New game start

[Bill Whitmore]

I was watching the video Chris Park posted last week.

For the video, he started a couple new games during the demonstration and I noticed that, while he selects a starting world, he doesn't start off controlling that world. Rather, he starts off with his Ark along the perimeter of that world fighting off AI ships.

Is this the intent for the final game? Will the player start off needing to capture his starting world from the AI? Or was this something that was done for demo purposes to show combat more quickly during the demo?

With the changeover from Command Stations to Arks, I rather like the idea that the opening salvo in the war is the players making simultaneous strikes across multiple worlds.

[x4000]

Yep, the intent is that you have to capture even your first world.  Good eye!

[Draco18s]

It was mentioned in an update somewhere.

[MaxAstro]

Okay that is really cool.  I particularly like the idea that you could just skip capturing the world you "start" on and go looking for a more ideal homeworld for your first planet...

Also inb4 someone manages a zero-planet win. 

[WolfWhiteFire]

Also inb4 someone manages a zero-planet win. 

People have done many impressive things, but I am not sure winning the game with no resources except the starting ones to build ships, having no safe area, managing to get through all AI planets to the home world, and with very little protecting your Ark will become one of them.

[x4000]

Also inb4 someone manages a zero-planet win. 

People have done many impressive things, but I am not sure winning the game with no resources except the starting ones to build ships, having no safe area, managing to get through all AI planets to the home world, and with very little protecting your Ark will become one of them.

With mods, you never know!

I could see someone making the Ark produce juuust enough stuff that maybe it's feasible in some way, heh.  That would be nuts.

[chemical_art]

Also inb4 someone manages a zero-planet win. 

People have done many impressive things, but I am not sure winning the game with no resources except the starting ones to build ships, having no safe area, managing to get through all AI planets to the home world, and with very little protecting your Ark will become one of them.

With mods, you never know!

I could see someone making the Ark produce juuust enough stuff that maybe it's feasible in some way, heh.  That would be nuts.

I'm waiting for the nenzul redux mod which has the player never formally claiming a world, just raiding and razing AI worlds for resources while the player stays nomadic.

[WolfWhiteFire]

With mods, you never know!

I could see someone making the Ark produce juuust enough stuff that maybe it's feasible in some way, heh.  That would be nuts.

I don't really think that counts, if someone uses mods to make the game easier then it is no longer the base game.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm waiting for the nenzul redux mod which has the player never formally claiming a world, just raiding and razing AI worlds for resources while the player stays nomadic.

Yea, with the ark being mobile you can bend-but-not-break to an extent that just wasn't in the scope of the first game.

I'm not sure if the vanilla game would have such a thing, but it'd be possible to have types of AI attacks that are basically "ok, they're going to stamp you out, but if you keep moving and evading them and survive long enough their forces will get called elsewhere and you can get back on track. Maybe something where the AIP goes up over time until it hits some unbearable level, and you just have to survive for a certain length of time and then the AIP goes back down to "normal".

On the other hand, that couldn't happen more than once a game or you'd probably get tired of having to do so much rebuilding. And in any event it's probably not appropriate to the standard game.

[BadgerBadger]

I wonder if there could be some "thing" you could do to the AI that would make them come after you in such an unbearable fashion. Maybe some kind of fancy hacking?

[keith.lamothe]

I wonder if there could be some "thing" you could do to the AI that would make them come after you in such an unbearable fashion. Maybe some kind of fancy hacking?

That was the first concrete idea that came to mind, yes.

Perhaps hacking the super terminal doesn't produce quite the apocalyptic in-system response it did in AIWC, but instead temporarily increases AIP by 1 every 5 seconds. The AI keeps that modifier for as long as you maintain the hack, and for X/5 (where X = the total AIP caused in this fashion) minutes afterward, and at the end of that time the temporary +X modifier becomes a permanent -X/10 modifier.

[MaxAstro]

I would love to see a forced-nomadic game mode.  Something along the lines of having the Ark be able to produce enough resources to play the game effectively, but any planet captured produces a superterminal response on that planet until the AI takes it back.

Definitely would be a very different way of playing the game, taking guerrilla warfare to the extreme as you capture planets just long enough to steal something useful from them and then GTFO.  xD

...Honestly that sounds fun enough that I'm gonna seriously look at modding something like that in when I get my hands on the mod tools. 

[z99-_]

Perhaps hacking the super terminal doesn't produce quite the apocalyptic in-system response it did in AIWC, but instead temporarily increases AIP by 1 every 5 seconds. The AI keeps that modifier for as long as you maintain the hack, and for X/5 (where X = the total AIP caused in this fashion) minutes afterward, and at the end of that time the temporary +X modifier becomes a permanent -X/10 modifier.

Let's see ... for a normal 150 AIP hack, that would mean the AIP would ramp up to 1500 over 2 hours, and stay there for 5 hours afterward. O_O

Chhhhhrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiissssssss! Keith is trying to program the AI to go on genocidal rampages again! Make him stop please

[keith.lamothe]

150 AIP is a bit high for an ST hack I like 70 or so (net reduction) as a good level for doing-very-well at an ST hack on serious difficulty (70 could be achieved on 10/10 with extreme effort and, sometimes, a nuke). But yes, the numbers I gave are still too extreme for 70. Maybe numbers more like +1 AIP per second during the hack (instead of every 5), X/10 minutes for a final reduction of X/5. So for 70 net reduction that would be:

- hack for 5 minutes and 50 seconds, bringing AIP up 350
- survive inflated AIP for 35 minutes
- net AIP change = -70

Perhaps that's actually too forgiving, I dunno, but the pain amplification controls would be readily available

[z99-_]

Having played through the showdown device ending, I can say that half an hour of high AIP would be a loooooooong time. And since I do prefer ST hacks that require Golems, Spire Dreadnaughts and the Exodian Blade, I think having the extra AIP time be linearly proportional to end AIP reduction would be less than ideal. What about making it a multiple of time spent in hack instead? Then, you could make the AIP per second increase as you go into the hack, so really big hacks result in really big extra AIP, but over manageable timescales. Of course, this would provide an incentive for people to push the hack for as long as possible, which would result in lots of fun stories about crazy ST hacks and how they lost as a result (or won, if you're into that ).

Also, what about adding some of the extreme hacking responses as extreme ST hack responses? 1200 AIP for 15 minutes under regular conditions might be doable, but if the AI starts sending waves three hops into my territory, that's a bit different ...