I remember incarnate saying he'd look through this thread carefully at some point... lets keep it nice and bumped until then, eh? ;P

I'm sure he's reading it. Hell, he STARTED the post.

He's PROBABLY saying "Oh crap my workload just increased exponentially. That's what I get for asking for suggestions. How much vacation time do I have left this year?..."

If the devs keep creating new stuff you'll either end up with a case of mudflation again, of the new stuff isn't usefull.

Besides that, you'll get the situation where a "recipy" that didn't result in anything usefull when you tried it yesterday suddenly does result in something usefull today. That would not be a very logical thing to happen. That would mean you would regularly have to retry every possible combination of ingredients just to see if something does happen this time... not fun.

If we don't use Phaserlight's "sliders" idea for limiting the power of crafted items, then I think we'll have to have a "tech tree" of items that can be crated. This tech tree would have to be HUGE, making crafting interesting without creating items that unbalance things.

No, Noid, I'm thinking the crafting would be consistent and unchanging, the "formulas" to create items would await discovery by players, and once discovered, they could be shared or hoarded. The statistics of EVERY item that is eventually "craftable" would be pre-determined by the devs, and I'm sure they would try to not have items that would be too "uber."

Once the economy comes into play, I predict that once a great crafting discovery is made, it will be "hoarded" so that the player or guild that discovered it could make a profit from their work. That's why I'd like to see a realistic free-market economy first before the crafting.

I think the devs would just add on to the tech tree when they felt like it, not tell the playerbase, and see how long it takes to get recognized. I don't think the devs would ever alter the formulas for existing designs that are already part of the game. (Even if they haven't been discovered yet).
Unless the item unbalanced the game, then a little tweaking would be in order.

*bump* ing as UncleDave suggested.

Hmm...
Thinking about the whole "invalid recipie makes pile of junk" idea, maybe it should be different than I first envisioned:

It should not produce junk, but it should just consume a random one of the resources (or maybe the cheapest one?) and give a message that "There is no known item to be produced this way".

The whole point of consuming resources is to make it hard/impossible to discrover all the recipies by "bruteforce".

Hi,

I have a clumsy solution to keep the games ballance and do not force the devs to invent new items every day.

The items stats are relative. Each stat is a percentage to a theoretical max value. If an item become outdated its stats decrease. This will result that the hightech trinket you've bought a week ago is a newbie toy today.

Its a bit hard to describe so I try explain it through an example:
The damage effectiveness of middle level cannon is 40%. You develop a better one with the stat 41%. This induce that the stats of minor cannons and armors decrease by 1%.

Your enemies cannon and armor effectiveness is now only 39% your cannon is 41%. Advance on your side.
The enemies have to invent same technology or steal the blueprints ... or wait until it becomes available in each shop.

An item with worse stats costs less ... so the hierarchy of guns and armor shifts down a bit. After a time delay all NPC-s will be reequipped with the cannons of their level and this is the time when the new item can be bought in any shop.

To keep the system ballanced the NPC companies has own developments. E.g. if everybody develops only cannons then there will be a big gap in armors. The npc development can fill the gaps. The game can encourage the fill up of gaps by reducing the development price.

Regards,

Darkwood

PS: An important problem: the name of the invented items :)

I suggest to use the inventors (or guilds) name and some random or user choosen code.

That's... actually an interesting idea, darvud!

In order to keep pace with technology, you must keep crafting and improving everything. If you buy something, save your ship, log off for 6 months, and then log back in, you'll find that your ship is hopelessly outmatched by almost everything, since technology has progressed past your old items.

So, every "New" crafted item that exceeds the "quality percentage" of everything else gives a negative bump to all other items?

Hello,

Negative bump? Yes, you have a handicap if you attack with an outdated equipment.

There can be some backdoor to save money of sleepers ... like with the NPC ships.
-- When you log in your mechanics anounces that he tried to keep your equipment up to date. Its not the best but quite good.
-- Some shops offers some support service on their goods. They update it periodically :)

Worse is that lot of guides will be worthless. You will not be able to answer the simple question: what weapon is the best?
... Well the high-end development is very expensive ... so technology of experts will not change fast.

Regards,

Darkwood

Interesting. Weapons and armour effeciency should be linked.

Day at day 0 you have weapon A and your enemy has ship with armour A and you know that 10 shots with your weapon will kill your enemy.

Now some other person somewhere else in the galaxy invents weapon A+ and as a result, your weapon A does less damage.
At the same time, armour A should also become less efficient, so it will still take 10 shots of your weapon A to kill someone with armour A.

This scheme would introduce a nice endless money sink :D

So what really happens is everytime someone crafts something new, it keeps the same level of damage that the best thing has now, and everything else gets worse.

That would be frustrating ;]

Hi,

maybe the question sounds odd but why will the ppl invent new items?

Here is my vision of the future:

At the begining everybody will try to invent something. This will result that lot of inventions will go from design desk to garbage almost immediatly. This state is unstable: The money spent on inventions does not pay out; all inventors and those who tries to keep equipment up-to-date will be ruined.

So the frekvency of inventions will rapidly slow down ... The first more-or-less stable state will be "no-invent-at-all".

I would like to avoid it but have no clue how to encourage the invention but avoid the ruin of economy.

Regards,

Darkwood

Hi,

here is another idea about crafting to keep you all awake

... to be more precize its tinkering...:)

All items consist of components and each component has one or more normalized interfaces (joints).
You can freely combine components with compatible interfaces.

