so that extended player purchasing can drive the prices up. Then a player-driven economy could take off, which would REALLY help the miners. I recognize that this would be a major change, but it's just a thought. :)

In order to do a proper player driver economy resources could no longer be unlimited at Sol. Your right this would help out miners a lot. This is an idea some people have wanted to see in the game for a long time. But it does present another problem. Adding in such a thing at this point risk to throw things off balance. There is nothing that can prevent bigger players from coming in and taking control of the areas with good resources. Assuming the area isn't mined out in the first place of course. Also it would make it that much harder for newer players to actually grow. They would have to either mine to get everything or have someone else make the stuff for them. Meanwhile bigger players who make in solars by the buttloads will not only take over the best mining spots for resources but they likely would buy out everything that comes up on the Earth trading outpost and horde it back in case they need it for later.  This would of course make it even harder on newbies to grow. The only way such a system could be added in fairly would be if either a wipe was done of all accounts or a 2nd server be started.  I think the latter would be a better option. Of course if SirEmi were to do that he might as well add in my suggestions I posted a while back for pvp into that server.

I was thinking player-driven-economy lite. AKA, unlimited resources that fluctuate based on player consumption. Something to give players an incentive to fly to Uranus to buy Bromine from me instead of Sol Corp, but not so extreme that it would mean bromine costs 10000 per m3 after Raph is done building shields for his next ship  :))

I don't know, just thinking out loud. I'm sure there are other more pressing projects, regardless... LIKE ALIEN SHIPS!!!

Ya with any kind of player-run environment there's monopolies and ugly rivalries and griefers. This is the dark side of player-run activities. There're liars and cheaters in abundance. Freedom has a cost. If the game maker doesn't control some things then they can't guarantee a consistent and fair experience for the players. I guess each game has to determine the right balance of freedom to do as you want (including harming others) and restrictions placed on you to keep it fair for everyone. For example, if a resource is limited and players or corporations can "own" it via their superior forces, thus making it harder for others to gain access, then a game maker could do several things to restrict the ability of players to own said resources, via things like: respawning said resource in random places (giving others a chance to have it for a while), limiting when and how or if players can forcefully take resources from others, making it droppable in events or environments all players have access to, reducing its actual value (as opposed to the price players put on it).

This is why mmorpg pvp games generally don't allow free-for-all mechanics because it's so easy for a high-level player to kill you if you're just beginning to climb the ladder. Generally, there're limitations on the skill/level range, the reward, where and when.

How adverse do we want our  gaming environment to be? I imagine the safer it's the more stale it'd be for anybody who prefers player-run envrionments. I know in my case I prefer player-run environments and some risk involved in my decisions. But does that mean I want the risk of being imprisoned by Hitler into concentration camps, forced to eat the corpses of other prisoners like myself while making military parts for Hitler's army? I can't think I'd enjoy that. Or what if I was forced to live in a empty cold dark room (aka MK Ultra)? Adverse circumstnaces can bring out the best and the worst in our existence. Some of it's worth it and some isn't.

if planets can hold more than 10k m3 amount of each random resource, this problem can be solved
restrict player with 10k m3 mineral/gas buy quota and then there are still massive amount of resource from outer system. It is not possible to monitor 20 planet per player (it will make your head hurt) and if lucky, you can get a diamond planet with 10k diamond
this will make the game have more thing to do than just farming solar and searching for you-know-not-where alien module

This here would be the best way to do it for this server.



1. It is possible to monitor a lot if you have corp members helping you to do so. Also monitoring 20 wouldn't be that hard really if you got a ship patrolling each system.  It doesn't take long to check every one.  Though it is boring.

2. 10k though is hardly enough for larger players.  At your level it might seem like it, but trust me, that wouldn't even cover 1 module upgrade on most of my stuff at my tech.

