Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game
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Author Topic: Pirate Hunting Pay  (Read 3241 times)
Sydney
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« on: November 15, 2012, 05:00:42 AM »

I think there is a serious problem with the COM missions. Currently it appears that the pay for the COM missions is roughly (or exactly?) twice the power level of the Pirate Hijacker ship. The pirate Hijackers power is then corelated to the power of the players ship.

This means the more powerfull my ship the more money i can expect to make running COM missions. It sounds nice in principle, however in practice it can lead to 'Excellent battle captain! I have transferred $2816207 solars to your account.' It would take me literally a month of sundays to earn this amount of solars mining minerals. Add to that that I have to transport the minerals back to SOL, so its not like i can mine without having a ship involved in generating mining income. It takes even a strong miner 2-3 weeks (or more) to make that amount of solars, where a player running COM missions can potentially make it in 7-8 hours.

Essentially it makes me ask the question why even bother mining. Im just going to end up a sitting duck to players that have been running COM missions and can afford significantly better ships and weapons. I think the pay of the COM missions should be roughly equivalent to what the player could make if they had invested their income in mining. Ie neither 'path' should be inherantly better than another, just different, this way the game will appeal to a wider base of players. Players like me that are interested in 'building up' a system/network will very quickly tire of and abandon the game if its clear that we are relegated to being second class players by a game mechanic that so strongly favours a single style of game play. I also question how much long term enjoyment a player can get from simply doing the COM missions.

I assume the Pirate Hijackers power level is currently randomly selected from low upto the players ships power level with roughly equal chances for each category.... the equal chance is problematic. The pirate power should not be evenly distributed, lower powered pirate hijackers should be much more likely than hijackers with higher power. I also think it would be a nice touch too to occasionally pick up COM signals where the pirate Hijacker is stronger than the players ship. This would still give the occasional COM signal with a high powered opponent, but most of them would be lower powered.

In addition to this i think the pay scale should also be adjusted. I favour a non linear approach, so that the pay for lower powered pirates is still pretty good, but that the pay for higher powered ones doesnt continue to climb It will still give players a good days pay for their work, but it shouldnt mean that with a single days play they could finance the purchase of the largest ship possible in the game....





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SirEmi
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« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2012, 06:52:48 AM »

Yeah, working on the NPC pirate ships configurations and tactics, there will be some adjustments to make the battles fair.

The reward will probably be adjusted depending on ship power, with higher pay / power in the lower end of the scale and proportionally lower solar / power as the power shoots up. Different encountered ships may also pack nukes and carry lots of armor, an upgraded big weapon etc.

Will see how it goes, the objective is to make Combat missions about same profitable as mining.
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Sydney
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« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2012, 07:44:33 AM »

One Interesting alternative or perhapes in addition to using 'generated' pirate ships.

You could actually use some of the player ship configurations as templates

For instance, half the time you get a 'generated ship' as they currently are.  and the rest of the time instead of generating a standard ship the script selects a random player ship within the appropriate power level and duplicates it for the pirate hijacker ship.

This would certainly provide at least a little more interest / surprise at the higher power levels... It also means that players cannot simply create a 'standard' pirate hunting build that they know works against the generated ships.

(You could also advertise this as player generated content ;) )
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