The stats of an item depends on its components.

For example:
the magnetic field resonator of the ion cannon MKII has same joint as the resonator of the Gauss cannon MKIII.
If you switch the resonators then you'll get cannons with a bit different stats. (the ion cannon has longer range and the gauss gun still works :)

Some combination of components are legalized by devs. This way you can build new items: from components of 2 nail guns and a gauss cannon you can build a fletchett gun. On other hand the ion cannon above stays still a "Modified Ion Cannon MKII".

Regards,

Darkwood

@Starfisher: yes, everyone else gets a worse item, but you wouldn't notice it, untill you met the guy with the better gun.
In essence, it really would be like only one guy has a better gun. The problem is that if you keep inventing better guns you end up with really-big-numbers and really-big-numbers tend to get problematic. So instead of making the numbers of the better guns bigger, we make the numbers of all other guns smaller. In the end, those worse guns will just disapear anyway.

@darvud: The state that everyone is just about broke and noone will invent new stuff is also the state that doing an invention really pays of, because you will be able to use your invention for a long time. So people will start inventing again.

I'm starting to get that parrot-like feeling, but let me say again: tech trees, inventing better and better items over time, discovering new recipes, they all may be fun to talk about but I just can't see them working in a persistant universe.

It doesn't really make a difference if older item's stats actually degenerate or not when new items are invented... they would still be fractionally worse than the newly invented items. Once again, you have the case where half the items in the game eventually become worthless, and this punishes new players... mudflation.

I agree that crafted items should generally be better than regular items... but I disagree that the quality should increase over time or that new recipes should be continually implemented. Remember we're talking about four developers here. Constantly coming up with new "recipes" to be discovered or continually developing a balanced tech tree is the job of an entire dedicated sub-team... a luxury we don't have.

I think it would be a far better use of time to create some kind of algorithm based on variations of a basic recipe for each weapon type that led to different effects. These effects would naturally have to be balanced (see my post on trade-offs) since it won't take long for players to discover an uber recipe.

This isn't to say that all crafted items should be of identical value... it should be possible to really gum up a recipe to create a P.O.S. gauss cannon, but on the other hand there shouldn't be one perfect combination of widgets that grants an uber cannon of doom.

It's really the same as ship balance... you want to have a variety of ships being used in a variety of roles... if one ship is categorically better than all others, there would be no reason to use the other ships once you had the sufficient license levels.

So we're back to tradeoffs, then. OK I guess I can go for that.
The basic tradeoffs are weight & expense vs. "uberness"
I guess we could have weapon tradeoffs of autotargeting vs. range vs. damage vs. ammo req's. Special abilities like seeking, splash damage, etc.

So, there is a certain "level" of facility where you do your srafting. (Or perhaps different levels of machines that you construct to do crafting, but we'll leave that out for now.) At a level 1 facility, you have 100 "points" to spread throughout your new device you are crafting. At a level 10 facility, you have 1000 "points" to spread throughout your device.

You allocate points to certain characteristics of your device, with higher-level characteristics costing more. For example:
No Auto-Aim costs 0
Poor Auto-Aim costs 25
Average Auto-Aim costs 200
Good Auto-Aim costs 350 (Like Gauss)
Very Good Auto-Aim costs 500 (Like AGT)
Excellent Auto Aim costs 800

Then you can use whatever points you have left over for the rest of your weapon.

I guess you would be able to build other neat things that would go into equipment ports. Like tractor beams, on-board crafting stations that make new Xith pellets for your railguns, extra batteries, warp field inhibitors, etc.

All of these special ability items would take up a slot and probably be very expensive and massive.

Dear parrot :)

here we write down our idea not the Only Holy Solution. For example, my 2 ideas exclude each other.
My thoughts about crafting system are as good as yours. Its on devs to choose one or develop own system.

Regards

Parrot 2

@LeberMac:
Not bad idea. I suggest to build in some protection against extremes. For example: all stat are reduced to zero except damage and some minor accuracy.

Regards

Darkwood

Heh heh...

I'm not meaning to give the impression that I think my idea is the Only Holy Solution, in fact there could be far better ways to go about it that the devs already have in mind. I would be interested to hear what you think about the problem I see in continuously improving items, tho.

My idea was kind of related to Full Metal Alchemist's concept of equivalent exchange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist ...which is really another expression of the conservation of energy in physics... if you want to get something, you have to give something of equal value up. (Classic example being potential energy vs. kinetic energy)...

Also, (not to change the topic) Lebermac briefly mentioned ammo based weaponry, which I think is worth discussing. So far we seem to have used energy weapons as our example, but once you get into ammo weapons a few issues pop up:

If you craft a new ammo-based weapon, what kind of ammo could it use? Should you also have to craft the ammunition? What about re-arming at a station?

If I make an improved sunflare launcher, does it make sense that the launcher would cause a standard sunflare warhead to do more damage or have a bigger splash?

Next problem with the ammunition: how long a fight lasts?

Until now I pressed the fire button at the begining of the combat and released it at the end. If I have limited amount of shots then I need more precise aim and/or bigger damage than with energy weapons... and a refill depo somewhere close.

Btw ... very few weapons we use now are energy weapons. Plasma, ion, positron all fires participles ie they need some kind of refill.

Regards,

Darkwood

Edit: Can I load some CU ammo in my cargo and refill on the fligh? Can I bring less ammo and carry more goods to sell?
Edit2: NPC-s will have unlimited ammo or we have chance to exhaust them?