3. Also I doubt you would have us worried about actually finding diamond to use for anything. Chances are the price on that would drop quite low since so many of us get a lot of it from COMs and either use it for duel or sell it to Sol anyways. 

4. Not trying to condescend you or anything. I remember what it was like back around your power. Modules were much cheaper back then.  I miss those days sometimes. lol

This game, however, is very selective on its limits: it limits economics, but not module mk, for example,
so new players have a very hard time to catch up.


The only things that I can think of that keep high-level players from whiping us all out are:

- they're just really friendly people that prefer to play nice  :icecream:
- they got bored with trying to find our stuff  :surprize!:
- they got bored with the way to easy victories  :out_cold:
- they prefer to have at least one or two other players around  :notworthy:
- some other reason(s) I haven't thought of yet  :21:

You forgot insanely long attack timers. lol.  Even with the ability to power down timers are still an issue. Most of the time it wouldn't even be worth spending QP to speed up an attack.

:D

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/sargas37/whistling.gif)

New idea:

An "Explore Nearby Stars" button in the nav room.
It will automatically plot a course for the nearest KNOWN star near the ship and once it gets there it will automatically survey the planets and moons and send a message to the captain that it's done its sweep.

It could be a toggle feature that could be left on to have a ship auto-exploring by jumping to a different star each time if the intel for the nearest star is older than a month old or something.

After playing Civilization V I have fallen in love with the idea of an auto-explore mechanic. It would help mining because you could actually find what you want without manually going to EVERY FREAKIN STAR and you could progressively fill your star map with info as you progress in other parts of the game.

The ship would run on this complex system of autopilots as long as it had fuel, but the idea is that if the nearest stars are stars A, B, & C (in that order) and the intel on Star A is pretty recent, the ship will recognize this and instead of just bouncing between two stars it will go to the next nearest star with old or non-existent info.

Pretty good right guys???

we have actually been asking for that type of 'chain-jumping for quite a while now.I think JJL brought it up first. Maybe it going to be one of those pesky small updates we have been waiting for.

What of those players whom have dozens of ships, high MK engines and hundreds of millions of solar? They could produce a fleet of autoexplorers and know almost immediately when there's a good mining spot. This might be ok on the frontier, far away from SOL, assuming there's enough room for extremely wealthy players to compete for good spots, but close to SOL it could make it substantially harder for new players to find good spots. Presently, the "tedium" of exploring does balance somewhat the extreme wealth of some players versus the lack thereof amongst new players.

I do support a feature like this. I thikn hte real problem is once a player has tons of ships and fast engines, the pressure to use them to explore is too great. They bump up against the limitations in the system, like a fat man in a small car. I get the feeling this whole congestion in the exploring system is hte procuct of a game which is still confusing a single ship with a fleet of them. A game needs to decide whether it's going to be about a single ship experience or a fleet of them or both. If it wants to be both it needs to figure out how to make it work smoothly all the way from a single ship to a fleet of ships.

I want to add I'm becoming more like that fat man in a small car everyday. I have more and more ships, more and more modules, more and more mining units and so on. More and more I get the feeling I'm losing something by being away from the game. When I first started out it was very leisurely. Star travel was a dozen hours and I just walked away without even a glance. Now I look and it's only a couple hours or less. And I got more than one ship. More and more the game feels too real-time.

So I feel you. The game needs to be able to run on  its own better, no matter how powerful a player is.

I think I could fit in the category wealthy and numerous ships. I do not explore & I do not mine simply because it does not pay as much as other missions. Also I take missions at a minimum of 2 sectors away from earth to give a chance to newbies. So auto-exploring, I suggested it, but more for finding derelict alien ships than anything else. Try to use simultaneously 40 ships to explore!!!! You will get bored pretty soon.

Yea I do all of my SoS and COM missions quite far away from Sol, usually in the 4th ring because those are the best paying SoS missions and I've seen large numbers of COM missions all bunched up out there anyway.

I would like to see some kind of long range scanning module added into the game. Basically you could navigate to a system and then go to your scanner module and have it scan the system. The higher mk the scanner the faster the scan is completed. It wouldn't give you the same detailed information you would get from manually moving to each planet/moon/asteroid field it would just give you some basic information. Things like number of slots on the planet, if there are any modules/ships/stations in the system and the total amount of minerals and gas that a planet has (not the specific types but rather a total amount for each planetary body). That would allow many of us to see if there is anything of interest in the system and if there is then we could manually poke around and get the details, if not we could move on. These types of scans would be one time things, not something that would go into your database to look at whenever you wanted, you would still have to manually explore each planet to get that. Of course any ships in the safe zone of a system would be exempt from these scans since you couldn't attack it or even hail it in the first place anyway.

There would be a sister module as well called the scanner jamming module, as you might suspect it would serve to jam a scanning module so that your planetary forces (if deployed on a planet), your ship or your station would remain invisible to a scan as long as your jamming device was the same level or higher than the scanning module being used.

I really like the idea of an economy system where prices fluctuate based on demand, perhaps something like the demand for a certain mineral exceeds 1,000% of the supply (minerals that are sold back to Sol) for a week so the price goes up by 50% for the following week. Then if the same thing happens the next week the price goes up by another 50%. As long as there was some kind of cap like prices not being able to exceed 300% of their original price then it wouldn't be too bad, big players like Jam, Raphel, Mata might decide to do more nest missions to get the minerals they need rather than pay 3x the price for some mineral they need like 400k of. As a result that leaves more potential hijackings out there for newer players who just need some cash, and also perhaps the minerals for other modules that people might not normally build could be cheaper so we see more diversity in the types of modules that are built. Feel free to add to the idea but hopefully it would result in cycles of sort when certain minerals are more expensive and people go find them instead of buying them and cycles where other minerals become super cheap and making modules out of those is a better option.

It actually gives me an idea as well, I would kind of like to have multiple options for what to use when making a module. For example if a module needs Iron-nickel, why couldn't I substitute Iron instead? Or perhaps just Nickel? Maybe even Aluminum since that is another metal used for construction. Obviously it wouldn't be the same amounts because those resources have different prices but it could adjust accordingly. Idk I have a lot of different ideas floating around in my head after reading some of the posts here. I might just make another thread for that though, it's a bit off the exploring star systems topic lol.

2 ships is max for exploring aliens you can't menage more in same time ... :)

When the new cluster was created, I did exploration with 30 ships !!!!!!!

Very nice idea.  The goal is to reduce the clickfest as a player gains power, and I think your idea does that. But keep in mind this too could become a problem someday. The difference is instead of individual planets being a clickfest, it'd be individual stars. It's imaginable if a player has enough ships and there're enough stars.

I'll add I think the scanner should show what types of minerals/gases the planets have, but only a rough guess of the amount.

I like that idea, but you recall hte post I made in the suggestions forum about wanting to be able to mark minerals/gases or to preorder them on the manufacturing screen? The more ways there're to make modules or the more modules there're the worse the problem I brought up will be. With all of these ingredients for "recipes," we need a (better) interface for it.

Well the idea that I had that I didn't put in there would make that problem a little less of a problem. And actually if you could make modules out of multiple types of resources it should reduce that problem in the first place since you wouldn't need one very specific resource to make a module so if you sold that resource it shouldn't be a big deal you would just make your modules out of something else. Though certainly a better interface wouldn't be a bad idea, I just think it needs to be a bit more than just marking/flagging certain minerals in your cargo bay or something if SirEmi is going to do something.

I want to do a little research on the various resources we have in the game before I actually post what that idea is though. I'm not sure right now if it will work, if it will then I think SirEmi would be more likely to implement it if I actually do a bit of the work myself and give a detailed list of things to put in.

how you do that, until you check all planets/moons in 2 systems timer for interstellar jump expire :)